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Blaming people has gotten an especially bad rap during the pandemic. Public health officials emphasize the ineffectiveness of blaming people who won’t wear a mask, encouraging us instead to sympathize with their desire to “return to normal.” ACT UP New York chastised us to fight “institutions not individuals,” forgetting apparently that institutions only survive on the backs of millions of people willing to support them. And it’s commonplace today to hear organizers and activists portraying blame as antithetical to the bonds of community, tearing apart a social fabric we worked so hard to weave together. In sum, individual blame is widely regarded today as a toxic manifestation of all that is corrosive to moral life.
I want to introduce another perspective on blame, one which views it as an affirmation of community and of the moral capacity of its members. Far from corroding our social bonds, blame (when used appropriately) is one of the most powerful practices we have in signaling to one another that we respect each other enough to hold each other accountable for what we do. On this understanding of blame, the refusal to engage in it, though motivated by an eagerness to respect the dignity of each person, is in fact a manifestation of contempt for the other insofar as it is a failure to see them as capable of autonomous choice. This stance, a refusal to engage in a practice constitutive of moral life, is the real threat to community, and we have been living within its terrible consequences for four years.
What, then, is blame? Blame falls under what philosophers since David Hume have called the “moral sentiments”: those emotions which arise within and form the connective tissue of moral life. Blame, praise, guilt, and shame — these are the practices and sentiments that arise as we navigate moral life, as we observe the ways others have navigated it in relation to us. We praise the person who does right; we blame the person who does wrong. Moral sentiments are what make moral life alive. We are not just unfeeling calculators of moral life — we care what happens, we respond to what happens, we feel what happens. As P.F. Strawson puts it, the moral sentiments comprise “that complicated web of attitudes and feelings which form an essential part of the moral life as we know it.”
What the moral sentiments have an especially tight focus on is “the quality of others’ wills towards us, as manifested in their behaviour.” (Strawson) An example will help illuminate this point: imagine my friend intentionally drops a brick on my foot. I would have very good reason to be mad about this; to resent them for this; to blame them for the pain I am now experiencing. I would be within my rights to say, “Ouch!” and, “What the fuck??”
But then imagine that I find out I was mistaken about what they intended to do — it turns out, the brick slipped through their hand even though they were trying their best to hold on. They weren’t doing anything particularly irresponsible (like trying to hold it right over my head), nor were they under any special obligation to be careful about bricks (they’re just a friend helping me out, not a skilled bricklayer). The brick really did just slip. Now this sort of discovery should have a substantial impact on what I am feeling. True, the pain in my foot does not subside. (“Ouch!”) But the second layer of psychological pain, if you will allow me to call it that, should vanish — I haven’t been wronged, because it was just an accident. Thus if I am being reasonable I should relinquish the resentment and blame that initially arose in response to that second layer of psychological pain. The persistence of resentment and blame would no longer match the facts of the situation we find ourselves in.
What this example is meant to show is that we care a great deal about not only what others do to us but also why — we care what was going on in their head. The moral sentiments, then, are just a natural emotional manifestation of this tendency to care about the will of the other as manifested in what they do. Where we perceive the will of the other as in conflict with our own basic moral worth and our right to autonomy and care and respect, we naturally experience resentment and blame. On the other hand, where we see that the will of the other is fully compatible with ourselves as individuals worthy of care and respect, we are more inclined to moral neutrality, if not gratitude and praise. The moral sentiments, when working properly, generally match the moral valence of the situation at hand.
An interesting feature of the moral sentiments is that they are suspended not only in cases of accidents (like the accidental brick drop) but also cases where the individual themself is, for some reason or another, outside the bounds of moral accountability. Many non-human animals are like this: it would be absurd to sincerely blame the mosquito for biting me. It’s just what mosquitos do. Babies are like this, too — sure, they puke on us, but they don’t mean to do it. Even some adults are outside the bounds of moral accountability — think of, say, someone without the cognitive capacity to truly understand right and wrong. They can of course be valued members of our community. But holding them to the same moral standards would be a misunderstanding of their capacities — it would be to hold them accountable for something they couldn’t possibly understand.
In all three of these cases, we rightfully see that there’s something inappropriate about straightforwardly blaming certain individuals for what they do, even if what they do causes pain or discomfort. In fact almost all legal systems reflect this intuition (or at least a distant echo of it): hence the exculpatory plea of “insanity,” the fact that children are at least in theory not eligible for the same kinds of legal punishment, the fact that you can’t prosecute a non-human animal. Again, it is not that these kinds of individuals somehow can’t cause harm, because the reality is that they can and do; it’s that they shouldn’t be held accountable for harm in the same way as others due to something about their incapacity to understand moral life.
Strawson goes on to say that the appropriate attitude to take towards individuals like this is what he calls the “objective attitude.” This perspective views certain individuals as not fully participating in the world (at least not yet) — not acting autonomously, not being the sort of thing whose actions in the world are entirely self-determined. Rather, they are the sorts of beings who are acted upon — the wind pushes the mosquito to and fro; the baby is moved by hunger and discomfort but does not exactly decide to cry out for help. They are not entirely sources of free action. Thus we shift to the objective attitude and view these kinds of individuals as beings “to be managed or handled or cured or trained.” In other words, we suspend the ordinary moral sentiments that arise in interpersonal relationships and instead shift to an attitude that views the other as in some deep sense outside the influence of moral life.
We now have a picture in front of us in which there are at least two kinds of beings in moral life: those who are fully participating in it insofar as they are independent sources of autonomous action, and those who fall short of that to some degree on account of an essential incapacity to understand the full moral weight of what they do (indeed an incapacity to fully act insofar as action requires intention). In this picture, the moral sentiments are only an appropriate reaction to the actions of the full participants — it is only appropriate to blame, for example, someone with the capacity to fully know what they were doing. If on the other hand we are dealing with the kind of being whose goings-on in the world couldn’t ever amount to full intentional action, then the appropriate response is to suspend the ordinary moral sentiments and instead adopt the objective attitude. On this objective attitude, we regard the other certainly as something to be taken account of but not something to hold accountable.
Let me now tie this back to my main point: namely, that blame is in fact an affirmation of community and the moral capacities of its members. One implication of the picture described above is that the act of blaming depends on already seeing the other as one of us; it assumes that the other is a participant in shared moral life. Otherwise, blame would be inappropriate. So although blame may inflict some suffering on the one who is blamed, and therefore violate the general principle that people should be spared suffering when possible, it is nonetheless “the consequence of continuing to view him as a member of the moral community; only as one who has offended against its demands.” Blame is, in this way, a form of respect.
On the other hand, if we refuse to blame the blameworthy, what we are implicitly communicating is that this is not the sort of person who is a full participant in moral life; this is not someone who is capable of autonomous choice. After all, it is only those kinds of beings for whom we suspend our ordinary moral sentiments. Adopting the objective attitude in this case, towards someone who is in fact a full participant in moral life, is to treat them as something “to be managed or handled or cured or trained.” These forms of treatment, when directed at individuals fully capable of free, autonomous choice, are the height of disrespect. The refusal to blame the blameworthy is a form of contempt.
Public health officials are notorious for adopting the objective attitude towards individuals — how often have you heard one articulate the idea that blaming individuals is less effective for public health than, e.g., incentivizing bare minimum precautions? This may very well be the case, empirically speaking; we often shut down when blamed and refuse to take accountability. We hate being made aware of how we’ve harmed others. I understand why public health officials would want to find ways of influencing the public that result in fewer deaths. But notice that this requires viewing the public as something merely to be “managed” — not as living sites of autonomous choice and action but rather as individuals to be understood, manipulated, and controlled. The objective attitude is one of paternalism; when directed at people capable of accountability, it is a form of contempt.
Of course I sympathize with the impulse to refrain from blame in interpersonal life, too, especially since blame is so often accompanied by antipathy, vindictiveness, and a disinterest in ultimately restoring whatever relationship was fractured. It’s understandable that people may think blame is a form of contempt we should shy away from: blame often looks like contempt, is motivated by contempt, is an expression of contempt. When blame is vitriol, it seems like the right thing to do is to channel it away from individuals and towards, say, institutions.
But blame need not always be accompanied by these antisocial attitudes — in fact, I believe a healthy blame exists alongside good-will and a prosocial desire to mend the torn social fabric. This mending cannot take place, though, without first acknowledging that it has been torn and that someone in particular did the tearing. In this sense, blame is “part of the general framework of human life.” (Strawson) All blame does is say: This person did wrong, and they are one of us. It is a way we show one another that we respect each other as agents of choice enough to refrain from the condescension and paternalism of the objective attitude.
This understanding of blame and the moral sentiments allows us to respond to the invitation to blame “institutions not individuals” with the reply, “Why not both?” Our institutions have failed to properly appreciate and protect the value of human life, especially with respect to the pandemic. In this sense, they are blameworthy. But millions of individuals have committed this same failure — to use Strawson’s turn of phrase, their indifference has manifested in their behavior. When people no longer care about spreading disease, about disabling and killing others down the chain of transmission, about the millions of people who cannot safely leave the house because of most people’s refusal to take basic precautions, they can be rightly described as grossly indifferent to both the suffering of others and their own participation in that suffering. Blame is the appropriate reaction to this gross indifference. It is also an essential element holding together the notion of community even in the face of so many people tearing it apart.