Blame is a common reaction to something of negative normativesignificance about someone or their behavior. A paradigm case,perhaps, would be when one person wrongs another, and the latterresponds with resentment and a verbal rebuke, but of course we alsoblame others for their attitudes and characters (Eshleman 2004, Smith2005, Holroyd 2012). Thus blaming scenarios typically involve a widerange of inward and outward responses to a wrongful or bad action,attitude, or character (such responses include: beliefs, desires,expectations, emotions, sanctions, and so on). In theorizing aboutblame, then, philosophers have typically asked two questions:

• Which reactions and interactions constitute blame?
• When is it appropriate to respond in these ways?

It is common to approach these questions with a larger theoreticalagenda in mind: for example, in an effort to understand the conditionsof moral responsibility and the nature of freedom. But the questionsare interesting in their own right, especially since blame is such acommon feature of our lives. This entry will critically discuss theanswers that have been offered in response to the above questionsconcerning blame, with the aim of shedding some light on blame’snature, ethics, and significance. (It is blame, rather than praise,that has received the lion’s share of attention fromphilosophers in recent years, despite the fact that they are a naturalpair. Though that is perhaps beginning to change—see King 2023,Lippert-Rasmussen 2024, and Shoemaker 2024 for book-length treatmentsof blame that also pay serious attention to praise.)

• 1. What is Blame?
  • 1.1 Cognitive Theories of Blame
  • 1.2 Emotional Theories of Blame
  • 1.3 Conative Theories of Blame
    • 1.3.1 Dispositions Around a Belief-Desire Pair
    • 1.3.2 Attitude Adjustment in Response to Impairment
  • 1.4 Functional Theories of Blame
• 2. When is Blame Appropriate?
  • 2.1 Facts about the Person Being Blamed
    • 2.1.1 Moral Agency
    • 2.1.2 Freedom and Responsibility
  • 2.2 Facts about the Blaming Interaction
    • 2.2.1 Proportionality
    • 2.2.2 Epistemic Considerations
  • 2.3 Facts about the Blamer
    • 2.3.1 Standing
    • 2.3.2 Hypocrisy
    • 2.3.3 Other Blamer-Based Worries
  • 2.4 Varieties of Blame
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. What is Blame?

To begin, note that almost all philosophical discussions of blameignore (or mention only to set aside) the form of blame sometimescharacterized as causal or explanatory responsibility (Kenner 1967;Hart 1968; Beardsley 1969). It is this notion of blame that is atstake when we say that a hurricane is to blame for the destruction ofa city’s harbor, or that the cat is to blame for knocking overthe vase. Theorists contrast this sense of “blame” withthe sort ofinterpersonal blame that, for example, one givesup when one forgives. (As Pamela Hieronymi (2001) has pointed out,forgiveness in fact requiresnot giving up one’sjudgment that the other person isexplanatorily to blame.)But just what the relation is between causal blame and interpersonalblame is an important question that has not been well-explored (thoughsee Chislenko 2021). Nevertheless, in this entry the focus will be onthe latter form of blame, which is a response to moral agents on thebasis of their wrong, bad, or otherwise objectionable actions,attitudes, or characters.

Theories of blame could be organized in a number of different ways,depending on one’s purposes. Any scheme for categorizingtheories has its advantages and disadvantages, and by selecting onescheme over the other, one necessarily emphasizes certain aspects ofblame while ignoring other aspects of blame that might be equallyimportant. Nevertheless, the taxonomy to follow is consonant with muchof the literature in classifying theories according to the activity ormental state that is thought to constitute (or at least make up theprimary component of) blame. According to this way of carving thingsup, we get four categories: cognitive, emotional, conative, andfunctional accounts of blame.

1.1 Cognitive Theories of Blame

Cognitive theories of blame hold that blame is fundamentally ajudgment or evaluation that we make about an agent in light of theiractions, attitudes, or character. One of the earliest cognitivetheories of blame is due to J. J. C. Smart (1961), who develops hisanalysis of blame indirectly, since he begins by distinguishingbetween praise anddispraise (rather than with the morenatural distinction between praise and blame). According to Smart, topraise or dispraise an individual is simply tograde them asa member of a particular kind. And as Smart says, this sort of gradingis no different than the sort of grading involved in judging one appleto be better than the others at the supermarket. Crucially, Smartnotes that though you might dispraise a young philosopher for theirpoor writing in a letter of recommendation, you are not therebyblaming them for it. Thus for Smart, blame is distinct from dispraise.Unlike dispraise, blame involves more than merely gradingsomeone’s actions or character (morally), since blame carrieswith it the implication that the person is responsible for theiraction or character. Blame, then, is a negative evaluative judgmentthat implies responsibility.

In a similar vein, Gary Watson (1996) has suggested that there is anevaluative form of blame connected with what he calls the“aretaic perspective”. To blame someone in this way is tojudge that they have failed with respect to some standard ofexcellence (areté). It is also to insist that theagent is responsible for their action in the sense that the action isattributable to the agent—it represents theirevaluative standpoint, their practical identity, what they“stand for” (Watson 1996: 234). Like Smart, Watsonrecognizes that it is possible to make such a judgmentdispassionately. Thus, on the grading and evaluative theories of blamedeveloped by Smart and Watson, there is nothing about blame thatrequires a blamer to be emotionally exercised in any way. However,unlike Smart—whoidentifies blame with a form ofgrading that implies moral responsibility—Watson does not takearetaic blame to be a generalanalysis of blame. Rather, forWatson, aretaic blame is just one way among many that we blame othersfor their actions.

Even though many have resisted thinking of blame as a form of grading,a number of contemporary accounts of blame retain the core idea inSmart’s (and Watson’s) account that blame is a kind ofevaluative judgment. But what sort of evaluative judgment will do?Many theorists have identified blame with judgments that essentiallyimplicate how the blamed agent’smoral orpractical self was involved in the production of action. Thisallows cognitive theories to explain the special force of blame. Afterall, as T.M. Scanlon puts it, “given that most people careabout” their moral selves (and others’ opinions abouttheir moral selves), judgments that implicate these aspects of aperson are not “mere descriptions” (Scanlon 1986:170). Michael Zimmerman (1988) and Ishtiyaque Haji (1998) make thispoint vividly when they argue that to blame someone is to judge thatin virtue of their attitudes, actions, or character, they have astain on their moral self or a mark against their moralledger. As Zimmerman puts it, when we blame someone, we judge

that there is a “discredit” or “debit” in hisledger … that his “moral standing” has been“diminished” (Zimmerman 1988: 38).

One need not endorse the idea of an actual moral ledger in order tohold a cognitive theory of blame. Pamela Hieronymi (2004), forexample, articulates a cognitive account of blame, where the judgmentin question is a judgment that the blamed agent has shown the blamer(or another) ill will. Since we care deeply about other people’sjudgments about the quality of our wills, this judgment can also carrythe distinctive force of blame.

One potential problem for cognitive accounts is that they riskconflatingblaming withjudging blameworthy (Kenner1967; Coates and Tognazzini 2012). After all, it seems quite possibleto judge, for example, that another has displayed ill will or thatthey have a mark against their moral ledger (and so, judge that theyare blameworthy), without actually blaming them. Theco-conspirator’s recognition of the wrongness of apartner’s criminal activity might, in fact, underlie admirationfor the partner’s skillful execution of a heinous crime thatmost of us couldn’t stomach. The fact that the same judgmentcould elicit such different responses (repulsion and resentment inthose of us who are committed to the values of morality and admirationin those who are not) suggests that the judgment alone cannotconstitute blame. More recently, Hanna Pickard (2013) has argued thatsince it is possible to knowingly blame others inappropriately (i.e.,to blame others even when we know that they are not really blameworthyfor their actions), the judgment that another is blameworthy, or thatthey have shown ill will or disregard, is not necessary for blame. Itlooks, then, that judgments of the sort discussed above are neithernecessary nor sufficient for blame.

A further problem for cognitive accounts is one suggested by GaryWatson (1987). According to Watson, attempts to identify or reduceblameexclusively to its cognitive components (recall thatalthough Watson thinks that aretaic blame takes the form of judgments,it does not exhaust the phenomenon of blaming) make it seem

as though in blaming we were mainly moral clerks, recording moralfaults … from a detached and austerely “objective”standpoint (1987 as reprinted in Watson 2004: 226–27).

Here Watson argues that blame issues from the perspective of aparticipant in human relationships, one in which we are not merelyobserving the moral order but are actively involved in a moralcommunity. These sorts of considerations form the basis for emotionaltheories of blame.

1.2 Emotional Theories of Blame

Despite the fact that P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom andResentment” (1962) contains little sustained discussion of blameas such, many take it to be the contemporary genesis of emotionaltheories of blame. According to Strawson, our status as morallyresponsible agents is grounded in the non-detached attitudes andemotions that are (in part) constitutive of ordinary interpersonalrelationships. Regarding others as morally responsible agents, forStrawson, is not a matter of judgment but of emotional response.

R. Jay Wallace (1994) has developed this idea into an account of“holding responsible” according to which we hold othersmorally responsible just in case we experience resentment,indignation, or (in the self-regarding case) guilt as a response totheir actions, or judge that such a response would be appropriate.Thus, for Wallace, (a specific subset of) Strawson’s“reactive attitudes” are essentially implicated in thestance we take up when we hold others responsible. But though it ispossible to take up the stance of “holding responsible”without being emotionally exercised, Wallace stresses (and reiteratesthis in Wallace 2011) that to actuallyblame an agent, onemust be exercised emotionally.

Of course, Strawson and Wallace are hardly alone in endorsingemotional theories of blame. While these “Strawsonian”accounts of blame focus on the reactive attitudes (particularlyresentment, indignation, and guilt), other emotional theories of blameare more inclusive. Susan Wolf (2011), David Shoemaker (2015, 2017),and Leonhard Menges (2017), for example, defend accounts of blame thatemphasize anger. Similarly, Macalester Bell (2013a, 2013b) argues fora “hostile attitudes” account of blame that includes theattitude of contempt as a blaming attitude. And Douglas Portmore(2022) offers an account that emphasizes the feeling of disappointmentor disapproval. Consequently, what holds emotional theories of blametogether is not widespread agreement over which emotions constituteblame. Rather, it is a shared commitment to thinking that to blame isto respond to others’ actions with a negative emotion.

Though it’s very plausible that we blame others by responding totheir actions with anger, resentment, indignation, or even contempt,there are a number of objections to emotional theories of blame.George Sher (2006) argues that emotional responses are unnecessary forblame. For example, Sher argues that we can blame a loved one withoutfeeling negative emotional reactions. So too, we can blame villainsfrom whom we are temporally distant without any emotional response.The thought here is simply that it is possible to blame Nero for theburning of Rome, even though we do not feel any resentment orindignation towards Nero for his cruelty. In response, defenders ofemotional theories might simply argue that despite appearances,without the emotions, one is simply not blaming Nero but insteadmerely judging blameworthy (see Wallace 1994, 2011). Alternatively, adefender of emotional theories could argue (plausibly, but by no meansuncontroversially) that one can be in an emotional state even if onedoes not experience any felt affect.

A second objection to emotional theories of blame might be called the“force objection”. Pamela Hieronymi develops thisobjection by noting that

an affective accompaniment of a judgment would be a certain unpleasantemotional disturbance … but, the force of blame seems deeper,more serious or weightier (Hieronymi 2004: 121).

Thus, in Hieronymi’s view, the normative force of blame must begrounded in the cognitive elements of blaming emotions, since it isthese elements that are responsive to and reflect our concern formorality. But if the force of blame is grounded in the cognitiveelements of the emotion, then why wouldn’t a judgment with thesame content constitute an instance of blame? It seems that whileemotions might be concomitant with blame, it is the cognitiveelement—one that can be present even if the blamer is notemotionally exercised—and not the emotion itself thatconstitutes one’s blame. In response to this sort of objection,Wallace (2011) has argued that the reactive emotions are notsuperfluous add-ons to the judgment, but instead they serve to changethe meaning of the judgment, imbuing the judgment with the sort ofexpressive significance that is characteristic of blame and that wouldotherwise be lacking from a mere judgment. (See also Reis-Dennis 2019on the meaning and function of moral anger.)

More recently, Miranda Fricker (2016) has argued that our blamingpractices evince too much internal diversity to be so neatlyidentified with the narrow set of attitudes that emotion theoristsfocus on. Because blame in one context can vary so significantly fromblame in another context—self-blame is different than directsecond-personal blame, and each of these forms of blame is importantlydifferent than third-party blame—there is very little that ispresent in all instances of blame. And surely no specific emotionalexperience will be present in all cases. In response to this, LeonhardMenges (2017) has claimed that there is actually less diversity in ourblaming practices than Fricker supposes, and that to the degree thereis any diversity in how we blame, it does nothing to undermine therationale for emotional accounts of blame.

1.3 Conative Theories of Blame

Conative theories of blame emphasize motivational elements, likedesires and intentions, as essential to blame. Two of the mostdeveloped extant theories of blame—those due to George Sher(2006) and T. M. Scanlon (2008, 2013)—fall in this category. Andthough we will focus on these two theories, other conative theoriesare possible (see, for example, Bernáth 2020).

1.3.1 Dispositions Around a Belief-Desire Pair

As mentioned above, George Sher (2006) is skeptical of emotionaltheories of blame. However, he is also skeptical about accounts ofblame that are merely cognitive. There is more to blame than a merejudgment that an agent has acted wrongly, but one need not beemotionally exercised in order to blame. Sher prefers a happy mediumbetween these two widely accepted alternatives.

According to Sher, what must be added to judgments of wrongness is abackwards-looking desire “that the person in question not haveperformed his past bad act” (2006: 112). But it’s notenough that the blamer simply wish that the bad action not havehappened; the desire must be one that issues from the blamer’sgeneral commitment to morality, since what we really want is that thewrongdoer not have “exercised his own decision-making capacitiesin a certain way”, and that “he have responded, or that hebe disposed to respond, to what we consider a compelling moralreason” (2006: 105). On the resulting view, when the cognitivecomponent of judging blameworthy is accompanied by this desire, whichreflects our general commitment to morality, then we are blaming. (Seealso Arpaly 2006 and Arpaly & Schroeder 2014 for a similar view,according to which blame requires having a conative orientation“against the wrong or bad” (Arpaly & Schroeder 2014:161).) Moreover, Sher argues that the belief-desire pair in questionis itself the basis of those affective and behavioral dispositionsthat are commonly associated with blame. For example, a blamer’sdisposition to feel hostile attitudes like anger towards the agent andto also reprimand, rebuke, and seek apology are to be explained by thepresence of the belief-desire pair.

Despite the elegance of Sher’s view, it has generated a numberof critical replies. Pamela Hieronymi (2008) objects to the linkbetween the belief-desire pair and attendant affective and behavioraldispositions. To her mind, the link is too weak: though she acceptsSher’s claim that the belief-desire pair is essentiallyimplicated in one’s general commitment to morality, she does notthink he has adequately shown that the characteristic dispositions areimplicated in the same way. After all, “surely our commitment tomorality could be affirmed or clarified in ways that do not involvehostile behavior or reproach” (2008: 25). But if this iscorrect, then it looks like blame’s characteristic dispositionsneed not be present, even in those who are genuinely and sincerelycommitted to moral norms. As a result, Hieronymi concludes that Sherhas failed to show thatblame—which must involve suchdispositions—is essentially tied to a more general commitment tomorality.

A second objection to Sher’s view is due to Angela Smith (2008),who rejects Sher’s claim that a desire component is part of whatconstitutes an attitude as blame. To defend this, she invites us toconsider an ordinary case of blame, say the blame we feel for apolitician who leads us into a disastrous war. While we no doubtdesire that the politician hadn’t led us into the war because weare generally committed to morality (and we therefore don’tenjoy the suffering of innocents), it is not clear how this desire isitself part of our blame. By Smith’s lights, the desirecomponent of the belief-desire pair, like the attendant affective andbehavioral dispositions, seems to be something that is above andbeyond blame itself. In more recent work, Smith has also argued thatin some cases, say in “the reactions of a mother whose son isblameworthy for [a] crime” (Smith 2013: 35), the relevantbelief-desire pair might be present without blame. Another challengeto Sher’s theory is that it is too “sanitized” or“whitewashed” to do justice to our actual practice (McGeer2013, Chislenko 2024).

1.3.2 Attitude Adjustment in Response to Impairment

T. M. Scanlon (2008) has developed an influential account of blamethat represents something of a shift from his earlier, more cognitive,account (see Scanlon 1986). In developing this new account,Scanlon’s initial motivation is similar to that of Sher, sinceScanlon thinks that an adequate account of blame must fit somewherebetween a merejudgment that another has acted in someobjectionable way and asanction (of which expressed reactiveemotions are but one paradigm case).

For Scanlon, the cognitive component of blame is provided by ajudgment that another has acted in a way that impairs meaningfulinterpersonal relations; this is a judgment of blameworthiness. Butthis judgment itself is insufficient for blame (for reasons similar tothose that Sher gives), so in addition to judging that the agent isblameworthy, blame requires you “to take yourrelationship with him or her to be modified in a way that [a judgmentof blameworthiness] holds to be appropriate” (Scanlon 2008:128–29). In other words, blaming someone involves not just thebelief that they have acted in a way that impairs your relationshipwith them, but also, that you take yourself to have reasons to reviseyour intentions and attitudes towards them, and accordingly that yourevise these intentions and attitudes on the basis of suchreasons.

Like Sher, then, Scanlon has provided an initially plausible accountof what it is to blame. But also like Sher, his account has beenwidely criticized. The most common line of criticism is best summed upby R. Jay Wallace’s (2011) slogan that Scanlon’s account“leaves the blame out of blame”. More precisely, Wallaceargues that

blame has a quality of opprobrium that is not captured by theconsiderations about the normative significance of impairedrelationships that are at the center of Scanlon’s approach(Wallace 2011: 349; see also Mason 2011).

Susan Wolf (2011) has also argued that in some cases, such as the caseof a hot-headed but ultimately loving family, it seems that you canblame another without taking yourself to have impairments in yourrelationship or attendant reasons to revise your intentions orattitudes towards that person. The characteristic features ofScanlon’s interpretation of blame, then, seem to be unnecessary.Finally, Sher (2013) has argued that Scanlon’s emphasis onrelationships is problematic. After all, many cases of wrongdoinginvolve strangers—e.g., in most car thefts, the victim does notknow the criminal. Nevertheless, it still seems that it is possible toblame those with whom we have no standing relationship. So blamecannot essentially implicate interpersonal relationships. Scanlon, inresponse (2008, 2013), insists that all rational agents stand in the“moral relationship” to one another. However, whether thiskind of relationship is sufficient to explain the blame of strangersis unclear. And indeed, as Sher points out, even if there is somerelationship between a victim and the stranger who victimizes them,it’s not clear thatthis relationship plays any role atall in grounding the blame. (For recent discussion of Scanlon’saccount, see Chislenko 2020 and Sars 2023.)

1.4 Functional Theories of Blame

In light of the above difficulties, perhaps we should conclude thatthere simply is no single type of mental state or attitude that isconstitutive of blame. One way to go here would be to abandon theproject of analyzing blame altogether (Nussbaum 2016). A second way togo would be to argue that blame is a disposition that can manifest inmany different ways depending on the context (Werkmäster 2022).In recent years, however, many authors have taken a third path, whichis to develop a functional account of blame, according to which blameis to be identified by its functional role, rather than by anyparticular attitude or combination of attitudes.

According to one functional account of blame, the function of blame isprotest. In other words, what we’re doing when we blame othersis protesting their actions, attitudes, or character. But this, ofcourse, means that any number of attitudes or combination of attitudescould be present in blame. Pamela Hieronymi (2001), Matthew Talbert(2012), and Victoria McGeer (2013) argue that reactive attitudes likeresentment (and the expressions of these attitudes) serve as powerfulforms of protest. Angela Smith (2013), on the other hand, argues thatwhen we modify our attitudes and intentions as Scanlon envisions, butdo soas a form of protest, then we are actually blaming. Inother words, for Smith, it’s not enough that we modify ourattitudes and intentions; the modification in question must serve aparticular function, namely that of protest, to count as an instanceof blame. And in order to count as a protest, it need not involve anyparticular emotional state. (See also Pereboom 2021, which develops aforward-looking account of blame based on the idea of moral protest,which does not involve retributive emotions.)

There are at least two sources of concern for those theories that takeprotest to be the function of blame. First, it’s not clear thatprotest is independent of blame, such that one could specify what itis to protest without appealing to blaming attitudes. But if this isso, it’s not clear that appealing to the notion of protest willhelp us clarify the nature of blame. Second, protest seemsparadigmaticallyexpressed. Indeed, it’s hard to makesense of unexpressed protest. Do workers protest unfair laborconditions simply through their beliefs or attitudes? Or must theymake such beliefs and attitudes known? And if it is the latter, thenit’s not clear that protest could be the function of blame.After all, not all blame is expressed. These objections are notdecisive, of course, but they do suggest that there is more work to bedone in defense of protest views to help us better understand what thenature of protest is, such that appeals to protest can provide anon-circular account of blame. (See Chislenko 2019 for a discussion ofthese objections and other aspects of the moral protest account ofblame.)

Of course, there might be other functions of blame: to express orcommunicate condemnation, disapproval, demands, or expectations (Duff1986, Macnamara 2011, 2015, McKenna 2012, Bennett 2013, Fricker 2016,Mason 2019), or to stand up for our values (Houston 1992, Franklin2013), or to signal the blamer’s normative commitments(Shoemaker and Vargas 2019), or to “facilitate sharedknowledge” about the ways that wrongdoing changes the normativelandscape (Sliwa 2019). (On the structure of functionalist accounts ingeneral, see Wang 2024.)

One potential problem with views that emphasize communication is thatmany instances of blame are not expressed or communicated. So, in whatsense are those instances of blame communicative? And if they are not,how can blame be essentially communicative in its nature? (Jefferson2024 contains a discussion of whether and how it makes sense to blamethe dead, on this sort of account.) Gary Watson suggests thatresentment is “incipiently communicative” and says that“in some elusive sense, resentment is ‘meant to beexpressed’” (Watson 2011: 328). That sense remains elusive(see Telech 2020 and Wang 2021 for recent discussion).

2. When is Blame Appropriate?

Blame is easily abused and misused, so a complete understanding of thephenomenon will require looking not just at what blameis butalsowhen it’s appropriate. (We use‘appropriate’ as a broad normative term to cover all sortsof evaluations, such as whether any particular instance of blame isfitting, warranted, permissible, required, effective, and so on.) AsMiranda Fricker puts it: “Like most things in life, our practiceof blame is susceptible to the vices of being done from the wrong sortof motive, in the wrong degree, in the wrong way, or with the wrongsort of object” (Fricker 2016: 168). This list provides a niceinitial taxonomy of ways that blame can go awry: an ethics of blamewill need to take into consideration (a) facts about the blamer, (b)facts about the blaming interaction itself, and (c) facts about theperson being blamed. (See Coates 2020 for a detailed outline of thevarious issues that might come up when exploring the ethics ofblame.)

Keep in mind, too, that how you answer the question of what blameis will influence these ethical questions, since thepropriety conditions of a judgment are plausibly distinct from thepropriety conditions of a rebuke. Because we are not here endorsing aparticular theory of blame, our characterization of the norms inquestion will operate at a level of abstraction that floats free ofsubstantive commitments concerning the nature of blame. (It’salso worth noting that the conditions on appropriate blame outlinedbelow may perhaps be legitimately ignored if the stakes are highenough and the likely consequences of blame so valuable. In otherwords, there may be cases where it is appropriate to blame for the‘wrong’ sort of reason. We set these cases aside for thepurposes of our discussion, though see Calhoun 1989, Ciurria 2019, andEdlich 2022.)

2.1 Facts about the Person Being Blamed

Begin by considering potentially relevant facts about the person whois being blamed. A natural answer to the question of when blame isappropriate is to say that blame is only appropriate when the personblamed is in fact blameworthy. This may sound at first likean unhelpful tautology—after all, what could it mean to beworthy of blame if not simply that you can be appropriatelyblamed?—but the emphasis onworthiness is meant to drawattention to the fact that it’s only appropriate to blame aperson when they haveearned it or when theydeserveit. That is, only when certain facts aboutthe person beingblamed are in place. Which facts? What does one have to do toearn blame?

2.1.1 Moral Agency

As we noted in section 1 above, beingto blame (i.e.,causally responsible; see Beardsley 1969 and Kenner 1967) is notsufficient for beingblameworthy because often, the best ormost salient causal explanation doesn’t even involve a moralagent at all. Earthquakes and mosquitoes can be to blame for variousnegative outcomes, but neither can be blameworthy because neither can,as Gary Watson puts it, “act effectively and competently inmoral matters” (2013: 3322). Only certain creatures are evencandidates for blame in the first place, and though it is a matter ofsome controversy which precise capacities are required, the listcertainly includes the capacities for reflection, deliberation,decision-making, and self-determination. But earthquakes andmosquitoes are the easy cases; the harder cases are children andpsychopaths, individuals who haven’t (or haven’t yet)developed an understanding of or an appreciation for moral norms.These individuals, it seems, can still act in morally significantways—indeed, in ways we would naturally describe as cruel andeven evil—but whether they can earn moral blame (as opposedmerely to giving us good reason to protect ourselves from them) is avexed question (see Watson 2011, 2024, Shoemaker 2015, and Nelkin 2015for insightful discussion). But regardless of how one answers thatquestion, it is widely accepted that potentially blameworthy agentsmust be capable of reflecting upon, reasoning about, and executing adecision about how to behave. If someone lacks these capacities, theyareexempted from blame.

2.1.2 Freedom and Responsibility

In addition to having the general capacity for practical reasoning,however, it is often thought that an individual is appropriatelyblamed only if they had (and, on the occasion, exercised) free will.The excuse “I couldn’t help it” or “I wasforced to do it” is often sufficient to render blameinappropriate, so it’s a natural thought that someone can onlybe blamed for those things that theycould have helped, orweren’t forced into—in other words, for thosethings that they chose of their own free will. (But note that this isprimarily a condition applied toactions for which one isthought to be blameworthy. Taking seriously the possibility that wecan be blameworthy for our attitudes as well might naturally lead oneto downplay the importance of free will, or reconceive what itinvolves. See, for example, Smith 2005.) Typically, free will isthought of as a sort ofcontrol: as the ability to control(by selecting) which of two possible futures obtains, for example, oras the ability to control (by guiding) one’s actions in light ofone’s considered judgments about what one ought to do. (See vanInwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Nelkin 2011; Franklin 2018.) The questionof whether control of the right sort is compatible with determinismhas proven to be a difficult one to answer; hence it’s adifficult question whether blame would ever be appropriate in adeterministic world. There are less sweeping threats to freedom,however. We are all vulnerable to coercion, manipulation, situationalpressures, and varying degrees of temptation or compulsion, and theextent to which these factors rob us of our freedom is the extent towhich we may not be deserving of blame.

If you add the capacity for practical reasoning to the right sort ofcapacities for control (which will likely include not just volitionalcapacities but cognitive capacities, too), you end up with a morallyresponsible agent—that is to say, an individual who has thecapacities that render them a sensible target of blame (see Fischer& Ravizza 1998; Vargas 2013). If, in performing a morallyreprehensible action, they exercise those capacities, then they aremorally responsiblefor that action—that is to say,they are a sensible target of blame for that action (they are neitherexempted nor excused from our blaming practices).

There are further subtleties here, but they are inessential to themain point, which is simply that most theorists think that it is onlyappropriate to blame someone if they have certain capacities forcontrol, practical reasoning, moral understanding, etc., and exercisedthem on the occasion in question. (One of the subtleties is that evenif an agent satisfies all the relevant control conditions, they maystill fail to be responsible if they fail to meet an independentepistemic condition. Non-culpable ignorance (perhaps even culpableignorance) of the consequences of one’s actions seems to excusebad behavior as much as lack of control. See Ginet 2000, Mele 2011,and Robichaud & Wieland 2017.) Likewise, most theorists think thatif someone has and exercises these capacities, then they areblameworthy—that is, they haveearned blame. (SeeMcCormick 2022 for a recent discussion of whether blame can ever bedeserved.) But just because someone has earned blame doesn’tmean that blame is necessarily the right response. To see why,let’s turn now to facts about the blaming interactionitself.

2.2 Facts about the Blaming Interaction

Even if someone is blameworthy, not justany blaminginteraction is called for. If we think of blame as a“move” made through moral space, or as a contribution to amoral conversation (McKenna 2012), then one dimension of normativequestions will concern the moves or messages that are called for. Wemight think of these asprocedural norms (Coates andTognazzini 2012).

2.2.1 Proportionality

Analogous to the common thought that the punishment must fit thecrime, it is plausible to suppose that the blame must, in some sense,fit the transgression. Perhaps it’s legitimate to be annoyed atyour friend for forgetting your birthday one year, but youshouldn’t (at least in the absence of some special context) vownever to speak to them again as a result of that one lapse. What willcount as a proportional blaming response to a transgression will nodoubt vary with different relationships and different transgressions,but there will likely always be some responses that take thetransgression too seriously, and some that don’t take itseriously enough.

What counts as a proportional blaming response won’t depend juston the nature of the transgression, though; it will likely also dependon the way the wrongdoer has responded to their own transgression. AsAngela Smith puts it:

If someone has an objectionable attitude toward me, for example, butis already reproaching herself for it and making efforts to change,then I may judge that I have no reason to adopt or express any blamingattitudes toward her at all. Her own self-reproach shows me that shealready recognizes that I have moral standing and deserve bettertreatment, and therefore I may no longer see her attitude as posing achallenge to me or my status. In cases of this sort, the faultyattitude is still attributable to the agent and she is open tolegitimate moral criticism for it; but the agent is already respondingappropriately to this fact and therefore there may be no grounds forfurther criticism on the part of others (Smith 2007: 482).

Relatedly, in the case of third-party blame—where your blame isdirected at someone who has wronged someone else—there areprocedural questions concerning how the intensity of your blamematches up with the intensity of the blame from the person who waswronged. If I suspect that your failure to blame someone who haswronged you stems from a lack of self-respect or a lack of feelingempowered, then perhaps I can appropriately be more outraged than youare. But in other cases it seems as though I need to temper my blamein light of how you yourself view the wrong that has been done to you.For example, what if you have forgiven the wrongdoer? Does that byitself render third-party blame out of order? Maura Priest (2016)suggests that we distinguish between “Spectator Blame” and“Associate Blame” to help deal with this issue. Whileforgiveness might render blamingon behalf of the victiminappropriate, there is still a more detached form of blame that couldbe appropriately maintained.

2.2.2 Epistemic Considerations

Imaginary philosophical examples are always told by an omniscientnarrator, but of course real-life cases of blame are never like that,and we have to rely on our fallible judgments about the obscuremotivations of other human beings. Sometimes we are confident thatsomeone has done wrong; other times we let our anger hamper ourimagination and our generosity in searching for possible excuses forapparent wrongdoing. Having too quick a temper is itself something forwhich one can be open to criticism, and what makes a temper count astoo quick is often that it outstrips the evidence forwrongdoing. The realm of interpersonal blame is not perfectlyanalogous to the realm of legal responsibility, of course, so“beyond a reasonable doubt” may be too demanding arequirement, but nevertheless there is some epistemic standard thatmust be met before blame is appropriate, even if the potential targetof blame is in fact blameworthy. (This point is developed in moredetail in Coates 2016. See also Rosen 2004.)

2.3 Facts about the Blamer

Even if some agent is blameworthy, and even if no procedural normwould be violated, it’s not the case (or, at least, notalways the case) that everyone can blame. As Roger Wertheimerpoints out,

some matters—like other folks’ intimate intrafamilialrelations—may be none of your business, not your affair, no(proper) concern of yours, so, whatever your evidence and emotions, itis not your place to bear ill will (Wertheimer 1998: 499).

G. A. Cohen echoes the sentiment from a different perspective:

[Moral] admonition may be sound, and in place, but some may be poorlyplaced to offer it. When a person replies to a critic by saying:“Where doyou get off criticizingme forthat?”, she is not denying (or, of course, affirming)the inherent soundness of the critic’s criticism. She is denyingher critic’s right to make that criticism, in a posture ofjudgment (Cohen 2006: 118).

The general idea here is that there may be facts about the person whois expressing blame that make their blame inappropriate. It’snot their place, they aren’t well positioned, they don’thave the authority, and so on. Marilyn Friedman (2013: 272) puts thepoint nicely by saying that not everyone isblamerworthy. Tocontinue with the legal analogy from above: whereas the blaminginteraction raises questions ofprocedure, we might think offacts about the blamer as giving rise to questions aboutjurisdiction. Granted that the wrongdoer is blameworthy andthat the blaming procedures would be in order, who exactly can enactthose procedures?

2.3.1 Standing

There has recently been an explosion of work on the so-calledstanding to blame, which is often taken to be the primaryfact about the blamer that is relevant to whether an instance of blameis appropriate. Hypocritical blame is usually treated as a paradigmexample, and the most basic thought is simply that there seems to besomething inappropriate about blame issued by a blamer who is guiltyof the same (or similar) transgression to which they are reacting. Thestandard way of talking about what’s going wrong in this sort ofcase is to use the label ‘standing’: the hypocriticalblamer lacks the standing to blame.

Not everyone who writes about standing uses the term in the same way,perhaps in part because there are several interesting philosophicalissues in this neighborhood that are not always clearly distinguished.The literature has grown up around the issue of hypocritical blame,which is widely thought to be inappropriate in some way. But there aremultiple ways in which it might be inappropriate, and it’s notclear that the language of ‘standing’ is helpfully appliedto them all. For example, the hypocritical blamer may well be making amoral mistake, but that may be a separate issue from the question ofwhether and why the person being hypocritically blamed canlegitimately ignore or dismiss that blame. Hypocritical blame may beinappropriate in the sense of ‘morally wrong’ and alsoinappropriate in the sense of ‘legitimately dismissable’,but those seem to be separate senses, which may have independentexplanations. (And of course there may be other ways in whichhypocritical blame is inappropriate.)

Moreover, worries about standing seem to apply beyond questions ofhypocrisy to other blamer-based worries, such as whether the blamer iscomplicit in the wrongdoing or meddling in someone else’sbusiness. So it would be a mistake, from a methodological point ofview, to wed the concept of standing too closely to the specificissues that arise in cases of hypocritical blame. Perhaps what goeswrong in hypocritical blame is the same sort of thing as what goeswrong in meddlesome blame, but best to leave the “perhapsnot” option on the table as well.

In light of the risk of terminological confusion, perhaps the best wayforward is to follow Linda Radzik (2023) and opt for a“minimal” understanding of standing, according to which itis simply a matter ofeligibility. Just as there are factsabout the person being blamed that make them eligible for blame in thefirst place – moral agency, normative competence, and so on– so there are facts about the blamer that make them eligible toblame in the first place. This minimal concept of standing leaves open(as it should) questions about, for example, the criteria foreligibility or the precise normative status(es) that eligibilityconfers.

It’s worth noting that there are some who have expressedskepticism about the very idea of standing. But what these theoristsare skeptical about is not the minimal idea of eligibility to blame.Instead, they have expressed doubts about whether it is wise todismiss hypocritical blamers (Bell 2013a) or about whether it makessense to talk about a right or privilege to blame (King 2019) or aboutthe very idea of some special sort of interpersonal authority thatplaces some people above others for purposes of criticism (Dover2019a, 2019b). If we opt for a minimal understanding of standing, thenthese theorists are not skeptics about standing; instead, they aretheorists who argue thateveryone has standing, evenhypocrites and meddlers. So we might simply say that they are skepticsaboutdifferential standing.

For now, though, let’s leave terminological issues behind andlook a bit more closely at the blamer-based worries that often getdiscussed in the literature on the standing to blame.

2.3.2 Hypocrisy

At least sometimes, we blame others with the aim of getting them tosee the error of their ways and change their behavior in the future.One sure way to fail at this is to be guilty of the very same (or arelevantly similar) transgression as the one you are condemning. Thehypocritical blamer is perhaps the paradigm example of someone whoseblame somehow goes awry. For one thing, it’s unlikely thathypocritical blame will be effective (Dworkin 2000, Roadevin 2018),but the problem seems to go deeper than that. (Another way to put it:hypocritical blame would still be problematic even if itwereeffective.) Here we can separate a few questions: first, what, ifanything, is morally problematic about hypocritical blame; second,what is the content and force of the standard “who are you toblame me” rebuttal of hypocritical blame; third, in virtue ofwhat does hypocrisy undermine standing, assuming it does?

So, first: what, if anything, is morally problematic abouthypocritical blame? (See Szabados and Soifer 2004 for a book lengthtreatment of the ethics of hypocrisy in general.) The answer to thisquestion will likely depend on the nature of blame. R. Jay Wallace,for example, who advocates a Strawsonian account of blame, explainsthe problem with hypocrisy by an appeal to the underlying commitmentsof the reactive attitudes. For Wallace (2010: 326), “blamecarries with it a kind of practical commitment to criticalself-scrutiny”, a commitment that the hypocritical blamer failsto live up to. Given that “we all have an interest in beingprotected from the kind of social disapproval and opprobrium that areinvolved in blame”, the hypocritical blamer—as long asthey aren’t also blaming themselves, in which case they mightnot count as hypocritical—treats their own interest in avoidingblame as more important than the interest of the target of theirblame. As Wallace puts it (2010: 328): “This offends against apresumption in favor of the equal standing of persons that [is]fundamental to moral thought”.

Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller (2018) offer a similar view, arguing thathypocritical blame involves an unfair “differential blamingdisposition”, which “contravenes the equality ofpersons” (2018: 123). They argue that their account, unlikeWallace’s, can account not only for what’s objectionableabout hypocritical moraladdress, but also for why evenunexpressed hypocritical blame is morally problematic.Emphasizing the idea of self-scrutiny more than the idea of theequality of persons, Matt King (2020) argues that the hypocriticalblamer is guilty of misdirected attention. According to King,“there is a general principle favoring attending to conductingourselves rightly in the world over attending to the faults ofothers” (2020: 1438), and it is this principle that thehypocritical blamer has flouted.

Other accounts of the moral wrongness involved in hypocritical blameinclude the idea that it is often ill-motivated and thus unfair(Statman 2023) and that it involves dishonesty that threatens toundermine the valuable role that blame plays in our responsibilitypractices (Piovarchy 2025).

Even if hypocritical blame is morally wrong, however, thatdoesn’t necessarily help us to make sense of the “who areyou” charge that motivates so much recent work on standing. WhenI challenge your credentials to cast blame by accusing you ofhypocrisy, I’m not simply trying to tell you that you are doingsomething morally wrong. Although that would presumably count as areason to cease blaming, the “who are you” charge is morepointed than the claim that the blamer has a reason to stop. Instead,it seems like I am trying tosilence ordeflect yourblame in some way. (It’s this further thought that drives someof the skepticism about the notion of standing, since the “whoare you” retort may be deployed simply as an evasion.) Oursecond question, then, is how exactly to make sense of the content andforce of the “who are you” charge when applied to ahypocritical blamer.

There are several ways to go here. For Matt King (2020), the retortfunctions mainly to redirect the hypocritical blamer’s attentionback to where it should be in the first place: on their own conductand character. But many theorists think of standing as involving apositive normative status, like possessing the right or privilege orauthority to blame, in which case the retort may be a way of pointingout that the hypocritical blamer lacks this status and thus has losttheir moral voice, so to speak. We saw above that Fritz & Millerlargely agree with Wallace that hypocritical blaming is unfair becausethe hypocrite harbors a “differential blamingdisposition”. But they go a step further by suggesting that thenormativeupshot of the unfairness of hypocritical blame isthat the blamer “forfeits the right to blame others” forviolations of the norm with respect to which the hypocrisy arises(Fritz & Miller 2018: 125). This thought fits quite naturally withsome ways in which the “who are you” charge tends to beformulated. When I ask the rhetorical question, “Who are you toblame me?”, perhaps what I’m trying to say is thatalthoughothers may have the right to blame me for thistransgression,you do not have such a right. Your hypocrisyhas taken it from you.

Another proposal, recently developed by Ori Herstein (2017, 2020),doesn’t appeal to a general right to blame, but instead beginsfrom the insight that blaming is, in part, an attempt togivereasons to the person being blamed—reasons to stop whatthey are doing, to apologize, to acknowledge wrongdoing. Even withoutbeing blamed, a wrongdoer would presumably have these reasons, butwhat blame does is add another type of reason to themix—specifically, adirective reason. This richeraccount of the blaming transaction opens up a new way of understandingthe “who are you” charge. In Herstein’s view,although a hypocritical blamer does still issue a valid directivethrough their blame, that directive can nevertheless be permissiblyignored “without substantive deliberation on [its] merits”(Herstein 2017: 3110). Adam Piovarchy (2020) and Justin Snedegar(2024a) have also defended similar accounts, which emphasize the waythat a person who is blamed hypocritically can rightly ignore ordismiss the second-personal demands that blame otherwise successfullytransmits (see also Edwards 2019).

Finally, if hypocrisy does undermine standing,why does it doso? On some views, the very same facts that ground the wrongness ofhypocritical blame also explain the loss of standing. For example,according to Fritz and Miller (2019), the hypocritical blamer rejectsthe equality of persons, which is the very thing that grounds theright to blame in the first place. Hence there is a tight connectionbetween what makes hypocritical blame morally objectionable and why itresults in lost standing. Other accounts focus on the fact that thehypocritical blamer fails to be committed to the very norm aroundwhich their criticism has been crafted (Todd 2019, Lippert-Rasmussen2024), though one might reasonably wonder why there is this connectionbetween commitment and the loss of the relevant status. (Riedener 2019argues, for example, that commitment to the norm is a“constitutive rule of the speech act of blame” (196).)Finally, some theorists appeal to the idea ofrelative moralstatus, arguing that eligibility for taking up the role of ablamer requires that one be “better” in some way than theone being blamed, whereas a hypocritical blamer is manifestly not insuch an elevated position (Todd 2023, Snedegar 2024a, Snedegar2024b).

2.3.3 Other Blamer-Based Worries

Although hypocrisy is the most frequently discussed blamer-based factthat would render blame problematic, there are certainly others worthexploring. Here we’ll briefly discuss four: complicity,meddling, moral luck, and claimant injustice. (For discussion of threeother potential blamer-based worries, see Telech and Tierney 2019,Tognazzini 2022, and O’Brien 2022.)

To charge someone with blaming hypocritically is to allege that theyare blaming (or, at least, pretending to blame) in response totransgressions similar to those that they have committed in the past.A somewhat related charge, but worth distinguishing, is the claim thatthe blamer is somehow objectionably involved in the very act that theyare, at this very moment, condemning. This is to charge the blamerwithcomplicity, and such a charge might take many forms. G.A. Cohen (2006: 126) gives a nice sample: “you ordered me to doit, you asked me to do it, you forced me to do it, you left me with noreasonable alternative, you gave me the means to do it”. Thesuperior officer who orders a subordinate to do something morallyreprehensible is not in a position to blame the subordinate forcarrying out the order, even if civilians are. And this is notnecessarily because the superior officer has done similar things inthe past, but instead because they are too closely involved in thevery act they are purporting to condemn.

The issue of complicity has recently been discussed in connection withwhether thestate has the standing to blame certaincriminals. Gary Watson (2015) and Gustavo A. Beade (2019) each raiseworries about the fact that criminality is correlated with certainsocial disadvantages that the state itself may be responsible for. Ifcomplicity in wrongdoing undermines the standing to blame, and if thestate is—as seems plausible—at least partly responsiblefor the social conditions that partly explain criminal behavior, thenit suddenly becomes unclear that the state is in a position to punishcertain law-breakers. Nicola Lacey and Hanna Pickard (2021) reply byarguing for a sharp contrast between the context of interpersonalrelationships and the context of criminal law.

Although it is helpful for some purposes to distinguish hypocrisy fromcomplicity, it may be that at a more fundamental level they areproblematic for the same reason. This is the view that Patrick Todd(2012, 2019) advocates. According to Todd, the reason we can raise the“who are you” charge against both hypocrites and those whoare complicit in our wrongdoing is that in both cases, theblamer’s own behavior demonstrates a lack of commitment to therelevant moral norm.

Even if a blamer isn’t a hypocrite and isn’t involved inthe action they are condemning, their blame can nevertheless beinappropriate if the wrong in question is justnone of theirbusiness. Linda Radzik gives a nice description of our commonmoral attitudes toward these situations:

Neighbors and teachers hesitate to interfere with a parent’streatment of her child although they judge the treatment to bewrongful, unless the wrong reaches a certain level of severity. Evenwithin close relationships, we are sometimes uncertain whether weshould express our negative moral judgment of a friend’sbehavior. True, the hesitancy to sanction in these cases is sometimesbased on laziness, self-interest, cowardice or uncertainty about themoral judgments at issue, none of which contradict the claim that wehave the standing to sanction. But, at other times, our hesitancyseems to be based on the sense that it would bewrong tosanction. We say, “It isn’t my place to interfere eventhough I can see what she is doing is wrong”. We do not feelentitled to sanction every wrongdoer for every wrong (Radzik 2011:582).

And the thought, of course, is that we do notfeel entitledto sanction every wrongdoer for every wrong because wearen’t so entitled. Radzik describes three situationsin which only a limited group of individuals could appropriatelyblame: (1) cases where agents wrong themselves, (2) cases where thewrong is “committed within special relationships, such asromantic partnerships, familial bonds, and friendships” (2011:593), and (3) cases where third-party blame “would interferewith the victim’s ability to find vindication in the aftermathof wrongdoing” (2011: 597).

It’s a good question exactlywhy appropriate blamewould be restricted only to certain individuals in these sorts ofcase. Perhaps there are norms of privacy or attention at play (Smith2007; Nagel 1998; Gaukroger 2020; King 2020; Radzik 2024), or perhapsthere’s an illuminating analogy to be made here with the notionof standing in the law (Sabini and Silver 1982, though see also Bell2013a and King 2019), or perhaps if we see blame as a response whichpresupposes that the person blamed is in some way accountableto the members of their moral community, then we candistinguish between several (overlapping) moral communities, only someof which any one person belongs to, and thus only some of whichunderwrite one’s ability to blame appropriately (Duff 2010). Ifwe adopt Scanlon’s account of blame (2008), then perhaps we cansay that some wrongs are none of our business because they don’timpair any ofour relationships, and hence don’t renderappropriate any blame-constituting modifications in thoserelationships (see also Seim 2019 on relationship-specific norms andthe ethics of meddlesome blame).

The so-called “Business Condition” on appropriateblame—that blame is inappropriate if the wrong is none of yourbusiness—is another place where it is helpful to distinguish thequestion of why meddlesome blame is is morally problematic from thequestion of whether and how it might undermine one’s eligibilityto blame. It’s also worth noting thatwhether blamecounts as meddlesome in the first place may be up for negotiationbetween the blamer and the one being blamed, which perhaps shows thatsometimes blame can be legitimately ignored even if the blamersatisfied all the (pre-existing) criteria for eligibility (Snedegar2025).

Moral luck (in all its forms) provides another perspectivefrom which to see how blame might be inappropriate. Consider GaryWatson’s (1987) influential discussion of Robert Harris, who isat once an unequivocally cruel murderer and also, in a real sense, avictim of his tragic formative circumstances. It’s a legitimatequestion, given his history, whether Harris is even the sort ofcreature who is a sensible target of blame – that is, whetherHarris is even a morally responsible agent in the first place –but even if we grant that he is, there’s another potentialobstacle to blame at work here. Watson expresses it like this:

The fact that Harris’s cruelty is an intelligible response tohis circumstances gives a foothold not only for sympathy, but for thethought that ifI had been subjected to such circumstances, Imight well have become as vile. What is unsettling is the thought thatone’s moral self is such a fragile thing. One tends to think ofone’s moral sensibilities as going deeper than that (though itis not clear what this means). This thought induces not only anontological shudder, but a sense of equality with the other: I too ama potential sinner (Watson 1987, as reprinted in Watson 2004:245).

The obstacle to blame that Watson is describing here is not thethought that Harris might not be blameworthy (though he might not be),but rather the thought expressed well by the phrase “There butfor the grace of God go I”. It’s a humbling perspective totake on one’s agency, one that may “taint one’s ownview of one’s moral self as an achievement” (2004: 246),and make one feel that “indignation on one’s part would beself-righteous and indulgent” (2004: 254). For want of a betterterm, we might say that this is a worry aboutsubjunctivehypocrisy, since it certainly has a similar flavor to thehypocrisy worry discussed above. The thought is something like this:“If I were as bad as him, I’d have no standing to blamehim. But the difference between us is simply a matter of luck, andsurely my good moral luck can’t serve as the basis for my moralstanding to blame. So I lack the standing to blame even thoughI’ve never done the terrible things in question.” (Forrecent discussion, see Isserow 2022 and Piovarchy 2023.)

It’s worth mentioning one other fact about the blamer that cancomplicate a blaming interaction, though this one fits less well intothe framework we’ve been exploring because it’s notsomething that makes blameinappropriate so much as it issomething that makes blameunheard. We have in mind an ideaintroduced by Vanessa Carbonell (2019), which she dubsclaimantinjustice. According to Carbonell, claimant injustice“…occurs when social prejudices or structuralinequalities undermine a moral agent’s ability to engage infelicitous moral address—to make moral claims, to call outwrongdoing, to judge or condemn others for their action, to holdresponsible, to seek redress, to blame or punish, to participate inany of the social practices associated with the participant andvicarious reactive attitudes” (2019: 182). The idea here is thatthe very power to engage in moral address is something that requires asocial context where the blamer is recognized as (and believesthemselves to be) a valid source of moral claims, but this context canbe absent for members of marginalized groups, thus rendering themunable to hold members of dominant groups responsible. Thus it may bethat yet another fact about the blamer—the fact that they aremarginalized—can render blame infelicitous. (See Hornsby 1995for related discussion.) Again, it’s not that their blame isdismissed so much as simply not heardas moraladdress in the first place.

2.4 Varieties of Blame

In this entry we have focused mostly on blame understood as a negativereaction to the moral wrongdoing of others, but in closing it’sworth noting three ways in which this is an oversimplification.

First, we don’t just blame others; we also blame ourselves. Andself-blame raises some distinctive issues that deserve separatetreatment (see the essays in Carlsson 2022). For example, severalauthors have pointed out that questions of hypocrisy and standing geta bit tricky in the self-regarding case, since there seems to be asense in which we are always hypocritical when we blame ourselves(since we are guilty of the very same action we are blaming ourselvesfor). Does this mean, then, that no one ever has the standing to blamethemselves? (For discussion, see Fritz & Miller 2021, Tierney2021, and Todd & Rabern 2022.)

Second, we don’t just dish out blame formoralfailures. So it is worth inquiring further into the nature and ethicsof epistemic blame (Boult 2021), aesthetic blame (Kubala 2024), andnon-moral blame more generally (Matheson & Milam 2022).

Finally, blame is just one among many ways that we respond tofailures, and it’s still an open question just how blame relatesto activities like holding responsible, demanding answers,sanctioning, punishing, and so on. (For some attempted taxonomies, seeMacnamara 2011; Shoemaker 2011; Smith 2012; Tognazzini 2015.) So,answers to the above questions about the ethics of blame will notautomatically double as answers to analogous questions about theethics of these other ways of interacting.

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• “Praise and Blame”, entry by Garrath Williams in theInternet Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy.
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• “Beyond Blame”, an online forum inBoston Review with contributions fromseveral philosophers.
• Blame, an episode of the NPR podcastRadiolab.

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Acknowledgments

Our sincere thanks to John Martin Fischer, Coleen Macnamara, AngelaSmith, and Gary Watson for all of their help thinking about moralresponsibility and blame over the years, and to the American Councilof Learned Societies and The College of William & Mary forfinancial assistance during the initial research for this entry.Thanks also to Dee Payton and Patrick Todd for helpful discussionsabout the issue of standing.