Contrary to what the critics claim, there is a necessary connection between blame and suffering. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. But to blame oneself-to feel guilty-necessarily involves suffering. The pain of guilt is constitutive of feeling guilt: if it doesn't hurt, it isn't guilt. With this conception of blameworthiness we can explain why the control condition should obtain. We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was (directly or indirectly) under our control because (a) to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, (b) to feel guilty is to suffer, and (c) one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one's control. The main task of the paper is to argue for (a). Condition b), I hope, needs no defence. I take (c) to have a strong intuitive appeal, but I will not provide any arguments for it. Control can be understood in many different ways. I will not try to specify the relevant control
Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. Therefore, the different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty for X; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X.
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