Social Constraints On Moral Address

Carbonell, Vanessa

doi:10.1111/phpr.12450

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…13 See also Carbonell (2019). 14 Not everyone who writes about standing understands it in terms of a right; see King (2019) whose skepticism about standing to blame is driven largely by his skepticism that it can be understood in terms of rights.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame

Snedegar

2023

J. Moral Philos.

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Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things of which they are also guilty exhibit familiar moral faults, such as making an exception of oneself, and that these faults explain why they lack standing. I argue in support of relative moral status accounts, showing that they both better trace our practice of dismissing blame on the basis of lack of standing, and that they have more explanatory resources than have been appreciated.

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Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame

Snedegar

2023

J. Moral Philos.

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“…Privileged wrongdoers may hold harmful stereotypes about the moral competence or standing of their victims, perhaps dismissing them as ‘bossy’, ‘bitchy’, ‘bitter’, or ‘uppity,’ or viewing them as morally compromised in ways that makes their blame illegitimate. Vanessa Carbonell (2019) calls this phenomenon, wherein marginalized victims are undermined in their capacity to engage in felicitous moral address, ‘claimant injustice’. This can happen when the wrongdoer simply does not recognize that they have harmed the victim and therefore fails to find the latter's blame fitting.…”

Section: Reasons To Let Gomentioning

confidence: 99%

Letting go of blame

Brunning

Milam

2022

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Most philosophers acknowledge ways of overcoming blame, even blame directed at a culpable offender, that are not forgiving. Sometimes continuing to blame a friend for their offensive comment just isn't worth it, so we let go instead. However, despite being a common and widely recognised experience, no one has offered a positive account of letting go. Instead, it tends to be characterised negatively and superficially, usually in order to delineate the boundaries of forgiveness. This paper gives a more complete and systematic account of this important practice. We argue that the basic distinction between forgiving and letting go of blame follows from distinctions that many philosophers already accept. We then develop a positive account in terms of the reasons one has to let go rather than forgive and show that letting go is as valuable a part of our shared moral lives as forgiveness.

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“…There may be further prerequisites for felicitous moral address, including those based in relational features of prospective addressors. Vanessa Carbonell (2019) argues that an agent's being socially marginalized can—despite his ability to understand (and be guided by) the relevant norms—undermine his ability to morally address others. One's “ability,” in a different, normatively suffused, sense of the term, to address blameworthy agents may also be compromised if one lacks the moral standing to blame.…”

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confidence: 99%

Demanding more of Strawsonian accountability theory

Telech

2020

European J of Philosophy

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A neglected and non‐trivial problem exists for a central cluster of Strawsonian accountability theories of moral responsibility, namely those that, following Gary Watson, understand the reactive attitudes to be implicit forms of moral address, particularly moral demand. The problem consists in the joint acceptance of two claims: (a) Accountability is a matter of agents holding one another to moral demands, and (b) accountability is a view of blame and praise. I label joint acceptance of these claims the Strawsonian's demand dogma. Symptomatic of a larger tendency among responsibility theorists to focus on blame to the neglect of its positive counterpart, the demand dogma saddles the Strawsonian with an impoverished and ultimately untenable view of praise. This is because moral demand occupies a dual role on the Strawsonian's view of blame, one that it is incapable of occupying for praise. For, demands figure not only in the contents of blame responses; demand typifies the form of these responses themselves. That is, reactive attitudes of blame, unlike those of praise, implicitly make demands of their targets. The force of this problem is highlighted by considering the inadequacy of various strategies for shoehorning “demand” into our conception of praise. If reactive attitudes generally are incipient forms of moral address, praise‐manifesting attitudes must communicate something other than demand. Though primarily critical, this paper invites Strawsonian responsibility theorists to give renewed attention to the foundations of the proposal that the reactive attitudes are incipiently communicative, focusing this time on the form of address that lies at the heart of praise.

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Social Constraints On Moral Address

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame

Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame

Letting go of blame

Demanding more of Strawsonian accountability theory

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