Praise and Blame

Joel Feinberg observed that "moral responsibility… is a subject about
which we are all confused" (1970: 37). Perhaps nowhere is this
confusion more evident than in our understandings of praise and blame.
This entry will contrast three influential philosophical accounts of
our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might
be justified. On the one hand, a broadly Kantian approach sees
responsibility for actions as relying on forms of self-control that
point back to the idea of free will. On this account praise and blame
are justified because a person freely chooses her actions. Praise and
blame respond to the person as the chooser of her deed; they recognize
her dignity as a rational agent, as Kantians tend to put it. This
approach sharply contrasts with two further ways of thinking about the
issues. One is utilitarian, where praise and blame are justified in
terms of their social benefits. Another, more complex approach is
roughly Aristotelian. This approach situates practices of praise and
blame in terms of our on-going relationships with one another. This
approach stresses the importance of mutual accountability, moral
education, and assessments of character in terms of the many vices and
virtues.

1. Introduction

This article will not try to convey the exact details of these
accounts, but to show how these ways of looking at mutual
accountability capture important parts of our everyday commonsense.
One modern commentator claimed that, in our attitudes to moral
responsibility, "we are all Kantians now" – by "we" meaning not just
philosophers but all Western persons (Adkins, 1960: 2). Another
central figure in this debate, Bernard Williams, agrees that Kant
captured a widespread tendency of modern moral thinking, but also
claims that there exist important counter-tendencies in our actual
practices of responsibility. For Williams, ancient Greek
understandings are actually more realistic and helpful than the
Kantian one. So far as our modern praising and blaming actually make
sense, he claims, they are better captured by a (roughly) Aristotelian
account.

There are some important differences between praise and blame that
will not be central to this entry; in fact, blame will get the
greatest attention here. This is partly because praise seems less
problematic: misplaced blame is felt as deeply unfair, not least
because being exposed to blame is unpleasant and costly in a way that
being praised is not. But it is principally because blame has a closer
connection than praise to matters of intense philosophical interest,
including freedom, responsibility and desert. We often praise
inanimate objects (such as art works or buildings) and animals (a
loyal pet, for example), although we could not blame such entities,
however deeply dissatisfied we felt with them. The focus of this
article, however, will be upon entities that are clearly open to blame
as well as praise: human beings.

What is blame, such that only human beings can be blamed? We are all
familiar with resentment, reproach and accusation regarding a person's
past actions; likewise, we all know the sense of guilt, shame or
indignation they can elicit. Philosophers differ on how far certain
emotions may be central to blame (this relates to a wider dispute,
regarding which emotions, if any, constitute a proper basis for moral
action). What is clear is that blame suggests both responsibility and
culpability. Here, responsibility only implies that the act can be
identified with a person, such that she can reasonably be expected to
respond for it in some way. That is, it does not necessarily imply
fault, or culpability. This is the idea that the person is "in the
wrong," that fault somehow attaches to them so that they deserve
blame. (Philosophers tend to describe this as "blameworthiness.") What
sense we should give to these ideas of culpability or desert, and what
is necessary for us to think of a person as responsible: these are
central issues for this entry.

For further aspects of responsibility, see the sister entry to this
article, responsibility. Another article also examines the topic of
free will in depth. Nonetheless, since Kant's account begins with the
question of free will, it is also necessary to say something about
this straightaway. The entry will then set out the utilitarian and
Aristotelian accounts, before returning to Kant's theory. It concludes
by discussing ideas of moral worth and desert that make Kant's account
so appealing.
2. The Problem of Free Will

The free will debate has become an old chestnut of modern philosophy.
It is an intuitively plausible way of approaching the issues –
familiar to many even before they encounter philosophical texts. It is
perhaps surprising, then, that this debate is actually a rather modern
one.

The basic gist is this: if I am to be responsible (really responsible)
for my conduct, then it must be within my control. However, if it is
true that every event in the universe is determined by causal laws,
then this must be true of the events that constitute my actions.
Therefore, my conduct cannot really be within my control; therefore, I
am not really responsible for my conduct. Two conclusions immediately
suggest themselves. One is that it is incoherent to praise or blame me
– and everyone else – for our actions, because it is so difficult to
doubt the causal well-orderedness of the universe. The alternative
conclusion, scarcely more appealing, is that the human will somehow
sits outside this causal framework – ie, we have free will – because
it is unthinkable that our moral ideas be so desperately incoherent.

Both lines of thought are incompatibilist; that is, they see the ideas
of responsibility involved in praise and blame as incompatible with
the causal well-orderedness of the universe. But while both attract
some limited support among philosophers, the overwhelming consensus
now lies with compatibilism. This is simply the thesis that
responsibility and causal order are compatible. Most philosophers
agree that the alleged incompatibility results from some important
confusions, although there is much less consensus about what these may
be. At least one area of confusion is clear, however, and forms the
central issue of this article: what sort of responsibility for conduct
is involved in praise and blame? Several familiar points in the free
will debate are helpful for approaching this.

In the first place, it is well-known that this debate does not turn on
the truth of determinism as such. Determinism is the idea that every
event is determined by fixed causal laws. Yet it may well be that
every event is somehow random in origin. One interpretation of quantum
physics claims that causal laws are the product of statistical
regularities, while these regularities stem from a near infinite
number of random events. So far as the human will is concerned, this
makes no difference. If my conduct is the product of chance, this
makes me no more responsible for it than does its being generated by
causal laws. The point is that if I am to be blamed or praised, then I
must control my conduct – not causal laws, nor mere chance, nor some
particular combination of the two.

Second, the free will debate bears a disquieting similarity to an
older controversy. In medieval philosophy it used to be asked how
God's omniscience – his knowledge of everything that has happened and
will happen – could be reconciled with our being subject to his moral
judgment (that is, being sent to heaven or to hell). If God knows what
we will do then this seems to imply that it is already decided whether
we will act well or badly. And this, in turn, suggests that it makes
no sense to punish or reward us. Theologians developed various
doctrines to overcome this difficulty, but few sound convincing to
modern ears – perhaps because the problem itself is no longer a live
one, even for most believers. However that may be, it is interesting
that many modern versions of the debate seem to take at least one of
the planks of Christian theology for granted: that individuals have
wills that can be bad or good, usually now expressed in the terms of
people's "blameworthiness" or (less often) "praiseworthiness."

In this way, the modern American philosopher Joel Feinberg ironically
referred to "a moral bank account" that we carry through life, which
sums up our moral credits and debits in a single sum (1970: 20).
Whether or not such an "account" makes sense, it is at least clear
that the idea of "the will" is by no means self-explanatory. For Kant,
as we shall see, it was obvious that all my choices can be summed up
in a single moral evaluation, whether I have a "good" or "bad" will.
Kant is equivocal, however, as to whether only God might make this
evaluation, or whether human beings might also form reasonable
opinions on the matter. But especially if we take the point of view of
mutual, human accountability, it is not obvious why we should believe
any such single evaluation to be possible, or what role this
evaluation might play in our individual or collective lives.
Certainly, we usually praise and blame in terms of particular actions
and particular vices and virtues – not a good or bad will.

Third, this way of framing the issues creates a problematic gulf
between normal moral agents (adult human beings of sound mind) and
other creatures – animals and children. At some stage of evolution,
and at some stage toward maturity, certain animals become "free," when
before they had all been determined in their conduct. Although it is
grossly implausible that there are no relevant moral differences
between the other animals, children, and human adults, it is no more
plausible that the free will simply pops into existence at a certain
stage of human development. (Within a Christian framework this issue
was less problematic: human beings, and only human beings, have
souls.) Nonetheless, we tend to think there is something sufficiently
distinctive about human action, so that many non-religious people find
the idea of free will plausible, and almost everyone assumes that
blame (if not praise) only makes sense with regard to (mature?) human
beings.

Taking the last three points together generates a further point. If
the idea of the will is complex, and there is no straightforward moral
dividing line between children and adults, between humans and other
animals – together, these ideas suggest that a "will" is not something
we all straightforwardly "have." In other words: it is implausible
that all adult humans have the same capacities, all to the same
extent, that are involved in controlling action. One way of retaining
the idea of the will might be to think of it as the bundle of
capacities that are needed to control action in the light of moral
concerns, these capacities being set only at such a level that all
adult human beings of sound mind really seem to possess them. But two
points need to be kept in mind about such a strategy. First, it
remains the case that people will vary in how far they possess such
capacities, and this variation will largely be a product of upbringing
and natural qualities – that is, not something within an individual's
own control. Second, the sort of ultimate control over one's moral
character supposed in Kant's or similar "free will" accounts is
unlikely to be vindicated in this way.
3. Two Contrasting Approaches

Two influential lines of thought oppose the idea that praise and blame
relate to "free will," the metaphysical idea that we are responsible
for our action because they are controlled by us and not (simply)
caused by the world around us. For the utilitarian, praise and blame,
like all our other practices, can only be justified in terms of their
social consequences. A more complex account was given by Aristotle,
who shares the utilitarian's sense that praise and blame have
important social consequences, but also offers an extended account of
how they relate to the capacities needed for moral action.
a. The Utilitarian Account

The utilitarian case is straightforward. Blame and praise encourage us
to perform socially valuable actions and to avoid socially costly
actions. If we know we will be blamed for greed or cruelty, for
example, then we have powerful motives to avoid these. Praise and
blame also involve us in making assessments of people's strengths and
weaknesses, which is important when it comes to deciding who should be
entrusted with which tasks and responsibilities. The stingy person
might make a good banker, but a bad organizer of social occasions.

This approach does seem to capture important truths: we want to
encourage and discourage different sorts of activity, and we need to
have a sense of what different people are good at. It also makes sense
of why we don't blame some actions, even if they had bad outcomes
(even though, in principle, only outcomes matter to the utilitarian).
If the bad outcome was not chosen by the person (for example, she was
forced to act that way by someone else), then there is nothing to be
gained from blaming them (much better to blame the person who forced
her). Thus the utilitarian can accommodate the important fact that
praise and blame relate to free action: but this need not be thought
of in terms of metaphysical "free will," but instead the compatibilist
freedom involved in choosing one's actions independently of others'
interference.

But the utilitarian account faces a simple objection: does it really
provide for responsibility, still more culpability? For example, if we
know that someone does not respond well to criticism, it seems that
the utilitarian case for blame is undermined. We would do much better
to flatter and cajole them into acting differently. Of course, the
utilitarian might reply that this is often what we in fact do with
such people. Further, he might add that we do still blame such people
when we discuss their characters behind their backs, perhaps
describing them as self-righteous or stubborn. What seems to be
missing in this response, however, is the idea that the person
deserves blame. They seem to deserve criticism in just the same way
that a faulty machine or a cracked mug deserve criticism: it's useful
that everyone knows they're faulty, but they can hardly be described
as blameworthy. Especially when we move from blame to the question of
sanctions or punishment, this lack of desert seems to present a real
problem for the utilitarian account.

Utilitarians face a more complex criticism, which goes beyond the
scope of this entry. Historically more concerned with the actions of
government than individuals, utilitarianism never developed a
realistic moral psychology – that is, very roughly, an account of what
makes the decent person tick. This lack of attention has permitted
some of the most devastating critique of utilitarianism, such as
Bernard Williams's and Susan Wolf's. But if we want to understand
responsibility, our capacity to accept praise and blame as well as our
tendency to dole them out, then we need to have a fairly good picture
of moral agency.
b. The Aristotelian Account

This is where Aristotle's more complex account enters the story. The
most famous discussion of when people can be praised and blamed for
their actions remains Aristotle's. As with the utilitarians, Aristotle
saw no need to talk about praise and blame in terms of free will.
Aristotle speaks of whether acts are voluntary, and whether we
attribute them to a person or to other factors. Some have ascribed
this way of framing the issues to a lack of moral or scientific
sophistication on the part of the ancient Greeks. However, a number of
modern philosophers, most prominently Bernard Williams and Martha
Nussbaum, have suggested that an Aristotelian account is actually more
coherent and sophisticated than those typical of modern philosophy –
and, indeed, more coherent than our modern, "common sense" intuitions
about moral responsibility.

At first glance, it looks as if Aristotle takes it for granted that we
are responsible for our actions, so that others can reasonably praise
or blame or punish us. What he does is to highlight various conditions
that lessen or cancel our responsibility. He discusses force of
events, threats and coercion, ignorance, intoxication and bad
character. Yet, taken together, his account shows us the basic
elements involved in being a person who can reasonably be praised or
blamed.

The first limitation upon voluntary action that Aristotle discusses is
force of circumstances. His well-known example concerns a ship caught
in a storm; the sailors must throw goods overboard if the ship is not
to sink (NE 1110a). In this case the action is not fully voluntary,
and we would not blame the sailors for their actions. (Nor, of course,
would we blame the storm: the undesirable consequence, the loss of the
goods, must be chalked off as the product of natural causes, for which
no one can be blamed.) Note that such cases are extreme examples of
the force of necessity under which we always live – we are always
constrained in our actions by circumstances, although we only tend to
notice this when the constraint is sudden or unexpected. (If blame
were to arise in such a situation, it would be where the sailors
failed to take account of necessity, so that the ship and many aboard
perished.)

In fact, it tends to be the interference of other people that causes
us the most grief – and which really causes problems for
responsibility attributions. Such interference can take many forms,
but its paradigmatic forms are coercion and manipulation. Regarding
coercion, Aristotle's judgment is balanced. It depends on what action
my coercer is demanding of me, and what threats he makes. Some actions
are so heinous that we should be blamed for doing them, whatever we
are threatened with (and whatever blame also attaches to our coercer)
– thus Aristotle dismisses the idea that a man might be "compelled" to
kill his mother (NE 1110a). This makes it clear that a central issue
at stake in attributions of responsibility is the expectations that
people have of one another. There are some forms of coercion we do not
usually expect people to resist, but there are also some sorts of
action that we think people should never undertake, regardless of such
factors. In such cases praise and blame are clearly working to clarify
and reinforce these expectations – in other words, they provide for a
form of moral education.

Aristotle does not comment on manipulation, where other people lead us
to a false view of our circumstances. But he does discuss ignorance of
these circumstances, and how it undermines our responsibility. If we
are ignorant of who someone is, for example – as was Oedipus, who did
not know that the old man obstructing him was actually his father – we
may commit acts we would otherwise abhor – thus Oedipus committed
patricide, killing his own father. For Aristotle, such actions are not
to be blamed (with the important provisos that the ignorance is not
itself culpable and the action was otherwise justified). What decides
good or bad character is how a person reacts when he finds out the
truth – if we fail to regret our deeds, then we can certainly be
blamed, even if the original choice was justifiable. Our regret about
the deed shows that we want to disown it, and prepares us to make up
for it as best we can. A lack of regret shows we are happy for the
deed to have been done anyhow, even though we are now aware of facts
that others think should have prevented us from acting that way.

This argument hints at an important point. For Aristotle, the moral
judgment of the self may be quite different from the judgments of
others. The actor should regret his action deeply but, as long as he
does so, on-lookers should not blame, but rather pity or perhaps
console him. If we suppose that both actor and on-looker are making a
judgment about the actor's moral worth this seems puzzlingly
inconsistent. Yet Aristotle's account has a different logic: The
actor's regret reveals his determination not to be associated with
such an action. The on-lookers' pity relates to their awareness that
this "self-blame" is proper yet not earned; it is something that could
fall upon anyone in the wrong circumstances. Simplifying, we could say
that on-lookers make a positive judgment of the actor, based on his
preparedness to make a negative judgment of himself. But this is not
so paradoxical if we think of these judgments, not as relating to
moral worth, but as preparations for action. Something has gone wrong,
after all, and those affected seem to deserve some recompense. In such
a situation, the actor will feel duty-bound to help put things right
(perhaps to compensate, at any rate to apologise or show remorse).
On-lookers, pitying rather than blaming, try to make his task easier,
since the responsibility, in such a case, was not earned by the actor.

We have just discussed actions done in ignorance of the facts. But not
every form of ignorance excuses; factual knowledge is very different
from moral knowledge. What if a man did not know murder was wrong?
Would this make his murders morally innocent? Aristotle says not:
there are certain things we can and do expect people to know – above
all, basic moral truths such as the wrongness of murder. But this
knowledge is not as straightforward as it might appear: it must
include a fairly good capacity to judge which sorts of killing count
as murder. Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann organized the killing of
thousands, without a sense of its wrongness. Aristotle is clear: such
moral ignorance, an inability or failure to judge, excuses no adult.
Eichmann should be held responsible for murder. But why should moral
ignorance not excuse, when factual ignorance does? We must recognize
that moral knowledge is actually rather different from factual
knowledge. If a person is morally ignorant it is his whole character,
his lasting ability to judge and act well, that is impaired – and
presumably very difficult to set right. Isolated errors in factual
knowledge, on the other hand, can be easily corrected. So long as we
subsequently recognize and regret what we have done, factual mistakes
involve no lasting corruption of character.

Still, if a person is morally ignorant it follows that they are unable
to choose well. Aristotle agrees, arguing that those of settled bad
character – be they morally ignorant or otherwise – are unable to make
decent moral judgments. Does this mean that blame is incoherent or
misplaced? He claims not. Even if the vicious person cannot now choose
to act otherwise, there was a time when her vices were not fixed, when
she could have chosen not to be vicious. Therefore, Aristotle says,
she can be blamed. This is neat but rather unconvincing. Aristotle is
famous for emphasising the importance of good upbringing and
habituation, and presumably many vices are formed in childhood, before
people have formed capacities for deliberating reasonably. Indeed,
many vices undercut the capacity for rational deliberation. So it is a
clear implication of Aristotle's own account that the badly brought up
person may never be in a position to choose not to be vicious. Note,
further, that this move represents Aristotle at his most Kantian:
blame is justified by reference to control, to a "could have done
otherwise" – even when his own account of character formation suggests
that such control probably never existed.

What are we to say, then, when a person seems unlikely to change: she
appears quite settled in some particular vice, either because she
cannot understand the criticism or because she is unable to alter her
character or habits? Such cases are very common, and – unless we
suppose that they are not morally deplorable – seem to undermine the
modern assumption that blame must relate only to conduct under our
control. (The same sort of argument can also be made with praise: a
virtuous person might be quite unable to do certain things – commit
cruelty, for example.) Clearly, if we think a character trait is
really beyond alteration, by us or by the person concerned, our
blaming won't involve an attempt to reason with the person we condemn.
But our condemnation might have another rationale: for example, to
clarify what sort of standards we expect of others, or to signal our
fellow-feeling with those who have been adversely affected by
someone's vices.

In sum, Aristotle's account is not entirely self-consistent. Generally
his focus is two-fold: upon the qualities of character revealed by
acts, in terms of our overall moral expectations; and upon the
responsibilities that must be born, given the effects of an action.
For most of the time, his account proceeds without much reference to
desert, and it is this neglect that seems to pose the chief difficulty
for the Aristotelian story. It is interesting, then, that Aristotle
himself sometimes suggests that bad qualities are to be blamed because
they were originally subject to choice, even though this quasi-Kantian
claim is not (on his own account of character formation) really
supportable. Whether or not Aristotle should have made this argument,
it does show how powerful is the thought that blame must be justified
in terms of what the person herself chose – however long ago that
choice supposedly was made.

Despite this, philosophers have returned to Aristotle's account again
and again to illuminate key ingredients of responsible agency.

* The capacity to respond to others' censure and encouragement,
whether expressed emotionally (eg, as resentment) or in the more
articulated forms of praise and blame.
* A reasonable grasp of how actions are understood by people
around us and how they affect others, including the need to share out
responsibilities for "patching things up" where something has gone
wrong. (That we praise and blame children, however, emphasises the
educative and encouraging role that praise and blame play in
developing such knowledge.)
* Together with our own ability to express judgments of others,
these capacities allow us to participate in forms of mutual
accountability, whereby we inculcate and to some extent enforce shared
standards of action.

This list is not comprehensive, but it serves to illustrate the
underlying point of an Aristotelian account: our praising and blaming
of one another rest on these sort of fairly basic capacities, which do
not seem to demand any strong metaphysical elaboration. Indeed, if we
approach the matter this way, the puzzle seems to be inverted. Not,
"how might free will and determinism be reconciled?;" rather, "why
should we feel there is a metaphysical issue at all?"
4. The Kantian Account and Moral Worth

We have seen that the Aristotelian and utilitarian accounts face a
common criticism. Illuminating as they may be, they seem to pay too
little attention to the question of desert, or culpability. Is the
vicious person blameworthy? Does the person of good will, however much
she is hindered by bad luck and hard circumstances, not deserve moral
recognition? Our intuitions tend to answer such questions
affirmatively. And the most usual justification is that the bad person
has less moral worth than the person of good will, and therefore
deserves blame and perhaps even punishment. A utitilitarian such as
JJC Smart sees such justifications as "pharisaical" – that is, as
hypocritically self-righteous, and encouraging of excessively
moralistic forms of blame and retribution. But there is no denying the
power and influence of such justifications.

The reason why so many people – within and without academic philosophy
– feel the pull of the free will debate lies in the idea of moral
worth we often associate with responsibility attributions such as
blame. Galen Strawson expresses the core idea as follows: "if we have
[true responsibility], then it makes sense, at least, to suppose that
it might be just to punish some with eternal torment in hell, and
reward others with eternal bliss in heaven" (1991: viii). Any such
"ultimate" merit or demerit clearly has to be a matter of strictly
individual desert. If it were merely a matter of chance who went to
heaven or hell – or who would do so, if those fates really existed –
this would plainly be a matter of mere fortune. Such intense good or
bad luck would make the world even more morally arbitrary than it
already is. If such merit is to be fairly allocated, therefore, it
needs to be seen as something that lies within individuals' own
control. This line of thought, in turn, is based on what John
Skorupski calls an "ideal of pure egalitarian desert" (1999: 156).
Modern morality regards each person as equal in moral standing, as
having an intrinsic dignity and deserving of equal respect. The
thought is that we all equally possess control over our will, so that
it makes sense to imagine everybody reaping an equally fair return on
how well we exercise that control. (Clearly, this line of thought goes
against the idea of the will referred to above, as a "bundle" of
capacities unequally distributed among human beings.)

The thinker who grapples most systematically with these questions is
Kant. He sees us all as equal in our capacity to strive for morality.
But he knows that we don't all do this, and claims that only some are
worthy of happiness.

For Kant, our moral worth – the goodness of our will – is gauged by
how sincerely and persistently we have sought to do our duty. To do
our duty may be much harder for some people, for instance, those who
have violent passions or who were brought up with bad habits. But
moral worth is not about results; it is about the will. We all have
such a will, an ability to choose well, despite the fact that some of
us face stronger counter-inclinations or more difficult circumstances.
To truly judge a person's moral worth involves seeing past all the
obstacles that their will has faced. Kant argues that this makes moral
worth impossible for us to judge with any assurance; only God can see
beyond all those things. This lack of knowledge corresponds to Kant's
main concern, which is how we judge ourselves. Our concern should be
to do the right thing, and to do it because it is the right thing. To
Kant it's no problem that we're never sure about others' wills, and
the obstacles or benefits they have faced. The point is that we can
never be sure of our own motivations, and must always be attempting to
do better in the future.

Moreover, Kant claims we are all equally well able to see what we
should do. For Kant "even the most hardened scoundrel" would act
morally, were it not for the opposing incentives of his inclinations
and desires (Groundwork, 4:454). Kant needs to claim this because
otherwise he would not be able to justify condemning people who
suppose they are doing the right thing, when in fact their acts are
quite wicked – the problem of the self-righteous wrong-doer. Adolf
Eichmann, who we mentioned before, seems to have been sincere in
thinking his acts were defensible (he even justified his actions with
a twisted version of Kant's moral philosophy!). Yet no one, and
certainly not Kant, would doubt that he deserved the gravest
condemnation for his crimes. In simplest form, the Kantian thought is
that, if only we wanted to, we could all see that certain things are
wrong – for example, no one could possibly want a world where everyone
committed actions like Eichmann's. Nonetheless, such examples are
problematic for Kant, because it does seem implausible that people are
equal in their capacities for moral knowledge. People's sensitivity to
different moral considerations is highly variable, and is clearly
shaped by up-bringing and environment.

(By way of contrast, it may be worth noting that from an Aristotelian
perspective, the realities of moral ignorance and moral disagreement
pose no theoretical problems. In fact, they provide an important
justification for praise and blame in terms of mutual accountability –
that is, they help with moral learning by communicating when we have
met or failed to meet moral standards. But because Kant's account goes
inward, to my scrutiny of my motives and intentions, he says
remarkably little about this crucial educative aspect of
responsibility attributions.)

Modern Kantian writers differ on how to deal with these two issues,
the invisibility of the will and the claim that we share equal access
to moral knowledge. One important line of thought is Christine
Korsgaard's. When we blame someone, she claims, we are recognising his
capacity to reason about his conduct. Many people have felt that it is
"enlightened" not to blame people for bad conduct, and instead to
offer explanations that excuse or mitigate – for instance, by taking a
person's anti-social behaviour to have been caused by a bad childhood
rather than a bad will. But Kantians insist that this is to deny
someone recognition as a rational agent, as someone capable of
choosing his action in the light of reasons. This corresponds to the
important intuition that there is something patronising about making
excuses for people, and not taking their own point of view seriously.

It is not clear whether blame, on this account, need have any link
with the idea that someone's will has proved defective; and it is this
which is important if we are to give a place to culpability within the
Kantian schema. Modern Kantians usually concede that Kant was too
optimistic about our ability always to see the right thing to do. In
this case, it is sometimes difficult for us to judge correctly, and so
we have to work together at discovering the moral standards applicable
in complex situations. Clearly, then, we need to communicate
concerning the rights and wrongs of our individual actions. What this
seems to omit, however, is the fact that desert is in play when we
blame: blame often has an emotional content, and rarely sounds like a
disinterested conversation about what would have been the right thing
to do. One reason for this, in turn, is that we are identified by our
acts, and tend to identify ourselves with them: if our acts are
faulty, and none of the standard excusing conditions apply (such as
factual ignorance, as discussed by Aristotle), so too must our
character be, if blame is to be deserved. (On the other hand, perhaps
it is true that we tend to "take things too personally.")

This points to a real difficulty for Kantians. Moral evaluation is
supposed to concern the will, not all the other complicated factors
that have formed our character. (Aristotelians, and many others,
reject the idea that such a separation can be made, even in theory.)
Although Kantians think such a separation is theoretically possible,
in practice they concede that we can only guess at the will. This
seems to suggest that we should not blame one another, inasmuch as
blame implies culpability, an individual failure to will rightly. But
this leaves us with two unrealistic alternatives. One is that we
explain bad conduct in terms of mitigating factors, which is plainly
unattractive, for the very good Kantian reason that it fails to
respect people as the choosers of their deeds. Yet the other obvious
alternative, that instead of blame we should pursue an enlightened, as
well as enlightening, conversation about correct responses to
situations, is patently unreal. If people as we know them are going to
change, or learn, by and large it will not be unemotional reasoning
that alters them, but the many forces that speak to all aspects of
character – for instance, resentment, shame, force of opinion. Yet,
for all that these characteristic aspects of blame do not operate on
the will (as Kantians conceive it), they certainly convey moral
disapproval, and can be very effective.
5. The Idea of Moral Worth

The notion of moral worth central to Kant's account is probably what
one writer on ancient Greek ethics – AWH Adkins – had in mind when he
said, "We are all Kantians now." (1960: 2) Kant's idea attractively
reconciles two broad value judgments: (i) the egalitarian idea that
all persons are moral equals by virtue of having freedom to choose
morally; and (ii) the idea that responsibility relates to desert, so
that people can nonetheless be judged very differently – some being
condemned for their lives and characters, others praised. Although we
have seen serious problems with the idea that people have an equal
ability to choose well, most people agree that blame which attaches to
parts of our character that we cannot control is deeply unfair. Does
this mean, then, that we should accept a Kantian idea of moral worth,
where praise and blame are understood as responses to people's
ultimate deserts?

To begin with, contrast Kant with Aristotle. Aristotle makes no claims
about a person's ultimate merit or demerit. People might be vicious or
virtuous in various ways, and there might be rare paragons who possess
a comprehensive set of virtues (yes, these are philosophers).
Naturally we would not want to associate with the vicious, and
naturally we will want to condemn their vices in no uncertain terms:
It might help them to learn to do better, and it may caution others
against them, and it should reinforce our own and other people's sense
of what character traits are desirable. But for Aristotle there is no
sense that the vicious are earning a lasting form of discredit that
should condemn them in the eyes of an ultimate judge. If the vicious
person were to protest to Aristotle that the condemnations he faced
were unfair, perhaps because his character had been shaped by his
vicious parents, one suspects Aristotle would be rather unmoved. Life
isn't fair, he might say, and we certainly won't make it fairer by
pretending some vices are less real because of their origin in early
childhood, let alone because of their fixity within an individual's
character. It may be unpleasant (he might continue) for you to hear
this blame and condemnation – indeed, I'm glad that it is, because at
least it shows that you are not so vicious that you don't care about
others' opinions of you – but there are other matters at stake here,
above all the standards and expectations which regulate all our lives
together.

So Aristotle's characteristic view is that some people just are better
than others, in their abilities to choose rightly as in other regards.
Given this "brute fact," it is all the more important to give
attention to mutual moral education and ensuring that people feel the
need to take responsibility where things have gone wrong. Yet it does
seem true that Aristotle paid too little attention to the question of
desert. We can see this by recalling that he is not wholly consistent
here. As we saw, he does try to justify our blame of the vicious
person in terms of that person's choice to become vicious, supposing
that otherwise our condemnation would be unfair. Nonetheless, the main
thrust of his account seems to be that Kant's egalitarian fairness is
not something we can really achieve.

On the other hand, it is difficult to deny the basic, very appealing
intuition of Kant's ethics: that people's happiness should correspond
to their moral worth – to the sincere intentions that are within
everyone's control. Apart from its appeal to fairness, this conception
is also plausible because it corresponds well to several features of
praise and blame. We do tend to judge the intent behind people's
actions, rather than the often haphazard results of their deeds. We
take account of people's circumstances, and judge less harshly where
these place hard or immoral pressures on people. We also, quite often,
feel that allowances should be made for the effects on character of
abusive or deprived upbringings. In each case, we can interpret these
concessions in Kantian terms – as drawing a distinction between the
person's will and the obstacles of circumstance, thus keeping our
moral evaluation to what is within a person's control – and,
therefore, what concerns their deserts.

There are, however, reasons to doubt whether this Kantian
interpretation is really the best account of these intuitions. The
most obvious problem is that we often expect people to take
responsibility for things they didn't intend. This is not only in
those cases where we judge that someone should have formed their
intentions more carefully. Certainly we judge the negligent driver who
causes an accident more harshly than a driver who was careful but
nevertheless caused an accident. But even in the latter case, we
expect the driver to bear important responsibilities. The problem that
many of the things which attract moral culpability are wholly or
partly outside of individual control is connected with the problem of
moral luck. It is important to realise, however, that this problem is
based on the Kantian idea that moral judgments, be it of character or
future responsibilities, are deserved because they relate to a
person's "moral worth."

Aristotle's account offers a different way of understanding these
everyday intuitions about when blame is justified. On his account we
are judging the character of the person we are dealing with, based on
how they act, how seriously they take their responsibilities, and how
they respond to others' responsibility attributions. To judge such
questions we do indeed give a lot of weight to a person's intentions:
obviously, an intended action reveals a person's character especially
clearly. At the same time, we need to appreciate what he knew about
the situation he was responding to, what pressures he was under, and
special factors affecting his ability to deliberate and choose. Hence
Aristotle's concern with factual ignorance, force of circumstances,
and intoxication; and we might note the more modern concern with
mental illness. On an Aristotelian line, the point is that these
factors alter the extent to which actions reveal the character of the
person. That they undermine the person's "control" is true, but
subsidiary. To support this thought, we might consider how certain
forms of bad character constitute a lack of control over one's actions
– thus the person who is weak-willed or indecisive, for example. Here
weak-willed, indecisive action reveals the person, and her inability
to control her actions.

This suggests that we do not need to accept Kant's will-based view,
where blame relates to moral worth. But we might still wonder if the
other accounts can explain the culpability aspect of blame, the idea
that it relates to desert.

Both utilitarians and Aristotelians can agree that at least one sense
of desert clearly applies. A person deserves to be judged accurately,
just as the facts deserve to be assessed truly, if they are to be
assessed at all. As we need to judge one another, then clearly we
deserve to be assessed fairly. But this doesn't quite take us to the
idea that a person has earned blame, for the fact is that a negative
judgment of our character is unpleasant and costly. After all, human
beings understand such judgments, and feel their effects, in a way
that other entities do not.

There is another question of desert: praise raises the possibility of
reward, while blame almost automatically suggests we ought to do
something to make up for what we have done or how we have been. Moral
philosophers continue to dispute whether utilitarians can give a
proper account of this sort of responsibility. But we have already
seen how Aristotle could respond. On his view responsibility
attributions have a practical aspect: they are preparations for
action. It is obvious that when something has gone wrong, we need to
distribute the resulting responsibilities: who should pay
compensation, apologise, or even be punished. If we take the view that
there are always duties to be done, including making good when things
have gone wrong, then the question is not what the results say about
people's moral worth, but rather how responsibilities for making good
can be fairly divvied up.

But whether this is enough to justify the sense of desert that tends
to attach to judgments of blame, or whether we tend to be too keen to
invest blame with ideas of personal desert – these are questions much
beyond the scope of this entry.
6. Conclusion

Praise and blame relate to our sense of people as capable of taking
responsibility for their actions. As we saw, ideas about
responsibility are usually presented in terms of a contest between two
positions, compatibilism and incompatibilism. Incompatibilists accept
the dilemma of free will versus determinism: responsibility depends on
me controlling my actions, rather than other causal influences that
operate around me. Praise, but especially blame, make no sense if
determinism is true. Compatibilists, on the other hand, want to insist
that the causal well-orderedness of the universe is, precisely,
compatible with our responsibility for our actions. But for most
philosophers the question is not whether responsibility and causal
well-orderedness are compatible, but how. In other words, to adapt
Adkins's adage, "we are all compatibilists now."

The essential issue for any compatibilist position lies in the
conception of responsibility it relies on – an issue much less
well-explored by philosophers than the metaphysics of freedom and
determinism. This article has contrasted three broad schools of
thought on how we put responsibility into practice, by praising and
blaming one another. When Adkins claimed that "we are all Kantians
now," he was not referring to Kant's (incompatibilist) metaphysics but
rather to our tendency to feel that responsibility attributions must
have depth, that they reflect something about a person's "real"
deserts. Yet this position leads us to claims about control over the
self, to the idea of choices that are really ours and not the result
of any external influence. In other words, it is more difficult than
it may seem to separate Kant's position from his metaphysical account
of freedom and the incompatibilism which he, above all other writers,
so strongly articulated.

The roughly Aristotelian alternative discussed here has been most
influentially articulated in Bernard Williams's critique of modern
accounts of morality, which he thinks are most clearly expressed in
Kant's philosophy. Williams argues that these ideas neither make sense
on their own terms, nor do they make sense of what we actually do when
we do engage in attributions of responsibility. As we have seen,
Aristotle's account of praise and blame is based on: (i) how far acts
reveal character; (ii) the fair distribution of responsibilities to
act; and (iii) the attempt to exchange reasons, share standards, and
maintain relationships with those whom we judge – and who judge us in
turn.

What both the Aristotelian and utilitarian accounts lack is the deep
thirst for equality and fairness which motivate Kant. Aristotle's
account provides no equivalent to the Kantian will – some moral
quantity which all human beings possess and which grounds the idea of
their equal worth. Nor does it really satisfy the widespread sense
that moral judgment should offer fairness – even though the world does
not. There is a deeply appealing sense of fairness in Kant's concern
to do justice to each person's will, by isolating some moral core to
the person independent of all formative and environmental factors.
Even if wicked people prosper and the innocent suffer, our moral
judgment of each constitutes a deep and subtle form of compensation:
with regard to what really matters, the one is lacking while the other
is undiminished. Even if goodness is made much harder for some, and
its results may be correspondingly less, nonetheless we should try to
see past those externals, once more, to what really matters.

To this, the Aristotelian and the utilitarian alike may say: to treat
praise and blame as reflecting such a pure form of desert is to lose
touch with what really matters about them. Praise and blame help us
live together in a world where ultimate deserts are impossible to make
out, if they exist at all. But just because we cannot make out
people's "moral worth," it is still true that we need to take
responsibility – not least, in our openness to one another's praise
and blame.
7. References and Further Reading

* Adkins, AWH (1960) Merit and responsibility, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
* Aristotle Nicomachean ethics (the most readable translation is
Roger Crisp's, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).
* Feinberg, Joel (1970) Doing and deserving: essays in the theory
of responsibility (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ).
o A set of classic essays on responsibility for action,
including justifications of praise and blame.
* Fingarette, Herbert (1967) On responsibility (Basic Books, New York).
o Another set of classic essays, including the argument that
blame is intelligible insofar as it connects up with someone's
pre-existing concern for others.
* Kant, Immanuel (1784) Groundwork to the metaphysics of morals
(the best translation is Mary Gregor's, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1998).
* Korsgaard, Christine (1996) "Creating the Kingdom of Ends:
Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations" in her Creating
the kingdom of ends (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
o A sophisticated Kantian account of praise and blame.
* Skorupski, John (1999) "The definition of morality" in his
Ethical explorations (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
* Smart, J.J.C. (1961) "Free will, praise and blame" Mind 70, 291-306.
o A clear and succinct utilitarian account of praise and blame.
* Smiley, Marion (1992) Moral responsibility and the boundaries of
community: power and accountability from a pragmatic point of view
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
o Criticises conventional discussions of freedom and
determinism, claiming that they fail to investigate the idea of
responsibility.
* Strawson, Galen (1991) Freedom and belief (Clarendon, Oxford).
* Strawson, Peter (1974) "Freedom and resentment" in his Freedom
and resentment and other essays (Methuen, London).
o This famous essay resituates the free will debate by
highlighting the importance of "reactive attitudes" such as resentment
to interpersonal relations.
* Williams, Bernard (1993) Shame and necessity (University of
California Press, Berkeley CA) .
o A sustained argument that the ancient Greeks had a nuanced
and sophisticated account of responsibility attributions.
* Williams, Bernard (1995a) "How free does the will need to be?"
in his Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers,
1982-1993 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
* Williams, Bernard (1995b) "Voluntary acts and responsible
agents," in his Making sense of humanity.