Deserved Guilt and Blameworthiness over Time

Abstract

Shoemaker (forthcoming) provides an interesting and relevant discussion, although the paper is framed in terms of forgiveness rather than blameworthiness.Callard (2018) and Marusic (2020) provide interesting discussions of the rationality of anger over time, without linking this discussion to blameworthiness. 2 Randolph Clarke (manuscript) call this "the standard view."render an agent less blameworthy for what he has done.A victim might decide to let go of blame because he needed to move on with his life.Such prudential reasons might outweigh other reasons the victim has for continuing to blame the wrongdoer.But it would not make the agent any less blameworthy.However, there seems to be certain things a victim or a wrongdoer can feel or do that might change the wrongdoer's status as blameworthy.A wrongdoer might experience guilt, atone, apologize and make reparations.A victim might forgive.Such actions and emotions seem to be reasons for why the victim should stop feeling resentment, or at least for resentment to diminish and for why the wrongdoer should stop feeling guilt for their action, or at least for guilt to diminish.Moreover, these reasons seem relevant to the agent's blameworthiness, and not merely to the overall justification of continued blame.My aim in this paper is to answer the question of how and why blameworthiness can cease or diminish.In order to investigate this question, we need to consider what it is to be blameworthy.I will begin by discussing several ways in which a theory which understands blameworthiness in terms of the fittingness of resentment and indignation might attempt to answer this question.I will argue that all of the most plausible candidates face serious difficulties (sections 3 -5).The problem is that it is very hard to develop a view of the representational content of blame that can account for the ways in which, intuitively, blameworthiness might diminish or disappear.The solution, I will argue, is to adopt a different account of blameworthiness, which does not rely merely on the fittingness of other-directed blame, but rather on the desert of self-directed blame.If we understand blameworthiness in terms of deserved guilt, we can give a plausible account of how blameworthiness can change over time.In section 6 and 7 I present this account.The thesis I will defend is this: whether an agent remains blameworthy will depend of whether she has experienced the guilt she deserved to feel for her action, attitude or omission. Blameworthiness and the Reactive AttitudesThe starting point for my discussion is the following, commonly accepted, generic biconditional:Blameworthiness: An agent S is blameworthy for X iff it is appropriate to blame S for X.

Topics & Concepts