We should begin by reviewing the main candidates for a unitary
account that have been offered.
One common account of blame is judgmental: to blame someone is to
judge that the person acted wrongly (or morally wrongly, if moral blame
is the focus).6 (Sometimes this is called a “judgment of blameworthiness,”
but let us eschew that circular term.) Some versions specify the nature of
the judgment more narrowly: it is a negative judgment pertaining to the
moral virtues; or a judgment of ill will. To this account a variety of objec-
tions have been raised, all involving the idea that it does not capture the
human depth or force of blame.
At the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, is an account that
makes blame not psychological at all, but a type of action: to blame is
258 Appendix B
to punish, or sanction in some other way. Such accounts, it is claimed,
cannot do justice to hidden or unexpressed blame, or, indeed, to blame
where the person is not in a position to act against the aggressor.
Strawson’s very influential account, further developed by Wallace,
defines blame in terms of the “reactive attitudes”: to blame is to experi-
ence resentment and other such attitudes, which involve at least some
renunciation of good will and at least some “modification … of the gen-
eral demand that another should, if possible, be spared suffering.”7 (To
the extent that Strawson and Wallace fail to analyze these emotions, their
view is actually a family of views, depending on whether one would adopt
a non- cognitive account of anger or some variety of cognitive account. In
the latter case the reactive attitudes account would overlap partly, though
not totally, with the judgmental account.) Critics object, however, that
one can blame someone without hostile or punitive emotions.
George Sher concludes that the element that has to be added to the
judgment of wrongdoing in order to get blame is a backward- looking
desire that the person not have so acted.8 This account, he argues, is
broad enough to cover both wrongdoing by people we know and wrong-
doing by strangers. It can be objected, however, that Sher’s account fails
to cover a case where a loved one (say, an erring child) has done wrong;
the parent both believes he has done wrong and wishes he hadn’t, but
may have an attitude more akin to grief and compassion than to blame.
Thomas Scanlon’s influential account insists, like Sher’s, that blame
does not require punitive attitudes, but does go beyond a judgment of
wrongdoing. Instead, Scanlon argues, blame is best understood in terms
of a modification in the relationship between wrongdoer and wronged.
Friendship- defining intentions are reciprocal, and so the recognition that
the other party has acted with ill will leads the wronged party to with-
draw good will.9 This account is obviously rich and significant; but it
has encountered a number of objections. Those who like the Strawsonian
account feel that it does not do justice to the intensity and heat of blame.10
Sher believes that it cannot do justice to the blame of strangers— although
Scanlon has anticipated this objection, insisting that a bare moral relation-
ship connects us to all moral agents. Finally, Angela Smith argues that it
cannot handle the mother/ criminal son example any better than Sher’s
account: for the mother may indeed modify her attitudes, intentions, and
expectations toward the son, but she might do so by showing extra love
and affection. Surely it would be strange to think of this modification as
a way of blaming him.
Finally, Angela Smith suggests that the most inclusive account of
blame, and one that really gets at the common link among all the cases of
genuine blame, is one that invokes the idea of protest (in addition to the
judgment of wrongdoing). Smith builds on Scanlon, saying that blame
Anger and Blame
259
requires, and is constituted by, both a judgment of wrongdoing and a
particular sort of modification of attitudes, namely one that is a protest
against “the moral claim implicit in [the wrongdoer’s] conduct, where
such protest implicitly seeks some kind of moral acknowledgment on the
part of the blameworthy agent and/ or on the part of others in the moral
community.”11
Smith’s account is in many ways attractive, but it appears to purchase
inclusiveness at the price of vagueness: for (in addition to the circularity
involved in the term “blameworthy person”), the definition pushes off
much of the indeterminacy of blame itself onto the equally indeterminate
notion of protest. Is protest an action? A set of reactive emotions? What
does it add to the modification of relationships, or what particular type
of modification does it introduce? Smith makes it clear that it introduces
an idea of weight or seriousness (since she gives an example of a person
who acts wrongly in a silly way, and she thinks he acted wrongly, but
can’t blame him because it is just too silly). She also suggests that protest is closely linked to apology and forgiveness, and perhaps she thinks of it
as including a demand for apology, but this remains inchoate, and I sus-
pect that if she did make this a necessary condition of blame, the account
would lose the virtue of inclusiveness.
What should we make of all this? We have certainly learned a lot
about different types and instances of blame from these accounts. What
remains to be clarified is whether they possess the sort of unity that
would make us conclude that one account is right and the others wrong,
or whether we should, instead, conclude that they are descriptions of
different phenomena somewhat misleadingly grouped under a single
rubric. Is there a shared core running through all the cases? Insofar as
there is, it is well expressed by Smith as the idea that blame is “a response to a person on the basis of some wrongful, objectionable, or untoward
conduct on her part.”12
It seems to me that in some cases (let’s call them Cases A), a judg-
ment of wrongfulness is all that there is: the response is just that. The
word “blame” includes such cases, and such cases are important to my
account, which insists on accountability but urges non- anger. The term
“blame” also includes cases (Cases B) in which there is a judgment
accompanied by anger; and, if one holds a non- cognitive account of
anger, it may even include cases in which there is anger but no judg-
ment. These too are genuine cases of “blame.” It seems right to point
out that Cases B are not like Cases A, but not right to say that the word
“blame” is incorrectly applied to Cases A. At least it seems natural
to use the term of cases in the A range. Some further cases to which
the word is plausibly and correctly applied, Cases C, are Scanlon/
Smith cases, in which there may be no hostile emotion, but, instead,
260 Appendix B
modifications of relationship. I see no reason to think that the only sort
that is correctly called “blame” is the sort in which there is a protest
(though I feel I don’t unde
rstand that notion very well). Scanlon’s type
of case, in which a judgment of wrongdoing is simply accompanied by
distancing, seems perfectly recognizable as a case to which the term is
rightly applied, although Smith is right to point out that it is different
in interesting ways from her central cases. Finally, we have a group
of Cases, Cases D (Sher cases), in which what is added to the judg-
ment is a retrospective wish rather than any sort of forward- looking
modification. While it is certainly important to say that many cases
of blame are not like this, being prospective rather than retrospective,
is the word “blame” inaptly used of such cases? This seems unclear.
Possibly Smith’s case of the loving and indulgent mother is a borderline
case, even for the very most inclusive use of the term. She does judge
that her son acted wrongfully, so her case is at least a case of type A.
I think what Smith is getting at is that her emotional attitudes are so
positive and so out of kilter with the judgment of wrongdoing that
it’s possible she is simply mouthing the judgment and doesn’t really
believe it. If that is her attitude, she does not blame him. But if she
really truly judges that he acted wrongfully, but loves him more than
ever, why isn’t that a case rightly called “blame”? We should not grant
as a matter of conceptual analysis that people cannot combine a judg-
ment of accountability with love and generosity: indeed that combina-
tion, which interests me greatly, seems common, though certainly not
common enough.
In short, while it is very useful to distinguish these different cases,
and while we surely learn a lot from the distinctions that these fine phi-
losophers have introduced, human reactions come in many types, and
the word “blame” is very imprecise. Maybe it’s not quite as duplicitous
as “privacy,” which covers things that have no common thread at all. But
it’s pretty empty and uninformative.
As far as my project goes, it seems important to remember that there
can be cases of blame (A, C, and D) that do not involve anger and its
hostile payback wishes. Indeed I make much of these possibilities. This
important set of possibilities can be discerned in the literature on blame,
but we learn about it more in spite of the literature than because of it.
Insofar as all these fine philosophers are pursuing a single essence, they
appear to be pursuing a will- o’- the- wisp.
Appendix C: Anger and Its Species
My strategy in this book is to work with a generic notion of anger, to define it as a genus, and to introduce pertinent variations through description
of cases. In one case (“Transition- Anger”) I introduce a technical term
to characterize a borderline species that lacks one prominent feature of
the genus (the payback wish). This strategy follows that of Aristotle, and
especially clearly that of the Greek and Roman Stoics; numerous later
thinkers, including Butler and Smith, follow the same strategy.
The Stoics were obsessed with definitions in the emotional realm,
and they have left us lists upon lists of definitions of the major emotion-
types and their more concrete species.1 (These categories are rendered
into Latin by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, with some alterations necessitated by linguistic and cultural differences.)
As I have mentioned in the text, the Stoics categorize anger ( orgēe is their generic term, as it is Aristotle’s) as among those emotions that are
defined by a favorable attitude toward a future good. That is because
they place the payback wish in a central position. Their generic defini-
tion refers to the wish for payback, but also to the belief that one has
been wronged; so it is in essence like Aristotle’s, with the reference to
“down- ranking” replaced (correctly) by a more general reference to
wrongfulness.2
In some recent philosophical discussions, one encounters a differ-
ent approach, usually without explicit defense. People suggest (although
they don’t really argue) that there are a number of different things,
261
262 Appendix C
“anger,” “resentment,” “indignation,” and others, which are not related
as species of a genus. What is this all about, and what significance does it
have for my project?
Three different issues deserve attention. First, many people hold
that there are emotions in the area of anger that are specifically moral,
which have a moral judgment as part of their content, and that these
are worth being treated as separate emotions, rather than as types of
anger. “Resentment” and “indignation” are the ones usually singled out
in this way. I have argued that the generic emotion, anger, does contain
a judgment of wrongfulness. So the question for me, then, is whether
“resentment” contains a particular type of judgment of wrongfulness,
namely, a moral type? I think our linguistic intuitions just do not sup-
port that claim. When a person describes her emotion as resentment, that
typically would suggest that she believes it has some grounds. But must
those always be moral grounds? If a person is insulted in a typical down-
ranking way, she might well say, “I resent that.” If a school rejects one’s
child as an applicant, the aggrieved parent, believing that the school was
both careless and mistaken, might say that she resents the way the school
acted— without even raising the question whether a moral principle was
involved. “Indignation” is similarly slippery. I can be “indignant” about
insults to status and rank, about nonmoral affronts of many kinds. So,
although many cases of resentment and indignation are surely moral,
I don’t think they all are. We can do better, I think, by focusing on the
generic term with its implied judgment of wrongfulness, and then get-
ting clear, in each case, about what type of judgment it is.3
In other words, I don’t omit morally grounded anger, I just prefer to
use the generic term “anger,” and then to characterize the case by further
description, rather than by trying to make the imprecise terms of daily
language do that for me.
A second issue that is often raised, implicitly or explicitly, is whether
there are species of anger that do not involve a payback wish. I have dealt
with that question at length in chapter 2, arguing that there is such a bor-
derline case, although it is rarer than we often like to think. I introduce
the technical term “Transition- Anger” for this case, defining it as anger,
or quasi- anger, that lacks the payback wish. The ordinary word “indigna-
tion,” as I note there, often characterizes an attitude that lacks a payback
wish, but by no means always. So I prefer the technical term.
Third, we must ask whether there are types of anger that are wholly
without a judgment of wrongfulness. I think one reason why people like
to focus on the terms “resentment” and “indignation” is that they want
to emphasize the presence of a judgment of wrongfulness, and they are
not convinced that anger by itself entails this. I’ve already discussed
&nbs
p; this question, but let me do so a little further. When anger bursts out
Anger and Its Species
263
suddenly, it may appear to onlookers to be without a judgment. But of
course many cognitive attitudes that are based on habit and on deeply
internalized patterns of thinking erupt suddenly, without the implica-
tion that there is no judgment involved. Every time we walk, we rely on
a whole host of beliefs about the world that we do not pause to inspect
consciously: that objects are solid, that things obey the laws of gravity,
etc. The absence of conscious focus does not entail that we are not using
beliefs. In my view, anger is often like these cases: its patterns can be laid down in childhood, and these habitual patterns may guide behavior, on
many occasions, without conscious focus. I have suggested, consistently
with that view, that anger always contains a cognitive appraisal, even if
stored deeply in the psyche and not fully formulated. It may certainly be
true that in the cases we call “resentment” there is apt to be a conscious
focus on the wrongfulness, but of course that is true of all sorts of cases in which we use the term “anger.”
What about the anger of young infants? With many emotions, as
I discussed in Appendix A, there will be varieties that rest upon “seeing-
as” and not full- fledged judgment. Thus the fear of many animals is prob-
ably best described as nonjudgmental, and that of very young infants as
well. Anger seems more complicated, since it requires causal thinking. If
infants bawl in rage, with no sense of wrongful injury at all, that might
be metaphorically described as anger, but it really lacks something that
infants acquire soon enough— by the age of one, it now appears— namely
the idea that some type of wrong is being done. Paul Bloom’s research
has shown that very young infants have incipient judgments of fairness,
right, and wrong.4 As soon as those thoughts are present, even in an
inchoate form, we have, I believe, full- fledged anger. Before that, we have
something that may be on the border of anger but is not yet anger. I’m
inclined to think that many fewer animals have full- fledged anger than
have fear, simply because anger requires more complicated cognitions.
We can certainly debate these boundaries, and we should. What is
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