‘How dare you!’ – anklager og mot-anklager på Facebook knyttet til Greta Thunbergs FN-tale 23. ­september 2019

The contribution analyzes accusations related to Greta Thunberg’s speech in the UN on September 2019, posted on public Facebook pages in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The accusations we analyze are of three types: 1. Accusations that amplify and mirror Thunberg’s accusations, 2. Accusations against Thunberg, her followers, and supporters, and 3. Accu­sations against people who are bullying Thunberg and her ­followers on­line. None of the accusations is the first move in an apologetic discourse. We argue that the rhetorical functions of accusations that are not met with an apology have two important characteristics: 1. they attribute responsibility to the ­accused by expressing a reactive attitude towards his or her action, 2. they express a judgement that the action is blameworthy. We use these perspectives to analyze the accusations related to Thunberg’s speech on the public Facebook pages and characterize the rhetorical functions of the three types of ­accusations

Robots to Blame?

My concern is the preservation of rationally justifiable moral practices, which face challenges because of the increasing integration of social robots into roles previously occupied exclusively by persons. I will focus on the attribution of responsibility and blaming as examples of such practices. I will argue that blaming robots (a) does not satisfy the rational constraints on the reactive attitude of blame and other related reactive attitudes and practices such as resentment, forgiving, and punishment, and (b) is by itself morally wrong.

Bad Blood

In his landmark essay “Freedom and Resentment,” the philosopher Peter Strawson coined the term “reactive attitude” to refer to our emotional reactions to wrongdoing or acts of goodwill in the context of social relationships, such as your resentment toward a person who wronged you or gratitude toward a person who did you a favor. These emotional reactions, Strawson argued, are beneficial because they serve to uphold the standards of our moral community. Strawson didn’t take an official stance on whether hatred can perform a similar beneficial role. But subsequently, a number of thinkers have argued that it serves no worthwhile purpose. In terms of safeguarding our moral ideals, we are better off without it. Hate is frowned upon because of its close ties to vengeance. Vengeful hate is dehumanizing. But, this chapter argues, vengeance is not essential to hate. Without it, hate can be a gateway to moral vision.

Shaming, Blaming, and Responsibility

Despite its cultural prominence, shaming has been neglected in moral philosophy. I develop an overdue account of shaming, which distinguishes it from both blaming and the mere production of shame. I distinguish between two kinds of shaming. Agential shaming is a form of blaming. It involves holding an individual morally responsible for some wrongdoing or flaw by expressing a negative reactive attitude towards her and inviting an audience to join in. Non-agential shaming also involves negatively evaluating a person and inviting an audience to join in. Yet it is not a form of blaming, because the shamer does not hold the target morally responsible for anything. For example, we non-agentially shame people for their body shapes, for having periods, or for being victims of rape. Non-agential shaming involves the expression of an emotionally toned objective attitude, like disgust. While agential shaming enforces social norms, non-agential shaming enforces social standards.

Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore.

I’ll Show You: Spite as a Reactive Attitude

Spite is typically considered a vicious emotion that causes us to engage in petty, vindictive, and sometimes self-destructive behavior. Even though it has this bad reputation, I will argue that spite is a reactive attitude. Spite is emotional defiance of another’s command: to spite you, I will do something exactly because you told me not to. Our liability to feelings of spite presupposes that we recognize others as having practical authority, which is why it qualifies as a reactive attitude. I conclude by offering conditions under which spite can be justified and unjustified.

Resentment

This chapter introduces the concept of resentment by delineating the two most influential and significant models of it as a practice—resentment as a moral impetus to justice and resentment as a disabling spitefulness and envy. After first examining how resentment has been employed as a concept in contemporary philosophy after Strawson elucidated it as an exemplary “reactive attitude,” the chapter discerns how it has been represented in two literary works—one from the classical world, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and one from nineteenth-century Europe, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—to show the dynamic features of resentment, which can be understood not only as an individual ailment but also as a social disease.

Personal Relationships and Blame

Scanlon argues that blame involves revising one’s relationship with a wrongdoer because of the significance for the blamer of that wrongdoing, and he argues that reactive attitude accounts of blame cannot accommodate how blame varies according to that relationship. This chapter argues that a reactive attitude account can nonetheless accommodate this point. To do this, one must turn to broad, interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes in terms of which we can make sense of human communities. The sort of relationship whose impairment is relevant to blame, then, is that of co-membership in such communities, and the significance of the agent's wrongdoing relevant for blame is the significance those actions and attitudes have for us in the community. Examining the connections between one’s personal commitments and one’s communal relationships reveals that revisions to one’s relationship with the wrongdoer are a consequence rather than, as Scanlon claims, a part of blame.

Answerability without Blame?

Widely derided by popular psychologists as a destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary philosophers. The chapter pushes against their defenses of blame by distinguishing between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, arguing that some disagreement over blame’s value can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several different forms. Critiques of blame properly target judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, which treats the wrongdoer as deserving of the blamer’s hostile reactions. This tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers—an effect particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts; here, it is often more appropriate and constructive to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. The chapter argues that such blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and challenges the existence of a sharp divide between therapeutic and nontherapeutic responses to wrongdoers.