Why the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame fails

It is commonly believed that blamees can dismiss hypocritical blame on the ground that the hypocrite has no standing to blame their target. Many believe that the feature of hypocritical blame that undermines standing to blame is that it involves an implicit denial of the moral equality of persons. After all, the hypocrite treats herself better than her blamee for no good reason. In the light of the complement to hypocrites and a comparison of hypocritical and non-hypocritical blamers subscribing to hierarchical moral norms, I show why we must reject the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame.

Complicity and hypocrisy

This article offers a justification for accommodating claims of conscience. The standard justification points to the pain that acting against one’s conscience entails. But that defense cannot make sense of the state’s refusal to accommodate individuals where the law interferes with their deeply meaningful but nonmoral projects. An alternative justification, we argue, arises once one recognizes the connection between conscience and moral address: One’s lived moral convictions determine when and with what force one can hold others to account. Acting against one’s convictions can undermine one’s standing to blame others who act in similar ways. When the state compels someone to act against conscience, it renders her complicit in conduct she takes to be wrong and thereby impairs her ability to condemn similar conduct in the future, in a manner akin to the hypocrite. The reason the state should not compel people to act against conscience, then, is that doing so would undercut their moral standing.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

Introduction to OSAR 6

This introduction to the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility briefly discusses each of the new essays being published. They were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of moral emotions like shame, resentment, and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

Skepticism about the Standing to Blame

There are cases thought to illustrate that appropriate blame requires special standing. One might lack the standing to blame another because the fault is private and one is a stranger or because one is guilty of the very same offense and so one’s blame would be hypocritical. But despite its prevalence as an explanation of what goes wrong in such cases, the standing to blame itself has been given relatively little attention. The aim of this paper is to cast doubt on the standing to blame. It considers a range of plausible interpretations and, finding each wanting, concludes that those who wish to endorse the standing to blame owe us more by way of a characterization and defense. In raising this challenge, the paper motivates an alternative explanation of the cases.