I’m a PhD candidate in philosophy at McGill. My areas of specialty are normative ethics, metaethics, and the philosophy of emotion. My GRIN project is the first chapter of my dissertation.
Blame can be assessed for appropriateness in a certain way, depending on whether its object is worthy of, or merits, that response. In short: blame is appropriate when it fits its object. Hypocritical blame involves someone blaming someone else for committing a transgression that is identical with—or relevantly similar to—one they have committed. It’s inappropriate for me to blame someone else for stealing when I’m also guilty of stealing. So hypocritical blame could be characterized as unfitting. But this is inconsistent with the claims that (a) someone is blameworthy only if it’s fitting to blame them and that (b) targets of hypocritical blame are blameworthy.
R.J. Wallace resolves this puzzle by denying that hypocritical blame is unfitting. Although hypocritical blame accurately represents its target, there are practical reasons against blaming hypocritically that make it morally inappropriate and that indirectly motivate us to set aside our blaming attitudes. Rachel Achs and Oded Na’aman, by contrast, deny that someone is blameworthy only if it’s fitting to blame them, while accepting that hypocritical blame is unfitting. They argue that non-hypocrisy is a background condition that enables the fittingness of blame, but crucially, this condition is irrelevant to whether the target of hypocritical blame is blameworthy.
The third strategy I defend doesn’t require denying that hypocritical blame is unfitting or that someone is blameworthy only if it’s fitting to blame them. In short: being blameworthy is a fundamentally agent-relative evaluative property, like being shameful or surprising. So non-hypocrisy doesn’t just enable the fittingness of blame but it also enables the target of hypocritical blame to be blameworthy-relative-to the blaming subject.
Publications:
- (2024). “Should We Bother With ‘Theories of the Emotions’?” Forthcoming in a special issue of The Ethics Forum. (Short commentary on Ch. 1 of Philosophy of Emotion: A Contemporary Introduction by Christine Tappolet).
- (2024). “Revisiting Response-Dependent Responsibility.” Forthcoming in a special issue of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review.
- (2024). “Avoiding Strawson’s Crude Opposition: How to Straddle the Participant and Objective Stances.” (with Neil Campbell). Acta Analytica, 39(1), 117–141. Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12136-023-00552-5.
Link to website: https://alexandercarty.weebly.com