Causes and Blame: A Pragmatic Analysis

In the target article "A Theory of Blame," the authors set out their multi-stage path model for how people assign blame to individuals for the consequences of their actions. The article addresses, and connects, several large bodies of empirical literature from psychologyincluding causation, morality, emotion, and attribution. We are sympathetic with, and supportive of, many of its claims. We particularly like the model's nuanced integration of numerous important constructs (e.g., morality, social warrant, obligation, mental state inferences) into the assessment of blame, which creates specific testable hypotheses not only about whether and which information affects blame judgments but also when and why it does so.

Chicago-Kent} Law Review, 2016

Bernáth, László, Blame and Fault: Toward a Conative Theory of Blame. Disputatio: International Journal of Philosophy, 12 (59). pp. 371-94. , 2020

This paper outlines a new conative theory of blame. I argue that the best-known conative approaches to blame (Scanlon 1998, 2008, Sher 2006a) misrepresent the cognitive and dispositional components of blame. Section 1 argues, against Scanlon and Sher, that blaming involves the judgment that an act or state is the fault of the blamed. I also propose an alternative dispositional condition on which blaming only occurs if it matters to the blamer whether the blamed gets the punishment that she deserves. In Section 2, I discuss objections to judgment-based accounts of blame (that they cannot tell the difference between blaming and judging to be blameworthy, that they cannot explain why blame is often accompanied by emotion, and that they cannot make sense of irrational blame), and I argue that my proposal can handle all of them.

Law & Society: Public Law - Crime, 2016

Causation plays an essential role in attributions of legal responsibility. However, considerable confusion has been generated in philosophy, law and economics by the use of causal language to refer not merely to causation in its basic (actual/factual/natural) sense, which refers to the operation of the laws of nature, but also to the quite different normative issue of appropriate legal responsibility. To reduce such confusion, we argue that causal language in these disciplines should be used to refer solely to causation in its basic sense. While it is often said that the law need not and should not concern itself with philosophical analyses of causation, we demonstrate that this is incorrect with respect to causation in its basic sense. After surveying the philosophical foundations of the modern analyses of causation, we discuss the inadequacy of the counterfactual strong necessity (sine qua non, but-for) criterion for a condition to be a cause in a specific instance, which is domin...

Philosophy Compass, 2007

In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent's moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent's causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The final viewthe view I argue for -is that causation is the vehicle of transmission of moral responsibility. According to this view, although moral responsibility does not require causation, causation still grounds moral responsibility.

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified— 'Communicative Blame'—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised.

Blame: Its Nature and Norms, edited by D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini, is a vital resource for those interested in moral responsibility, especially its normative aspects. The book includes fourteen new essays-all of excellent quality-as well as a valuable and substantial introductory essay, "The Contours of Blame," by the editors.

In this paper I want to argue that acts of blame are performed by collectives, and not by any collective but only by collectives that satisfy certain conditions – broadly those that, by collec-tivizing reason, can be held to be autonomous subjects to which it makes sense to attribute attitudes, including participant reactive attitudes such as resentment. The actors involved must also be related to the collective in particular ways in order to hold and be held responsible, but they need not have the same attitudes as the collective. This implies both that our attributions of moral responsibility to an agent does not depend only on facts about the agent but also on facts about us, and that the reasons for which we hold responsible and by which we justify our moral practices, and which the agent can likewise appeal to in an attempt to avoid being held responsible, depend on the collective involved and its substantive ethical precepts. The answer to whether an agent is responsible, or is an appropriate object of a reactive attitude, is not to be settled purely by philosophical analysis, and even the kind of naturalistic description of the pattern of our reactive attitudes that [22] suggests in " Freedom and Resentment " will only go part of the way – the excuses and exemptions are things we might say in a dialogue where reasons are exchanged, but each collective has some leeway over what substantive reasons count as grounds of an excuse or exemption.

The paper defends the view that events are the basic relata of causation, against arguments based on linguistic analysis to the effect that only facts can play that role. According to those arguments, causal contexts let the meaning of the expressions embedded in them shift: even expressions possessing the linguistic form that usually designates an event take a factual meaning.