EL NOMBRE Y LAS VOCALES

But blame is not merely the recognition that an attributable moral wrong- doing has occurred. It is important to respect the fact that, as George Sher points out, it is central to our conception of blame that blame is fundamen- tally “a reaction to a person on the basis of the wrongness of what he has done” in which we take “wrong acts to…reflect badly on the agents who perform them”(7). Even a moral responsibility skeptic might allow that there are morally wrong acts and that we are justified in reacting to the fact that

137 To give just one example, Taylor (2003) argues that hierarchical accounts of autono- mous agency ought to be rejected given that they generally fail to account for cases of se- vere duress since they wrongly predict that agents are still autonomous when they act under duress. The Minimal Approval view does in a certain sense propose conditions for “autonomous agency” but the sense of autonomy relevant to attributional-responsibility is taken to be rather minimal. (There is a good case to be made that the fact that acting under duress is not compatible with autonomy in its various stronger senses invoked outside of discussions of responsibility, including medical and political contexts.) While I take it that it is important that the complete specification of blameworthiness make room somewhere to explain the fact that agents are not blameworthy in cases of severe duress, it is not obvious to me that this must be done via showing how duress undercuts at- tributable agency, given just how minimal the sense of attributable agency required for the Minimal Approval view is. But views that posit that less minimal agential conditions and thus stronger senses of autonomy are required for attributability may seem more ob- jectionable if they relegate exemptions for duress to the normative domain instead of ex- plaining them via their accounts of autonomous agency.

such actions have occurred. But this seems to fall short of genuine blame, which goes above and beyond a mere judgment that someone has com- mitted a wrongdoing or the admonishment of such an act. Dispassionately telling a murderer that what she did was wrong and that she ought not do so again in the future falls short of blaming her on a fundamental level. When we blame her we, in some important respect, react to her on the ba- sis of her action. The central question an account of blame needs to an- swer, therefore, is what blaming adds over and above a judgment that someone has acted wrongly that somehow relates her wrongdoing to a re- action to the wrongdoer herself.

However, two straightforward ways of implicating the agent herself in the content of blaming attitudes: via robust traits or implicit judgments, are not available to proponents of the Minimal Approval view.

According to various traditional Deep Self views, an agent’s act is at- tributable iff it is caused by a mental state that has an especially tight con- nection to an agent’s practical standpoint or character. For example, Mi- chael Bratman posits that agents’ actions must align with their planning states, and their planning states, when taken all together, jointly constitute an agent’s diachronic practical identity. On certain readings of Frankfurt’s theory, such as on David Velleman’s interpretation, second-order volitions play the role of being functionally identical to the agent herself such that blaming attitudes directed at the initiation of an attributable action just are blaming attitudes directed at the agent herself. Blame’s sting, on such views, comes from the fact that one’s attributable acts express one’s deep- est commitments and so criticism of an agent’s attributable action im- pugns the core of her being. Sometimes this idea is coupled with the idea that an agent’s diachronic commitments or values make up her character traits, and so when we blame an agent due to her action, we are really blaming her for having certain morally problematic traits, which are ex- pressed through her action. Call this the Robust Trait view.

But given a simple correlation between attributability and attribution- al-blame, the Minimal Approval theorist cannot avail herself of the Robust Trait view. If an agent’s act is attributable, according to the Minimal Ap- proval theorist, all we know is that some part of her self stands behind it, not that who she most deeply is stands behind it. Given the way the Min- imal Approval view handles weakness of will, it could be possible for a person to be generally kind, and even to most strongly endorse doing the kind thing in every scenario, but still be blameworthy for acting unkindly in a one-off weak-willed scenario. For her to blameworthy, doing that un- kind thing must be something she approved of to some minimal degree, but unkindness needn’t be a part of any larger or more defining feature of her will.

On another view, one that is meant to be compatible with more mini- mal conceptions of attributability, the content of blame is the not the char- acter of the agent, but rather, the meaning of the agent’s action, which is in part a function of the agent’s position with regard to the person doing the blaming. As T. M. Scanlon puts it, the meaning of an action for a person is “the significance that person has reason to assign to it, given the reasons for which it was performed and the person’s relation to the agent.”138 _On Angela Smith’s version of the view, which she calls the Rational Relations view, the content of blame is the judgment of the agent taken to be implic- it (by the blamer) in her so acting.139 It is because Smith takes it that at- tributable actions can reasonably be taken to reveal the judgment of the agent that agents are answerable, or can be called upon to provide justifi- cation for their actions. But according to the Minimal Approval view, agents do not need to take themselves to have normative reasons to per- form the attributable actions they perform; they may approve of them for

138 Scanlon (2008): 54. 139 Smith (2005): 17.

no reason at all. So it would be unreasonable for blamers to assume that agents take their attributable actions to be justifiable.