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.