Inadequate Agency and Appropriate Anger

Daphne Brandenburg

doi:10.1007/s10677-019-09982-w

Abstract

Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility (CC accounts) argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are (generally) sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts and argue reproachful engagements can have an important communicative and agency-cultivating pointe. I then go on to propose an addition to CC-accounts that explains how underdeveloped and compromised agents can be held responsible. I will show how this addition resolves ambiguities in accounts from McKenna, Vargas and McGeer. I conclude the paper by anticipating an objection CC accounts could raise: that reproach and blame are co-extensive.

Highlights

Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility (CC accounts) argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame
Children and service users in mental health care are at times –temporarily or permanently- insufficiently able to comply with moral norms, and their carers do not consider them blameworthy for transgressing them
In philosophy it is commonly assumed that negative reactive attitudes are inappropriate and best suspended if their addressee lacked ability to comply with moral norms (McKenna 2012; Vargas 2013; Wallace 1996)

Summary

Brandenburg

In the First section of this paper I discuss how prominent Strawsonians like McKenna, Vargas, and McGeer respond to the blame-sceptic by claiming that blaming sentiments are justified if their addressee deserves it, because -in those cases- these sentiments successfully communicate moral censure to the addressee and (in a way that is derived from this communication) tend to cultivate moral agency in the addressee. McKenna agrees with her but notes that, though justified, these attitudes would not be fitting as ‘moral address’ to the agent, given the agent’s inabilities to recognize forms of oppression (McKenna 2017) This form of address may still be appropriate in so far as it communicates that their behaviour is sexually or racially oppressive, and potentially scaffolds or develops the person’s responsiveness to racial or sexual oppression even if the person is not deserving of blame, i.e. despite a below threshold ability to respond to moral considerations one may still be receptive to reproachful attitudes and appropriately be addressed by them. His sensitivity to what her feelings convey to him would render him –in the communicative sense of the word- an appropriate addressee of reproach, but he is not thereby a deserving candidate of blame

An Addition to CC Accounts

Anticipating an Objection

Conclusion