Is Blame a Moral Attitude?

Abstract

The present article challenges a widespread view of blame as an inherently moral attitude. I begin by pointing out some features of blame that are not readily explained by, and not obviously compatible with, a moral orientation. To account for those features, I elucidate Nietzsche’s insights that blame responds to frustration and can serve as a bulwark against unwelcome self-perception, drawing as well on modern psychoanalysis’s inheritance of those insights. In the second half of the paper, I critically examine three of the most thorough attempts to root blame in moral foundations, those of George Sher, T.M. Scanlon and Miranda Fricker. I argue that each of these authors overestimates the prevalence and centrality of the influence morality can have on blame, to conclude that blame and morality only dovetail contingently some of the time.