Benjamin Matheson (University of Bern), "Blameworthiness is Terminable"
Forthcoming, Philosophical Quarterly
Suppose a person steals from you and they have no justification or excuse for doing so. In short, suppose the person is blameworthy for stealing from you.
Now suppose that the person feels guilty about what they’ve done, they replace what they stole, they apologise, and in so doing promise to never repeat the wrong, that they transform in the relevant respects such that stealing from you is no longer psychologically open to them, that you accept their apology, that you forgive them, and that then you reconcile with them. In short, suppose that the person rectifies her wrong and redeems herself, and that you then re-establish your relationship with them. Call this person Redeemed Wrongdoer.
Question: Does Redeemed Wrongdoer’s blameworthiness for stealing from you diminish to any extent after she rectifies her wrong and redeems herself?
If you’re answer is no, then you are an interminability theorist. According to interminability, blameworthiness is an interminable property – that is, a property that remains forever instantiated after it is initially instantiated. On this view, blameworthiness is similar to property of being born in a particular place; no matter how much one changes, it will always be true that one was born in that place. An implication of interminability is that no matter how bad a person feels, apologies, transformations, and compensates the wrong she commits, she remains just as blameworthy as she ever was as time passes.
If you’re answer is yes, then you’re a terminability theorist. According to terminability, blameworthiness is a terminable property – that is, it is a property that need not be forever instantiated after it is initially instantiated. On this view, blameworthiness is similar to the property of being a good dancer. Just because a person is a good dancer earlier in life, it doesn’t follow that the person will be a good dancer later in life. People change, and the terminability theorist claims that blameworthiness is just another of the many properties that can dimmish, and perhaps even be lost, over time.
In my forthcoming article, I argue against interminability and in favour of terminability. I first seek to clarify the debate about whether blameworthiness terminable or interminable. I then seek to undermine the positive and negative case for interminability. My goal isn’t to defend any particular terminability account. Rather, it is just to defend the plausibility of terminability in general. A key part of my argument is that interminability is a very strong view because it is incompatible with any changes in blameworthiness over time. Terminability, on the other hand, is comparatively weak: we need only show that a slight diminishment in blameworthiness is at all possible for it to be true. So, if Redeemed Wrongdoer’s blameworthiness only diminishes by a tiny degree, then terminability is true.
One of the problems with earlier implicit defences of terminability (e.g. Khoury and Matheson 2018) is that they sought to elicit the intuition that a person who commits a wrong – including even significant wrongs, such as atrocities – can cease being blameworthy entirely. My argumentative strategy, however, doesn’t rely on eliciting such a strong intuition. Indeed, it doesn’t rely on eliciting any intuition at all – though I do think it’s quite hard to resist the claim that Redeemed Wrongdoer’s blameworthiness diminishes a tiny amount. Rather, my focus is to undermine reasons in favour of interminability. One of those reasons is that terminability might seem to be an obviously implausible view. But much of terminability’s seeming implausibility rests on a confusion about what terminability implies. So I first set out to clarify what terminability implies and in doing so to clarify the debate between terminability and interminability theorists.
First, terminability theorists don’t have to agree that blameworthiness can cease altogether. Terminability is true if a person’s blameworthiness can merely diminish.
Second, terminability theorists don’t have to agree that people can cease being blameworthy for all kinds of acts. They can allow that certain acts – such as atrocities – are beyond the pale, and are ones we cannot cease being blameworthy for.
Third, just because one terminability account is objectionable (for one reason or another), it doesn’t mean that they all are. An objection to one of these theories isn’t necessarily an objection to the other. As I discuss in the paper, The Posthumous Blame Objection at best only affects certain terminability accounts.
Fourth, it’s not the case that terminability theorists are making strange claims about change. Rather, they are making a mundane one. Blameworthiness, for them, is just like any other property of ours that can change over time, such as the property of being a good dancer. Of course, interminability theorists think that, unlike the property of being a good dancer, the blameworthiness property is interminable. However, this is something that the interminability theorist must argue for and cannot just assume at start of their inquiry. As we’ll see shortly, the interminability theorist’s key weakness is that they fail to explain why becoming blameworthy entails that a person forever remains blameworthy.
Fifth, it’s not the case that terminability theorists are committed to a strong (e.g. emotional) account of blame. In the paper, I assume the “holding against” conception of blame, and I argue that even on this weak conception of blame, there is no good reason to think that blameworthiness can at least diminish over time.
Finally, I argue the key point of contention between terminability and interminability theorists is over the content of blame. Interminability theorists think that blame merely involves a historical evaluation – that is, one that looks at a person’s whole life so far and checks for any unexcused impermissible conduct. Terminability theorists, on the other hand, hold that also blame involves a present evaluation – that is, an evaluation that speaks to the present properties (things that are true of the person rather than things that were true of her) that a person has at the time they are blamed.
Why, then, think that blameworthiness is interminable? In the paper, I consider three arguments. I think they each fail for similar reasons, so I’ll focus on just one here – namely Randolph Clarke’s (2022) prima facie case for interminability (which I call The Entailment Argument):
If one is guilty of a moral offense, then one is culpable for it. And one who is culpable for an offense is to blame for it. To be to blame for something is to be worthy of blame, or blameworthy, for it. Hence, blameworthiness is forever: once blameworthy for an offense, always blameworthy for that offense. And since one is worthy of blame just in case blame would be fitting, we may add that once one is blameworthy for an offense, it will always be the case that some possible instance of blame of one for that offense would be fitting. (Clarke 2022: 2582)
The first problem with this argument is that the terms it uses – such as “guilty”, “culpable”, “to blame”, “worthy of blame”, “blameworthy”, “fitting target of blame” – can all be understood to mean the same thing, so it isn’t clear where the argument finds support for its substantial conclusion.
The second, and more important problem, is that it implicitly assumes that becoming blameworthy is sufficient for remaining blameworthy. It doesn’t follow that because a person is guilty/culpable – that is, blameworthy – when she acts that she is blameworthy after the time of action. More specifically, when we meet the conditions on becoming blameworthy (such as knowing that what we’re doing is wrong, exercising control, being able to do otherwise, etc.), it doesn’t automatically follow that we meet the conditions on remaining blameworthy. This only follows if we assume that interminability is true, but that’s exactly what the argument is trying to support. Similar problems plague the other two arguments that I discuss.
It's worth noting that the distinction between becoming blameworthy and remaining blameworthy is mundane, and not one that illicitly supports terminability. Even if you’re an interminability theorist, you can (and for clarity’s sake, I think you must) talk in terms of this distinction. Your view is just that becoming blameworthy is sufficient for remaining blameworthy. But no good reason has so far been given in favour of interminability. In the rest of the paper, I consider objections to terminability that might be used to support interminability.
I consider three objections: The Posthumous Blame Objection, The Self-Blame Objection, and The Ethics Objection. I’ll focus here on The Ethics Objection because I think it is the most powerful objection to terminability.
While terminability theorists hold that Redeemed Wrongdoer at least becomes less blameworthy (and many hold she becomes not all blameworthy), interminability theorists hold that Redeemed Wrongdoer may cease to be an all-things-considered appropriate target of blame, but she doesn’t cease to be blameworthy. Basically, rather than her redemption affecting her blameworthiness, redemption just disables but does not remove the reason others have to blame her. This means that if someone were to blame Redeemed Wrongdoer, the terminability theorists would say the person has made a factual error (your blame is mistaken because she isn’t actually blameworthy), whereas the interminability theorists would say the person has not made a factual error but has rather made a merely ethical one (your blame isn’t mistaken because she isn’t blameworthy, but you’ve got overriding reason not to actually have blame her – namely, the fact she’s rectified her wrong and redeemed herself).
Note that this objection implies an agreement between terminability and interminability theorists: they both agree that Redeemed Wrongdoer is not all-things-considered target of blame, but they disagree on what best explains this. Terminability theorists explain this in terms of the metaphysics of blameworthiness, while interminability theorists explain this in terms of the ethics of blame.
In our earlier paper, “Is Blameworthiness Forever?”, Andrew Khoury and I (2018) sought to undermine this objection by appealing to a particular account of blame. On this account, when we blame, we attribute a flaw to the target of blame. In response, Clarke (2022) argues that we still attribute a flaw to a person who has redeemed themselves – namely, a flaw in her past. To see his point, compare Redeemed Wrongdoer with Innocent Person. While we can attribute no flaws to Innocent Person, we can still attribute a flaw to Redeemed Wrongdoer. Thus, Clarke takes it that we can still blame Redeemed Wrongdoer even by the lights of the Khoury & Matheson (2018) account of blame.
The problem is that there is a significant difference between attributing a persisting flaw and attributing a flaw in someone’s past – namely, the latter implies a historical evaluation while the former implies a present evaluation. Khoury and I were perhaps not explicit enough about this, but by “flaw” we meant a persisting flaw – that is, a present property of a person. We take to be irrelevant to blame that a person has a flaw in her past – at least in the sense of “blame” that is more than acknowledging a blemish on someone’s moral record (something that Clarke agrees with). What matters, on our view, is rather that a person is presently flawed, and thus that blame involves a present evaluation of (and the attribution of a present property to) the target of blame. Even if you disagree that attributing flaws is part of blame, you can instead take “flaw” to stand-in for whatever present property you think is relevant to blame, such as continuing to have wrongdoing-incurred reparative obligations (Tierney 2022).
My response to Clarke’s point is that attributing a historical flaw does not have the same sting as attributing a present flaw – that is, it doesn’t have the sting that is characteristic of blame. More strongly, I argue that attributing only a historical flaw does not appear to be a kind of blame at all.
Compare two life stories: Redeemed Wrongdoer’s and Unredeemed Wrongdoer’s. Suppose they have the same kind of life story, except that Unredeemed Wrongdoer hasn’t done anything to rectify his wrong. According to the interminability theorist, we can blame both just as much as each other because they are both blameworthy to the same extent – though we have an ethical reason not to actually blame Redeemed Wrongdoer (namely, her redemption).
It's true that we can fittingly attribute lots of the same things to both Redeemed Wrongdoer and Unredeemed Wrongdoer. We can say that they did something in the past, that it was impermissible to do this, that they each lacked an excuse for acting that way, and that they each possess a flaw in their past. But notice that there is something extra we can attribute to Unredeemed Wrongdoer – namely, that he currently possesses a flaw. Again, we can understand this more generally as attributing a present property to the person we blame. We can take this more general property to be that the person’s earlier wrong is unrectified. We cannot fittingly attribute this present property to Redeemed Wrongdoer because she has rectified her wrong and redeemed herself. On this view, then, when we blame a person, we represent or evaluate the target of blame as having performed an unexcused and unrectified impermissible action. It the attribution of a present property that I contend gives blame is characteristic sting.
To see this, consider what it would be like to try to “blame” Redeemed Wrongdoer while taking into account the fact she’s rectified her wrong and redeemed herself. Consider the thought we might have: “You did something wrong but now you’ve rectified that wrong and redeemed yourself”. Not only does this not sting, but it’s also the kind of thing we would say to someone to stop them blaming themselves. So, it doesn’t seem plausible this thought (or anything that merely expressed this thought) counts as blame.
Clarke could respond by pointing out how we can fittingly blame Redeemed Wrongdoer in a way that stings. While he endorses the holding against conception of blame, he doesn’t say much about what holding against implies. I consider four ways we might hold a wrong against Redeemed Wrongdoer: (1) holding her to a moral debt, (2) feeling disappointed with her, (3) changing our relationship with her, (4) being indignant with. And I argue that each is unfitting. Given that these forms of holding against are unfitting, I conclude that it is unfitting to blame Redeemed Wrongdoer. So, it is in fact that case that Redeemed Wrongdoer’s blameworthiness not only diminishes but also ceases altogether. Blameworthiness is terminable, and it can terminate altogether.
Because this objection fails, the prospects for interminability are dim. The prospects for terminability, on the other hand, are bright. Again, I haven’t sought to defend any particular terminability account in this paper. Rather, this paper is a clarifying and ground-clearing exercise. There are several plausible candidates for terminability accounts of blameworthiness over time, and there is an exciting debate to be had between its various proponents (e.g. Khoury and Matheson 2018; Carlsson 2022; Portmore 2022; Tierney 2022; Khoury 2022; Matheson 2023; Matheson, forthcoming).
A more general lesson is that all theorists of blame have to engage with work on blameworthiness over time. We not only need to know how a person becomes blameworthy, but we also need to know how a person remains blameworthy as time passes. Recent work on blameworthiness over time provides some possible answers but work in this area has only really just begun.
References
Carlsson, A. (2022). “Deserved guilt and blameworthiness over time”. In Carlsson, A. (Ed.), Self-blame and moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clarke, R. (2022) “Still Guilty” Philosophical Studies, 179/8:2579-2596
Khoury, A. (2022) “Forgiveness, Repentance, and Diachronic Blameworthiness” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 8/4:700-720
Khoury, A. & Matheson, B. (2018). “Is blameworthiness forever?” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4/2:204–224.
Matheson, B. (2023) Self-Manipulation and Moral Responsibility. Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 42/3:107-129.
Matheson, Benjamin (forthcoming) “Blameworthiness is Terminable” Philosophical Quarterly
Portmore, D. (2022) “A comprehensive account of blame: Self-blame, non-moral blame, and blame for the non-voluntary”. In Carlsson, A (Ed.), Self-blame and moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tierney, H. (2022) “Making Amends: How to Alter the Fittingness of Blame”, in Howard, C. and Rowland, R. (eds), Fittingness: Essays in the Philosophy of Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press
If the wrongdoer is a narcissist then they are interminable regardless of those wronged and cannot be blamed for anything. Nor can they be forgiven. They have no culpability, no moral agency. There is nothing to be forgiven. They are close to p-zombies, but still part of the dimension that is Homo sp.
Rectification assumes reconciliation is possible, where agents have no empathy reconciliation is not possible. The rectification is an almost random act. Narcissists say stuff, occasionally it is the truth but it always suits their current status, usually to generate narcissistic supply.
We have evolved to police these parasites or perhaps recidivists to primate social hierarchies, dealing with these police powers in the abstract without mentioning the cause is beside the point
I reckon...