Affiliation:
1. Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University , Cornell, USA
Abstract
Abstract
In order to lay out a design of blame and praise, it is necessary first to understand their nature. This chapter surveys all of the contemporary philosophical (constitutivist) theories of blame. They each capture some forms of blame but have a hard time accounting for others. This general problem points the way to developing a functionalist theory instead, one explaining what blame is for. But there is another crucial gap in constitutivist theories, namely, they don’t really discuss or account for praise. Indeed, blame and praise are all, it is argued, part of a system of agential responses, so the question guiding the investigation is what is this system for? The answer: it is for norm maintenance, and its contributing parts characteristically deliver stings (bad feelings) and buzzes (good feelings) and are costly signals of the respondent’s commitment to norm patrol. The chapter ends by defending this view against three functionalist rivals.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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