Moral Blame

Meritocratic worldviews that stress personal responsibility, such as the Protestant ethic or general beliefs in a just world, are typically associated with stigmatizing attitudes and could explain the persistence of mental illness stigma. Beliefs in a just world for oneself ("I get what I deserve"), however, are often related to personal well-being and can be a coping resource for stigmatized individuals. Despite these findings in other stigmatized groups, the link between worldviews and the stigma of psychiatric disorders is unknown. We measured just world beliefs for self and others as well as endorsement of the Protestant ethic in 85 people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or affective disorders and 50 members of the general public. Stigmatizing attitudes toward people with mental illness (perceived responsibility, perceived dangerousness, general agreement with negative stereotypes) were assessed by self-report. Using a response-latency task, the Brief Implicit Association Test, we also examined guilt-related implicit negative stereotypes about mental illness. We found a consistent positive link between endorsing the Protestant ethic and stigmatizing self-reported attitudes in both groups. Implicit guilt-related stereotypes were positively associated with the Protestant ethic only among members of the public. Among people with mental illness, stronger just world beliefs for self were related to reduced self-stigma, but also to more implicit blame of persons with mental illness. The Protestant ethic may increase (self-)stigmatizing attitudes; just world beliefs for oneself, on the other hand, may lead to unexpected implicit self-blame in stigmatized individuals. Public anti-stigma campaigns and initiatives to reduce self-stigma among people with mental illness should take worldviews into account.

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible, a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question-also explored in the experiment-whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook.

"(...) This research called my attention to the role of blame in cultural models about climate. The main international debates on climate change focus almost exclusively on the phenomenon’s physical causes, while at the same time there is an enormous ethnographic literature that reveals “blame” to be integral to how societies deal with crises in general (and climate related ones in particular). This reveals a conceptual gap where anthropology can effectively make critical contributions. (...)"

Hypocrites are often thought to lack the standing to blame others for faults similar to their own. Although this claim is widely accepted, it is seldom argued for. We offer an argument for the claim that nonhypocrisy is a necessary condition on the standing to blame. We first offer a novel, dispositional account of hypocrisy. Our account captures the commonsense view that hypocrisy involves making an unjustified exception of oneself. This exception-making involves a rejection of the impartiality of morality and thereby a rejection of the equality of persons, which we argue grounds the standing to blame others. This paper is co-authored with Kyle Fritz.

This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer: What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what justifies engaging in epistemic blame? I argue that a number of problems arise when we try to answer these questions using existing conceptions of moral blame. I then consider and reject Brown's (2020) belief-desire model of epistemic blame. Finally, I argue that an agency-cultivation model of moral responsibility is not only able to help us develop a plausible theory of epistemic blame, it is particularly well-placed to do so.

Opponents to genetic or biomedical human enhancement often claim that the availability of these technologies would have negative consequences for those who either choose not to utilize these resources or lack access to them. However, Thomas Douglas has argued that this objection has no force against the use of technologies that aim to bring about morally desirable character traits, as the unenhanced would benefit from being surrounded by such people. I will argue that things are not as straightforward as Douglas makes out. The widespread use of moral enhancement would raise the standards for praise and blame worthiness, making it much harder for the unenhanced to perform praiseworthy actions or avoid performing blameworthy actions. This shows that supporters of moral enhancement cannot avoid this challenge in the way that Douglas suggests.

In March of 2020, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women. He has yet to stand trial for sexual harassment charges made against him by over 100 women. Is Harvey Weinstein blameworthy? Some philosophical theories would say that he’s not, and others would say that he is, but for uncompelling reasons. I say that this is true of the reasons-responsiveness theory, and a specific version of that theory, the guilt theory. I critique these theories and then offer a feminist model of blame that gives uptake to the reasons offered by Weinstein’s victims, and other survivors of sexual violence. This theory rectifies the imbalance of epistemic power that enables people like Weinstein to oppress so many women.

We examine three basic tropes-villain, victim, and hero-that emerge in images, claims, and narratives. We compare recent research on characters with the predictions of an established tradition, affect control theory (ACT). Combined, the theories describe core traits of the villain victim hero triad and predict audiences' reactions. Character theory (CT) can help us understand the cultural roots of evaluation, potency, and activity profiles and the robustness of profile ratings. It also provides nuanced information regarding multiplicity in, and sub-types of, characters and how characters work together to define roles. Character types can be strategically deployed in political realms, potentially guiding strategies, goals, and group dynamics. ACT predictions hold up well, but CT suggests several paths for extension and elaboration. In many cases, cultural research and social psychology work on parallel tracks, with little cross-talk. They have much to learn from each other.

This paper focuses on a non-volitional account that has received a good deal of attention recently, Angela Smith's rational relations view. I argue that without historical conditions on blameworthiness for the non-voluntary non-volitionist accounts like Smith’s are (i) vulnerable to manipulation cases and (ii) fail to make sufficient room for the distinction between badness and blameworthiness. Towards the end of the paper I propose conditions aimed to supplement these deficiencies. The conditions that I propose are tailored to suit non-volitional accounts of blameworthiness. Unlike some volitional historical conditions on blameworthiness, the conditions that I propose do not require that the person have exercised voluntary control (e.g., via choices or decisions) over the acquisition of her attitudes or values.

The aim of the present study was to examine to what degree different mechanisms of moral disengagement were related to age, gender, bullying, and defending among school children. Three hundred and seventy-two Swedish children ranging in age from 10 to 14 years completed a questionnaire. Findings revealed that boys expressed significantly higher levels of moral justification, euphemistic labeling, diffusion of responsibility, distorting consequences, and victim attribution, as compared with girls. Whereas boys bullied others significantly more often than girls, age was unrelated to bullying. Moral justification and victim attribution were the only dimensions of moral disengagement that significantly related to bullying. Furthermore, younger children and girls were more likely to defend victims. Diffusion of responsibility and victim attribution were significantly and negatively related to defending, while the other dimensions of moral disengagement were unrelated to defending.

The aim with the present study was to investigate bystander actions in bullying situations as well as reasons behind these actions as they are articulated by Swedish students from fourth to seventh grade. Forty-three semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with students. Qualitative analysis of data was performed by methods from grounded theory. The analysis of the student voices of being a bystander in bullying reveals a complexity in which different definition-of-situation processes are evoked (a) relations (friends and social hierarchy), (b) defining seriousness, (c) victim’s contribution to the situation, (d) social roles and intervention responsibilities, and (e) distressing emotions. There are often conflicted motives in how to act as a bystander, which could evoke moral distress among the students. Our analysis is unique in that it introduces the concept of moral distress as a process that has to be considered in order to better understand bystander actions among children The findings also indicate bystander reactions that could be associated with moral disengagement, such as not perceiving a moral obligation to intervene if the victim is defined as a non-friend (‘none of my business’), protecting the friendship with the bully, and blaming the victim.

My wife couldn’t find the bike keys when rushing out the door the other day and she immediately blamed me for losing it. She blamed me that I was not always using the key hanger and took 5 minutes class for on how to use key hanger effectively along with how to be disciplined

It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a
surprisingly hopeful upshot, since our unfortunate condition makes it appropriate to respond to one another mercifully. I suggest that this response can take two forms. Without collapsing justice into mercy, it is right to make our approach to justice and punishment more merciful and to recognize the fittingness of “erring” on the side of mercy when we are uncertain how to apportion blame.

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed.

A question that always arises in the aftermath of corporate wrongdoing is, “Who’s responsible?” (“Who can fix this?” might be a better question, but it’s not the one we usually turn to.) While the answer will typically be quite complicated, the question itself seems relatively simple. But each of the two words comprising the question are importantly ambiguous, and the way we interpret them will have significant implications for the answers we come up with. Here I focus on the complexities of the “who”: does it include collective agents, like firms? If we hold the collective agents responsible, do we thereby hold their members responsible for too much, or too little? How are they responsible at all?

There are individualist, collectivist, and holist answers to those questions. The first two approaches refuse to recognize the firms and rely on a distributive approach to moral responsibility that yields implausible results. The holist approach recognizes the firms themselves as potentially responsible, but critics have objected that this forces us to either blame their members for things they haven’t done or excuse them entirely. I reply that using a suitably robust account of corporate agents and a non-distributive paradigm of moral responsibility (“collateral responsibility”) avoids both outcomes, allowing us to properly allocate responsibility to the firms and to hold the members responsible for their own contributions.

"Who's responsible?" has become a pressing question in the wake of the financial crisis. The answer will obviously be very complicated, but the question itself seems relatively simple. And yet each of the two words comprising the question is ambiguous, and how we interpret them will have significant implications for the answers we come up with. Here I focus on the complexities of the " who " : does it include collective agents, like firms? If we hold the collective agents responsible, do we thereby hold their members responsible for too much, or too little? How are they responsible at all? A suitably robust account of corporate agents and a non-distributive paradigm of moral responsibility (" collateral responsibility ") allows us to blame the firms for their own actions without either blaming their members for things they haven't done or excusing them entirely.

"Who's responsible?" has become a pressing question in the wake of the financial crisis.  While the answer will obviously be very complicated, the question itself seems relatively simple.  But each of the two words comprising the question is importantly ambiguous, and the way we interpret them will have significant implications for the answers we come up with.  Here I focus on the complexities of the “who”:  does it include collective agents, like firms?  If we hold the collective agents responsible, do we thereby hold their members responsible for too much, or too little?  How are they responsible at all? 

There are individualist, collectivist, and holist answers to those questions.  The first two approaches refuse to recognize the firms and rely on a distributive approach to moral responsibility that yields implausible results.  The holist approach recognizes the firms themselves as potentially responsible, but critics object that this forces us to either blame their members for things they haven’t done or excuse them entirely.  I reply that using a suitably robust account of corporate agents and a non-distributive paradigm of moral responsibility (“collateral responsibility”) avoids both outcomes.  I close by considering the implications for Countrywide and its members.

This paper puts forward an account of blame combining two ideas that are usually set up against each other: that blame performs an important function, and that blame is justified by the moral reasons making people blameworthy rather than by its functionality. The paper argues that blame could not have developed in a purely instrumental form, and that its functionality itself demands that its functionality be effaced in favour of non-instrumental reasons for blame – its functionality is self-effacing. This notion is sharpened and it is shown how it offers an alternative to instrumentalist or consequentialist accounts of blame which preserves their animating insight while avoiding their weaknesses by recasting that insight in an explanatory role. This not only allows one to do better justice to the authority and autonomy of non-instrumental reasons for blame, but also reveals that autonomy to be a precondition of blame's functionality. Unlike rival accounts, it also avoids the "alienation effect" that renders blame unstable under reflection by undercutting the authority of the moral reasons which enable it to perform its function in the first place. It instead yields a vindicatory explanation that strengthens our confidence in those moral reasons.

Feminist philosophy provides unique insight into moral responsibility. The general consensus in philosophy, including feminist theory, is that responsibility tracks or responds to features of a person’s self, such as attitudes and capacities. But feminists think of the self in a unique way: as relational and socially embedded. This raises new questions about how we should hold people responsible. Are people responsible for (the effects of) their relationships, social connections, and shared attitudes, or only their personal choices and thoughts? Are people responsible for ignorance and collective wrongdoing, even if these things are widely accepted in their culture? Do people participate in oppressive practices because they don’t have access to relevant moral information, or because they have a vested interest in ignoring the testimony of their victims?

Because feminist philosophy is so internally diverse, we find a range of answers to these questions. But there is growing consensus that we need to pay more attention to marginalized voices – voices that call into question the dominant standpoint of nondisabled White women.

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame.

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt).

Abstract: «The Open Texture of the Concept of Moral Blame». This article explores moral blame as a social practice. Its main thesis is that the concept of blame presents a non-univocal open texture, and thus we cannot expect to reach a concise definition of (the act of) blaming. In order to clarify what do we do when we blame, we need to heed an appropriate methodology capable of bringing together this multivocity of meanings. Hart and Finnis's theory of central and borderline cases is presented as a valuable analytical tool so as to offer a differentiated but general description of all instances of blaming. As a starting point to develop this analysis, Thomas M. Scanlon's relational approach of moral blame is considered.

Blame is a moral judgment that has a cognitive and a social nature. In this paper we first focus on the cognitive side and introduce a new theoretical model of blame that integrates insights and evidence from extant research. Within this model, we demonstrate the critical role of such concepts as agent, intentionality, and obligation—all of which are grounded in people’s theory of mind. We then contrast two views on the ordering of blame and theory of mind based inferences: blame-late models, which claim that blame follows mental state inferences; and blame-early models, which claim that the opposite order holds. After integrating these two views within our model, we turn to two eminently social questions on moral judgment: blaming as a social act; and blaming of group agents. We suggest that our model of blame provides a fruitful framework for both of these questions, thus highlighting the intimate connection between blame as a cognitive phenomenon and blame as a social phenomenon.

Some philosophers believe that because ignorance tends to excuse, a blameworthy actor will either be a knowing wrongdoer or her ignorance will be traceable to a prior instance of knowing wrongdoing. I argue that this claim is false because a wrongdoer’s behavior can exhibit moral and attributional qualities that are sufficient for blameworthiness even if she never acted akratically. However, while blameworthiness does not depend on a wrongdoer recognizing the moral status of her behavior, it often does depend on the wrongdoer being aware of the likely consequences of her behavior. Without this latter sort of awareness, an agent’s behavior may lack the moral features that make blaming responses appropriate. Moreover, what is often required in this context is actual awareness of the consequences of one’s behavior. Thus, the mere fact that an agent could have or should have been aware of the consequences of her behavior is in many cases not sufficient for genuine moral blameworthiness.

Published in the Springer Journal Neuroethics
Available here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-015-9243-6?wt_mc=internal.event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst

Neil Levy argues that the degree to which psychopaths ought to be held blameworthy for their actions depends on the extent to which they are capable of mental time travel--episodic memory and episodic foresight.  Levy claims that deficits in mental time travel prevent psychopaths from fully appreciating what it is to be a person, and, without this understanding, we can at best hold psychopaths blameworthy for harming non-persons.  In this paper, I build upon and clarify various aspects of Levy’s view.  Specifically, I begin by outlining the neurobiological data on mental time travel, and I argue that psychopaths, or at least some psychopaths, indeed appear to have the deficits Levy ascribes to them.  I then expand upon the legal implications of his argument.  I use an analogy between juveniles and psychopaths to argue that the penological justification for retributive punishment against psychopaths ought to be substantially diminished.

Sally Haslanger identifies three standard philosophical approaches – conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative – and defends an ameliorative analysis of race and gender as the most effective at addressing social injustice. In this paper, I assign three influential theories of moral responsibility to these categories, and I defend the ameliorative approach as the most justice-conducive. But I argue that existing ameliorative accounts of responsibility are not ameliorative enough – they do not adequately address social injustice. I propose a new ameliorative model that defines ordinary responsibility as part of a political apparatus of power that polices and enforces oppressive norms. And I argue that we should create new, counterhegemonic discourses about responsibility through collective political resistance.

"The purpose of this paper is to explore general practitioners' (GPs') and psychiatrists' views and experiences of transparent forms of medical regulation in practice, as well as those of medical regulators and those representing patients and professionals. The research included interviews with GPs, psychiatrists and others involved in medical regulation, representing patients and professionals. A qualitative narrative analysis of the interviews was then conducted. Narratives suggest rising levels of complaints, legalisation and blame within the National Health Service (NHS). Three key themes emerge. First, doctors feel "guilty until proven innocent" within increasingly legalised regulatory systems and are consequently practising more defensively. Second, regulation is described as providing "spectacular transparency", driven by political responses to high profile scandals rather than its effects in practice, which can be seen as a social defence. Finally, it is suggested that a "blame business" is driving this form of transparency, in which self-interested regulators, the media, lawyers, and even some patient organisations are fuelling transparency in a wider culture of blame. A relatively small number of people were interviewed, so further research testing the findings would be useful. Transparency has some perverse effects on doctors' practice.

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS: Rising levels of blame has perverse consequences for patient care, as doctors are practicing more defensively as a result, as well as significant financial implications for NHS funding. Transparent forms of regulation are assumed to be beneficial and yet little research has examined its effects in practice. In this paper we highlight a number of perverse effects of transparency in practice."

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.

"http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000013  Previous research has found that people collectively wronged by an outgroup take insult when its representative offers compensation, and that an expression of shame but not guilt can lower such insult. This experiment showed a moderating factor: strength of outgroup blame. Black community members were participants, presented with an apology for discriminatory searches of Blacks by the police. The effects – that shame but not guilt reduces insult from compensation – were replicated only among those who strongly blamed outgroup entities. As before, these effects emerged only on insult rather than satisfaction measures, and only when compensation was offered. When blamed by the public, an official body should therefore consider how much its apology conveys shame rather than guilt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)"

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X.

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers . All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances.

Many argue that skepticism about blameworthiness impugns the rationality of the reactive anger partly constitutive of blame, and therefore generates a strong reason for skeptics to either relinquish doubt or eschew anger. Appealing to the conclusion Gary Watson draws in his influential discussion about the sadistic murderer Robert Harris, these philosophers argue that it is nearly impossible for any sane adult to target an agent with the anger that is constitutive of blame without also believing that the targeted agent deserves it. I call this view retributivism about anger. In this paper, I debunk the Harris explanation, and argue for a view I call the practical view of anger. Roughly, this is the view that an agent can target an individual with anger if she believes she is sufficiently justified in doing so, and values acting on that justification more than she disvalues harming the individual. Blameworthiness is the justification most often assumed to obtain. And we tend to value acting on it. However, there are non-desert based justifications and values that can work just as well. I cite as paradigms two kinds of cases: cases of moral reform in which we value the betterment of the immoral agent and moral community more than we disvalue the temporary harm that anger causes, and cases of moral protest in which we react angrily to an immoral but nevertheless undeserving actor in order to overcome or take a stand against the immoral system of which they are a part. That we lack the belief that such an agent deserves to be targeted by anger is not a sufficient emotional hinderance. So although skepticism about blameworthiness undermines a common justification for the reactive anger constitutive of blame, it does not impugn the rationality of blaming agents in reaction to their immoral acts.