By Kartik Upadhyaya (Research Fellow, the Oxford Uehiro Institute)
From the 1st to 8th of this June , Miranda Fricker, Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, joined a glittering list of moral thinkers by delivering Uehiro’s Annual Lecture Series at Keble College’s H B Allen Centre.
Description
The series focused on standards of appropriate normative interaction, particularly in response to instances of moral wrongdoing. Its main interests were twofold:
Q1. To what lengths can we appropriately go in order to press those responsible for wrongdoing to redress that wrongdoing?
Q2. To what extent need we assume that wrongdoers are capable of appropriate responses to our pressurising attempts?
To prepare audiences for her treatment of both questions, Fricker’s first lecture introduced her general functionalist approach to accountability practices (in this particular talk, the practice of blaming). Functionalism aims to account for blaming not by offering a definition of it, but instead detailing its salient functions that help us understand and vindicate the phenomenon from a normative point of view. In defence of functionalism, Fricker points out that blaming is a diverse set of activities, ranging from a person’s adoption of attitudes, beliefs or emotions, to public acts of moral expression or communication of those attitudes; requests for certain kinds of moral conversation; or even participation in those conversations. In the light of that disunity, setting out to offer a full definition of blame will either attract counterexamples or lend itself to minimal conditions that are too narrow to enlighten us.
Fricker thus concludes that we can make significant progress by instead asking, What overall good does this diverse practice add to moral life? Her own response focused on the goods of shared moral understanding. Fricker argued that through blaming, stakeholders in an incident of moral wrongdoing – wrongdoers, victims, and other agents – have a way to mutually acknowledge and develop particular interpretations of that incident. The goods of shared understanding are produced not in every single instance of blaming, but in paradigm instances where attitudes about wrongdoing are exchanged between agents (typically victim and wrongdoer) in a call for dialogue.
Armed with that account, Fricker returned to one issue of definition: What is the thing (i.e. the blaming attitude) communicated in a practice geared towards shared moral understanding? The answer can’t be ‘moral judgment about a person’s behaviour’, as blaming is more animated than a purely observational or fact-finding exercise. What else is needed beyond a moral judgment? Not, says Fricker, resentment or hostility, as it is possible to blame without anger. Nor does she think the judgment must be accompanied by engagement in moral protest, as protest mainly targets unjust actions whereas blaming mainly targets the agents responsible. Rather, the missing ingredient is engaged disapprobation: a set of dispositions to accuse and censure the wrongdoer. Engaged disapprobation is the mechanism by which we demand the blameworthy to acknowledge and affirm certain interpretations of their behaviour, and to redress the matter accordingly, for example, by offering compensation, an explanation of their behaviour, taking steps to reform pertinent aspects of it, and, relatedly, apologising for it.
In her second lecture, Fricker further argued that we can demand that the blameworthy apologise, not merely via rational accusation, but also via non-moral suasive tactics, including forms of coercion or manipulation. For example, we might appropriately threaten to end a relationship with someone who’s wronged us unless the person apologises (“if you really valued our relationship, you would…”).
This novel argument took apology to be a version of avowal, in the sense discussed by Michel Foucault. Foucault describes avowal as an act of publicly owning some claim about oneself, with the social meaning that the agent has done so freely and because they acknowledge its truth. In the case of apology, Fricker suggested that avowal is what victims can appropriately demand. They can demand that wrongdoers perform an act that allows other parties to take them to have freely constituted themselves as sorry because it is true that they are sorry.
The ‘take them to have’ clause above is what makes this view distinctive. Because what is demanded of wrongdoers is an act that has a specific social meaning, acts of apology can be successful even if the meaning they generate does not track the facts. Consider, by Fricker’s analogy, a criminal confession extracted under interrogative pressure: in suitable circumstances, the confession can be taken to mean that the suspect has freely admitted to being guilty because they are guilty. Similarly, apologies enacted under pressure from third parties can be taken to mean the that the wrongdoer has freely admitted that they are sorry even when they did not act freely, or were not really sorry. This may seem a troubling implication of the Foucaldian argument, but it is, for Fricker, less troubling if we start out with the observation that it can be appropriate to pressure people into apology.
If part of the point of blaming is to exert non-moral pressure on people to apologise on the basis of acquired moral understanding, why do we bother to exert moral pressure too, via conversational engagement? A discussion pointing out the moral considerations at stake in wrongdoing would be well-taken if wrongdoers see their force already. But we often blame people precisely because they fail to see that force, in the hope that they come to see it as a result of our blaming them. Why do this? As Fricker put it, why is proleptic blame – blame that proceeds as if wrongdoers already possess moral understanding in the hope that they’ll thereby possess it – appropriate?
Her third lecture argued that we should hope that wrongdoers have a baseline ethical disposition; that is, a desire to be esteemed by their interlocutors. This core human desire for esteem, highlighted in Bernard Williams’ work on moral persuasion, moves us to be open to what others say. Because it heightens the wrongdoer’s prospects of showing that they have understood and share their interlocutor’s moral judgment, a disposition to be open to what the victim says heightens the wrongdoer’s prospects of improved esteem in their eyes.
Some might worry that this is the wrong kind of reason for engaged disapprobation. Conversations are meant to respect the normative agency of wrongdoers, not to function as a “big stick” that prods people into their rightful place in the queue for social regard. However, Fricker denies that this is implied by her account of proleptic blaming. Following Victoria McGeer, she argues that in felicitous cases, the aim of proleptic blaming remains to trigger genuine moral reform through the exercise of a wrongdoer’s normative faculties, and that it therefore remains respectful, even though the esteem-based mechanism used to trigger that exercise is a non-rational one.
Some afterthoughts
To complete our summary of this year’s series, a few afterthoughts and questions arising from it.
In the first talk, Fricker’s criticisms of alternative accounts of blaming are compelling. It is also plausible that the good of shared moral understanding is central to an account of blaming. Questions remained in the Q&A as to whether this is sufficient to meet the functionalist’s promise of vindicating the practice, partly because a more detailed account remains to be developed of the relationship between what Fricker calls engaged disapprobation and the achievement of the relevant good. For instance, imagine that engaged disapprobation is found to be ineffective at, or unnecessary for, advancing shared moral understanding. Or imagine engaged disapprobation is also found to advance overriding bad things. In this event the practice is not vindicated by appeal to that good alone.
In the second talk, Fricker seems right that we are at least sometimes morally permitted to threaten to end relationships with a person unless they apologise. But it is instructive to reflect further on when and why this is true. Fricker’s appeal to avowal offers a way to make sense of the phenomenon of pressurising for successful apology – this makes sense because the response sought isn’t an act whose performance requires the absence of coercion – yet it does not in itself offer a normative defence.
Here’s one possible defence mentioned in the Q&A, and discussed in philosophical work on manipulation and blackmail: it is permissible make threats because it would be permissible to execute them. For example, consider: Why you might be permitted to threaten to call the police if a mugger fails to hand your wallet back? Arguably because you would be permitted to call the police in response to the mugger’s failure to hand it back. Now consider why someone is permitted to threaten to cease relations with wrongdoers if they fail to apologise. Again, arguably because they would be permitted to cease relations in response to that failure. Whilst this view looks attractive, it doesn’t quite explain why, in the case of apology, the quality of a wrongdoer’s responses to relational threats seems, intuitively, to affect our justification for executing those threats. Suppose, for example, that the mugger suddenly falls unconscious onto the hood of a passing vehicle and fails to hand your wallet back as a result. In that case, your justification for calling the police seems unaffected. But now suppose that the wrongdoer similarly fails to apologise because they fell unconscious onto a passing vehicle. In this case, your justification for ceasing relations with them seems affected.
In the third talk, we might ask whether the topic of proleptic blaming raises a genuine puzzle, or, at least, a distinctive one, once we compare it to other instances of discursively acquired moral understanding. Discursive moral learning no doubt happens in non-blaming contexts. Say a friend puts to you in conversation some thoughts they have about our reasons to keep our promises. You have never yourself been blameworthy for failing to comply with these reasons, but the friend’s remarks alerted you to a consideration that makes you think about keeping promises in a different way. This phenomenon does not look puzzling at first glance. Nor does it seem to require a special esteem-based mechanism to explain how you managed to arrive at novel understanding – you did so because you generally possess a capacity to acquire moral knowledge when confronted with new moral evidence. It might be interesting to pin down what’s distinctive about conversations involving wrongdoers. If there is nothing distinctive, then maybe Fricker’s inquiry raises a problem about successful learning much larger in scope than that of successful learning in response to one’s wrongdoing.