The Beam and the Mote
On Blame, Standing, and Normativity
Published on 20. October 2023
273 pages
978-0-19-754461-7 (ISBN)
Description
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye" says the Bible. In other words: there is something problematic about one person blaming another, when the blamer's faults are even greater.
Many believe that even if one has done something blameworthy, one can dismiss blame when coming from a hypocritical blamer. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen examines the nature and ethics of standingless, hypocritical blame. It argues that hypocrites lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norms to which they appeal in their blame; that hypocritical blame is pro tanto morally wrong because it involves treating the blamee as an inferior; and that there are many other sources of lacking standing to blame than hypocrisy, e.g., complicity. Lippert-Rasmussen extrapolates these analyses to other moral responses, notably praising and forgiving. So far, philosophers interested in standing have focused narrowly on blaming, but many other moral responses require standing as well. Indeed, Lippert-Rasmussen argues that considerations about standing apply to illocutionary acts not involving appeals to moral norms, e.g., non-moral encouragements and epistemic blame. In closing, Lippert-Rasmussen uses insights related to the idea of standing as a basis for making a grand claim about how part of morality is interpersonal in a sense often ignored in discussions of mainstream first-order moral theories, and to elucidate the nature of the moral wrong involved in relying on negative statistical generalizations about certain groups of people.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
12/2023
Oxford University Press Inc
€96.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor of political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark and professor II in philosophy at the Arctic University of Norway-UiT. He has published widely on issues in ethics and political philosophy. Previous books include: Born Free and Equal (Oxford University Press, 2013), Relational Egalitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Making Sense of Affirmative Action (Oxford University Press, 2020). He was associate editor at Ethics (2008-2020) and Chair for the Society for Applied Philosophy 2011-2014. Presently, he is director of the Center for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, University of Aarhus.
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Topic and main aims
2. Structure
3. Significance
Chapter 1: Hypocritical blame
1. Introduction
2. When is blame hypocritical?
2.1 The blaming condition
2.2 The incoherence condition
2.3 The no-self-blame condition
2.4 The no-justification condition
2.5 Summary
3. Standing to blame and its denial
4. Other accounts of what it is to dismiss blame on grounds of the hypocrite's lack of standing
5. Conclusion
Chapter 2: Complications and defeaters of standing
1. Introduction
2. Private blame
3. Self-blame
4. Third-person blame
5. Degrees of blame and degrees of standing
6. Skepticism about standing to blame
7. Why does hypocrisy undermine standing to blame?
8. Conclusion
Chapter 3: What, if anything, makes hypocritical blame morally wrong?
1. Introduction
2. Lack of desert
3. Lack of commitment
4. Wrong attention
5. Transgression of moral authority
6. Failure of reciprocity
7. Moral community
8. Implying falsehoods
9. A clash with moral equality
10. Conclusion
Chapter 4: Other ways of not having standing to blame
1. Introduction
2. Tu quoque
3. Complicity
4. None of your business
5. ?You don't know what it's like?
6. ?You don't accept that principle yourself?
7. Conclusion
Chapter 5: Praising
1. Introduction
2. What is praising?
3. Standing to praise
4. Hypocritical praise
5. The wrongfulness of hypocritical praise
6. Other forms of standingless praise
7. Standing to prame
8. Conclusion
Chapter 6: Forgiving
1. Introduction
2. What is it to forgive?
3. Dismissing forgiveness as standingless
4. Hypocritical forgiving
5. What undermines standing to forgive?
6. The wrongfulness of hypocritical forgiveness
7. Other ways in which forgiving can be standingless
8. Fromtaking
9. Conclusion
10. Appendix: Forgiving and standing to apologize
Chapter 7: Morality, normativity, and standing
1. Introduction
2. Encouraging
3. Epistemic blame
4. Consequentialism, deontology, and the interpersonal nature of holding accountable
5. Standing and moral encroachment
6. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
