Alexander Edlich

This paper develops a conception of affective self-respect and discusses its relevance to affective injustice. It starts from Gallegos’ concept of affective goods: goods the possession of which is good for us as affective beings and makes our affective lives go well. Within this framework, it proposes that an affirmative relation to one’s affectivity is an affective good. Drawing on Dillon’s account of self-respect, it argues that we should acknowledge a dimension of recognition self-respect concerned with the significance our affectivity has for us: affective self-respect. It presents examples of agents who lack this affirmative relation to their affective nature to provide a sketch of what having affective self-respect entails. The paper then examines the value of affective self-respect and how it can be a site of affective injustice. Affective self-respect is shown to be intrinsically valuable as an affirmative way of relating to what one is like, an apt valuing response, and an enabler of other affective goods. Due to its importance, we may have moral claims to what contributes to it and against what threatens it. Furthermore, many recognized forms of affective injustice involve threats to affective self-respect, which partly explains their wrongness. Finally, having unimpaired affective self-respect likely mitigates the harms of many forms of affective injustice. The paper thus aims to show not only that affective self-respect is a central aspect of the psychology of affective beings but also how attending to it contributes to our understanding of how we can be wronged in affective regards.

In this chapter I review the related concepts of moral responsibility and blame. I zoom in on the specific sense of moral responsibility that concerns this investigation and some approaches to it, especially attributionism. I also discuss different ways of conceptualising blame and offer a working understanding of it as conflicting responses to wrongdoers in light of their wrongdoing. The chapter thereby isolates the sense of responsibility and blame that will inform the investigation in later chapters and develops important contrasts between different ways of responding to wrongdoers.

Chapter 6 provides a synopsis of the argument so far and applies it to the protest view of blame and attributionism about moral responsibility. It clarifies the point of objectionability as an accountability-related concept concerned with the moral status not of agents but of pieces of conduct. It also suggests a way of reconciling our intuitions about atypical offenders by acknowledging objecting as an accountability response that stands up to objectionable conduct but does not target agents. To defend this, I return to the protest view of blame and attributionism about blameworthiness. I argue that their inclusive construal of blameworthiness is unconvincing once we acknowledge the possibility of conduct-focussed moral responses.

Chapter 8 summarises the emerging view. It ends by highlighting, once more, the significance of responding to conduct rather than merely to agents. If Strawson’s participant stance is the stance in which another’s conduct matters morally and is targeted with demands and blame, it contrasts not merely with the objective stance in which other agents and their conduct are merely to be managed and handled. It contrasts, likewise, with a critical stance that acknowledges the moral significance of someone’s conduct and objects to it without thereby holding it against its agent. Taking this stance, I suggest, affords us the possibility of responding to moral offenses beyond responsibility and blame.

This chapter discusses the protest view of blame: the view that what blame is or what explains its point and adequacy can be spelled out by employing a notion of moral protest. I discuss different versions of the protest view and show that they work with one or the other of two understandings of protest: protest is understood either a rejection of claims made by wrongdoing or as a communication of the protester’s moral views. I raise worries about both understandings, especially that both threaten to collapse protest into mere disagreement and are therefore hospitable to blame skepticism. The chapter concludes by pointing out the possibility of moral protest that is not blame and the challenges this raises for the protest view.

Chapter 7 adds further support to my argument both for the significance of protest without blame and against the attributionist position on blameworthiness. It does so by engaging with Talbert’s Victim Objection to volitionist views of blameworthiness, a recent indirect argument for an inclusive construal of blameworthiness. Talbert argues that we need blame wherever there is ill-willed wrongdoing to support victims’ needs. The chapter challenges this in two ways. First, it argues that protest without blame is a response that can satisfy these needs if it is appropriately attuned to the offense. The Victim Objection rests on the mistaken assumption that only blame can serve victims’ interests. Second, I argue that the Victim Objection, were it to go through, would prove too much because even unambiguously excused agents can victimise. This highlights again that responses to agents and responses to conduct must be theorised separately.

Chapter 5 discusses the fittingness conditions of moral objections. It goes through different possible ways of understanding the concept of moral objectionability and especially argues against a content view that understands the objectionability of an attitude or action in terms of its content or the judgments it is based on. The chapter argues that objectionability should rather be understood in terms of criticisability: an attitude is objectionable if it can be criticised on relevant grounds. I argue that these grounds must be understood as related to the deontic in a particular way: a piece of conduct is objectionable if a potentially deontic reason can be given against it, where potentially deontic reasons are those that decisively count against this piece of conduct and obligate the agent, given her abilities and circumstances, to the degree that they can guide their attitudes in light of this reason. The chapter closes with drawing out some implications of this view and discusses how the concept of objectionability adds to the kinds of moral significance we can ascribe to other agents’ conduct.

In this chapter I develop a novel understanding of moral protest based on the observation that it can come apart from blame. I argue that while blame appraises wrongdoers, protest is a response to wrongdoing. I analyse protest into objections and demands for redress and offer an account of objections as stance-takings: in objecting, a speaker expresses and commits to the stance that the conduct objected to was objectionable. This account allows for attitudes related to moral protest that can remain unexpressed: (1) the internalized stance that the conduct protested is objectionable and (2) emotions of moral disapproval directed at pieces of conduct. The chapter offers a discussion of what an objecting stance consists in as well as a characterisation of the emotion of moral disapproval of pieces of conduct. This discussion of act-directed moral responses points us to non-conflicting ways of registering and standing up to inacceptable conduct.

Hermeneutical injustice means being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the identity. We begin with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of the stigma attached to an identity rather due to unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of ‘Tightlacing’: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in the erasure of their identities.

This paper provides an analysis of the phrase ‘acting on behalf of another.’ To do this, acting on behalf is first distinguished from ‘acting for the sake of another,’ the latter being a matter of other-directed motivation, the former of what we call ‘normative other-directedness’—i.e., acting on the claims and duties of the other. Second, we provide a distinction between two kinds of acting on behalf of another: representation as other-directedness plus normative replacement, and normative support as other-directedness without normative replacement. Third, the paper offers conditions of appropriateness for both types of acting on behalf.

In this paper, we introduce a distinctive kind of psychological abuse we call Tightlacing. We begin by presenting four examples and argue that there is a distinctive form of abuse in these examples that cannot be captured by our existing moral categories. We then outline our diagnosis of this distinctive form of abuse. Tightlacing consists in inducing a mistaken self-conception in others that licenses overburdening demands on them such that victims apply those demands to themselves. We discuss typical Tightlacing strategies and argue that Tightlacing typically is manipulative. Typical tightlacers will be motivated by a strong desire to suppress a kind of behaviour on the victim’s part. We will then differentiate Tightlacing from a related and widely discussed form of psychological abuse, Gaslighting. While Gaslighting focuses on the victim’s epistemic capacities and typically serves to insulate the abuser from potential dissent, Tightlacing focuses on the kind of person the victim is and typically serves to insulate the abuser from confronting ways of behaviour they cannot cope with. While Gaslighting targets the victim’s epistemic self-trust, Tightlacing targets their basic sense of who they are and their sense of entitlement to conduct themselves as who they really are. We finish by diagnosing the wrong-making features of Tightlacing, arguing that Tightlacing, among many secondary wrongs, makes the victim complicit in a denial of their rights as well as an erasure of who they are.

This paper points out neglected considerations about the standing to blame. It starts from the observation that the standing to blame debate largely focusses on factors concerning the blamer or the relation of blamer and wrongdoer, mainly hypocrisy and meddling, while neglecting the victim of wrongdoing. This paper wants to set this right by pointing out how considerations about the victim can impact a third party’s standing. The first such consideration is the blamer’s personal relation to the victim. It is argued that persons close to the victim thereby gain standing even in the presence of factors that would normally undermine it. Arguing from the well-known sexual assault case of Chanel Miller and the public reactions to it, the paper then introduces two more considerations about standing hitherto neglected. First, given that blame has an expressive function and serves to contradict expressive aspects of wrongdoings, it is argued that third-party blame can morally support the victim in the face of wrongdoing and that such support matters to victims. It is argued that this importance of third-party blame can ground standing. Thirdly and relatedly, the paper argues that insufficient collective responses to wrongdoing, i.e. when other bystanders do not respond with sufficient blaming responses, can equally ground standing of third parties. It is argued that these considerations are relevant not only for an ethics of blame broadly conceived but also for standing to blame in particular. Thereby, the paper establishes that considerations about the victim are central for discussion of the standing to blame.