Kartik Upadhyaya

This essay outlines and responds to the problem of appropriate piling-on. Suppose that a person is responsible for having acted wrongly. It seems apt for you to blame that person. Now suppose that I also find out about the wrongdoing. If blame is an apt response for you, and there is no special difference between us, then it is surely an apt response for me as well. Imagine, however, that there are millions of people all in identical situations to you and me. It does not seem appropriate for all these people to blame the person together. But how can that be? Why can’t we iterate the reasoning just outlined until we reach the umpteen-millionth person, and conclude that all of the millions can appropriately blame? I argue that everyone can blame inaptly even if each person blames aptly. The argument involves an account of when and why blame’s outcomes make it inapt, drawing an unexplored contrast between internal and external standards of proportionality in blaming.

When a wrongdoer apologises and is forgiven, the normative situation seems to change. But what changes, and how? Philosophers writing about apology and forgiveness tend to assume that these practices—we call them redressive practices—bring about a variety of normative changes including undertaking new obligations, cancelling other obligations, and generating reasons to resume normal relations. We argue, to the contrary, that the range of normative changes following redressive practices is much narrower than many assume. The second question asks how normative changes come about. One view, defended by Brandon Warmke and Nicolas Cornell among others, is that forgiveness is a normative power. Christopher Bennett concurs, going a step further by suggesting that apology is also a normative power. We reject these claims, arguing that, rather than effecting normative changes directly, apology and forgiveness convey or instantiate independent facts that themselves create normative change. Instead, we explain the normativity of redressive practices on the grounds that they satisfy our normative interests. Although we lack the kind of control over our normative situation post-wrongdoing that normative powers would confer, this is not a form of control we have reason to value.

Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. Hypocrisy undermines this process of mutual deliberation. Thus, even if better than silence, hypocritical blaming is second-best, and that is why it is wrong.

Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response to wrongdoing, there is both instrumental and non-instrumental value in ensuring that those who face similar moral predicaments reason about these predicaments, and the appropriate responses to them, together. Hypocrisy is wrong because it hampers our ability to realise that value. And hypocrites lose standing to blame for a similar reason. Standing depends on the value of particular people engaging in an accountability procedure together, a value which the hypocrite forestalls, by failing to acknowledge wrongdoing in the course of blaming. This account of a duty to blame non-hypocritically helps unpack the relationship between hypocrisy and a range of other defects in a person’s standing. It also responds to a central sceptical challenge to the wrongness of hypocritical blaming. The challenge is that accurate hypocritical blaming can’t be wrong because it is morally good, and indeed is morally better than not blaming others at all. My response: hypocritical blaming is wrong, not because it is morally worse than not blaming at all, but because it is second-best, i.e. worse than non-hypocritical blaming, which enables mutual deliberation about wrongdoing.