Kyle Fritz

Supervisors and managers plausibly have the moral standing, or right, to blame their employees for violations of company policies. Yet hypocrites plausibly lack the standing to hold others accountable for wrongs they are guilty of themselves. These two observations raise a concern: does a supervisor have the standing to blame their employees for violations of some company policy if the supervisor hypocritically also violates that policy? On one hand, it seems clear that they must, given their position in the company. On the other hand, it seems clear that they cannot, given their hypocrisy. We argue for a disjunctive explanation for this apparent inconsistency according to which hypocritical supervisors may lack standing qua individual persons, yet nevertheless have standing either in virtue of their role or in virtue of inheriting the standing of their organization as a proxy for that organization. While the role solution is attractive in its simplicity, it is unclear that it can adequately explain all cases of hypocritical supervisors. Yet while the proxy solution is more complete, it relies on contentious claims about corporate moral responsibility. We develop both explanations, remaining neutral on whether the comprehensiveness of the proxy solution is worth its metaphysical commitments.

Some writers, such as John Fischer and Michael McKenna, have recently claimed that an agent can be morally responsible for a wrong action and yet not be blameworthy for that action. A careful examination of the claim, however, suggests two readings. On one reading, there are further conditions on blameworthiness beyond freely and wittingly doing wrong. On another innocuous reading, there are no such further conditions. Despite Fischer and McKenna’s attempts to offer further conditions on blameworthiness in addition to responsibility for wrongdoing, I argue that only the innocuous reading is plausible. Once we distinguish between blame being deserved and blame being all-things-considered appropriate, we need not appeal to further conditions on blameworthiness. This discussion has important upshots regarding how compatibilists respond to certain manipulation arguments and how proponents of derived responsibility respond to criticism that agents are responsible even for outcomes that are not reasonably foreseeable.