Volume 26, Number 3
February 2024
ARTICLE

Dismissing Blame

Volume 26, Number 3, February 2024, Pages 469–494
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v26i3.2844
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Abstract

When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame coming from this particular person. This is a common response if the blamer is being hypocritical or meddlesome in blaming the wrongdoer. This paper aims to make sense of this kind of response: What are we doing when we dismiss blame? A common thought is that we dismiss demands issued by blame, but we still must identify the content of the relevant demands. My proposal is that when we dismiss blame, we dismiss a demand to respond to the blame with a second-personal expression of remorse to the blamer.
Copyright © 2024 Justin Snedegar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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