An Asymmetry Between Praise and Blame?

Suppose that it's appropriate to blame S for φ only if in φ-ing, S fails to meet some demand or expectation.  Something like this seems to fit our practices; that is, we tend to blame (or otherwise hold responsible) those individuals who fail to satisfy our (normative) expectations or demands. 

But what's the analog for praise?  A couple possibilities:

• (A) It's appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S meets our demands/expectations.
• (B) It's appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S greatly exceeds our demands/expectations.

I don't think either of these is going to get the job done as an account of praise (i.e. an explanation of how praise functions in our actual practices) or as a norm for praising (i.e. how we should go about praising). 

(A) seems to be too liberal; I think that it's reasonable to expect of me that I won't kick any cats today, and guess what-- I haven't kicked any cats today!  Surely I haven't merited praise for refraining from kicking cats.  (B) seems to be too restrictive; imagine a trolley problem in which you are the fat man perched over the tracks and instead of five people in the path of the runaway trolley, there is a detonation device that if hit will eradicate New York City.  If we stipulate that the only way to stop the trolley is for you to jump in front of it, then it seems to me that you’re obligated to do so.  And yet, in spite of your obligation, the evening news reports that posthumously laud you as a hero seem entirely appropriate.

If (A) and (B) won't do the job, what will?  Here are a couple of suggestions:

• (C) The appropriateness of praise is a function from what is demanded/expected of an agent to the strength of will that must be exerted in order to perform the action in question.
• (D) It is appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S acted virtuously (i.e. she acted in such a way that she fares well when evaluated against some standard)

I think I'm inclined towards something like (D) right now, but if either something like (C) or (D) is correct, then it's not obvious to me that the conditions under which it's appropriate to blame an agent for her actions will be the same as those conditions under which it's appropriate it to praise her. 

So I'm wondering whether (C), (D), or something I haven't suggested seem plausible?  Or maybe I've dismissed (A) and (B) too quickly?

Comments

[kris]

Hello Justin, I'm a student studing philosophy at Taiwan.

I share your intuition about (A) and (B). And I think (C) might be a valid condition (or a helpful guide toward a valid condition). Because one of the necessary condition to be praised is to do something that people barely do in the same condition (no matter this "barely" is for ability or for will) - we wouldn't praise someone for making a choice which would be made by anyone in the same situation.

However, I'm not sure about what you mean by (D). I think that's because I don't know the phrase "fares well."

Could you give me a supplemental instruction? Thank you very much!

(Sorry for my bad English, hope you don't mind.)

[Neil]

I share the asymmetry intuition, but one thought I have in response is that maybe blame/praise isn't the right pair in this context. What about blame/credit?

[Justin A. Capes]

Justin,

When you talk of the appropriateness of blaming being dependent on the agent violating some demand or expectation, do you mean violating an obligation or do you mean a social demand or expectation to fulfill one's obligations? If the former, then I think the asymmetry with which you are concerned is a live possibility. If the latter, however, I don't think blame need depend on a person violating a (reasonable) expectation on our part. What about Huck Finn type cases, where the agent does what is right, though against his better judgment. Some think a person like Huck can be blameworthy even though he hasn't failed to live up to some moral demand or expectation of ours (or has he?).

Also, not sure what you think about Frankfurt-cases, but it seems to me that the agent in a Frankfurt-case may be blameworthy and that the agent violates a moral obligation he had. But given that the person is unable to do otherwise, it would surely be unreasonable for us to demand or expect him to fulfill his obligation. And yet, many of us are inclined to think he is still worthy of blame and thus that it would be appropriate to blame him.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Hi Justin. Interesting post. There is clearly a dissertation to be written on the asymmetry issue! Susan Wolf identified it but neither she nor anyone else has really analyzed it. There's just a bit of experimental data on it, but it'd also be fun to try to map the contours of folk's intuitions about praise vs. blame.

Anyway, your ideas are an interesting first stab. I'll just mention something that came up in Joshua Knobe's talk at the central APA. He has fascinating results about which sorts of counterfactuals people consider irrelevant. It looks like people are quick to consider counterfactuals that improve the actual situation but consider irrelevant those counterfactuals that worsen the actual situation. Hence, we are quick to consider all the ways someone who did something bad (i.e., who fails to satisfy our normative demands) could have acted otherwise. But we generally consider it irrelevant to consider all the ways someone who did something good (or at least expected) could have acted otherwise. This might help explain Wolf's view that praiseworthiness does not require the ability to do otherwise. But it might also be that praiseworthiness increases to the degree that counterfactuals *do* seem relevant because the agent acted in ways many people would not have acted (because the agent exceeded our expectations, perhaps as you suggest, by exercising greater strength of will than most of us would or could). Just a thought.

[Justin Coates]

Kris,

When I say faring well against some standard, all I'm meaning is that we might praise you for (merely) fulfilling some obligation if in so doing, you acted virtuously. So even if you were obligated to sacrifice yourself, doing so would require a great deal of courageousness that most of us aren't ready to exhibit. So we praise you for acting courageously (i.e. faring well against the standard of courage).

Neil,

Could you say more about what distinguishes praise and credit? At least in my usage (how's that for a tiny data point), they're roughly equivalent in these sorts of contexts.

Justin,

I think I'm thinking of the first sort of demands or obligations that you mentioned. So for instance, we feel resentment when someone has failed to satisfy some demand or expectation, and we legitimately feel resentment when someone has failed to satisfy some genuine moral demand or expectation. Moreover, I think that when we express resentment in the first case (one in which we are mistaken about the actual norms), it misfires as a speech act (because it doesn't satisfy the felicity conditions of those sorts of communicative acts--namely, it has the false presupposition that the agent in question violated an actual demand or obligation). I'm not sure if all this helped clarify or just made things muddier.

Re FSCs: I'm not sure I agree with you. If Jones is in the voting booth getting ready support some unjust measure with her vote, yet the CI is there to ensure that she votes this way, I see no reason to think I can't resent her (where resentment is a response to her failure to meet an expectation or demand) if I'm affected by the injustice (or feel indignant on behalf of those affected) and maybe I could even rebuke her (she did act just unjustly!). Now, I don't think that CI has the authority to feel resentful towards her or rebuke her but that's because the CI lacks the authority to do so (but this is another post...).

I'm not sure if this quite gets onto your point, so rather than continuing, I'll just trust that if I'm wildly off, you'll let me know.

Eddy,

I like Wolf's conclusion that the conditions under which it's fair to blame are different (and more demanding) than those for praise, but I think she's wrong in thinking the difference lies in the ability to do otherwise. I suspect it's control more generally; blame probably requires something like guidance control, but I'm doubting praise requires anything like guidance control (e.g. as long as your action expresses your values, commitments, or loves you might deserve praise). Obviously, I'm borrowing some from Wolf and Watson's response to Wolf, "Two Faces of Responsibility."

The Knobe stuff sounds really interesting. I'd be really interested in figuring out why we're so much more attuned to blame (and the conditions under which blame is fair) than we are attuned to praise, but it certainly seems like we are (I know I am, and from the literature, so are most other philosophers working in FW/MR).

[Grant Rozeboom]

Justin-

Fascinating post. First, a clarificatory question: By "blame," do you include the concept of "holding responsible"? That is, by blaming someone for doing X (presumably, a wrong or injustice of some sort) are we holding them responsible for doing X?

If so, I agree that the asymmetry you posit is there, and I also agree that something along the lines of the super-obligatory, or above-and-beyond, requirements of virtue will be necessary (as described in D).

My brief contributory thought is this: To warrant praise, someone must not only perform an action in a way that meets certain external standards we have regarding virtue, but they must _own_ their actions such that the virtuous character of these deeds reflects their selves. Here's what I have in mind:

Suppose in the case you present above, where a man sacrifices his life to derail the trolley, the man does so for reasons partially related to his wanting to kill himself. He might have been looking for an opportunity to kill himself and, seeing that his self-imposed death would also avert a crisis, he decides to end the life he perceives as miserable and not-worthwhile by diving in front of the streetcar. Would such a man warrant our praise in acting thusly?

Maybe, insofar as he did do something noble. But the fact that the noble character of the deed doesn't align with the way he views this deed in terms of his endorsed beliefs and desires seems to lessen (or displace?) whatever praise-worthiness he might have earned in derailing the trolley with his body.

Therefore, it seems that, not only must someone do something virtuous in a way that they are responsible for acting virtuously, but they must own or identify with these virtuous deeds to warrant full attributions of praise (and even hero-worship, if they wear the appropriate attire of a cape and mask).

[Kris]

Justin,

I see. Thank you!

[Matt King]

Hi Justin,

It's funny that Eddy should make the dissertation comment - my dissertation began with something like the above observation, which I used to motivate a critique of Strawsonian views of responsibility (just those that take understanding being responsible in terms of the appropriateness of holding responsible).

There's evidence for thinking that many of the excuses to blame (accident, inadvertence, mistake) would also undermine ascriptions of praiseworthiness. On the plausible assumption that both blameworthiness and praiseworthiness require responsibility, one natural conclusion to draw is that such excuses function generally to undermine an independent notion of moral responsibility.

I think it's open whether an asymmetry regarding praiseworthiness follows from a given view regarding blameworthiness, or whether considerations regarding symmetry count against a given view of blameworthiness. I argue for the latter.

The relevant chapter is now a paper under review - available off my website, if you're interested.

http://sites.google.com/site/mattkingsite/Papers

[Neil]

I have been talking to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about the issue. He points out that we can get an opposite asymmetry. If a parent goes well beyond her obligations to her child, we might praise her, but we would fail to blame her for *not* doing this.

[Brandon Wamke]

Hi Justin, I wonder if (D) is a bit too free-wheeling. Are all of my "virtous" acts really worthy of praise? Suppose that I get just the right amount of sleep each night, or drink an appropriate amount of coffee each day (or pick any pedestrian expression of a virtue like temperance).

Is it appropriate to praise a morally mature adult for getting the right amount of sleep? Surely, it is not an *injustice* to do so, but would it be an appropriate expression of praise between two morally mature adults?

(Imagine how such praise might be received: "Well thanks Sally, but why are you praising me for my sleep habits--isn't this just something that responsibly adults should do?")

[Justin Coates]

Grant,

I would include "holding responsible" in blame, so it looks like you're on board. I like your contribution; I'm inclined to think that something like identification might be required for praise, but I like the way you've motivated that conclusion.

It was good meeting you this weekend--good luck with all your decisions!

Matt,

Things went the other way for me. That is, I think a Strawsonian approach to responsibility has to be correct, and this asymmetry seemed to emerge naturally from it.

Obviously, I'll need to look at your work.

Neil,

I'm not seeing how that's a different asymmetry; can you say more?

Brandon,

Maybe you're right, although I can imagine situations in which praise of this sort in natural. So I'm wondering whether there are conceptual problems with praising in these sorts of cases or if it's just the pragmatics of praising getting in the way of our intuitions.

But this might be a more general worry with theorizing in this way because it's difficult to map the conceptual contours of praise (and blame) without the pragmatics of praising (and blaming) getting in the way.

[Mike in MI]

Blame/credit is more appropriate than blame/praise because praise is a kind of reward, but blame is not a kind of punishment. Praise should be paired with censure, not blame.

Blame and credit are evaluative acts. Praise and censure are speech acts that reward or punish.