"A Philosopher goes to the Therapist" - Daphne Brandenburg (University of Groningen)

By Daphne Brandenburg

One reason to worry about the free will problem is that persons do not deserve to be blamed for their bad actions when they are not free to do otherwise. And if our universe is a determined one, persons may never be free to do otherwise. Many philosophers respond to this problem by explaining how or why determinism does not exclude the possibility of free choices for which persons may deserve to be blamed.

I have sympathy for this response, but it has failed to convince everybody. Many of my students, for example, aren’t convinced by it. The free-will debate continues to rear its head in different places. It sometimes does so within my own head too. There will be days when I balk at the suggestion that some nasty person does not deserve to be blamed for what they did. Then, with time, or in a different mood, doubts creep in. Did they really know what they were doing? If they could choose to do better, then why didn’t they do better? What explains why they acted as they did? Does this explanation also excuse them?

An appealing intervention in this debate is to simply change the question. What, if anything, is the (further) point of blame? Does blaming a person bring about something else that is valuable?

The term blame may refer to a range of phenomena, but let’s focus on anger that manifests as an accusation. Although I do not think that blame always manifests as anger nor that anger is always a form of blame, the two often coincide. Let’s call such anger: accusatory anger. What is good about accusatory anger, besides the (contested) fact that a person may be deserving of it?

In my paper in the Journal of the APA, I critique a currently popular answer to this question. An increasing number of philosophers maintain that such anger renders its subject more sensitive to the considerations which they should have responded to. On this account the value of deserved blame can be found in its expression or communication to the person whom you blame. The idea is that doing so will bring home to the person how bad their action really was and why, and that resulting feelings of remorse tend to motivate the person to make amends and do better. In other words: blame will teach them!

I question whether such moral cultivation through communication is really the paradigmatic function of accusatory anger.

There is a tension between this particular position in philosophy, and a commonly held position in conflict-resolution studies and mediation therapy or counselling. According to this latter position, there is good reason to doubt that expressing or communicating blame will improve moral agency.

One worry is that expressing your anger as blame, rather than helping a person fully see how they’ve hurt or harmed others, instead motivates them to protect themselves from blame. They may do so by, for example, avoiding the issue, rationalizing what happened, or seeking appeasement for the wrong reasons. It is worth noting that deterrence is different from improved moral understanding, and does not always lead to it.

Another worry is that you yourself do not have the best access to the considerations that matter when you are angry. Anger requires interpretation in order for a person to get clear on the reasons for their anger and on how best to address them. This may be difficult when you are actively angry. It is also, importantly, further complicated by the fact that your anger is accusatory, because this outward direction discourages you from investigating your own perspective. For all those reasons, accusatory anger is typically considered to get in the way of improved moral understanding.

None of this takes away from the fact that anger is only human, that we should regulate it wisely, and that doing so may sometimes cost too much energy or may not be reasonable to ask of a person. Note also that this position implies anger has value insofar as it tells you something about what you care about and what you can and cannot put up with.

But this position does imply that, when you want to achieve shared moral clarity, it would be wise to reappraise your anger before you communicate about it. It recommends that you investigate what your anger tells you about what really matters to you and why, and what you —for that reason— would want to ask of the other person. This form of communication appeals to the other person’s capacity for empathy and perspective taking. When successful the other person also sees what matters and cares about that, because they care about you.

If this position is right, and there is empirical evidence that speaks in favour of it, then the philosophical position has to be reconsidered. Blame’s vindication cannot be found in the purported paradigmatic moral improvement that it brings about when it is expressed to the blamee. This is not to say that blame will never teach them, but moral education is unlikely to be the typical or even constitutive function of blaming.

So where does this leave us? Is there no point to blaming others at all? That conclusion would be too quick. Finding fault with someone may still be valuable for reasons that go beyond the (contested) reason that the person simply deserves it. But I think we have to look further in order to get a clearer picture of what those reasons are.