someone we are disposed to regard as capable of moral responsibility and with whom we exchange reasons, has engaged in conduct which displays either goodwill, ill will, or indifference to others. Reactive attitudes are ‘essentially natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us, displayed in their attitudes and actions.’ 4 A reactive attitude is an affective recognition that someone we believe to be a moral agent, i.e. It involves taking up what Peter Strawson calls a reactive attitude towards her. Holding a person morally responsible, meanwhile, involves not only a judgment of moral responsibility, but also an affective engagement with the target. We usually judge a person to be morally responsible for some wrongdoing if she was in sufficient control of herself and the conduct in question, and possessed the requisite knowledge, beliefs, and intentions. Our judgments of moral responsibility are typically guided by what we know about the agent’s control over her conduct, and her epistemic relation to it. Judgments of moral responsibility can be both aretaic and deontic one can be praiseworthy or blameworthy not just for actions, but also for dispositions, beliefs, and attitudes. This is a cognitive appraisal which need not have an affective dimension. To judge a person to be morally responsible for something is to judge that her conduct and her relation to that conduct are such that she is liable to praise or blame, i.e. Holding a person morally responsible for something is different from judging a person to be morally responsible for something. Blaming, in short, is the act of communicatively holding a person morally responsible for something. Shaming and blaming appear to be similar, so before theorizing the former, we should remind ourselves of the nature of the latter. My account of shaming places objective attitudes in the spotlight and demonstrates that they in fact play a significant role in our interpersonal lives. Objective attitudes have received less attention in moral philosophy than reactive attitudes, perhaps because of an assumption that we rarely experience or express them. Agential shaming thus functions to enforce social standards and values, many of which are oppressive. People are often non-agentially shamed for having periods, for having certain body shapes, for being ‘ugly,’ and for being victims of rape. Rather, it is a cruder form of public evaluation non-agential shamers typically express not reactive attitudes, but rather objective attitudes like disgust, and invite others to do the same. Yet the evaluation in question is not a form of blaming, because the shamer is not holding the target morally responsible for anything. Like agential shaming, it involves negatively evaluating a person and inviting an audience to join in this evaluation. The second form of shaming, non-agential shaming, is not a form of blaming. It is a key way of enforcing social norms. This is the kind of shaming experienced by Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. It consists of blaming an individual for some wrongdoing or flaw by expressing a negative reactive attitude towards her, and inviting an audience to do the same (in cases of private shaming, one invokes an audience rather than actually inviting them). The first, agential shaming, is a form of blaming. Working from a set of paradigmatic cases of shaming, I argue that shaming can take two forms. My definition will show that shaming is not the same as blaming, nor is it simply the production of shame. My goal in this paper is to offer an overdue definition of shaming. Alternatively, philosophers might assume that to shame is simply to produce shame, and shame itself has already received considerable philosophical attention. This might be because of an assumption that shaming, as a kind of negative personal evaluation, is roughly equivalent to blaming, a phenomenon we have already analyzed in depth. 2ĭespite our current cultural preoccupation with it, shaming has been neglected in moral philosophy. It is the subject of several best-selling books, and every day we encounter news stories and social media posts about ‘slut-shaming,’ ‘body-shaming,’ and ‘mom-shaming.’ 1 Sometimes shaming is subjected to hand-wringing over its dangerous consequences, and other times it is encouraged, with demands that perpetrators of wrongdoing be ‘named and shamed.’ ‘Shaming’ appeared in English-language books twice as often in 2008 than in 1988 and was a word of the year in 2015. Keywords: blame reactive attitudes responsibility shame shaming
0 kommentar(er)
