Can anyone deserve blame?
Blame assumes a person could have done better. If that assumption fails, what happens to praise, punishment and gratitude?
- Reading time
- 4 min
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Branch
- Free will
- First posed
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, c. 340 BCE; reshaped by P. F. Strawson, 1962
The question
Your friend promised to help you move and never showed up. You feel resentment. Then you learn she was in a car accident on the way. The resentment vanishes at once. Nothing about the outcome changed; what changed is whether she was responsible for it.
Moral responsibility is the property of being an appropriate target for blame or praise. Aristotle gave the classic conditions over two thousand years ago: an act is blameworthy if it was done voluntarily and knowingly, not under force and not from excusable ignorance.
The modern worry is deeper. Even when someone acts voluntarily and knowingly, their character, desires and judgment came from somewhere: genes, parents, culture, luck. If none of that was up to them, can they ever truly deserve to suffer for what they do, or to be rewarded for it?
Why it matters
Courts, schools, workplaces and families all run on responsibility. Prisons are justified in part by desert: the idea that wrongdoers deserve punishment. Whether desert makes sense is therefore not an academic question; it bears on how millions of people are treated.
It also shapes inner life. Guilt, pride, forgiveness and gratitude all assume that someone is responsible. Rethinking responsibility can change how you experience your own mistakes.
Key terms
- Moral responsibilityBeing the appropriate target of praise or blame for what one does.
- DesertDeserving something, such as praise, blame, reward or punishment, because of what one has done. 'Basic desert' is desert that does not depend on the good consequences of giving it.
- Reactive attitudesP. F. Strawson's term for emotions such as resentment, gratitude and indignation that we feel towards people we treat as responsible agents.
- Moral luckCases where we judge people differently because of factors outside their control, such as two equally careless drivers, only one of whom happens to hit a child.
- RetributivismThe view that wrongdoers deserve punishment because of what they did, not only because punishing them has good effects.
The positions
Responsibility is real and requires freedom
People are genuinely responsible for what they freely do, and deserve praise or blame accordingly.
Responsibility is a social practice
Responsibility does not depend on a metaphysical fact about free will. It lives in our natural reactive attitudes and the practices built on them.
Nobody deserves anything
Basic desert, the idea that someone deserves to suffer or be rewarded simply because of what they did, is never justified.
Arguments and objections
Responsibility is real and requires freedom
- Best argument
- Our moral lives presuppose it, and the presupposition is not idle: it tracks real differences between those who choose and those who are forced. Taking people seriously as agents means holding them responsible. Treating every wrongdoer as a mere product of causes can itself be disrespectful.
- Strongest objection
- If the choice traces back to factors beyond the agent's control, the desert seems to evaporate. Two people with identical characters in identical situations will act identically; the one born luckier gets the praise.
Responsibility is a social practice
- Best argument
- P. F. Strawson's famous essay 'Freedom and Resentment' argued that resentment, gratitude and indignation are part of human relationships, not theories that could be refuted. Even if determinism were proven, we could not simply stop feeling them, and we would have no good reason to try. The question to ask is when these attitudes are appropriate within the practice, not whether the practice is justified from outside.
- Strongest objection
- A practice can be natural and still unjustified. Many cultures found it natural to blame people for accidents or for their ancestry. If our attitudes rest on a false belief about how people work, the fact that they are natural does not vindicate them.
- The reply
- Strawsonians reply that the practice already contains the resources for self-correction: we do excuse the coerced, the ignorant and the ill, and can extend that understanding where evidence demands.
Nobody deserves anything
- Best argument
- Whether the universe is determined or random, our actions ultimately trace to factors we did not control. We can still hold people accountable in forward-looking ways: to protect others, to encourage change, to repair relationships. But retributive punishment, making people suffer because they deserve it, has no basis. Pereboom compares justified detention to quarantine.
- Strongest objection
- Without desert, punishment looks purely instrumental, which could justify punishing innocent people if it deterred crime well enough. Desert is what limits punishment to the guilty.
- The reply
- Defenders reply that rights and fairness can limit punishment without appeal to desert, and that a quarantine model would in practice be far more humane than current systems.
Who argued what
- Responsibility is real and requires freedom Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Robert Kane
- Responsibility is a social practice P. F. Strawson, R. Jay Wallace
- Nobody deserves anything Derk Pereboom, Gregg Caruso, Baruch Spinoza
Variations
Two drunk drivers
Two people drive home equally drunk. One makes it safely. The other hits a child who runs into the road. The second is blamed far more harshly, though their choices were identical. Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams called this moral luck: our judgments seem to depend on luck we claim should not matter.
The tumour
A man who had never shown violent tendencies developed strong urges, which disappeared when a brain tumour was removed and returned when it regrew. Cases like this, reported in the medical literature, make it hard to say where illness ends and character begins.
Go deeper
Accountability without desert
Several philosophers distinguish kinds of responsibility. Attributability asks whether an act reflects who you are. Answerability asks whether you can be asked to explain yourself. Accountability asks whether it is fair to impose sanctions. One can keep the first two while doubting basic desert, and many restorative justice approaches work in exactly that space.
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Responsibility
- WikipediaMoral responsibility
- EssayFreedom and Resentment, P. F. Strawson
- BookLiving Without Free Will, Derk Pereboom
- BookMortal Questions, Thomas Nagel · contains the essay 'Moral Luck'
Open questions
- If nobody ultimately deserves punishment, what is a prison for?
- Should outcomes you did not control change how much you are blamed?
- Can you forgive someone without first believing they were responsible?