The Fragility of Our Moral Standing to Blame

EDUARDO ENRIQUE RIVERA LOPEZ

México, DF

Conferencia; Seminario de Filosofía Moral; 2013

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas

The question I address in this paper is why, and under what conditions, a person can lose her moral standing to blame others for their actions. I defend two related claims. The first is that blaming is justifiable in fewer cases than we might expect. This conclusion depends on my second claim: our moral standing (or authority) to blame is more resistant to moral luck than moral responsibility (or blameworthiness) is often assumed to be. I consider different kinds of loss of standing to blame and focus on a specific kind: what has been called (and I will call) tu quoque arguments (?you have no moral standing to blame me because you did the same?). Then, I focus on the relationship between some specific cases of tu quoque and moral luck (and, more precisely, circumstantial moral luck). I defend the claim that the success of the tu quoque argument (and the corresponding loss of moral standing) is immune to moral circumstantial luck. From this claim I try to follow a number of considerations oriented to establishing the right scope of moral standing and suggest a unifying view that accounts for my previous analysis and, at the same time, rescues some features of our commonsensical practice.