I’ll Bet You Think This Blame is About You

In his landmark “Two Faces of Responsibility,” Gary Watson suggested that one face of responsibility evaluates agents and actions against standards of virtue while another concerns holding one another accountable through, e.g., demands and sanctions. This chapter elaborates the idea of a sanction before noting that many responses to moral failing fall between evaluation (a kind of belief) and sanction (a voluntary action). Being responsible also involves being subject to a variety of reactions that are “non-voluntary” in a sense here explained. The non-voluntariness of these reactions has two important upshots: First, questions about their justification are complex, in ways here examined. Second, unlike sanctions, they are not well thought of as burdens voluntarily imposed upon the wrongdoer by the responder. By overlooking the non-voluntariness of many reactions to moral failure, we risk misunderstanding the significance of those reactions. In an important sense, they are not about the wrongdoer, but rather about the one wronged.