The fragility of our moral standing to blame

Abstract

The question I address in this article 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 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.