Chapter 3 - Blame and the Reactive Attitudes

Summary

In Chapter 3, I focus on the nature of reactive blame itself. In order to see fully how the fittingness account of basic desert might help to resolve the problem of blame, we are in need of a clearer picture of the reactive attitudes whose conditions of appropriateness this solution will ultimately depend on. I canvass three prominent views of reactive blame (P. F. Strawson’s, R. J. Wallace’s, and David Shoemaker’s) that I take to be most helpful in further explicating what meeting the desert-based desideratum for normative adequacy might look like. Here I argue for a cognitivist view of the reactive attitudes, and that we ought to restrict the scope of the relevant class of reactive attitudes at issue quite narrowly. With a sharper view of the reactive attitudes in hand, I then return to the fittingness account of basic desert and offer a first pass at an account of the right kind of reasons to reactively blame.