The Standing to Blame as the Right to Shut Up

Abstract

In this paper, I interpret the recently proposed concept of the ‘standing to blame’ as a ‘right to shut up’ and argue on two grounds that a victim of ‘hypocritical blame’ cannot, despite a possible loss of standing on the part of the hypocrite, dodge the hypocrite’s blame (i.e., shut up the hypocrite). First, the literature considers hypocritical blame to undermine standing because it violates the equality of persons, but I argue that shutting up a hypocrite does the same, and therefore annuls the dodge: neither party can escape blame. Secondly, I argue that establishing hypocrisy is exceedingly difficult because of possible differences between the hypocrite and the blamee in the magnitude of norm-violation, in the specificity of the norm-violation, and because the hypocrite needs to agree that she is in fact violating the same norm. Together, these arguments establish that the blamee has to engage with the content of the hypocrite’s blame despite the (possible) hypocrisy. This constitutes a rejection of the standing to blame, at least in the case of hypocrisy as laid out in the literature. Finally, I interpret the reason for this rejection from a broader perspective by considering the importance of blame to uphold our moral system.