著者

井保 和也

出版者

Japanese Association for the Contemporary and Applied Philosophy (JACAP)

雑誌

Contemporary and Applied Philosophy (ISSN:18834329)

巻号頁・発行日

no.11, pp.1-22, 2020-01-31

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Suppose Ann, who is a colleague of Beth, was thirty minutes late for an important meeting. And suppose, on the next day, Beth was also ten minutes late for her appointment with Ann, and Ann blamed Beth for that. If you had been in the position of Beth then, you would have said, "You are hypocritical. Who are you to blame me for that?" This is because you have a widely shared intuition that some agent R has the standing to blame some other agent S for doing some wrong action φ only if R is not hypocritical with respect to φ. In philosophy of blame, this is called nonhypocrisy condition. My aim in this paper is to explain why nonhypocrisy condition seems to be plausible. (Note that I don't mean to justify it.) This paper is divided into four sections. In section 1, I explain the nature of blame briefly. In section 2, I strictly define hypocrisy that is involved in nonhypocrisy condition. In section 3, first, I see three important features of hypocritical blame, referring to Fritz and Miller. Next, I survey and criticize three theories of hypocritical blame that have been offered so far: inconsistency theory, equality-violating theory, and right-forfeiting theory. I think all of them have a defect respectively. The first one and the second one cannot properly explain one of the three important features of hypocritical blame. And, in order to support the third one, we have to bite bullets. In section 4, I offer a new theory of the nature of blame, looking-down theory, according to which, in many cases, when we blame others, we look down on them in some aretaic aspect. I conclude that we should appeal to this nature of blame to successfully explain why nonhypocrisy condition seems to be plausible.