Paulina Sliwa (Cambridge): “Responding to Wrongdoing”

Abstract: When we engage in moral criticism, it matters to us what the other party did intentionally. We blame others for their wrong actions by saying that they “did it on purpose” or that they “knew exactly what they were doing”. We say that we didn’t mean to harm, didn’t intend to offend, or didn’t know which consequences our action would have when we try to deflect blame. In this paper, I give an account of blame as a response to intentional wrongdoing. I argue against a widely accepted assumption in the literature that whether or not someone is morally responsible for a wrong turns on whether they are morally blameworthy for it. Rather, blaming someone is just one – but not the only – particular way of holding them morally responsible.