The impossibility of blaming token people fairly

the problem of demands

Resumo

This essay attempts to do two things. First, to problematize the relation between obligations and demands. Second, to show that the popular principle of Ought Implies Can and a plausible reading of what it is for blaming to be fair are incompatible with some cherished assumptions to the point of being impossible to blame concrete people, those with flesh and bones, fairly. The argument can be summarized as follows: For a person to fairly blame another subject, they need to be justified in believing both that a) the subject was obliged to act in accordance with the demand associated to blame; and b) the subject was capable of acting in this way. Unfortunately, there are reasons to think that b) is never justified, leading to the blaming itself to never be justified. I try to show that this argument is almost entirely independent of positions on free will, making it the only overall skeptical argument (that I know of) that delivers this conclusion about fair blame and, consequently, moral responsibility to an extent, without involving substantial debates on free will. The essay connects some previously unassociated literatures on Ought Implies Can, blame, the nature of normative demands, Objectivism/Subjectivism about moral obligation, and moral psychology. The conclusion of the piece is not to be an endorsement that there is no fair blame, rather, it claims that these arguments should be taken as a reductio ad absurdum.