Blame can sting a lot when it’s something we care about. To be blamed for baking an ugly cake would matter a little, to be blamed for being selfish matters more. Similarly, when a stranger blames me for a particular act I might not take it to heart as much as when I’m blamed for the same thing by a close friend. This paper aims to explore what these varying strengths can mean for our understanding of blame, as well as for the existence of various normative categories. In particular, it will look at some of the more extreme cases: cases when we get blamed by bad people, or for bad reasons. I’ll begin by clarifying the ‘bad blame’ phenomenon that I want to pinpoint. Next, I’ll show how we might be tempted to dismiss these cases as not being real instances of blame, either in terms of whether the blamer has the standing to blame or in terms of whether the blame is fitting. Finally, I’ll argue that this doesn’t account for all types of bad blame – and that something different is going on that can actually make genuine blame seem good for us.

Some responses are such that the agents are praiseworthy for them. A benevolent agent who made some sacrifice to help someone in need is morally praiseworthy. And someone who managed to solve an important scientific problem is epistemically praiseworthy. The question that arises is whether there is a unified explanation of what makes agents praiseworthy?

I argue that there is: in both the moral and the epistemic domain, what makes an agent praiseworthy for her response is that it manifests a degree of sensitivity that exceeds the degree of sensitivity one can fittingly expect of her.

I start with a widespread view about what makes agents morally praiseworthy: the “Quality of Will View”. While this view is highly compelling in the moral case, at first sight, one might think it is not extendable to the epistemic case. However, I argue that it is, when described a bit differently: first, I suggest that we should conceive of the manifestation of morally good will as the manifestation of moral sensitivity. Second, I lay out the structurally analogous notion of epistemic sensitivity, and I make a case for a view about what makes agents epistemically praiseworthy in terms of this notion.

According to the prudential companions in guilt argument (Fletcher 2018; 2021, Ch. 6):

1. If arguments for the moral error theory succeed, then analogues of these arguments establish the prudential error theory. (The parity premise.)

2. The prudential error theory is false; some prudential judgements attributing properties like being good (better) or bad (worse) for x are true. (The prudential existence premise.)

Therefore,

3. Arguments for the moral error theory fail.

My focus in this talk is on evaluating the parity premise, specifically with respect to what is probably the most influential argument for moral error theory in contemporary analytic philosophy, the argument from reasons. According to the argument from reasons, moral facts entail that a certain type of normative reason exists, but there are no such reasons. I contend that the parity premise succeeds with respect to some but not all the ways in which the argument from reasons has been developed in the literature.

Constitutivism is a popular strategy in metaethics that seeks to ground normativity in certain kinds of features that are constitutive of agency (Korsgaard 2009; Velleman 2009). Enoch’s so-called »shmagency challenge« called the normative source of agency itself into question and kindled a debate over how agency can be shown to be normatively non-arbitrary (Enoch 2006, 2011). A large portion of this debate revolves around the question whether agency is inescapable, i.e. the idea that being an agent is non-optional and that shmagency is simply not a position one could coherently occupy (Ferrero 2009, 2018; Katsafanas 2013; O’Hagan 2013; Velleman 2009). However, the debate is somewhat locked in a stalemate because there seems to be no clear way how to decide on the question of the (non-)intelligibility of shmagency other than relying on one’s metaethical intuitions, which prompted Enoch to note a certain kind of »they-just-don’t-get-it feeling« (Enoch 2011, 228) on both sides of the debate. This paper will sketch a way out of this stalemate by showing how the shmagency challenge is semantically defective.