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Rachel Achs – Hypocritical Blame Is Unfitting (Southampton Philosophy Visiting Speaker Seminar)
25 October 2022, 3:00 PM–5:00 PM BST
https://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=PHILOS-L;75ab7073.2210
The next talk in the Philosophy Visiting Speaker Seminar series at the University of Southampton will be given by Rachel Achs (Oxford/Santa Cruz) next Tuesday, 25th October, 3-5pm on Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, Room 65/2115. (Note the change of room.) Rachel’s title is “Hypocritical Blame Is Unfitting”, and the abstract is pasted below.
All welcome!
“Hypocritical Blame Is Unfitting”
Philosophers disagree about what, if anything, is wrong with blaming hypocritically, but almost all treat the issue as a moral one: Either there is something morally wrong with hypocritical blame or there isn’t. This paper argues that, although there are moral objections to blaming hypocritically, the first and foremost problem with hypocritical blame is that it’s unfitting. More specifically, it is an enabling condition on blame’s fittingness that the blaming subject be committed to the norm she blames a target person for violating. Because of a connection between an attitude’s fittingness and its representational accuracy, recognizing this fittingness condition in turn has interesting upshots – both for theorizing about what’s morally wrong with hypocrisy and for understanding the significance of blame itself.
Dr Brian McElwee
Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Southampton
Director, Southampton Ethics Centre
Director, British Society of Ethical Theory