For Elinor Mason, a major puzzle for normative ethics concerns how the responsibility concepts of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are related to the deontic concepts of right and wrong. In her view, it seems obvious that an agent can act wrongly without being blameworthy and rightly without being praiseworthy. But it seems equally obvious that there is some relationship between these concepts. In Ways to Be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness and Responsibility, Mason attempts to explain this relationship with a pluralistic account of both sets of concepts.

With respect to deontic concepts, Mason argues that different definitions of right and wrong are useful for different purposes. However, deontic notions should be related to responsibility notions in the following way. Any definition of right and wrong is useful only if it entails that an agent could reasonably be deemed responsible for her actions. We should therefore reject a “hyper-objectivist” definition of right and wrong. According to this definition, an agent acts rightly when she does what an omniscient agent would do in the circumstances and wrongly when she fails to do what such an agent would do. If we are to judge an agent’s actions with how well they conform to this standard, then her excuses for failing to do what is right will be the norm, not the exception. In following this standard, not only will the agent act wrongly in a praiseworthy manner and rightly in a blameworthy manner, this will even happen more often than not.

What is more useful for Mason is a moderately objective or “prospectivist” definition of right and wrong which defines right as what an idealized rational agent would do in the circumstances and wrong as what such an agent would fail to do. This definition is useful for giving moral agents a standard to aim for, but it has the following limitation. When an agent is required to consider probabilities and utilities as only an ideal rational agent would, she could still act rightly in a blameworthy way and wrongly in a praiseworthy way. Thus, right and wrong also need a subjective definition. An agent does what is subjectively right when she knowingly tries to do well by morality or “M” where “M” is a placeholder for a fully developed moral theory. She does what is subjectively wrong when she knowingly fails to try in the same manner.   

When it comes to responsibility concepts, Mason allows for two possible ways of being either praiseworthy or blameworthy and a third possible way of being only blameworthy. An agent can be praised and blamed in an ordinary or detached way, and blamed in an extended way. An agent can be praised in an ordinary way when she has acted subjectively rightly and blamed when she acts subjectively wrongly. Agents are only subject to this sort of praise and blame when they have a grasp of M and are therefore part of the moral community. As such agents, we also expect them to respond with pleasure when we praise them and remorse when we blame them.

For Mason, when we praise or blame an agent in a detached way, we do not regard them as understanding M and do not expect them to accept our reasons for praising or blaming them. When we praise or blame in this way, it is appropriate to feel the same kinds of emotions we would feel about the agent which we would feel in the case of ordinary praise or blame. But since the agent lacks moral understanding, it would not make sense to have a conversation with them about their praiseworthy or blameworthy behavior. Mason argues that her conception of detached praiseworthiness allows us to make sense of how an agent like Huckleberry Finn can be regarded as praiseworthy. Huckleberry Finn seems to act in a praiseworthy manner by helping Jim escape slavery, but Finn lacks a sufficient understanding of M to realize he acts rightly. For Mason, this means Finn is praiseworthy in a detached way, but not in an ordinary way.

What Mason concedes is the most controversial part of her view is her account of extended blameworthiness. An agent is blameworthy in this way when she inadvertently did something for which she could be held blameworthy in an ordinary way had she done it deliberately. But something more than regret is called for in the case of inadvertent wrongdoing. When an agent regrets her action, she acknowledges that she caused the action, but she does not necessarily accept responsibility for it. Accepting responsibility for inadvertent wrongdoing therefore warrants a stronger feeling. It is not necessary for the agent to feel guilt, since guilt is only appropriate for deliberate wrongdoing. But taking responsibility for her action at least warrants feeling remorse.

Mason’s book is filled with brilliant philosophical insights, but I have a concern about her rejection of hyper-objectivism. Mason’s worry with hyper-objectivism is that if right and wrong are defined as what only an omniscient agent would know, then right or wrong will have little to do with an agent’s responsibility. This is an understandable worry, but I do not see what is supposed to follow from her rejection of this hyper-objectivist standard. Certainly it will always be possible to assess an agent’s action based on how closely it matches what an omniscient agent would do in the circumstances. Whether an agent’s action meets such a standard may not be very interesting, and it is therefore reasonable to supplement hyper-objectivism with prospectivist and subjectivist definitions of right and wrong. But it is one thing to argue that the hyper-objectivist standard should be supplemented with these other standards, and it is quite another thing to argue that hyper-objectivism should be rejected altogether. Perhaps Mason believes that we should call meeting or failing to meet the hyper-objectivist standard something other than “right” and “wrong”. But I fail to see why it matters what one calls conforming or failing to conform to this standard, so long as it is understood that one is not evaluating how responsibly the agent acted in the circumstances.

 Despite this concern, I think anyone with a serious philosophical interest in praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and their relationship to the deontic concepts of right and wrong would find Mason’s book to be an excellent resource and there can be little doubt that her work will be influential in normative ethics for many years to come.

© 2019 Rich Holmes

Rich Holmes, Malone University