There are people who deserve to be shamed, hounded, and made permanently miserable by all, as a matter of civil good. — StreetlightX
I suggest that it is possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by getting past the idea that human motives are fundamentally arbitrary and capricious, and subject to conditioning and shaping by irrational social and bodily sources. What do you think? — Joshs
On the contrary, I think it's possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by giving up the aims that anger and blame serve, ie. wealth and power. — baker
are you saying that aside from skipping anger, should we also skip punishment or desert to the person who caused harm? — L'éléphant
in any moral assessment of a situation, there are always two sides -- the person causing harm and the person who suffered the harm. I've heard of people who forgave their attackers -- that is, they've come to terms with their anger and found closure by talking to their attackers directly and forgiving them (in court or prison of course). — L'éléphant
You know that forgiveness does not deter transgressions against people by evil people. The law does. People who commit heinous crimes and crimes of opportunity don't have conscience, and there are plenty of them around. — L'éléphant
Sorry. But I take a harder stance on moral claims -- those that involve suffering of the psychic and physical harm. I won't compromise on this. (Heck, that's why I made a thread here Enforcement of Morality)But what if this simply reflects a failure of insight on our part? What if ‘evil-doers’ believe they are just, and their failure isn’t one of moral intent but of insight? — Joshs
The "what-if" failure of insight on our part, as you proposed, has been studied for ages and ages -- backed by scholarly and medical studies. We aren't wrong in limiting the freedom of those who cause us harms. There's no more excuse that we might be short-sighted and not seeing the forest because of the trees. — L'éléphant
The straying, as you also name it, has various causes. There are certainly people born with mental illness whose propensity to harm people is well documented. So, this one is not capricious or random -- it has a root cause.What I would like to know is how you articulate the nature of wrong-doing and evil in terms of the capriciousness of straying from the path of righteousness. Tell me more about what makes such straying possible. Is it a kind of randomness? — Joshs
this one is not capricious or random -- it has a root cause. — L'éléphant
They don't aimlessly wander around separated from their minds and decision-making. — L'éléphant
I just said, they're found to be able to discern right from wrong. In short, they're not mentally ill. So yes, they are aware of what's morally correct.But you haven’t articulated this decision-making in terms
of how it differs from a morally ‘correct’ decision-making. — Joshs
I think we need to sit down and sort this thing you call randomness. To me, when an individual is born with mental illness, that's not random. That's their being. And for that, our society provides a treatment.But mental illness understood as a pathology is another name for randomness. The cause is arbitrary. — Joshs
This you might call arbitrariness (God I don't know what country you're in, but no offense, I find these terms not the kind I would use when discussing morality, but well okay.) Because it is a vice they want. And to support this vice, they would rationalize their behavior (while knowing right from wrong) -- this rationalization is their support, in a manner of speaking, to go ahead and act on their vice.Why are some self-centered and self-absorbed but not others? Is it a certain randomness or arbitrariness that lurks within each of us? — Joshs
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htmIf someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first. — Strawson, Freedom and Resentment
I suggest that it is possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by getting past the idea that human motives are fundamentally arbitrary and capricious, and subject to conditioning and shaping by irrational social and bodily sources. — Joshs
For Strawson, the recognition of freedom is the cause and basis of resentment (roughly blame in the sense of the OP). For Joshs the recognition of freedom is the basis of 'thinking beyond' blame. Same observation - opposite conclusions. Something interesting going on here. — Cuthbert
And I reject this view. First of all, I don't use free-will philosophically to argue about why guilt, blame, and punishment is a just view. Humans are psychologically predisposed to recognize these 3 elements. So, I use the psychological framework to make a statement about moral agency. — L'éléphant
Yes, I think a key attribute of anger and blame is that if can feel so righteous and satisfying and can provide purpose and structure to people's lives - a narrative built around a grievance can bring forth a worldview and one can feel 'blameless' and perhaps even 'sacred' in this process. I — Tom Storm
Do you think that anger and blame are also the only way we can think of to improve certain situations where the other acts in ways that appear capricious and ‘wayward’ to us, such that our anger tells us we can ‘ knock some sense’ back into them? — Joshs
I think anger satisfies an emotional need and I believe many of us seethe in hatreds and bigotries already and we are always on the look out for events or cues to activate these emotions. I come to this from work I have undertaken with violent offenders over the years. If this is not relevant please let me know. — Tom Storm
What I am suggesting is that we can get rid of the concept of blame, but only when. we stop thinking of motive and intent as potentially arbitrary , capricious , vulnerable to bodily-emotive and social conditioning and shaping. — Joshs
Anger and blame achieve the establishment of boundaries and rules, in different settings, in social situations. The cause is secondary, it is separate. Even if you got rid of blame, we'd only see a change in tone while the same punishment is being delivered — Judaka
The common people, whose convictions are the result of emotional impulse and not rational inquiry, will always be vulnerable to vicious, hateful Demagoguery — Michael Sol
That’s a form of blame, the attribution of irrationality to another. If we believe that one’s motives can be swayed in irrational directions, then our anger tells us we may be able to away them back into the fold. Derk Pereboom’s blame skepticism makes a similar argument, leading to a pared down notion of blame.I think most crime shows impairment in decision making, — Judaka
Would we still call it punishment if we believed that the other’s motives were not only in their own interests but in the interest of those they allegedly ‘wronged’? And furthermore, that we agree that given the level
of their understanding at the time they took action, their actions were indeed the best they could
possibly do?
Would you punish a child who locked a nose-bleeding friend in the closet because she was told by another child that a bloody nose is a deadly contagion that can wipe out a whole community?
Or would you teach them what they would like to know anyway?
Do we punish individuals who ostracize deviants because the medicinal folk ways they grew up with i. their very traditional cultures tell them the deviants are
evil? — Joshs
a certain conception of blame is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations. — Joshs
Going back to Gendlin, what is the difference between anger as an emotion or felt meaning and does he provide an account of blame? I am assuming he would see anger as sometimes having a useful role. — Tom Storm
a certain conception of blame is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations.
— Joshs
I'd also be interested in a few points on this. — Tom Storm
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.