Addressing the Past: Time, Blame and Guilt

ABSTRACT

Time passed after the commission of a wrong can affect how we respond to its agent now. Specifically it can introduce certain forms of complexity or ambivalence into our blaming responses. This paper considers how and why time might matter in this way. I illustrate the phenomenon by looking at a recent real-life example, surveying some responses to the case and identifying the relevant forms of ambivalence. I then consider a recent account of blameworthiness and its development over time that purports to account for this ambivalence. Blameworthiness, on this account, consists in a psychological flaw; time matters because it brings the possibility of change in the agent, and ambivalence arises because it is hard to know to the extent of such change. This account, I argue, mischaracterises responses to the case and misidentifies the source of their ambivalence. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotion, I sketch an alternative approach. Our responses, I suggest, make sense within processes through which we address wrongdoing. Time matters because these processes take time and because time’s having passed raises the question whether and how the wrong has been addressed. Unaddressed wrongs can elicit ambivalence of a specific form.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsibility
• blame
• blameworthiness
• remorse
• repentance
• reactive attitudes

Acknowledgments

While working out the ideas in this paper I have benefitted from discussion with, and written comments and suggestions from, Ulrike Heuer, Christopher Cowley and Monika Betzler. Special thanks to Ulrike for bringing my attention to the Bruno Dey case. I presented different versions of the paper at the Thumos Seminar at the University of Geneva and at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association at the University of St Andrews. I am grateful to the audiences for their helpful questions and suggestions, and would like in particular to thank Steve Humbert-Droz and Kyryll Khromov, whose comments encouraged me to reframe and refocus the discussion, and to Roberto Keller and James Laing, who also read drafts. Special thanks also to Florian Gatignon for the thoughtful prepared response he gave in Geneva, and to Fabrice Teroni and Julien Deonna for inviting me to speak there. Sorry to anyone I might have neglected to mention. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, who funded the postdoc during which much of the work towards this paper was done.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Khoury (2013) distinguishes these two questions as concerning two kinds of responsibility, synchronic and diachronic. This seems to me a mistake. The distinction is not properly between two kinds of responsibility but rather two kinds of questions we can ask about responsibility, or two kinds of conditions that might bear on it: conditions that must hold at the time of acting to establish responsibility, and conditions that must hold over time to sustain responsibility.

² ‘In a substantive way’ because it depends on more than their simply meeting basic enabling conditions like being alive and rationally competent.

³ Khoury and Matheson talk at points about ‘relevant’ psychological connectedness, and support their view in part by appealing to the idea that an agent’s distinctive psychological features when they act are ‘essential’ to their acting as they do (see e.g. Khoury and Matheson 2018, 214, 216–7).

⁴ One possible challenge to Khoury and Matheson’s argument that I will not develop here would challenge the reliability of the relevant ‘intuition’. Although philosophical argument tells us Leon-530 is numerically identical to Leon-30, many might nonetheless feel a strong inclination to say that he is a different person. If so, perhaps their inclination to say that Leon-530 is not blameworthy stems from the same source. If considered judgment can supersede our metaphysical ‘intuitions’ about such cases, why not our moral ones?

⁵ Arguably this is exactly what makes this at best a very poor form of apology. Compare, e.g. Smith (2008).

⁶ One salient question here is just what Dey’s psychological ‘flaw’, past or present, is supposed to be. In fact it seems likely that he was (unlike the fictional Leon) no fanatic, but rather another example of the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt 1963), participating in terrible crimes not so much from ill will as from quite ordinary forms of cowardice, ignorance, shallowness and so on.

⁷ In speaking of these emotions as ‘involving an attribution’, I am trying to remain relatively neutral on the issue of emotional intentionality, for instance on whether emotions have evaluative content, on what kind of attitude emotions are, and so on. See Deonna and Teroni (2012) for a helpful overview of many of the various possible answers to such questions.

⁸ For the relevant notion of background conditions on reasons, see Dancy (2004, 39–40).

⁹ To say that punishment could in this sense be ‘meaningless’ to victims is not to say that Dey should not be punished, or even that he should not be severely punished. This specific kind of process of moral repair need not be the only source of reasons for punishment. It seems clear to me that there are others, but whether Dey should be punished and how severely is not our question here.

¹⁰ What about Éva Pusztai-Fahidi’s claim that it is ‘never too late’ for such trials to take place? Perhaps her thought is that it is better late than never. ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is not an excuse to leave old wrongs unaddressed on the grounds that justice is no longer possible, but an imperative to stop delaying.

¹¹ On the idea of ‘gifted’ forgiveness see, e.g. Fricker (2019).