We began with the following questions
1) In what sense does Fricker mean communicative blame is explanatory?
2) Is it blame that helps explain reasons for moral transformation or is it some other kind of norm?
3) She describes blame as "messy." Does this preclude a paradigm case? Is being blamed or is blaming primary in her account?
4) What does she mean when she says blame is what makes us human? Is she essentializing the human?
5) How does guilt fit into her argument? (see. p.171)
6) How does section 5 fit with or follow from sections 1-4? What is the logical connection between them all?
7) What is conceptual analysis? What is paradigm based analysis? What is genealogical analysis? Isn’t section 1 a conceptual analysis?
8) Communicative blame does not have to be verbal (p.171 and p.179). What would nonverbal CB look like?
9) At the end she blames contingency (p.181). What does she mean by this? How does contingency fit with her conclusions about the uses of blame by the "right" or "wrong" people?
10) Is section 5 more troubling for her work than she understands it to be? She sees it as a caution and not an actual threat to her larger argument. What do we think?
Discussion
- The blame she is talking about is almost too general to say anything useful.
- When we blame people we are exerting a form of control over them. This is a phenomenon people have not paid attention to. She says the above is a worry, but it seems to really challenge everything that comes before in the paper.
- Could she not include the worry of section 5 in the pathologies of blame section?
- Why do we need to vindicate blame? Why does it have to take on a negative intonation? There seems to be a literature suggesting the latter.
- Forgiveness and guilt could enrich her account of blame.
- Discussion of family resemblances (p.166). She wants this unique combination of something more robust than willy-nilly, pell-mell Wittgensteinianism. She wants something attuned to that but also still attuned to the contingencies of the uses of power.
- Perhaps emotion could be part of the bridge to a more practice based account. Perhaps it could complicate whether or not you could even do conceptual analysis.
- Fricker says: surely we can say something philosophically interesting about blame. This is in place of just saying everything is pell-mell; there are many kinds of blame etc.
- "Constellation" might be a sibling or alternative term to paradigm here. Constellation as a non-hierarchical assemblage that isn’t random but is ordered around something more essential. It takes a certain shape.
- Is making someone feel sorry for what they’ve done more important than working to have that thing not happen again? She seems to suggest the former. There doesn’t seem to be any future oriented goal at stake i.e. having them not do it again.
- The proleptic blame bit from Williams is really interesting. The idea is to treat people as though they hold moral reasons even though they in fact do not. Because we don’t like other people’s disapprobation . . . somehow this is the hinge which leads us to adopt reasons or values which others assume we should have via proleptic blame.
- She mentioned the aim of “interpersonal calibration,” but it does not seem obviously true that calibrating our moral understandings is a good thing. This seems more like an assertion rather than something that is argued.
- Methodologically, what does a paradigm explanation do when we come up with a counter example? What would she say to an example of something that looks, smells, sounds like blame but does not do the kind of thing she is talking about? Maybe she would say that’s a parasitic instance; I am analyzing a paradigm so I can throw out that one example.
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