Abstract: What P.F. Strawson (1962) labelled the reactive attitudes—gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings—have each generated rich areas of research. But the reactive attitude that gets the most attention has historically been resentment, especially as it relates to blame and moral responsibility. Recently, however, discussions of blame and moral responsibility have featured another reactive attitude: guilt. These views are interesting and promising because they are able to capture a particular function of blame better than any extant view. Namely, if the point of blame is to allocate suffering to wrongdoers, then guilt-centric accounts of blameworthiness are bound to be more successful than their competitors. In this talk, I will reflect on the conversations and practices that surround guilty confessions and argue that they illuminate an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness. While blame can allocate deserved suffering to wrongdoers, it can also communicate that an individual who has been wronged deserves respect. This is an important function of blame that cannot be accounted for by these guilt-based views of blameworthiness.

NB: Tea starts at 3pm