Abstract

Tim Scanlon has recently argued that an action is *blameworthy* if it "show[s] something about the agent's attitudes toward others that impairs the relations that others can have with him or her" and hence that "to *blame* a person is to judge him or her to be blameworthy and to take your relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that this judgment of impaired relations holds to be appropriate" (*Moral Dimensions*, 128--29). Given this, Scanlon argues, reactive attitude accounts of blame, while they can capture some of the ways blaming attitudes vary depending on one's relationship to the wrongdoer, are in general "too thin" and cannot explain all the relevant changes in our attitudes, "including changes in our readiness to interact with [the wrongdoer] in specific ways" (143). Yet Scanlon does not provide clear accounts of what types of relationships matter for blame and how violations of the "standards" of these relationships justifies what new attitudes. My aim is to address this. To do this, we need to turn not merely to particular reactive attitudes but to broad, interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes in terms of which we can make sense of what I have come to call "communities of respect". My claim is that the sort of relationship whose impairment is relevant to blame is that of co-membership in a community of respect, so that the significance of the agent's wrongdoing relevant for blame is the significance those actions and attitudes have *for us* in the community. However, accommodating the variability of blame on which Scanlon rightly insists requires a more careful examination of two additional factors that affect how it is proper for one to respond to the impairment to those relationships that the wrongdoing represents: one's role in a given case as perpetrator, victim, or witness, and one's personal commitments. For, I argue, these factors provide one with excuses for failing to treat the perpetrator with the normal trust and respect we demand of each other, and the validity of these excuses itself depends on the overall rational structure of the patterns of reactive attitudes within the community. Consequently, both the individual and the community are important in defining the relationships and modifications of relationships that are central to blame; however, such modifications to personal relationships are a *consequence* of blame rather than, as Scanlon claims, part of its content.