Title:
Alternatives to Blame in Responding to Harm and Wrongdoing
Abstract:
Across a wide range of contexts, blame can be unfitting and/or counter-productive as a response to harm and wrongdoing. These contexts include: harms caused by structural injustice, where individual agents’ contributions are small and mediated by institutional structures; harms caused by corporations and other institutions; harms caused by the non-culpably ignorant; wrongdoing by children; wrongdoing by those who are morally apathetic or disengaged; behaviour whose moral status is uncertain or controversial.
I consider a range of alternative responses for reacting to morally problematic across such contexts. These alternative responses include: forms of protest that eschew blame; the instillation of ideals and aspirations; non-moral criticisms such as prudential and aesthetic criticism; appeals to pride, shame, personal ideals and standards; re-direction of attention to institutional structures; moral education; and open-ended moral conversation and debate.
Speaker Bio:
Brian McElwee is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Warwick and St Andrews. He is the Director of the Southampton Ethics Centre, and President of the British Society for Ethical Theory. His research focuses on moral demandingness and supererogation, blame, John Stuart Mill, and analogies between morality and other normative domains.
Location:
Ante Room (SW1.17), Somerset House East Wing, Strand Campus, King's College London
Time:
17:00-19:00
