introductory philosophy textbook. He is also the ongoing series editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. His publications have been about numerous topics in agency and responsibility, moral philosophy, moral psychology, the philosophy of humor, political philosophy, and personal identity.
Shoemaker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Architecture of Blame and Praise: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, and reported the following:
The Architecture of Blame and Praise is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of those responses we have to one another that, in some way, pertain to our exercises of responsible agency. Two oddities motivate the book.Learn more about The Architecture of Blame and Praise at the Oxford University Press website.
The first is that, until recently, philosophers have focused on trying to understand just blame, assuming that praise is simply its positive symmetrical counterpart. But that assumption seems belied by work in moral psychology suggesting that our actual patterns of blame and praise reveal asymmetries between the two. For example, people tend to reduce their blame of those who do bad things overwhelmed by emotion, but they don’t reduce their praise of those who do good things overwhelmed by emotion. Of course, the psychologists don’t tell us whether these responses are justified or what their connection with responsible agency is supposed to be.
My book aims to incorporate what’s right about both strands while avoiding their problems. I start by explicating a functionalist account of our blame and praise system, and then I go on to show that there is actually an overarching symmetry between blame and praise, but we can see it only after I’ve revealed a crucial but previously unrecognized form of blame: mockery.
This discussion of this point actually begins on page 99, which makes the Page 99 Test an excellent one for its glimpse into an essential part of my overall argument. I claim on the page that mocking’s positive pair is complimenting, and so it starts by saying that both responses are, “paradigmatically, responses to performances relative to some … standards, including aesthetic, athletic, culinary, epistemic, prudential, philosophical, and many more.”
So what is mockery?[T]o mock someone is to make fun of them for some failure, in a way that could foreseeably result in their feeling the sting of embarrassment, shame, or even humiliation.And what makes it appropriate?The first condition is truthiness: the target of mockery must have…the quality for which they are being mocked. I can’t aptly mock the fast for being slow, or the heroic for being cowards. The second condition…is publicity…. It’s in having that flaw exposed that one’s embarrassment is triggered, so the mockery, in order to be apt, must both be expressed and the aimed at that exposure…. A third condition of apt mockery is…that these flaws or failures be significant, that is, ridiculous. If you’ve come in second place in the Olympic finals of the 100-meter dash by 0.001 seconds, you’ve failed to win, but there is nothing at all mockable about your performance. However, if you’re entered in the 100-meter dash at the local charity event, and you trip coming out of the starting blocks and roll head-over-heels into the long-jump pit, then your failure is ridiculous enough to render you mockable.Mockery and its positive counterpart, compliments, are one symmetrical mode of blame and praise, typically nonmoral in nature, Moral blame and its symmetrical counterpart of moral praise tend to consist, respectively, in anger and gratitude. I then go on to defend the appropriateness of the whole range of responses in a way that does not appeal to whether people deserve these responses. The presumed need for desert as a moral justification for the sting of blame is what has led most philosophers who theorize about it to argue that we need a robust capacity for free will to do so. If I am right, this entire enterprise has been a mistake: we don’t need desert or free will to justify our blame/praise responses to one another.
--Marshal Zeringue
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