Children and Blame

Imagine that Terry A (for adult) is a 30-year-old visiting their sister. While they are out of the house, Rudy, their four-year-old nephew, sneaks into their room and steals their wallet. When Terry A finds out, they are incensed. They tell Rudy that they can’t believe they would do something so inconsiderate. They tell them that they can’t trust them anymore. They stop interacting with Rudy and give them the cold shoulder when Rudy tries to talk to them. In short, Terry A resents Rudy for stealing their wallet.

Most people would agree that there is something wrong with Terry’s response to Rudy’s bad behavior. While we might expect Terry to hold Rudy responsible in some sense for stealing Terry’s wallet (by sternly telling them they can’t do things like this etc.) we would expect them to do this without really resenting Rudy for taking their wallet (Svirsky, 2020).

Most people working on blame and responsibility also have a straightforward way to explain why Terry’s resentment is problematic. Resentment is a “reactive attitude” and the reactive attitudes can only be fittingly directed towards morally responsible agents. Given that the typical four-year old’s decision making capacities are extremely underdeveloped, Four-year olds aren’t really responsible for the things that they do. Terry’s reaction is problematic, then, because it is unfitting, and it is unfitting because Rudy is not morally responsible for stealing their wallet.

Now imagine that Terry C (for child) is Rudy’s four-year-old classmate. Terry C brings their favorite toy to class for show and tell. Rudy wants their toy and so, when Terry isn’t looking, they take the toy, hide it in their bag, and take it home with them. When Terry finds out, they respond in the way that adult Terry did. They yell at Rudy, they refuse to play with them, they push them away, and so on. In other words, they resent Rudy.

The puzzling thing is that Terry C’s reaction to Rudy’s bad behavior looks much better than Terry A’s reaction. This comes out in a few ways. First, it would be absurd to tell four-year-old Terry C not to resent Rudy “because Rudy is just a four-year-old.” That response might make sense when you are talking to Terry A, but not when talking to Terry C. Second, we still call out children when their anger is clearly inappropriate. If it turned out that Rudy only left with Terry’s toy because someone else placed the toy in Rudy’s bag without them noticing, then Terry’s anger would be obviously inappropriate, and we could tell them as much. Third, it would be concerning if Terry C never got angry at, or otherwise blamed, their classmates. In Strawsonian language, this would indicate that Terry C took up the “objective stance” towards their friends and classmates. Kids, however, aren’t supposed to view their friends and classmates as objects of management in the way that adults are, and we would be seriously concerned about a child who did. A natural way to explain all of this is that Terry C’s reaction to Rudy’s theft was fitting, and so we should treat it as such.

This is odd. The most natural way to explain why Terry A’s response was problematic was that Rudy is not morally responsible for stealing, and so their resentment was unfitting. If Rudy can’t be morally responsible for stealing, though, then how could Terry C fittingly resent them for stealing? To put the problem more explicitly, this pair of cases appears to put pressure on a widely held principle which, following Brink and Nelkin (2013), I will call

Strawson’s Thesis: For any agent A, B and proposition p, A can fittingly bear some reactive attitude towards B on account of p if, and only if, B is morally responsible for p.

To put things roughly, if this principle is correct, then Terry A’s resentment could only be unfitting if Rudy was not responsible for stealing their wallet. If Rudy can’t be responsible for stealing, though, then Terry C cannot fittingly resent Rudy either. In other words, if this principle is correct then, either Terry A and Terry C can both fittingly resent Rudy or neither can.

There are a few ways we might try to combat this problem. Most obviously, we could insist that Terry C’s resentment is not fitting, but that it is still appropriate in some other sense. Maybe it is useful or morally appropriate, for example, for children to resent or otherwise blame one another so that they can practice engaging in responsibility practices before they are older. The problem with this, though, is that the reactive attitudes of young children can clearly be appropriate in some sense even when they aren’t useful or morally appropriate. Imagine, for example, that two kids are sitting at a funeral. One pulls the other's hair and the other gets angry and loudly yells at them. Obviously, it would be better if they didn’t get angry at their sibling, and we would tell them that they can’t respond like that during a funeral. Still, their reaction clearly seems appropriate in some sense, even if it was ill-timed.

Alternatively, we might insist that Terry A’s resentment is actually fitting, but that it is still inappropriate in some other sense. This suggestion runs into basically the same problem, though. Terry A’s resentment still looks inappropriate in some sense even in cases where it is appropriate in other senses (ex. when Terry A’s resentment would have very good consequences).

There are other ways we might try to respond, but we don’t have the space here to consider them. Ultimately, I think that this pair of cases suggests a few important things about the reactive attitudes. First, and most obviously, we cannot hold on to “Strawson’s Thesis.” The reactive attitudes cannot have this simple and direct of a connection to moral responsibility. The main point I want to emphasize, though, is that this suggests, more broadly, that we need to move towards a relational conception of the reactive attitudes. In other words, whether or not I can fittingly feel the reactive attitudes towards someone must depend on the kind on the relations that I bear to them. It cannot depend solely on certain features of the person we have the attitude towards (like whether or not they are morally responsible). What explains the difference between Terry A and Terry C’s resentment is that adults have a very different kind of relationship with young children than young children do. Terry C is Rudy’s peer and classmate. Terry A is Rudy’s adult uncle. In order to figure out what makes the reactive attitudes fitting, then, we need to figure out what kinds of relations between the attitude holder and the object of the attitude make the reactive attitudes appropriate.

Contributor

Zeb Dempsey

Grad Fellow