This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Peter A. French, “The Principle of Responsive Adjustment,” Philosophy (October, 1984). I was not arguing that our gaining certain kinds of information about the action or, especially, the actor’s condition or moral status at the time of the occurrence would require altering whether we held the agent responsible. In that paper I focused on cases in which there was insufficient evidence to hold an agent responsible for something untoward at t1 or even evidence that the agent lacked the appropriate intention at t1 to support blaming the agent for the event. In such cases, we might be inclined to generosity and let the agent off the hook. But then at a subsequent time the agent repeats the actions of t1 and our inclination is to blame the agent for the early untoward event, not because we are convinced that the agent at t1 had the appropriate intention then that motivated the agent’s actions, but because at t2 the agent has acted with intention in a repetitive action.
Andrew Khoury, “Synchronic and Diachronic Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies (2013), Vol. 165, pp. 735–752.
Borrowing the term and the account from John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Some might also allow that the mere passage of time is sufficient to alter the degree of blame or, as suggested by Jeffrie Murphy [J. Murphy and J. Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 24], we may forswear resentment for old time’s sake despite there being no discernable change in the agent.
See Khoury, op.cit.
See Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
See Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio (2004), Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 428–452.
L.R. Squire and E.R Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Freeman Press, 1999), p. ix.
Khoury, op.cit., p. 740 (including footnote).
Did one of those philosopher’s wicked scientists manipulate her brain?
See Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies (1997), Vol. 4, pp. 405–428, and “The Self and the SESMET,” Journal of Consciousness Studies (1999), Vol. 6, pp. 99–135.
Marya Schechtman, op.cit.
See Daniel Dennett, “Why Everyone is a Novelist,” Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 1988), pp. 16–22, and “The Origins of Selves,” Cogito (1989), pp. 163–173, and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); and Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981); and Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993).
Schechtman, op.cit., p. 94.
Benjamin Matheson, “Compatibilism and Personal Identity,” Philosophical Studies (2013).
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Ensimismamiento y alteractión, “Meditación de la técna,” trans. by Samuel P. Moody (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1939).
Stan Klein, “The Sense of Diachronic Personal Identity,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2013), Vol. 12, pp. 791–811, 806.
See Sharon Lamb, The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, and Responsibility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1996), pp. 26–29, though she says that “masochism” is not quite the right term, while offering no better suited alternative.
See Elizabeth Beardsley, “A Plea for Deserts,” American Philosophical Quarterly (1969), Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 33–42, and “Moral Disapproval and Moral Indignation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (December, 1970), Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 161–176. I published a paper on “Senses of Blame” in the Southern Journal of Philosophy (Winter, 1976) and had the opportunity to discuss it with Elizabeth at some length in the context of her work. As I have not returned to the subject specifically since then, this is an occasion for me to acknowledge her influence on my thinking about blame.
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 152–154.
Though some people, particularly the guilt-ridden who find confession an effective guilt-management tool, will say to others such things as “I am to blame for x,” sentencing themselves, as it were, and typically hoping for absolution when doing so in the Confessional booth.
Elizabeth Beardsley, “Moral Disapproval and Moral Indignation,” op.cit., p. 175.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Characterological Versus Behavioral Self-Blame: Inquiries Into Depression and Rape,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1979), Vol. 37, No. 10, pp. 1798–1809.
See also C. G. Davis, D. R. Lehman, R. C. Silver, C. B. Wortman, J. H. Ellard, “Self-Blame Following a Traumatic Event: The Role of Perceived Avoidability,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Impact Factor: 2.22, 1996), Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 557–567. They maintain that their research shows that the degree to which people who suffered spinal cord injuries believed that they could have avoided the accident predicted self-blame even after controlling for their other causal attributions for the event.
Ibid., p. 1799.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 1800.
Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Book the Third, Chapter II “On Repentance,” translated by Charles Cotton, (1877) (updated 2012 on Project Gutenberg's The Essays of Montaigne, Complete, by Michel de Montaigne at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0095).
Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 81.
It is perhaps of minor note that the terms “shame” and “atone” appear to have etymological roots in the concept of “cover.” “Shame” apparently derives from the Germanic skem and skam, from the Indo-European root kem/kam meaning “to cover, veil, or hide.” The “s” prefix makes it reflexive, so “to cover or hide oneself.” When one is ashamed the normal response is to conceal oneself. Shame relates to the way one looks to oneself and to how one thinks others perceive one. The Hebrew kipper (to atone) seems to have roots in the Arabic word for “cover,” but also the term for “wipe,” and it is said that the notion from which both cover and wipe derive is “rub.” Shame may be to cover and atone rubs off the cover.
I am ignoring substitutionary atonement as is maintained in Christian religions in which it is held that Jesus took the sins of all humans on himself and atoned for them by being crucified. However, the concept of substitutionary atonement might appeal to a hardcore Episodic as a way of explaining why a future self might do penance and make restitution for the misdeeds of a former self. After all, if we are a succession of discrete selves, either atonement loses sense or it must be understood in substitutionary terms. But, can substitutionary atonement really be morally justified? That, I suspect, is a problem for Christian theologians.
Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Third person penal substitution is, of course, a major tenet of the Christian conception of atonement. See David Lewis, “Do We Believe in Penal Substitution?” Philosophical Papers (1997), Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 203–209.
Some writers within psychotherapeutic and theological traditions discuss what they call self-reconciliation and emphasize the potential of at-one-ment with oneself. I am at a loss as to what it would be like to reconcile, in the relevant sense, with oneself.
The Greek word, translated in the New Testament as “repent,” is “metanoia” which meant an afterthought or something different from a previous thought. It might be translated as a change of mind, though in common and religious discourse it is generally taken to mean a change of mind combined with a commitment to a change of behavior.
Swinburne, op.cit., p. 148.
If one believes that no quality of will is ever deeply rooted and/or denies diachronic agent sameness, self-blame as a provocateur of atonement must be rejected. Montaigne did just that in his well-known essay “On Repentance.” He cannot self-blame, Montaigne argues, because he upholds something of a Heraclitian flux position (“our nature is constantly changing”), and he maintains a biological determinism that leads him to argue that what was done in the past was the result of whatever transitory natures agents had in the past, so agents in the present cannot be held responsible for what occurred in the past. (“I do not blame myself, I accuse my fortune, and not my work… In all affairs that are past, be it how it will, I have very little regret; for this imagination puts me out of my pain, that they were so to fall out they are in the great revolution of the world, and in the chain of stoical causes: your fancy cannot, by wish and imagination, move one tittle, but that the great current of things will not reverse both the past and the future.”) Consequently, he argues, repentance can never be genuine and self-blame is foolish. (“Repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.”) See Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Book the Third, Chapter II “On Repentance,” translated by Charles Cotton, op.cit.
Were S a characterological self-blamer she would assume that her dispositions are such that her avoiding dangerous locations is most unlikely and that she is the sort of person who attracts rapists. She cannot repent because she believes there is no likelihood of her altering her behavior or of her avoiding victimization.
Schechtman, op.cit., p. 94.
There are also amnesia versions that would exclude x from her narrative.
Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
Ibid., p. 351.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 340.
Ibid., p. 350.
We may leave open the question of whether any of the events in Briony’s narrative actually occurred and if her novel and McEwan’s novel are elaborate exercises in exploring the depths of interwoven fictional invention. All of it, after all, is fiction from cover to cover.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
French, P.A. Self-Blaming, Repentance, and Atonement. J Value Inquiry 48, 587–602 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9458-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9458-5