"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye" says the Bible. In other words: there is something problematic about one person blaming another, when the blamer's faults are even greater. Such blaming is hypocritical and, typically, we see ourselves as entitled to dismiss hypocritical blame. This is so, paradoxically, even when in fact we are blameworthy for that which we are being blamed hypocritically. This book explores the concept and ethics of hypocritical blame, and its wider ramifications, from a philosophical perspective.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor of political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark and professor II in philosophy at the Arctic University of Norway-UiT. He has published widely on issues in ethics and political philosophy. Previous books include: Born Free and Equal (Oxford University Press, 2013), Relational Egalitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Making Sense of Affirmative Action (Oxford University Press, 2020). He was associate editor at Ethics (2008-2020) and Chair for the Society for Applied Philosophy 2011-2014. Presently, he is director of the Center for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, University of Aarhus.

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction


• 1. Topic and main aims


• 2. Structure


• 3. Significance


• Chapter 1: Hypocritical blame


• 1. Introduction


• 2. When is blame hypocritical?


• 2.1 The blaming condition


• 2.2 The incoherence condition


• 2.3 The no-self-blame condition


• 2.4 The no-justification condition


• 2.5 Summary


• 3. Standing to blame and its denial


• 4. Other accounts of what it is to dismiss blame on grounds of the hypocrite's lack of standing


• 5. Conclusion


• Chapter 2: Complications and defeaters of standing


• 1. Introduction


• 2. Private blame


• 3. Self-blame


• 4. Third-person blame


• 5. Degrees of blame and degrees of standing


• 6. Skepticism about standing to blame


• 7. Why does hypocrisy undermine standing to blame?


• 8. Conclusion


• Chapter 3: What, if anything, makes hypocritical blame morally wrong?


• 1. Introduction


• 2. Lack of desert


• 3. Lack of commitment


• 4. Wrong attention


• 5. Transgression of moral authority


• 6. Failure of reciprocity


• 7. Moral community


• 8. Implying falsehoods


• 9. A clash with moral equality


• 10. Conclusion


• Chapter 4: Other ways of not having standing to blame


• 1. Introduction


• 2. Tu quoque


• 3. Complicity


• 4. None of your business


• 5. "You don't know what it's like"


• 6. "You don't accept that principle yourself"


• 7. Conclusion


• Chapter 5: Praising


• 1. Introduction


• 2. What is praising?


• 3. Standing to praise


• 4. Hypocritical praise


• 5. The wrongfulness of hypocritical praise


• 6. Other forms of standingless praise


• 7. Standing to prame


• 8. Conclusion


• Chapter 6: Forgiving


• 1. Introduction


• 2. What is it to forgive?


• 3. Dismissing forgiveness as standingless


• 4. Hypocritical forgiving


• 5. What undermines standing to forgive?


• 6. The wrongfulness of hypocritical forgiveness


• 7. Other ways in which forgiving can be standingless


• 8. Fromtaking


• 9. Conclusion


• 10. Appendix: Forgiving and standing to apologize


• Chapter 7: Morality, normativity, and standing


• 1. Introduction


• 2. Encouraging


• 3. Epistemic blame


• 4. Consequentialism, deontology, and the interpersonal nature of holding accountable


• 5. Standing and moral encroachment


• 6. Conclusion


• Bibliography


• Index