Standing to Blame, and the Authority to Demand an Answer

The hypocrite provides the familiar case. A person who condemns another for a fault while making an unjustified exception of the same fault in herself appears to lack the authority to issue that condemnation. Something has gone wrong, and the difficulty is saying precisely what, given that the condemned conduct may have been genuinely wrong and the condemnation accurate.

Chapter Seven enters an established dispute here and takes two conclusions from it. The parties are named as the book names them. Fritz and Miller explain the defect through the hypocrite’s rejection of moral equality. Piovarchy understands standing as a second-personal normative power. Bell disputes the standard account while conceding that blame is positional, since the propriety of criticism can depend on the relation between critic and target. Lippert-Rasmussen broadens the field beyond hypocrisy.

The two conclusions

First, the fittingness of a negative judgment and the authority to direct blame are different questions. A person may have acted wrongly even when a particular critic is not entitled to summon that person into a relation of confession, apology, or submission.

Second, loss of standing need not make the underlying reason disappear. It changes who may address the demand, what response is owed to that party, and which consequences may legitimately follow. The wrong does not evaporate because the wrong person mentioned it.

Four acts, routinely conflated

The productive move in section XII is to separate evaluative judgment, directed blame, a demand for reasons, and coercive sanction.

An observer may correctly judge that conduct was cruel while lacking standing to confront the agent. A victim may possess standing to demand acknowledgment without possessing authority to impose punishment. A court or a regulator may possess public authority to require evidence without claiming the moral intimacy characteristic of interpersonal blame.

Conflating these four produces a pair of false alternatives that recur whenever an institution is accused of hypocrisy: either a standingless institution may do nothing, or its every sanction is morally expressive blame. Neither follows. A regulator with a compromised record may still be entitled to compel the production of documents, while not being entitled to demand contrition.

The question, restated

The relational question is therefore not simply whether the agent did wrong. It is also: who is addressing the agent, in what capacity, under what reciprocal obligations, and with what proposed consequence?

Standing is not a decoration added after responsibility has been determined. The form of the demand can alter what answer is owed. An institution that seeks information in order to prevent recurrence may have a stronger claim than one that seeks a confession in order to protect its reputation. A victim’s claim to repair differs from a manager’s claim to obedience, even when both concern the same act.

Why this belongs in a book about Sartre

Because the doctrine of unlimited responsibility has no room for it. If every agent is fully responsible for everything in his situation, then the question of who may raise the matter never arises: the fact of the wrong is the whole of the analysis, and the identity of the accuser is an irrelevance.

Once responsibility is understood as answerability, and answerability as a relation, the accuser stops being irrelevant. To be answerable is always to be answerable to someone, or to a norm embodied in a legitimate practice. Standing is the name for the condition under which that someone is entitled to ask.

This is one of the places where the theoretical intervention of the second edition does work that the interpretation alone could not do. Sartre supplies the reason a person can be asked for reasons at all. He does not supply the account of who may ask.

Developed in Chapter Seven, sections XI and XII, and tested in Chapter Nine, section VI.