(The following brings together themes from maybe half a dozen or more posts from the past two years or so, many associated with MTSP Zoom discussions of Thomas Scanlon’s *What We Owe to Each Other* and George Sher’s *Desert*. I do not claim consistency with prior posts. I hope this post constitutes progress in a kind of on-again off-again philosophical project. Interspersed Roman numerals indicate footnotes, text of which are below the main text.)
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I think this: it being appropriate for you to resent me for not telling you about the party constitutes my wronging you by not telling you about the party. (i, ii) Wrongings are different from moral wrongs. All wrongings are moral wrongs, but not all moral wrongs are wrongings. (iii) (Moral wrongs, on my telling, are actions that make observer-role indignation appropriate – and the main action that is like this is people wronging other people. Indignation is third-personal agent-directed anger, unlike resentment, which is second-personal agent-directed anger. (iv) )
So an action being a wronging (and likewise an action being morally wrong) is like a joke being funny or a person being admirable. For an item to have such a property is for it to have the (second-order) property of having some (first-order, probably descriptive) property or other that makes it appropriate to have some particular type of response in emotional attitude.
Coming from this framework, I want to ask and answer (at least schematically) two questions. First: what are the most general features of an action that make resentment appropriate (thereby constituting an action being a wronging)? Second: on this understanding of wrongings, why might we be required to refrain from wronging persons?
(Big questions, but I think the focus on responsibility-type reactive attitudes — and how they function and fit together across roles, the fitting-attitudes type properties associated with them and the normative pressure they bring to bear on further responses — provides the right framework for answering them. So I’m trying to make a start.)
Here is my answer to the first question: it is appropriate to resent a person for performing an action when either: (i) the action expresses malice or indifference toward you and is sufficiently harmful to you or (ii) the action expresses malice or indifference toward you and has the purpose of communicating these to you (perhaps via evaluations that reflect them). In other words, resentment-appropriate action is either (something like) a violation or (something like) an insult. (v, vi, vii)
And here is my answer to the second question. Agents are required to refrain from performing resentment-worthy actions because, (i) when an action is resentment-worthy the prospect of performing it is guilt-worthy, (ii) if it is appropriate to feel guilt, then it is appropriate to perform the action of the action-tendency that is part of feeling guilty, specifically it is appropriate to refrain from performing actions that are wrongings of persons, and (iii) if an appropriate response (in some range of relevant options) is the only appropriate response (in that range of options), then it is normatively required (and this is the case for refraining from wronging others). (viii, ix)
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(i) It is appropriate for you to resent me for having certain thoughts and feelings about you as well (e.g. falsely and without good evidence thinking that you are a racist), but, in having such thoughts and feelings, I am not wronging you.
(ii) Contrast this idea with that of appropriateness in resentment (of agents for the performance of actions) being a function of one or more of: (i) the action being a wronging of you, (ii) the action being morally wrong, (iii) the action being such that I’m morally required not to do it. I’m asserting an opposite sort of order of constitutive explanation. Of course, we say things like “You wronged me, of course I resent you!” and, perhaps more typically, “I resent what you did to me because what you did was wrong!” I’ll claim that the ‘because’ in these ways of putting matters does not reflect the relevant constitutive type of explanatory relationship.
(iii) For example, plausibly, it is wrong, but not a wronging of a person, to do something that undermines conditions of justice in society, to defile natural beauty, to destroy a great work of art that you own.
(iv) A world in which our responsibility-type reactive attitudes are different in the right ways is a world in which there are wrongings of persons, but no actions are morally wrong.
(v) This is meant to be rough and schematic: there might be better ways to characterize (and label) the two categories (maybe I have some details wrong or have omitted some elements) and there are probably important sub-categories to articulate. The important question is whether I have, in broad outline, correctly identified the “normative stimulus conditions” for resenting someone for something that they have done.
(vi) It is not part of my task here to provide an account of appropriate “sympathetic” resentment on behalf of another (a friend, a fetus, an advanced dementia patient, a household pet, etc.) or on behalf of social institutions (one’s nation, one’s city, a sympathetic foreign country, etc.).
(vii) Plausibly, the ‘sufficiently’ in ‘sufficiently harm you’ is a “blank spot” in a schematic standard, to be filled-in by reference to distinct normative elements and circumstantial considerations in specific social contexts (and maybe there are other “blank spots” to identify in the standard when it is more precisely and fully spelled-out). If this is right then, though there might well be universal (but fully specified) standards for appropriate resentment, there might well also be many actions that are wrongings only relative to specific social circumstances or context (the “blank spots” filled-in in different ways for saliently different social circumstances or context). For example, perhaps though all insults, all maliciously harming actions and all gravely harmful negligent actions are resentment-worthy, negligent actions with somewhat lower levels of harm or costs imposed are resentment-worthy only relative to certain normative and circumstantial social contexts (intuitively, the less there is at stake for the agent, the lower the levels of harm below the gravely harmful are also resentment-worthy). Potentially, then, we have a partially-schematic universal standard that yields only pretty general and thin universal filled-in standards but an array of more-detailed filled-in standards corresponding to different normative and circumstantial social contexts. It could be that, though there is a universal core to an action counting as a wronging of a person, whether a given action counts as a wronging of a person might often depend on relevant normative and circumstantial elements in a social context. This same structure might be passed along to corresponding appropriate agent/perp guilt and the agent/perp being required not to wrong the patient/victim.
(viii) Though the main assumptions of this line of argument are, I think, obvious enough, they nonetheless might be worth spelling out explicitly: (i) actions that are resentment-worthy from the victim position or role are guilt-worthy from the perp position or role, (ii) some emotional attitudes, including guilt, include tendencies to express the attitude in a type of action and, because of this, the appropriateness of the attitude “transfers” to the type of action, (iii) if a response is uniquely appropriate that suffices for its being normatively required. (Regarding [iii], it should be kept in mind that being required not to wrong others is only solely relative to associated guilt-attitude appropriateness. It is not clear that this is the same as being morally required not to wrong others. Pragmatic or consequentialist-style morally-salient outcomes are relevant to what the best option is and hence to what one is morally required to do. Such factors might defeat the action being morally required.)
(ix) A world in which our responsibility-type reactive attitudes are different in the right ways is a world in which there are wrongings of persons, such actions are morally wrong, but we are not morally required not to wrong others (or not do what is otherwise morally wrong).
Policy of Truth 
I guess I have a worry, expressed when we discussed Scanlon, that accounts like this–cashing out wrongness in terms of what it’s appropriate to resent–either end up being circular or non-explanatory.
One issue is how strong “appropriate” is. Suppose you wrong me. Does this entail that I may resent you, or that I must? “Appropriate” straddles those two things.
Your first big question is: when is it appropriate to resent a person for performing an action?
Your answer involves four disjuncts. I find the second disjunct of disjunct (i) puzzling:
This is worded as though the indifference was doing the work, but it’s really the harm that is. There’s no strong causal connection between being indifferent to someone per se, and harming them. But it is wrong to be indifferent to the harm you cause someone, past a certain threshold. If so, why not just rely on harm and dispense with reliance on resentment? Wrongness is constituted by malicious or indifferent causation-of-harm, whether or not it’s resented.
The appeal to resentment just seems like a fifth wheel. Most people resent it when they’re harmed, but some don’t. There may be something amiss about those that don’t, but doesn’t seem all that relevant to an analysis of wrongness.
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That is helpful. Thanks!
(1) My view is that an action being a wronging is like a joke being funny: it is constituted by the item having the relevant first-order descriptive features and these features being the features that make some particular response in attitude appropriate. Your suggestion is that we identify an action being a wronging with an action simply having the first-order, descriptive features – and so, indeed, appropriateness-standards for resentment drop out of the picture (this, though the simplest and perhaps most intuitive alternative to my analysis, is something I neglected to list out). How to decide between these two? One answer is that an action being a wronging is relevantly similar to a joke being funny and the familiar fitting-attitudes, second-order property story is the right story regarding jokes being funny, people being admirable, etc. Another answer is that we should want an explanation of why these as against those first-order features are what (in a sense) make an action a wronging. Why not the action being beneficial to the patient? (And why aren’t jokes funny if they are the equivalent of a monotone reading from an instruction manual?) Because the first-order descriptive properties get grouped or categorized (and you get a second-order property) by reference to the normative standard – as the familiar fitting-attitudes, second-order property story specifies.
(2) As far as what those first-order, descriptive properties are, in the sort of case you are concerned with (negligent harming), I think that both the behaviorial harming and the indifferent motivation do the work they do together (individually necessary, jointly sufficient conditions perhaps). However, with theorists like Strawson, I would give the indifference (and the malice) – the bad quality of will – a kind of pride of place, reflected both in appropriate resentment of folks just for having the relevant negative sorts of thoughts and feelings about one and in the “insult” category of wronging (the harm drops out here and the action is simply expressive of ill or indifferent motivation). In any case, what would be appropriately responded to with resentment (of action, of someone doing something to one) includes both a quality of will condition and a (related) quality of behavior condition. (On my approach, appealing to how resentment functions and which functional standards are normative, as well as just appealing to our intuitions about what wronging is, can help us answer these questions.)
(3) Appropriateness is like correctness. There does not have to be only one correct response, though there might be. So it being appropriate to exhibit A does not entail that one is required to exhibit A. But I don’t think being permitted (not being required not to) is right. Offhand, I’d say this: appropriateness in exhibiting A, like correctness in exhibiting A, divides options into two categories, exhibiting A and not exhibiting A, with the first decisively favored against the second. If that is right, then, if one’s options are simply exhibiting A or not, then it seems that one is required to exhibit A. And this only-two-options condition seems to hold for appropriateness in attitude response in most or all cases. So, maybe with some exceptions in special cases, when it is appropriate to resent, one is required to resent.
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“My view is that an action being a wronging is like a joke being funny: it is constituted by the item having the relevant first-order descriptive features and these features being the features that make some particular response in attitude appropriate.”
This may be a bit of a cheap shot, but isn’t this to explain the obscure by the obscure? We don’t really have a convincing account of what makes jokes funny, so I don’t think invoking jokes can really illuminate wrongness.
At any rate, what makes jokes funny is at least partly relative to culture and language. But wrongness isn’t supposed to be relative in that way (unless what you’re seeking is a relativistic account of them). If so, there seems a mismatch between that example and what you’re trying to do.
I don’t really want fitting attitudes to literally drop out of the picture. I just think that invoking them the way you do gets the explanatory priorities backwards.
“(And why aren’t jokes funny if they are the equivalent of a monotone reading from an instruction manual?)”
Another cheap shot: What about Steven Wright? He’s funny, at least sometimes.
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I would be surprised if being amusement-worthy did not turn out to have pretty much the same structure as being resentment-worthy: a schematic universal core (with blank spots for relevant threshold properties and maybe some other stuff), yielding a few universal and many circumstance or larger-normative-context relative truths. Maybe with amusement-worthiness, there is less to the universal and more to the context-relative (it is probably easier to see universal elements to something being scary or fear-worthy). Watch out: once you let in a couple of fitting-attitudes accounts of these kinds of properties, they start making sense all over the place!
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In the right context, my boiler (or features of it) is funny… I wrote that as counterfactual, but it is not. My boiler is fucking hilarious! Special context.
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I tried to like your comment, but for some reason, I can’t seem to like comments on my own blog, so I rarely bother. Life is frustrating enough without having to fight with WordPress. {Resentment boils.}
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Here’s an objection to an important aspect of my view as stated. Suppose I intentionally stomp on your foot, but do so because I believe with adequate justification but falsely, that Dr. Evil will torture me and my loved ones unless I stomp on your foot. So I’m stomping on your foot without malice or indifference (I might be indifferent in a certain way if my beliefs about Dr. Evil were unjustified, hence the justified belief in the case). Plausibly, I’m wronging you. This is because there is no Dr. Evil and so, in fact, my actions impose too much harm on you relative to what might be gained on my end (or something like this). The wronging here, then, is a function of certain facts, not my take on them and the impact that this has on the quality of other-regard that my action expresses. But you would not appropriately resent me. This is because what I justifiably believe excuses me by undermining any lack of other-regard that might otherwise be expressed by the stomping. In this way, we can generate a counter-example to my view that wronging is a function of appropriateness-standards for resenting.
I think this point about wronging is right (and cuts against what I had in mind in my post). But I’m not sure it is right that it would be inappropriate for you to resent me. I think it would be appropriate for you to resent me for failing to meet an objective or fact-relative standard (as a matter of fact, my action harms you too much for whatever positive things it might provide me), but not for being a jerk (and expressing this through the right sort of action). So perhaps the standard for appropriate resentment of action is a bit different from what I initially indicated. Something like this: it is appropriate to resent not only violation or insult that essentially expresses malice or indifference, but also actions that are violations or insults independently of the motivation (or broader mindset) that rationalizes them. Call the first resentment (of action) “in the subjective mode” and the second resentment (of action) “in the objective mode.”
So: you would still appropriately resent me, but in the objective mode, not the subjective mode; counter-example countered. Perhaps the objective mode is less intense or personal than the subjective mode, making it easy, when faced with it and with the subjective mode in mind, to miss it (there’s my “error theory”). The excuse (my justified but false beliefs about Dr. Evil) would then make resentment in the subjective mode inappropriate. Wronging, then, might still be a function of appropriate resentment. It is just that, in some or all cases, the relevant resentment is resentment in the objective mode.
(I’m not sure this is right, but it might be. However, it is worth keeping in mind that, even setting aside the account of wronging in terms of appropriate resentment, these considerations bear on what the standards for appropriate resentment (and indignation and guilt) are. If there is strong intuitive (and perhaps functional, theoretical) backing for resentment taking either of these two kinds of objects, then we need something of a “disjunctive” standard for appropriate resentment of action (a broader account of appropriate resentment would include resenting someone for having certain negative thoughts and feeling about one; pretty obviously, such resentment would be subjective-mode resentment).)
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