Moral development and the ethics of blame

When we praise or blame someone for what they did, we are usually responding to their character: this was a generous act, that was a cruel one, and the person who did it is generous or cruel accordingly. But our characters have histories. We are shaped by upbringing, circumstance, and a great deal of luck about which influences reached us and when.

My research in moral psychology looks at what happens to our judgments of praise and blame once we take that developmental history into account. When people learn how someone came to have the dispositions they act on — a hard childhood, a formative mentor, an environment that rewarded exactly the wrong things — their assessments often shift. The interesting question is whether those shifts are tracking something real about responsibility, or whether they are a bias we should correct for.

This connects to my work in epistemology through a shared theme: the reach of factors outside an agent’s control into normative standings — moral or epistemic — that we typically pin on the agent’s inner character.