Immunity from Blame: Excused v. Justified
In the comments thread on my last post, Clayton mentioned the distinction between being immune from blame because one was justified and being immune from blame because one is excused for some reason. This distinction comes up in Wedgwood’s ‘Explaining Internalism’ as well, and I think Wedgwood uses it in a bad way. He is attacking the ’standard’ internalist view of rationality. On the standard view, it is the case that one is rational only if one is ‘cognitively blameless’. I don’t really know what the ‘cognitively’ is supposed to be doing, but I am in broad agreement that being rational has some link with being blameless. But Wedgewood attacks this feature by pointing out that there are two ways of being blameless–viz. being excused and being justified. Thus, he concludes that being blameless doesn’t have a tight connection with being rational.
I don’t feel the pull of this argument. Certainly when one is excused from blame one is immune from blame. But this is obviously different from being justified and thus being immune from blame. When one is justified, there isn’t some overriding consideration counting against one’s action/belief. But when one is excused there is some overriding consideration counting against one’s action/belief. It’s just that they have some type of excuse for failing to conform with what there was overriding reason to do.
Consider an analogy with having an equal amount of evidence to believe some proposition p. You could have an equal amount of evidence to believe p than to not believe p if you had no evidence either way. This is analogous to being justified. You can be immune from blame if there is no reason to blame you. You could also have an equal amount of evidence if you have two pieces of evidence that balance each other out. This is analogous to being excused. There are reasons to blame you, they are just neutralized by other considerations. Clearly these two are different. There are reasons to treat you as irrational when you are excused for blame. You are irrational, but you aren’t deserving of blame because of some countervailing consideration. This is not so when you are justified. And this is precisely what one is looking for when one looks at the connection between being blameless and being rational. Namely, that when you are fully rational, there is no reason to rationally blame you. This is simply not the case in the case of being excused from blame.
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