Blaming the dead

Jefferson, Anneli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1870-1361 2024. Blaming the dead. European Journal of Philosophy 10.1111/ejop.12947

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Abstract

Should moral blame stop at the grave? We often blame the dead for the bad things they did while alive. But blaming the dead poses a prima facie challenge to accounts which take our blaming practices to aim at communicating moral disapproval to wrongdoers or at improving their moral agency. If these kinds of aims are made definitional for blame, blaming the dead becomes impossible. But even on accounts which say that paradigmatically, blame is a form of moral engagement which aims to effect changes in the wrongdoer, blaming the dead may seem unjustified, pointless or even irrational. In this paper, I explain how blaming the dead can be made sense of and justified. However, not all cases of blaming the dead fit this explanation, because blaming the dead is not a homogenous practice.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0966-8373
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 March 2024
Date of Acceptance:	18 February 2024
Last Modified:	07 Mar 2024 10:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/166954

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