Time and date
Monday, 1 June 2026, 16:30 – 18:15
Venue
In-person: Lecture Theatre, The H B Allen Centre, 25 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN
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Series title | Moral Pressures: Bending Time, Shaping Wills
Lecture 1: Minimalist Blame: From Normative Function to Core Definition
There are many practices of blaming, and probably as many concepts of blame. This basic disunity in our subject matter makes trouble for conceptual analysis, and inspires a morally functionalist approach that asks what form blaming takes when it performs a morally positive role in our lives. My answer to this question is Communicative Blame—a kind of blame that aims to exert suasive moral and social pressures to bear in two-way dialogue with the wrongdoer in order to bring them to an appropriate appreciation of the moral significance of what they’ve done, with a view to establishing a shared moral understanding of it. This normative functional ideal, however, raises anew the question of what blame is, though now in a specific and manageable form: What is communicated in Communicative Blame? My answer to this question is 'minimalist blame’ which is defined, and its various explanatory and theoretical advantages considered.
Speaker
Miranda Fricker is Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU, and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. She is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work is mainly in Moral Philosophy and Social Epistemology, with current projects on blame and forgiveness, and on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams.
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