Many theorists of responsibility take for granted that to be a responsible agent is to be an apt target of responses like blame and praise. But what do these responses consist in, precisely? And do they really belong together, as symmetrical counterparts of each other? While there has been a lot of philosophical work on the nature of blame over the past 15 years—yielding multiple conflicting theories—there has been very little on the nature of praise until very recently. And indeed, those who have done some investigation of praise—including both philosophers and psychologists—have come away thinking that it is quite different than blame, and that the two are in fact not symmetrical counterparts at all.

In this book, I investigate the complicated nature of blame and praise—teasing out their many varieties while defending a general symmetry between them—and then I provide a thoroughgoing normative grounding for all types of blame and praise, one that does not appeal in any fashion to desert or the metaphysics of free will. The many original interdisciplinary contributions in the book include: a new functionalist theory of our entire interpersonal blame and praise system; the revelation of a heretofore unrecognized kind of blame; a discussion of how the case of narcissism tells an important story about the symmetrical structure of the blame/praise system; an investigation into the blame/praise emotions and their aptness conditions; an exploration into the key differences between other-blame and self-blame; and an argument drawing from experimental economics for why desert is unnecessary to render apt the hurtful ways in which we occasionally blame one another.