Blame

Suppose you confide in a close friend. You tell her your deepest secret and add that you trust her not to tell anyone else. But a week later, it seems that everyone knows: your friend must have blurted it out.

Now the question is: do you blame her?

The answer seems easy at first, but maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye. What if you found out that she only passed on your secret to someone who threatened to hurt her if she didn’t? What if she passed it on unconsciously, talking in her sleep? Or what if she wrote about it in her diary and then someone read it when she wasn’t looking? In those situations, you’d still feel upset, of course, but you could hardly blame her.

Then there are grey areas. Perhaps she had too much to drink and it slipped out, or perhaps she just forgot it was supposed to be a secret, or perhaps someone tricked her by pretending they already knew. Would it be right to blame your friend then? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, there are two sides to the argument.

If you believe in fate, it can be difficult ever to blame anyone for anything. After all, if everything that happens is determined by fortune or God or the stars, then your friend had no choice what to do. She was always going to betray your confidence, and that’s that.

But you don’t have to be a fatalist to run into problems. Philosophers have been arguing about these questions for centuries. We want to be able to hold people responsible for what they do, to praise them for good actions and blame them for bad ones. It seems simple, but the more you think about it, the more complicated it gets.

Think about this: perhaps your friend can’t keep a secret because she just isn’t a trustworthy person. But how is that her fault? She didn’t choose to be untrustworthy. Her personality stems from forces outside her control. Every choice she makes is governed by her genes, her upbringing and her environment. We wouldn’t blame her if someone shoved a gun in her face and ordered her to tell, so can we really blame her for acting on an even more irresistible influence—the force of her own personality?

And the same goes for all of us, of course. Our personalities are shaped by factors that can be traced back to way before we were even born.

These kinds of worries go right to the heart of what it means to be human. Our relationships are infused with concepts like trust and responsibility, praise and blame, freedom and choice… but we hardly ever stop to examine these concepts. And when we do, they can start to seem not just inappropriate, but pointless.

Perhaps blame is always inappropriate. Perhaps some people are just reliable and some aren’t. Can it really be as straightforward as that?

 

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