David Amrock

It’s worth emphasizing that an individual can’t be the object of social critique. As much as possible, critical discussion of the actions and words of individuals should be limited to the actions and the words (more to the point, the consequences of those actions and words), and not be treated as merely a referendum on the morality of the person. People are always limited in their moral perspective and in their exercise of free will – by any number of things, but including social influence – and that’s a condition that should be recognized as a matter of public morality. All wrongdoing has a social context and should be considered in that context.

This all needs to be said because American morality fixates so hopelessly on the individual. American morality embeds a person’s bad actions into its conception of that person, acts as though a person freely chooses his own moral disposition, as though a person, having committed harm, now embodies harm, as though a person chooses to “be bad” rather than to do what he pleases. Blame, in this context, is ostensibly a means to social improvement, equivalent to rooting out the malefactors in society, the bad cogs, so that society can run morally, or run smoothly.

And blame is undertaken quickly, and forcefully, and accompanied by punishment: public scorn and rejection, loss of social status, loss of livelihood, imprisonment, the lasting label of criminality. Blame is undertaken with umbrage, but not with rue: people are not, generally, doleful as they relegate other people into shame. Quite the contrary, blame is exultatory. I assume however much this has to do with the perceived righteousness of blame as a social duty, it has as much to do with the anxiety of the blamer who knows she could be the blamed tomorrow.

Because for ourselves, and anyone we find sympathetic, we can see that the harshness of American blame is undeserved. The harshness of the “consequences” – socially imposed consequences, that is – that threaten a person for their wrongdoing mean that for any person society doesn’t wish these consequences on – for anyone with adequate social sympathy – wrongdoing must be ignored or absolved. And thus society has laid two paths to the abnegation of its own responsibility for harm: individual blame for the less favored, and individual absolution for the more.

As a matter of course, blame and punishment will always affect the less advantaged more harshly. But that inequality itself is not the nature of the injustice. Were blame meted on everyone equally, the powerful and the powerless all suffering, things would not be better. Contrary to mainstream American thought, there is no social duty to punish, no glory in casting blame, no shortcut to the social prevention of harm.