Sebastian Jantsch
University Mannheim/ Goethe-University Frankfurt
Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2024) defends a radical detachment between the prescriptive (rightness of acts or beliefs) and the hypological (praise and blame), arguing that both are grounded in the success-conduciveness of dispositions assessed within a situation-relative space of feasible alternative dispositions. This yields a symmetrical framework in which agents can be blameworthy for right actions and praiseworthy for wrong actions.
I argue that her framework is more plausibly combined with a systematic asymmetry between praise and blame. I accept her account of blame, on which an agent is blameworthy to the extent that their disposition performs poorly relative to feasible alternatives under variation in relevant circumstances. But I propose a different conception of praise.
I follow Lasonen-Aarnio in taking praise to involve creditable success at least in cases of right action, and I accept her explanationist idea that creditable success requires an appropriate explanatory dependence between success and the agent’s manifested dispositions. However, I argue that this dependence is not a matter of occupying a generally success-conducive position within the space of feasible alternatives. Instead, praise requires that the agent’s sensitivity to the right-making features of the situation plays a non-redundant explanatory role in the actual success of the action. What matters is not merely that the agent instantiates a disposition that tends to produce success across relevant alternatives, but that this sensitivity figures in the explanation of why the action is successful in the actual case.
I argue that this success-dependent explanatory structure is constitutive of praise, and therefore cannot be instantiated in cases where success is absent. A principled consequence is that while agents may be blameworthy for right actions, there are no cases of praiseworthy wrongdoing—although agents may still be praiseworthy for their dispositions or character.
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SOPhiA 2026 