Blame vs Constructive Criticism
lmn comments on Chaos and Consequentialism:
Of course, if looked at the kind of responsibility that is compatible with blame, you’d notice it’s a lot more in line with the common sense notion of the term.
Well, yes, and I think that’s mostly unfortunate. The model of interaction in which people seek to blame each other seems worse — that is, less effective for meeting the needs and achieving the goals of those involved — than the one where constructive criticism is employed.
The blame model seems something like this. There are strong social norms which reliably distinguish good actions from bad actions, in a way which almost everyone involved can agree on. These norms are assumed to be understood. When someone violates these norms, the appropriate response is some form of social punishment, ranging from mild reprimand to deciding that they’re a bad person and ostracizing them.
The constructive criticism model, on the other hand, assumes that there are some common group goals and norms, but different individuals may have different individual goals and preferences, and these might not be fully known, and the group norms might not be fully understood by everyone. When someone does something you don’t like, it could be because they don’t know about your preferences, they don’t know about a group norm, they don’t understand the situation as well as you and so fail to see a consequence of an action which you see, etc. Since we assume that people do have somewhat common goals, we don’t have to enforce norm violations with punishment — by default, we assume people already care about each other enough that they would have respected each other’s wishes in an ideal situation. Perhaps they made a mistake because they lacked a skill (which is where the constructive feedback comes in), or didn’t understand the situation, your preferences, or the existing norms. Or, perhaps, they have an overriding reason for doing what they did. Social punishment (even the mild social punishment associated with most cases of blame) often doesn’t fix anything and may make things worse by escalating the conflict or creating hard feelings.
If you discuss the problem and find that they didn’t misunderstand or lack a necessary skill or have an overriding reason that you can agree with, and aren’t interested in doing differently in the future, then perhaps you don’t have enough commonality in your goals to interact. This is still different from the blame model, where sufficiently bad violations mark someone as a “bad person” to be avoided. You may still wish them the best; you simply don’t expect fruitful interactions with them.
That being said, there are cases where you might really judge someone to be a “bad person” in the more common sense, or where you really do want to impose social costs on some actions. Sociopaths exist, and (if they’re not a pro-social sociopath may need to be truly avoided and outed as a “bad person” (although pro-social psychopaths also exist; being a sociopath doesn’t automatically make you a bad person). However, it seems to me as if most people have overactive bad-person detectors in this regard, which harm other interactions. I don’t think this is because easily-tripped bad-person detectors are on the optimal setting given the high cost of failing to detect sociopaths. I think it’s because the concept of blame conflates the very different concepts involved in cheater-detection/sociopath-detection and more common situations.
