The Social Nature of it All

Scanlon brings many points to our attention when discussing the core relativity of blameworthiness in regards to actions done and the changes in the relationships of the people involved. What I agree with most, it seems, is the point he brings up about the fact that blameworthiness is basically a moral questioning/re-evaluation of the relationship between an instigator and a victim. Before anything, the instigator will form intent to be the driving force behind an action. He/she will be looking to get something out of what they plan on doing to the future victim. Once the deed is done, the victim will have time to conjure up some reasoning as to whether the perpetrator did something worthy of blame or not (possibly praiseworthiness). No matter the end result, there will be a sort of moral judgment pertaining to the relationship between the two people.

What will happen is that the relationship will move whichever way on a scale of, let's call it, "friendliness". With an increase in friendliness comes things like closeness, priority of possible relational activities, openness, etc., and a decrease would bring a lowering of levels of these qualities. I think that with blame, the action will often result in a negative re-evaluation of the friendliness. Also, praiseworthiness will also play a role in that it will do the opposite: the action will result in a positive re-evaluation. This way shows the commonality between blameworthiness and praiseworthiness because both affect the relationship in some way along the same scale of friendliness. Along with this end result, the friendliness factor can change again with punishment/reward, with both essentially bringing the relationship level back to where it was before.

So, without the people to be able to throw the "moral ball" back and forth, there would not be such constant re-alignments of qualities of relationships. The point and purpose of blameworthiness, and also praiseworthiness, is to fix the people, based off of their observed behaviors, and to adjust them in a way that would guarantee that they would act in ways that would better suit the instigator's idea for a better moral future.