Smith's mother case

            While I think Smith’s moral protest account is interesting, I do not think that Smith’s objections to Scanlon’s account are sound.  For example, I fail to see how Smith’s case of the mother whose son has been convicted of a terrible crime makes trouble for Scanlon’s account, nor do I see how a moral protest account would explain this case better.

            It is true that the mother can modify her relationship with the son in ways that are not typically associated with blame, such as showing more affection or changing her expectation of the son’s becoming a great artist.  However, I do not think that these modifications are the ones with which Scanlon is concerned when he talks about blame.  In Scanlon’s case of the son who repeatedly damages his father’s car (173), the father continues to lend the son the car because he still feels he should support his son.  But the father may still modify his relationship in other ways such that he no longer trusts the son with the car even while continuing to lend him the car.  Similarly, the mother may continue to show love, but the mother’s acknowledgement of her son’s wrongdoing is surely accompanied by a change in her understanding of her son as a person and what kind of expectations she should have of him.  This seems to me like the parent is blaming the child.  This would not the same type of blame we see in other cases in which blame is imbued with negative reactive attitudes, but it seems to be a form of blame nonetheless.  When putting myself in the son’s shoes, this type of blame also seems very forceful – no longer having the same type of relationship I had with my parents before my crime and knowing that they now see me in a different light would feel horrible, even if my parents continued to show me love and affection.

            It is also difficult to see how Smith’s moral protest account would explain this case.  While I do think that the mother does modify her relationship with the child and that this modification is properly called blame, I do not think that it can really be said that the mother protests the child’s actions.  So if Smith thinks that the mother does blame the child, her moral protest account does not show how the mother blames the child.  If Smith thinks that the mother actually does not blame the child, I would say that she is wrong.  I think that the change that occurs in the mother is a unique species of blame, and I do not see what else Smith could call the sort of change that occurs in the mother’s relationship with the child.

           Although this case does point out that the type of blame that exists in parent-child cases is of a different kind, I do not think that it is incompatible with Scanlon’s account, and it is hard to see how a moral protest account would be better.