The role of blame and forgiveness in the work of morality

What role do those basic human responses to wrongdoing — blaming and forgiving — play in moral-social life? Our practices of blaming and forgiving are thereby represented as playing a significant role in making shared morality through dialogical exchange, and moral subjects are pictured as moral protagonists — moral actors whose interactions on the moral stage perform, now according to a socially familiar script, now straying from it to improvise something new, the patterns of shared moral understandings that contribute to a collective moral life. My picture of things is rather that practices of blaming and forgiving give more or less contingent form to deep-seated core human modes of interpersonal moral response that are inevitably performed in what Cora Diamond memorably describes as “the realistic spirit”. This is a powerful constraint on the “grammar” of possible wrongdoing that I take from Raimond Gaita, which encourages the idea that, when we examine our practices of blaming and forgiving, we are examining two practices essential to the social generation of shared moral outlooks. By pruning and cultivating the core human practices of blaming and forgiving, the goal is to make them better serve the more distal role of generating shared moral understandings.