Jules Salomone-Sehr (The Queen's College, University of Oxford): 'Delayed Blame for Grave Wrongs'
Abstract: You might have suffered grave wrongs at the hands of others, wrongs that, however serious, it’s nonetheless taken you a long time to reckon with. Perhaps you were a kid then, thus not able to grasp what was done to you. Perhaps these wrongs were of a sexual nature, and as is the case with many sexual violence survivors, time was needed for you to understand what happened. Or perhaps what you suffered was not, back then, widely recognized as a wrong, and it took a recent collective moral awakening for you to realize your status as a victim of a wrong. Now that you have reckoned with the significance of that wrong, should you hold the wrongdoer responsible? In this presentation, I argue that whether to engage in delayed blame is likely to be a hard decision, one that’s underdetermined by the reasons available to the victim. In doing so, I advance our understanding of a facet of the ethics of blame that has received little attention—the ethics of delayed blame for grave wrongs.
