Assigning blame (philosophical explorations inspired by the main list)

[caliburncy]

Hi everybody,

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"Someday someone's going to have to explain to me the virtue of a 
proportional response." - Andrew Shepherd, "The American President"
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Here's where I get unwaveringly idealistic.  Please bear with me.  :-)

It is worth noting that I do not claim to consistently practice what 
I preach--I admit to severe fallibility, and only hope that this does 
not immediately undermine my point.  I also do not claim to possess 
Absolute Truth (or whatever you wish to call it) and so you are all, 
of course, at liberty to disagree with me with as much fervency as 
you wish.  Therefore, every sentence here could easily be predicated 
with an IMHO since we are discussing abstract concepts, but I will 
work under the assumption that you would find the repetitive 
inclusions of said IMHOs to be as annoying to read as I would find 
them to write, and hence I have left them out entirely.

Now then . . .

Amy makes some interesting points, but ones which, I think, look at 
these scenarios differently than I do.

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "lupinesque" <aiz24 at h...> wrote:
> But the question of who is *more* at fault is still valid, and IMO, 
> potentially important in resolving our conflict.

Why is it potentially important in resolving the conflict?  This is 
an honest question--I seriously can't figure when it truly would be.  
As best as I can see, regardless of the actions on either side (and 
hence the "proportion" of blame, if you believe in such a thing), the 
response to end the conflict is identical: seek reconciliation by 
forgiving the other person and asking forgiveness for anything you 
did wrong.  I don't understand how the question of who is more at 
fault changes that.

You see, I often wonder if the reason we have this notion of 
comparative morality, or specifically in this case comparative blame, 
is primarily out of an effort to rationalize our own actions.  We 
want to acknowledge that one person is more at fault so that we can 
say that what we did is "not as bad", because what they did 
was "worse".  (There is an opposite situation here that Amy, if I 
know her, is probably just dying to point out.  Don't worry, I will 
come to this later.)

This rationalization is, I think, nonsense, and I think we all 
realize it.  It is nonsense because we know it doesn't truly make 
what we did okay.  It is nonsense because it puts us in a position to 
judge when we possess no such authority, and certainly no such wisdom.

Too often we try to understand others through empathy.  Empathy is a 
wonderful tool, but it has its limits.  At some point in our lives, 
we will come across a situation in which empathy is not sufficient to 
understand the actions of someone else.  No matter what their past 
experiences are, we think, there is no way that we could ever 
understand how it led them to do something horrific as *that*.  At 
this point, empathy has failed us.  So what do we have left?

Compassion.  The fact of the matter is that understanding someone 
else through their experiences is impossible--those experiences will 
*never* be ours.  So we use empathy only as a means of goading our 
unwilling selves into compassion, but compassion is still the end 
goal, and even when empathy fails, compassion must still be striven 
for.

So, with that in mind, we come to the situation that Amy, I suspect, 
would have wanted to point out above.  Sometimes comparative blame, 
might lead us to realize that *we* are more at fault, and hence give 
us extra motivation to reconcile.  This is true.  The reason I have 
misgivings about it, however, is that while it will help in that 
particular situation, it will hinder us overall.  It lends to a 
worldview where only the people who are, by our system of comparative 
blame, more at fault are responsible for initiating reconciliation.  
It then gives us an out in all those circumstances where we do not 
wish to forgive, by ultimately leading to the same aformentioned 
rationalization.

It should be noted, at this point, that forgiveness is not synonymous 
with condoning an act.  In Amy's hypothetical scenario "b", Amy would 
*not* be condoning her friend's act by forgiving her.  In Buddhist 
philosophy, for example, it is held that forgiveness is ultimately an 
internal, not external, act: we forgive for our own sake as much as 
for the sake of the other person.  I think this is consistent with 
other religions, such as my own of Christianity, and equally 
consistent with morality outside of religion entirely.  Forgiveness 
is simply an acknowledgement that love is unconditional.

Unconditional is the key part (and the hardest to deal with).  Amy 
would not be able to ever reconcile with her friend in scenario "b" 
without this lack of conditions, because, well, unless Amy's 
conditions are pretty loose and accepting, her friend has almost 
certainly violated them.

It is my opinion that Amy, in scenario "b", would never be healed 
until she gives up this comparative notion of blame.  Amy is 
perfectly correct to say that her response was "beautific" by 
comparison.  But the point is *not* to compare, because all such 
comparisons are moot.  The actions on both sides are not relative to 
each other at all.  They can only be explored individually.

Does that make any sense or am I just rambling interminably?  I 
already know I'm preaching and I apologize, really I do, but that's 
honestly the only way I know how to talk about this kind of thing.  
I'm sorry if anyone finds this overwhelmingly didactic--that was not 
my intention, though I fear it is the result regardless.  Please 
understand that, despite appearances to the contrary, my goal is 
really simply to *discuss*, not to teach.

And in that spirit therefore, all questions, comments, 
counterarguments, etc. are welcome, as always.

-Luke