Free Assholes by Aaron James Page A

blameless for being an asshole
precisely because he is an asshole
?
    If that did follow, it would be so odd that we should assume something has gone awry. A good strategy for getting out of a muddle is to carefully review one’s assumptions. To do that, we might ask what is wrong with simply taking a hard line: it makes no difference, we may say, whether or not the asshole has a specific capacity to see what others are particularly owed. We have sufficient grounds for blaming the asshole for cutting in line in the mere fact that he does so while being motivated by certain moral views; he thinks like an asshole, with whatever
general
moral capacities come along with that sort of moral point of view. As for why he is special when he cuts in line, he mainly makes something up. Simply having his faulty moral perspective is
itself enough
to render him a proper object of blame, even if he can’t see the moral line-cutting situation in a different way.
    To see how this might be right, consider more carefully what
blaming
the asshole might include. It might of course involve openly addressing him with a specific communicative message, such as “Hey, asshole, there’s a line here. Get to the back of it, asshole.” But there are other ways of blaming. You could avert your eyes when he approaches with a smile. You could refuse to shake his hand. You might withdraw a posture of goodwill that would have otherwise made you hope that things go well for him. You might even resent him, or well up with indignation, but without trying to send him a message of disapproval. You might be resentful or indignant without trying to get him to understand or accept your rightful claims or equal moral status. All these reactions seem to count as ways of blaming him. Butnone of them depends upon the assumption that he isn’t, in a particular case, simply morally blind. You could avoid him, withdraw goodwill, or resent him all the same. 16
    If that seems promising, we might then question why
accountability
should take center stage. Suppose Watson is quite correct that holding someone to account involves an implicit demand that the addressed person recognize one’s status and rightful claims. We are suggesting that one can still rightly blame the asshole, in any number of ways, without trying to hold him accountable. We can even explain why holding the asshole to account should seem to matter: it is a way of seeking recognition, a way of trying to get him to see that we or others are owed certain things. But, as we will see in chapter 5 , the quest for recognition needn’t take only that form. Even if the asshole will not or even cannot listen, a minor act of protest can be a way of recognizing oneself by affirming one’s claim to better treatment in a way that any reasonable onlooker would agree with. One might simply swear “asshole!” under one’s breath or in mere thought, for much the same reason one swears out loud while alone in a car: the swearing is itself a way of taking a stand. We can blame and seek recognition, then, whether or not we try to hold him accountable. 17
BLAMING INCORRIGIBLES
    Our basic proposal, then, is that the asshole is properly blamed simply because he thinks like an asshole—that is, because he has certain mistaken moral views about what he is entitled to. He may even be incapable of seeing, in a particular situation, that he has good and sufficient reason to abide by the particular expectations that normally govern moral equals. Even with such moral blind spots, he is rightly blamed for those very errors in judgment.
    We should now consider a different way of resisting this conclusion. One may say that, even if the asshole is incapable of seeing in some particular case, his failure may and often will
trace back
to his earlier decisions about how seriously to take the claims of others. The asshole is responsible for his particular failure of seeing, in this view, because it reflects that
earlier
morally culpable