Free Assholes by Aaron James Page B

decision, much in the way one may be blameworthy for drunk driving and the consequent death of a child because one decided to get behind the wheel instead of calling a cab.
    There is something to this, which we will explore in a moment. Yet to say that this is the
only
way an asshole can be responsible for his moral blind spots would be to unduly limit when we can blame him. The asshole must then have at some point made a previous decision that explains how he could now be morally oblivious much of the time. But the appropriateness of resenting the guy who has just swerved through three lanes of traffic does not seem to depend on the assumption that he decided to be a guy of that kind in a clear-eyed moment of choice an hour or year or decadebefore. 18 He needn’t even have negligently overlooked how his life would affect others in any grand decision about what kind of person to be. As we suggested above, many assholes are overgrown teenagers who never faced up to the morality of disregarding others in any general and conscious way. (They certainly won’t have chosen a life under the description “life of disregarding others.” They might have said to themselves, “Fuck them!,” which comes to much the same thing.) Still, these assholes are rightly blamed, even if they can’t now see their reasons not to treat others as equals, and even if they never made a decision to become morally oblivious in this way.
    Is this unfair? Is it unfair to blame the asshole for failing to see things he perhaps cannot see, as a result of being a kind of person he may have never decided to become? No, this isn’t unfair at all: we treat non-assholes on the same terms. Everyone has the occasional moral lapse. There is something we just didn’t see (I should have said “thank you.” I should have been more careful with a friend’s confidences). Perhaps one
couldn’t
have seen without hindsight. Still, one is rightly blamed. The friend with compromised confidences will be miffed, and one will naturally apologize for the mistake. That is true even when one has generally made a huge effort at conscientiousness, being on the lookout for important things one knows one doesn’t yet know. Such larger efforts will
mitigate
blame in a given lapse, perhaps to an extent that no one will make a big deal of it. Perhaps the lapse doesn’t seem especially reflective of the personmore generally, and friends will blow it off by saying that “everyone makes mistakes.” Still, we are indeed blameworthy for the lapse, only to a lesser extent. That is why we apologize.
    Compare the jerk or the schmuck. We blame him for his particular failures of seeing, and we take them to be
exacerbated
by his more general failure to make an effort at improving his moral sight. In that sense, what might otherwise be a normal lapse
does
reflect the person’s jerky or schmucky nature. He may even be incorrigible in this. He may not defend this lackadaisical attitude and may even apologize for it—before being just as carefree over the next day or week. But it is not that we blame him for his particular failures of seeing
only
because we blame him for his more general way of being. We simply blame him for both.
    Like the jerk or schmuck, the asshole fails to recognize the particular moral claims of others
and
he makes no general effort at coming to better see what people are owed. The asshole is to blame for his particular failures of seeing no less than we are to blame for our particular moral lapses. As with the jerk and the schmuck, the asshole’s particular errors are exacerbated and possibly explained by his general failure to make any effort at improving his moral sight. In the case of the asshole, however, the general failure reflects his entrenched
resistance
to moral learning. It reflects his (perhaps inchoate) sense that
he doesn’t have to make those sorts of efforts
. Given his special standing, it is only natural that the special advantages of social