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“We Accept You, One of Us”: Praise, Blame, and Group Management

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Abstract

Praise and blame can function to manage membership in informal social groups. We can be praised into groups, like if you remark on my good taste in music and invite me to have lunch with you. We can be blamed out of groups, like if I’m rude to your spouse and you stop inviting me to parties. These can move in the opposite direction, with praise removing you from a group and blame drawing you in. If we attend to the way praise and blame shape our social world, we can revisit some debates about the ethics of praise and blame with new eyes.
Accepted: 22 November 2024
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024
Thanks to Derk Pereboom, Dave Shoemaker, Julia Markovits, Mercedes Corredor, Kathryn Pendoley,
Libby Southgate, Gus Turyn, Geo Weiss, and Hannah Winckler-Olick. Thanks to two anonymous referees
at this journal for their helpful and generous comments. Thanks also to audiences at the Cornell WiP series,
and the 2024 Eastern APA.
Timothy M. Kwiatek
kwiatek@psu.edu
1 Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
“We Accept You, One of Us”: Praise, Blame, and Group
Management
Timothy M.Kwiatek1
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-024-10477-6
Abstract
Praise and blame can function to manage membership in informal social groups. We can
be praised into groups, like if you remark on my good taste in music and invite me to
have lunch with you. We can be blamed out of groups, like if I’m rude to your spouse
and you stop inviting me to parties. These can move in the opposite direction, with praise
removing you from a group and blame drawing you in. If we attend to the way praise
and blame shape our social world, we can revisit some debates about the ethics of praise
and blame with new eyes.
Keywords Social groups · Praise · Blame · Ethics of praise and blame
Billie Joe Armstrong is a punk. He is a member of an informal community of punks. One
day, his band Green Day releases an album on a major label. This album was a huge com-
mercial success. It received praise from professional music critics. Simultaneously the
members of the band were blamed by other punks for releasing this album as they did. It was
seen as a betrayal by their community. Then Billie Joe Armstrong is not a punk anymore.
Roisin McNearny is an Irish Revolutionary in the IRA. While on trial for planting a car
bomb in London, she collaborates with the British authorities, obviously against the norms
of her group. This comes out later in the trial when she receives a more lenient sentence.
Knowing she snitched, her compatriots hum a funeral march in unison as she is led out of
the courtroom. Then she is not in the IRA anymore.1
1 Example from Keefe (2019).
1 3
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