Assholes (15 page)

What should we say here? Troubling implications loom. Could an asshole simply be making a lot of these innocent mistakes and so never or rarely be an inappropriate object of blame?
Could his entrenched sense of entitlement
itself
make him incapable of seeing that he owes it to others to wait in line? Could he be 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. But
none 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

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 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 decade
before.
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 person
more 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 life should flow his way. We thus blame the asshole for his situational errors
and
for the basic error that defines his very way of being.

Of course, the occasional asshole does change his way of being. Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge eventually undergoes a
dramatic moral transformation.
¹⁹
It is an interesting question whether assholes ever wholly transform, or whether being an asshole is more like a being an alcoholic: one is always gratefully in recovery and never finally cured. Nor would an eleventh-hour “transformation,” as death approaches, clearly qualify; it may be better to say that the dying man is understandably just not being himself. I would guess the transformation can be and sometimes is total. This is not, however, why assholes are properly blamed: assholes aren’t to blame because they can potentially recover. They are to blame simply because they think like an asshole, whether or not they will, or even can, ever change.