Zimmerman and Blame - by Alex Frey

While Zimmerman's position on moral luck does an admirable job in reconciling many of the flaws found in other pieces on this topic, there are various holes in this paper (many of which the author concedes, saying that it was not his intent to discuss certain topics within this essay in the first place) that do make it seem somewhat disjointed. One such area is his comparison of the noncollaborator (as opposed to the Nazi collaborator) to those like the unsuccessful driver (as opposed to the successful one who "succeeds" in hitting a pedestrian). The trouble here is Zimmerman's seeming need to apply some sort of *blame* in all such cases, regardless of the success of the agent. He finds it difficult to locate some reason to blame the noncollaborator, who hasn't actually done anything.

This problem, however, could be solved if he were actually to take a page from Richards' book. While we may be able to rightfully apply blame to people in certain situations, it is not necessary, in a morally negative evaluation of someone, to apply some sort of blame. A much more pragmatic and functional way to deal with a person who has the personal propensity for performing morally bad actions, given the correct circumstances, would be to simply say that there is something morally flawed with their character. Such a person, regardless of how constitutively bad their character may be, are those that we would hope to have seek or perform some sort of character-correcting activity before they find themselves in a situation where they would be apt to do something blameworthy. Thus, thus solution to Zimmerman's problem of blame in such situations is to realize there is some other way to judge (passively or actively) a person without having to actually see them as blameworthy.