Credit and Blame

CHAPTER 1

CREDIT, BLAME, AND SOCIAL LIFE

In Dostoevsky's chilling novel Crime and Punishment, poverty-stricken and ailing ex-student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov figures first as antihero, then finally as hero. At the book's very start, Raskolnikov descends the stairs from his shabby room to the St. Petersburg street. As he reflects on the crime he is contemplating, he mutters to himself:

Hm . . . yes . . . a man holds the fate of the world in his two hands, and yet, simply because he is afraid, he just lets things drift--that is a truism . . . I wonder what men are most afraid of . . . Any new departure, and especially a new word--that is what they fear most of all . . . But I am talking too much. That's why I don't act, because I am always talking. Or perhaps I talk so much just because I can't act.1
Raskolnikov soon summons up the courage--or the frenzy--to commit a viciously violent act. With a stolen axe, he murders the aged pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, cuts a greasy purse from around the old woman's neck, fills his pockets with pawned objects from a chest underneath her bed, misses thousands of rubles in a nearby chest of drawers, and slaughters the old woman's long-suffering sister Lizaveta Ivanovna when Lizaveta arrives unexpectedly.

Raskolnikov then flees in panic down the stairs, almost gets caught on the way out, rushes to his miserable room, lies down feverish and exhausted, gets up to go out with his loot, hides it under a big stone in a faraway courtyard, and never retrieves his ill-gotten gains from their hiding place. Most of the novel revolves around changes in relations between Raskolnikov and other people as the imperial police close their net around him. Before the book's sentimental finale, Raskolnikov remains incapable of returning the love and admiration friends and family lavish on him despite his surly treatment of them.

With his brutal violence, Raskolnikov hopes confusedly to rise above credit and blame. Yet at his trial witnesses testify to a series of extraordinary charitable and even heroic acts Raskolnikov performed while at the university: supporting the old, ailing father of a dead classmate, rescuing children from a burning room, and more. Those deeds, his voluntary confession, and his debilitating illness win him a short prison sentence of eight years. But Raskolnikov takes no credit for charity and heroism. He identifies himself with heroes like Napoleon. They--he thinks--took their good deeds for granted. They did not hesitate to destroy for the larger good of humanity.

Later, in a Siberian prison for his crime, Raskolnikov reflects again:

My conscience is easy. Of course, an illegal action has been committed; of course, the letter of the law has been broken and blood has been spilt; well, take my head to satisfy the letter of the law . . . and let that be all! Of course, if that were the case, many benefactors of mankind who did not inherit power but seized it for themselves, should have been punished at their very first steps. But the first steps of those men were successfully carried out, and therefore they were right, while mine failed, which means I had no right to permit myself that step.2
Although he is paying the penalty for his crime--hard labor in Siberia--Raskolnikov still refuses to accept the blame.

In his book's closing scenes, however, Dostoevsky breaks the somber spell. The love of Sonya, the former prostitute who has accompanied Raskolnikov to Siberia, redeems the antihero and starts him toward a new life. At the very end, Dostoevsky paints in the parallel with Christ's raising Lazarus from the dead. Life, for Raskolnikov, finally entails earning credit and taking blame. Perhaps the world's Napoleons can escape the binding of human relations, Dostoevsky tells us. The rest of us, Dostoevsky implies, have no choice but to take responsibility for our actions, good or bad.

The lesson cuts both ways: social life involves taking or giving credit and blame, but assignment of credit and blame also involves relations to other people. Nihilists, saints, and utilitarians may imagine worlds in which relations to specific other humans don't matter so long as accounts come out right with the cosmos, with the gods, or with humanity at large. They are rejecting their own humanity. Raskolnikov's very effort to escape credit and blame for his actions made the point. In so doing, he was denying his obligations to specific other people, including his mother, his sister, his companion Sonya, and his faithful friend Dmitri Prokofych Razumikhin. For the rest of us ordinary mortals, however, getting relations with specific other people right matters fundamentally.

Following that principle, this book examines how people assign credit and blame for things that go right or wrong. It shows that crediting and blaming are fundamentally social acts. They are doubly social. First, people living with others do not settle for Raskolnikov's indifference to responsibility. Instead, they insist that when things go right or wrong someone caused them, and should take responsibility for the consequences. They don't settle for attributing the consequences to luck or fate.

Second, people spend great effort in assigning that responsibility to themselves and others. They complain noisily when other people deny due credit or blame. How people give credit and blame to others (or, for that matter, demand credit for themselves) depends at first on any previously existing relations between the creditor and the credited, the blamer and the blamed. But the very acts of crediting and blaming then define or redefine relations between the parties. This book shows how.

Think of your own daily life. Simply listen to other people's conversations at lunch, during coffee breaks, or on the bus. We all discuss repeatedly who deserves credit and who is to blame, especially when we don't think someone (including ourselves) has received just deserts. Even when the people involved think justice has been served, they put serious effort into allocating credit and blame: they write award citations, praise children who do well, pronounce sentences on convicted criminals, cluck their tongues over the latest scandal.

Stories about credit and blame don't simply spark the passing interest of stories about newly discovered dinosaurs, the latest movie star romance, or antique automobiles seen on the street. They call up empathy. They resonate because they raise issues in our own lives, whether or not we have any direct connection with the people involved. As we will see, in war, peace, politics, economics, and everyday social life, people care greatly about the proper assignment of credit and blame. This book asks how people actually assign credit and blame.

THE SOCIAL LIVES OF CREDIT AND BLAME

The origins of the words "credit" and "blame" clearly communicate their social basis. Credit comes from the Latin credere, to trust or believe. The verb's past participle creditum meant a thing entrusted to someone else, including a loan. No credit could exist without a relation between the persons giving and receiving credit. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), still current meanings of credit include:

belief, credence, faith, trust
the attribute of being generally believed or credited
favorable estimation, good name, honor, reputation, repute
personal influence based on the confidence of others
honor or commendation bestowed on account of a particular action or personal quality
All except the first (which could consist simply of an individual's confidence in the earth's existence) strongly imply relations between givers and receivers of credit.

Blame comes from the Latin blasphemare, to revile or blaspheme. Blame only makes sense when some relation exists between the blamer and the blamed. (People do, of course, sometimes blame fate, their bad luck, evil spirits, the gods, or even themselves for their ill fortune. But even in these extreme cases they are talking about relationships between themselves and the originators of their misfortune.) Again the OED brings out the word's social basis: "the action of censuring; expression of disapprobation; imputation of demerit on account of a fault or blemish; reproof; censure; reprehension." A blames B, whether B deserves it or not.

Every act of crediting or blaming, however implicitly, invokes some standard of justice: she got (or failed to get) what she deserved. That standard applies to the object of credit or blame. If you or I assign credit or blame to someone else, furthermore, we necessarily refer to one justification or another.3 Here we detect a difference between credit and blame: credit calls up a justification that associates giver and receiver in the same moral milieu, while blame separates two moral settings from each other. As I engage in "the action of censuring," I justify my own distinction from the culprit's world.

Persons who give or receive credit and blame care greatly about justice and its miscarriages. We observers, however, need not worry so much about whether they have acted correctly. This book does not seek general principles of right and wrong action. Here, we ask instead how people assign credit and blame, however appropriately they do so by our personal standards.

We could think of that as primarily a cognitive and emotional question: What mental and visceral stirrings lead an individual to conclude that she or someone else deserves credit or blame for something that has happened? That is how Charles Darwin set up the problem.

Darwin's third great book, The Descent of Man, focused on cognitive and emotional bases of morality. Darwin laid out four likely causes for the human moral sense: (1) instinctive sympathy of all higher animals for members of their own social groups, (2) memories of past actions and motives that reinforced the satisfaction from making enduring social instincts prevail over short-term desires, (3) reinforcement of the first two by language and communication with other group members, and (4) habit including "obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community."4

Although Darwin did not single out credit and blame directly, he did conclude that

If any desire or instinct, leading to an action opposed to the good of others, still appears to a man, when recalled to mind, as strong as, or stronger than, his social instinct, he will feel no keen regret at having followed it; but he will be conscious that if his conduct were known to his fellows, it would meet with their disapprobation; and few are so destitute of sympathy as not to feel discomfort when this is realised.5
Psychologists and neuroscientists do not often use the word "instinct" these days. Now that they can simultaneously run experiments and watch the brain at work, however, they are confirming Darwin's general argument: Sociable moral principles evolved in the higher animals, and depend at least partly on relations to other group members, and on punishment proportionate to offenses.6 To some extent, furthermore, almost all human beings prefer to behave in ways that get approval from their fellows.7 Most of us reject Raskolnikov as our model.

In thinking about credit and blame, we therefore face an interesting choice. We could concentrate on the deep individual psychological processes, inborn or learned, that go on as people assign credit and blame. Or we could focus on how people deal with each other as they assign credit or blame. This book takes the second tack. While giving due respect to built-in moral propensities, it emphasizes a fascinating trio of related questions: What social processes produce the singling out of this individual or that as worthy of credit or blame? Having singled out someone as worthy of credit or blame, what do people do about it? How does the assignment of credit and blame affect the lives of the people involved?

All of us have enough personal experience with credit and blame to check general explanations against our own observations. My only firing from a job, for example, took place in a Chicago suburb, Elmhurst, during World War II. As a young teenager, I earned precious pocket money in a neighborhood grocery store after school and on weekends by unloading incoming shipments, stocking shelves, sweeping floors, and helping with home deliveries.

One day a bigger, stronger stock boy and I were unpacking cartons of breakfast cereal and stacking them. We (selfserving memory says "he") invented the labor-saving method of pulling cereal boxes from the carton and throwing them to each other across about six feet of distance, shouting and laughing as we tossed boxes of Wheaties and corn flakes. The store's co-owner walked into the middle of our jamboree. He fired me, but not my partner, who got off with a warning. Although the boss probably had other reasons for getting rid of me, I felt an acute sense of injustice, not to mention the blame I faced when I reported the news to my parents, who were barely scraping by on my father's uncertain income. I haven't written this book to avenge that wrong, forgotten for more than sixty years. But it illustrates the personal impact of blame.

Credit and blame operate on a much larger and weightier scale than a teenager's work history. During the 1980s, Latin American regimes that had thrown off dictatorships began establishing truth commissions that inquired into the abduction and killing of those dictatorships' enemies as well as the seizure and adoption of the enemies' children. The practice of truth commissions then generalized, most famously in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. During the twenty years beginning in 1982, more than twenty major truth commissions formed throughout the world. In 2001, a Ford Foundation backed International Center for Transitional Justice started to provide guidance for the setting up of truth commissions.8 Box 1.1 lists the commissions established from 1982 to 2002. In all these cases, either a change of regime, a peace settlement to a civil war, or both allowed current national leaders to look back at the harm done by previous holders of power. They attempted reconciliation through confession. In the case of East Timor,

A regulation issued on July 13, 2001 by the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor established a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation with a three part mandate: (1) to investigate human rights violations committed there between April 1974 and October 1999, resulting in the death of an estimated 200,000 East Timorese; (2) to facilitate reconciliation and integration of minor criminal offenders who submit confessions, through local "Community Reconciliation Processes"; and (3) to recommend further measures to prevent future abuses and address the needs of victims. After a months-long public nomination and selection process, seven national commissioners were sworn in on January 21, 2002 in Dilli.9
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BOX 1.1
Truth Commissions, 1982-2002 (dates of establishment in parenthesis)


Bolivia (1982): National Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances

Argentina (1983): National Commission on the Disappeared

Uruguay (1985): Commission for the Investigation of the Situation of the Disappeared and Related Events, plus three other commissions, 1985-2000

Zimbabwe (1985): Commission of Inquiry, results still unpublished

Philippines (1986): Presidential Committee on Human Rights

Chad (1990): Crimes and Misappropriations Committed by Ex-President Habr�, His Accomplices and/or Accessories

Chile (1991): National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation

Nepal (1991): Commission of Inquiry to Find the Disappeared Persons

El Salvador (1992): Commission on the Truth for El Salvador

Germany (1992): Study Commission for the Assessment of History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany

Guatemala (1994): Historical Clarification Commission

Haiti (1994): National Truth and Justice Commission

Sri Lanka (1994): Commissions of Inquiry into the Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons

Uganda (1994): Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights

South Africa (1995): Commission of Truth and Reconciliation

Ecuador (1996): Truth and Justice Commission

Nigeria (1999): Commission to Investigate Human Rights Abuses

Sierra Leone (1999): Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Peru (2000): Truth and Reconciliation Commission

South Korea (2000): Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths

East Timor (2001): Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation

Ghana (2001): National Reconciliation Commission

Panama (2001): Truth Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations

Serbia and Montenegro (2002): Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Source: USIP 2005

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Such truth commissions usually devoted less effort to establishing the truth--what really happened--than to organizing confession and reconciliation. But they certainly worked with both blame and credit. They provided an opportunity for oppressors to confess their wrongs, something like Raskolnikov's final acceptance of his past under Sonya's influence. They also allowed new national leaders to take and give credit for earlier suffering and present magnanimity.

Not all national leaders took that path. Mozambique's President Joaquim Chissano, for example, rejected it.10 Still, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and twenty other countries found that they could work their way toward peace by welding together credit and blame in truth commissions. If the point was to make a definitive transition to democracy, most of the commissions failed. Only a minority of the regimes listed in Box 1.1 (notably Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Germany, South Africa, and South Korea) have so far moved securely into democratic territory. But in all cases, public airing of the dark past assigned blame to the perpetrators while giving due credit to the victims, survivors, and successors. It drew a line between worthy and unworthy citizens. It then gave repentant perpetrators a chance to cross the line into rehabilitation.

JUDGING CREDIT AND BLAME

In firing an unsatisfactory worker, setting up a truth commission, and a thousand other assignments of credit or blame, people are making surprisingly similar judgments. They are making judgments of outcome, agency, competence, and responsibility. Truth commissions and other judges identify bad things that happened, look for their agents, decide whether the agents had the competence to produce the bad outcomes, and ask further whether the agents bear the responsibility for those outcomes because they acted with knowledge of the likely consequences.

Assigning credit or blame to someone, then, means identifying that someone as the agent who caused some outcome, whether meritorious or deplorable. It means making someone an effective agent. The more serious the outcome of the agent's action, the greater the potential credit or blame. But assigning credit or blame also imputes responsibility to the agent: she didn't do it accidentally, unwittingly, or out of pure impulse. Instead she performed more or less deliberately with knowledge of the likely consequences. What's more, the agent must be competent, capable of deliberated action. We may scream at the toddler or dog that pulls a food-laden tablecloth from the table or thank our lucky stars that the toddler or dog set up a howl when a menacing stranger came through the door. But neither one gets blame or credit for a fully responsible act.11

Outcomes obviously vary in gravity. In the cosmic balance, a teenager's firing in the 1940s pales by comparison with the wrongs addressed by truth commissions. Think of it in terms of an act's impact on value. If an action has only a trivial impact on the value of assets and capabilities held by the people it affects, we estimate that value as close to 0. If, in contrast, whole lives are at stake, we estimate that value as high: close to 1, on a scale from 0 to 1. How much change in value the action produces measures its weight.

We must then distinguish between positive and negative changes in value: positive if an action enhances assets and capabilities, negative if the action diminishes assets and capabilities. Saving a dozen lives produces high positive value. Killing a dozen people--unless they happen to be enemy soldiers-- produces high negative value. Combined with agency, competence, and responsibility, an outcome's value (positive or negative) guides the assignment of credit and blame.

Another important qualification: responsibility does not necessarily equal cause. Your judgment, my judgment, and a medical specialist's judgment as to what actually caused a given hospital patient to die often turn out to be irrelevant for the assignment of blame. Cause-effect connections usually play only a secondary and contingent part in determination of responsibility. That determination typically emphasizes judgments of intent and competence. Even legal proceedings for adjudication of responsibility normally center not on exactly what caused a given outcome, but on what the average competent person (whether doctor, lawyer, engineer, or ordinary citizen) is supposed to know and do.

A time-honored legal doctrine defines the "reasonable person" as a standard for such judgments. Here is the definition from Black's Law Dictionary (7th edition):

A hypothetical person used as a legal standard, esp. to determine whether someone acted with negligence. The reasonable person acts sensibly, does things without serious delay, and takes proper but not excessive precautions--Also termed reasonable man; prudent person; ordinarily prudent person; reasonably prudent person.
The legal dictionary goes on to say that the reasonable person is not simply the average person but the prudent one.

It also defines reasonable care: "As a test of liability for negligence, the degree of care that a prudent and competent person engaged in the same line of business or endeavor would exercise under similar circumstances." In the case of medical malpractice, for example, testifying physicians speak mainly about the prevailing standards of practice in their field for the treatment of a given condition, not about exactly what caused the disability or death in question.12 Judge and jury must decide whether the medical personnel accused of malpractice followed widely accepted procedures.