Blame Avoidance

Abstract

Murphy reviews some of the previous literature on blame. He argues that blame is frequently a knee-jerk reaction, rather than the calculated process than is suggested by some models. He posits that different people will come to differing judgments on how blameable someone is because they rank the importance of the components of blame differently. The rest of the chapter shows how blame avoidance is performed at the Leveson Inquiry, either by a rejection of responsibility suggesting that blame is hypocritical questioning the intentionality of an action on how predictable it was that the action would have negative consequences. Some witnesses also seek to show that an action which is bad for some is good for others and thus potentially less blameworthy.