Victim Blaming, Justified Risks, and Imperfect Victims

Abstract

Victim blaming is a harmful but quite pervasive phenomenon occurring in contemporary societies. When people engage in victim blaming, they shift the burden of the harmful act from the perpetrators and place it upon the victims instead. This article explores how the discourse on moral responsibility can help make sense of victim blaming. The distinction between moral responsibility and blameworthiness can shed light on the contradictory intuitions that people experience when they hear about a victim who took what seems to be an unnecessary risk. The focus of this article is to explain these intuitions and respond to them by suggesting that victims not only are not blameworthy when they take risks that challenge specific norms but instead are praiseworthy. Finally, whether such risks are justified when the agents taking them have people dependent upon them is discussed. Attending to structural injustice can point out why some choices seem more justified than others. Victims who take justified risks are praiseworthy, even when their efforts do not produce significant results. This article aims to address the absence of victim blaming in discussions of moral responsibility and to bring philosophical attention to this issue. The goal is to disentangle the phenomenon of victim blaming while supporting victims and vulnerable groups.

Keywords

• victim blaming
• moral responsibility
• risk
• epistemic blame