Why disregarding hypocritical blame is appropriate

The topic of standing to blame has recently received a lot of attention. Until now, however, it has focused mainly on the blamer's perspective, investigating what it means to say of blamers that they lose standing to blame and why it is that they lose this standing under specified conditions. The present paper focuses on the perspective of the blamees and tries to explain why they are allowed to disregard standingless, more specifically hypocritical, blame. According to the solution proposed by the paper, while hypocritical blamers present themselves as caring about justice or about the moral or material good of the blamees—and they themselves half-believe this presentation—their real motivation in blaming is less respectable. It is this problematic motivation that explains why blamees are permitted to disregard hypocritical blame. Ill-motivated blame is often unreliable, and readiness to even consider it often involves a compromise on the self-respect of the blamees.