The Praise-Blame Asymmetry

In our activities of value-evaluation, the phenomenon so-called praise-blame asymmetry is rather widespread and confusing. This paper intends to use three strategies to explain this phenomenon, i.e. strategies concerning intuition, experiment and theory.The praise-blame asymmetry is based on our intuition, as well as accord with it. So my first strategy of analysis appeals to intuition. As a kind of superficial mechanism, various factors have caused the asymmetry between praise and blame. These factors may have qualitative effects singly and quantitative influence compositely. However, due to the coarse and fallibility of intuition, these factors and their interactions are to a large extent underdetermined, so the mechanism composed by them are not sufficient in the interpretation of the asymmetrical phenomenon.By controlled experiments, we can largely avoid the inaccuracy of intuitional analyses. In recent years’experimental study of the praise-blame asymmetry, the ’Knobe Effect’has been quite famous and influential. This experiment shows that people are inclined to think that the good side effects caused by an indifferent man’s behavior are unintentional, while hold that the bad side effects caused by the same man’s behavior are intentional. Frank Hindriks uses the conception of ’Normative Reasons’ to explain this:the evaluation-makers concern with the normative reasons that the doers should follow, and when these reasons are violated or neglected, good behaviors will not be praised, while bad behavior still will be blamed. This approach has been refuted by Alessandro Lanterl’s theory of "Prescient Moral Character", which indicates that the praise-blame asymmetry still exists even if the moral character of an action was unknown when the doer makes his judgment and so the normative reasons were canceled. Thus, Knobe’s experiments and their variants have in fact increased divergences, rather than helped to solve the problem.Therefore, we try taking the third and the axiological strategy, which intends to illustrate the asymmetrical phenomenon using the organic holism and the fitting attitude theory of value. According to this approach, appropriate praises and blames deserve a second-order praise for that they increase the world’s positive value (or reduce the world’s negative value), which eventually leads to value-explosion; in order to evade this result, we need a concept of ’Value Singularity’, which means that there exists a value-point, when an attitude is appropriate, we will no longer give it a second-order praise. Specifically, the value singularity makes the second-order praise to become a neutral attitude. Although’Value Singularity’to a sense is a theoretical demanding, it apparently fits well with our common intuition.