You idiot

Imagine that Einstein falls for a scam, losing a week’s salary, and his wife Mileva says: “You idiot!” This seems like blame for an epistemic failure rather than a moral one. Is there such a thing as epistemic blame, and if so, what is it? Cameron Boult’s book Epistemic Blame develops a conception of epistemic blame as a kind of relationship modification. Some critics think this conception cannot distinguish blaming from excusing. I argue that the concern about excuses is an instance of a much broader problem: how to distinguish blame from excusing, forgiving, impersonal responses, and non-blaming ways of holding accountable. Relationship-centered views of all kinds of blame tend to define blame too broadly, folding in many non-blaming reactions. Taking “You idiot” as a paradigm case can help us articulate what kind of response can count as distinctively epistemic blame: a response that focuses on the blamed person as a locus of fault.