Grounding Racial Blame: Blood Money Benefits and White Guilt

I explain that Blood Money Benefits, which are psychic or material benefits one gains at the expense of another, present one way in which collectives come to be blameworthy. This collective blameworthiness, in turn, grounds collective blame as an actual moral phenomenon as opposed to, say, a category mistake or mere cultural practice. I give said explanation namely by responding to four objections to collective racial blameworthiness. They are as follows: I) Racial categories cannot be fleshed out in such a way as to underpin collective blameworthiness II) Collectives cannot have intentions or minds and cannot, therefore, harm others as a collective, and thus cannot be blameworthy III) Individuals are the proper building block of moral responsibility, not collectives - so collectives cannot be blameworthy and IV) Holding collectives blameworthy violates Rawls’ separateness of persons. In section 3 I handle objections I and II and develop my account of collective blameworthiness around Blood Money Benefits and how they obligate an agent to act for the sake of racial justice, both as an individual and within one’s collective, lest one become blameworthy. In section 4 I respond to objections III and IV as well as the additional concern that shame might be more suitable to collective responsibility than blame especially when high risk and high effort would be necessary to act. In section 5 I consider how we can reconceptualize collective guilt, particularly white guilt. As it stands now, white guilt is seen as a “moral taint” from a racial injustice committed in the past. However, we should shift our perception to see it as internalized blameworthiness resulting from one’s lack of action. I focus on collective racial blame in this piece, albeit, I suspect much of what I have to say here can be applied to different aspects of one’s identity (e.g. gender, class).