 Blame is easily abused and misused, so a complete understanding of the phenomenon will require looking not just at what blame is but also when it’s appropriate. (We use ‘appropriate’ as a broad normative term to cover all sorts of evaluations, such as whether any particular instance of blame is fitting, warranted, permissible, required, effective, and so on.) As Miranda Fricker puts it: “Like most things in life, our practice of blame is susceptible to the vices of being done from the wrong sort of motive, in the wrong degree, in the wrong way, or with the wrong sort of object” (Fricker 2016: 168). This list provides a nice initial taxonomy of ways that blame can go awry: an ethics of blame will need to take into consideration (a) facts about the blamer, (b) facts about the blaming interaction itself, and (c) facts about the person being blamed. (We’re lumping “in the wrong degree” together with “in the wrong way”, since disproportionality will be one way in which the blaming interaction can be problematic.) Keep in mind, too, that how you answer the question of what blame is will influence these ethical questions, since the propriety conditions of a judgment are plausibly distinct from the propriety conditions of a rebuke. Because we are not here endorsing a particular theory of blame, our characterization of the norms in question will operate at a level of abstraction that floats free of substantive commitments concerning the nature of blame. (It’s also worth noting that the conditions on appropriate blame outlined below may perhaps be legitimately ignored if the stakes are high enough and the likely consequences of blame so valuable. In other words, there may be cases where it is appropriate to blame for the ‘wrong’ sort of reason. We set these cases aside for the purposes of our discussion.)