 Even though many have resisted thinking of blame as a form of grading, a number of contemporary accounts of blame retain the core idea in Smart’s (and Watson’s) account that blame is a kind of evaluative judgment. But what sort of evaluative judgment will do? Many theorists have identified blame with judgments that essentially implicate how the blamed agent’s moral or practical self was involved in the production of action. This allows cognitive theories to explain the special force of blame. After all, as T.M. Scanlon puts it, “given that most people care about” their moral selves (and others’ opinions about their moral selves), judgments that implicate these aspects of a person are not “mere descriptions” (Scanlon 1986: 170). Michael Zimmerman (1988) and Ishtiyaque Haji (1998) make this point more vividly when they argue that to blame someone is to judge that in virtue of their attitudes, actions, or character, they have a stain on their moral self or a mark against their moral ledger. As Zimmerman puts it, when we blame someone, we judge