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The notions of "blame", "excuse", and "forgiveness" are strange to me now. I want to say that understanding is key, and everything else follows from understanding. If I understand a person's action, I should act, according to my values, regarding that person. Consistency to one's values is also key. Any emotions, feelings, etc. should either be recognized in my values or shouldn't interfere. If I am to praise or elevate someone, I should praise or elevate that person, and the same if I should rebuke or punish someone. Any extraneous desires that would prevent me from doing what I should do are to be contained. I must understand my values, by which I will understand the world, and how I should act within that world is then determined.

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I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.

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(I haven't presently read Wolf's essay on account of it being paywalled. However, I think I get the gist of it, and Scanlon's view too, from the abstract and some commentary.)

I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".

If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.

Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.

I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.

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Oh wow, thanks for engaging.

You might really appreciate reading some of Bishop Butler's sermons, which are not pay walled. When I briefly studied Moral Psychology, I was taught that Butler is sort of the under-appreciated bedrock of Moral Psychology. His perspective is on the surface religious, which is perhaps why he is not considered among Locke and Hobbes as a foundational thinker of the Enlightenment. And yet his methods are just as rational and philosophical. He tries to construct a taxonomy of what you call "emotional-logical beliefs."

https://anglicanhistory.org/butler/rolls/08.html

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Thank you for engaging. I'm having a good time talking with you.

Maybe I ought to read older texts more often...I do not fully understand what Butler means by terms such as "plain"! But that was a good read.

I do wonder which instances Butler imagines "sudden anger" to be useful in. I would think it rare that immediate action without consideration is good, but where it is good, I do not think the actor is acting in anger so much as he is acting in a justified instinct. It is probably more correct that the actor acts in anger when the action is bad. To be precise, I am talking about the actor's intention, whereas his action may turn out to be good or bad in that split-second. I don't believe that people should be judged on what occurs but only what they tried to do, while keeping in mind that "ideal intention" and "actual intention" are distinct (as good intentions pave the road to Hell!).

I do like how Butler described "deliberate anger" and its role in addressing wrongs committed unto people. I had to ponder what I myself meant when I brought up emotional-logic, because I have not understood it so well that I never confuse myself, but I suppose that is what Butler is describing: logic that addresses emotions, or allows emotions. In fact, if logic is not subservient to "cold-bloodedness", emotions are presumably a major component of the logic we perform every day, at some level or another.

I'm not religious, nor atheist or the like. I consider myself agnostic, but I think to be a proper agnostic one has to work to earn the title. Extending the notion of agnosticism to its logical conclusion, I find that we should all be agnostic in all matters: never professing knowledge to anything that we are ignorant of (which ultimately must be everything, because who knows anything nontrivial?). That's an extreme position, and would require a dense discussion, but it can be moderated to suit the circumstances. It suffices to say that, on momentous matters such as God, we must be ignorant. This doesn't preclude positing axioms, accepting them on faith, and performing logic, however. Indeed, we all require faith in some way or another. Anyways, I've found that freeing myself of the expectation of believing a certain way has helped me better appreciate all manner of religious, spiritual, mystic, etc. schools of thoughts. God is the greatest of the unknowable things, so any way we discuss Him shines light on some mode of life.