Method
Scapegoating
Overview
Scapegoating, sometimes called playing the blame game, is the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. Scapegoating may be conducted by individuals against individuals (e.g., "he did it, not me!"), individuals against groups (e.g., "I couldn't see anything because of all the tall people"), groups against individuals (e.g., "He was the reason our team didn't win"), and groups against groups.
A scapegoat may be an adult, child, sibling, employee, or peer, or it may be an ethnic, political or religious group, or a country. A whipping boy, identified patient, or fall guy are forms of scapegoat.
Scapegoating is distinct from buck passing. While scapegoating mainly centers around blame, buck passing revolves around passing responsibility between individuals. Instead of being a negatively cornered target, an individual involved in buck passing actively partakes in the act of shifting responsibility and may be able to deflect blame.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
What are called duties to ourselves are not socially obligatory, unless circumstances render them at the same time duties to others. The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or self-development; and for none of these is any one accountable to his fellow-creatures, because for none of them is it for the good of mankind that he be held accountable to them.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
States what Scapegoating is.
They who are differently affected we must necessarily call "unsound." So that nothing is better than what is usual in Latin, to say that they who are run away with by their lust or anger have quitted the command over themselves; though anger includes lust, for anger is defined to be the lust of revenge. They, then, who are said not to be masters of themselves, are said to be so because they are not under the…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth
States what Scapegoating is.
So understood, the deterring emotion is one which has grown out of experiences of utility, using that word in its ethical sense; and if we ask why this dreaded anger is called forth from others, we shall habitually find that it is because the forbidden act entails pain somewhere--is negatived by utility. On passing from domestic injunctions to injunctions current in the tribe, we see no less clearly how these…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
States what Scapegoating is.
Philosophers who discussed Scapegoating
Related ideas
- Jesus
- René Girard
- Ernest Becker
- Psychological projection
- Nazism
- Philosophical anthropology
- Salvation in Christianity
- Carl Jung
- Unconscious mind
- Kenneth Burke
Place in the tradition
Part of Dramatism.