Culpable Ignorance and Moral Responsibility: A Reply to FitzPatrick

Abstract

In the course of “Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge,” William FitzPatrick raises and dismisses a worry about moral responsibility focusing on normative ignorance. FitzPatrick argues that the account of culpable ignorance developed by Gideon Rosen in his “Skepticism about Moral Responsibility” is too demanding and urges us to adopt a less stringent account, according to which ignorance can be culpable whether or not it features a knowing act or omission in its causal history. In this brief reply, I will argue that FitzPatrick asks the right question in developing his account of culpable ignorance: he asks what agents could reasonably have been expected to do to remedy their normative ignorance. But he comes up with the wrong answer: there is (in many cases, at least) nothing agents can reasonably be expected to have done to this end. There is nothing they can reasonably have been expected to do because there was nothing it was rational for them to do to remedy their normative ignorance, and it is not reasonable to blame people for failing to act irrationally. Let me begin by briefly setting out Rosen’s argument. Rosen argues (with most other participants in the moral responsibility debate) that nonculpable normative ignorance excuses. But, he urges, agents can be culpably ignorant only if their ignorance traces back to an action with regard to which they are ignorant neither of relevant facts nor of norms. In that case, blameworthiness must always be for, or traceable back to,