Moral Ignorance Research Articles

Don’t know, don’t care?

My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is ignorant of the precise nature of what she cares about; one in which someone does not reflect on the significance of what she cares about in a particular set of circumstances, and one in which someone cares deeply about two morally significant considerations while being mistaken about their relative significance. I argue that these agents all clearly care at least “adequately” about everything morally significant, including the very considerations that in fact make their acts wrong. This creates theoretical room for a way of thinking about culpable moral ignorance that respects the key concerns of those in the voluntarist tradition who have held that moral ignorance is typically blameless, within an approach to thinking about moral responsibility according to which we are blameworthy for that which manifests poor quality of will; caring adequately does not require moral omniscience, but motivated moral ignorance and moral ignorance that reflects indifference to things that matter morally are still blameworthy. My thesis also suggests a fruitful change of direction for quality-of-will theorists: we should articulate the nature and structure of the standards for adequate caring, i.e. those that specify what it is to care “adequately”. I close by offering an initial proposal as to what these standards might look like and identifying four promising avenues for further research on this topic.

Moral and Factual Ignorance: a Quality of Will Parity

Within debates concerning responsibility for ignorance the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is often treated as crucial. Many prominent accounts hold that while factual ignorance routinely exculpates, moral ignorance never does so. The view that there is an in-principle distinction between moral and factual ignorance has been referred to as the “Asymmetry Thesis.” This view stands in opposition to the “Parity Thesis,” which holds that moral and factual ignorance are in-principle similar. The Parity Thesis has been closely aligned with volitionist accounts of moral responsibility, whereas the Asymmetry Thesis has been closely aligned with Quality of Will accounts. Two central questions are at work here: how ignorance excuses (when it does), and whether it excuses in the same way for both moral and factual ignorance. I will argue that these questions have often been confused in the present debate, and once we have distinguished more clearly between them, it seems that Quality of Will accounts are compatible with the Parity Thesis. And more generally: that the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is far less important in debates about responsibility for ignorance than it has often appeared.

Moral ignorance and the social nature of responsible agency

ABSTRACTIn this paper I sketch a socially situated account of responsible agency, the main tenet of which is that the powers that constitute responsible agency are themselves socially constituted. I explain in detail the constitution relation between responsibility-relevant powers and social context and provide detailed examples of how it is realized by focusing on what I call ‘expectations-generating social factors’ such as social practices, cultural scripts, social roles, socially available self-conceptions, and political and legal institutions. I then bring my account to bear on the debate about the exculpatory potential of moral ignorance. I show that a prominent position in this debate – the position that denies that moral ignorance exculpates – is grounded on an individualistic and acontextualist conception of moral capacities, moral cognition, and blameworthiness, and that this conception leads those philosophers who endorse it to make a number of questionable claims regarding the ability of ordinary agents to overcome their moral ignorance and the culpability they bear for the latter. I conclude by indicating how my socially situated account addresses the issue of moral ignorance.

The (In)Elasticity of Moral Ignorance

The (In)Elasticity of Moral Ignorance

Good Selves, True Selves: Moral Ignorance, Responsibility, and the Presumption of Goodness

Good Selves, True Selves: Moral Ignorance, Responsibility, and the Presumption of Goodness

No excuses for moral realism

Many believe that there is at least some asymmetry between the extent to which moral and non-moral ignorance excuse. I argue that the exculpatory force of moral ignorance—or lack thereof—poses a thus far overlooked challenge to moral realism. I show, firstly, that if there were any mind-independent moral truths, we would not expect there to be an asymmetry in exculpatory force between moral and ordinary ignorance at all. I then consider several attempts the realist might make to deny or accommodate this datum, and show why none of them work.

What's Special about Moral Ignorance?

AbstractAccording to an influential view by Elizabeth Harman, moral ignorance, as opposed to factual ignorance, never excuses one from blame. In defense of this view, Harman appeals to the following considerations: (i) that moral ignorance always implies a lack of good will, and (ii) that moral truth is always accessible. In this paper, I clearly distinguish these considerations, and present challenges to both. If my arguments are successful, sometimes moral ignorance excuses.

UNEXCUSED REASONABLE MISTAKES: CAN THE CASE FOR NOT EXCUSING MISTAKES OF LAW BE SUPPORTED BY THE CASE FOR NOT EXCUSING MISTAKES OF MORALITY?

ABSTRACTIn most common-law and civil-law jurisdictions, mistakes of law do not excuse. That is, the fact that one was ignorant of the content or requirements of some law does not excuse violations of that law. Many have argued that this doctrine is mistaken. In particular, many have argued that if an individual's ignorance or false belief is blameless, if she held the false belief reasonably, then she ought to be able to use that ignorance as an excuse for violating the law. It is much harder to find defenders of the doctrine, despite its prevalence. Pragmatic considerations are occasionally offered on its behalf, but these are generally not impressive. In this paper, I consider a more direct kind of justification for the doctrine, one that attempts to identify something more immediately normatively objectionable about being ignorant of the law. In particular, I consider an argument that suggests that legal ignorance is more like moral ignorance than like nonmoral ignorance and maintains that even nonculpable moral ignorance does not excuse.

Moral ignorance and blameworthiness

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers (people who, despite a normal background, behave in odious ways). All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances.

Cultural Dynamics, Moral Ignorance, and a Plausible Response to Immoral Acts

Cultural Dynamics, Moral Ignorance, and a Plausible Response to Immoral Acts

Non-culpable ignorance and HIV criminalisation

In this essay, I argue that any legal framework that addresses sexual transmission of HIV should be sensitive to the way that culpability can be mitigated by moral and factual...

The Case of Jojo and Our Pretheoretical Intuitions: An Externalist Interpretation

In their contribution to the Review of philosophy and psychology (19 March 2010), David Faraci and David Shoemaker object to Susan Wolf’s sane deep self view of moral responsibility, which is supposed to accord with our pretheoretical intuitions about deprived childhood victims better than the plain deep-self view. Wolf’s account hinges on the intuitiveness of a particular example, which asks us to consider JoJo, the son of an evil dictator of a small, undeveloped country who grows up to adopt his father’s sadistic values. Faraci and Shoemaker conduct a survey to test naive reasoners’ intuitions on this case. From the study results, they draw three general conclusions: (i) that Wolf’s view is false, (ii) that DSV is basically adequate, subject to the addition of a scalar dimension which measures degrees of responsibility, and (iii) that JoJo is partially excused by naive moral reasoners because he is seen as suffering from a rare and peculiar form of moral ignorance, “different in kind from the moral ignorance people usually experience” (p. 327). I dispute these conclusions and present an alternative interpretation of the study, which defends an externalist, Strawsonian account of moral responsibility, and I use this approach to show that JoJo’s circumstances are inherently extenuating (at least to a significant degree). Unlike Wolf’s view and DSV, my preferred account is capable of accommodating the fact that JoJo’s formative circumstances were the only factor that made a statistically significant difference to the subjects’ moral judgments. This is because it is the only view capable of according any degree of intrinsic relevance to such external factors.

The Idea of Philosophical Fieldwork: Global Justice, Moral Ignorance, and Intellectual Attitudes

This article is about the idea of philosophical fieldwork as a possible corrective to our current state of ignorance regarding the thoughts and views of distant others in the context of global normative theorising. By ‘philosophical fieldwork’ I mean a type of conceptual discovery — philosophical as non-empirical fieldwork. By ‘distant others’ I do not mean the ‘global poor’ but our academic peers who work within moral and political contexts distinct from ours and whom we tend not to consult in our global theorising: distant intellectually as much as geographically.

DOES MORAL IGNORANCE EXCULPATE?

AbstractNon‐moral ignorance can exculpate: if Anne spoons cyanide into Bill's coffee, but thinks she is spooning sugar, then Anne may be blameless for poisoning Bill. Gideon Rosen argues that moral ignorance can also exculpate: if one does not believe that one's action is wrong, and one has not mismanaged one's beliefs, then one is blameless for acting wrongly. On his view, many apparently blameworthy actions are blameless. I discuss several objections to Rosen. I then propose an alternative view on which many agents who act wrongly are blameworthy despite believing they are acting morally permissibly, and despite not having mismanaged their moral beliefs.1

The knowledge argument, the open question argument, and the moral problem

Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical nature could, apparently, suffer from ignorance about various aspects of conscious experience. Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical and mental nature could, apparently, suffer from moral ignorance. Does it follow that there are ways the world is, over and above the way it is physically or psychophysically? This paper defends a negative answer, based on a distinction between knowing the fact that p and knowing that p. This distinction is made intelligible by reference to criterial connections between the possession of moral or phenomenal knowledge, and the satisfaction of cognitively neutral conditions of desire and experiential history. The existence of such connections in the moral case makes for an efficient dissolution of the so-called moral problem.

Despair and distain: a tale of sexual abuse against internally displaced women in Northern Uganda

The war in Northern Uganda has had a more devastating effect on the lives and dignity of women and girls than of their male counterparts. There is deliberate gender-based violence and discrimination. Women and girls have become the soft targets of sexual violence, with rape and assault being used as weapons of war. These gender-specific threats have compounded the challenges to their protection. This article brings to light the fact that gender-based violence within the Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camps is the common, yet silent, affliction. The perpetrators include male family members, security personnel, leaders and agency officials. The risk factors that have perpetuated gender-based violence are notably the IDP situation itself, redundancy, sharing of housing units, general moral decay, ignorance, and poverty. It is shown that despite the presence of several local and International NGOs, there is no programme targeting this vice in the area. The government has failed to mobilize an effective strategy for humanitarian protection. The international community has also failed in its obligation to protect the vulnerable people by failing to close the protection gap faced by civilians. The article urges the government and the international community get seriously committed to the effective resolution of the conflict through peaceful negotiation, national reconciliation and the construction of a just and lasting peace. East African Journal of Peace and Human rights Vol. 12 (1) 2006: pp. 91-119

Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution

This paper takes on several distinct but related tasks. First, I present and discuss what I will call the “Ignorance Thesis,” which states that whenever an agent acts from ignorance, whether factual or moral, she is culpable for the act only if she is culpable for the ignorance from which she acts. Second, I offer a counterexample to the Ignorance Thesis, an example that applies most directly to the part I call the “Moral Ignorance Thesis.” Third, I argue for a principle—Don’t Know, Don’t Kill—that supports the view that the purported counterexample actually is a counterexample. Finally, I suggest that my arguments in this direction can supply a novel sort of argument against many instances of killing and eating certain sorts of animals.

A Defence of Prudential Moralism

Moralism is often charged with being ineffective, rude, hypocritical, and intolerant. This article challenges all of those claims, first using evidence from social science to argue that moralism can be effective in changing others' behaviour, serving as a remedy against the important problems of moral ignorance and weakness of will. Next, the apparent problems of rudeness, hypocrisy, and intolerance are argued to be either illusory or overstated. Finally, examples of unethical moralism are reviewed and a prudential type of moralism is differentiated and defended.

The construction of plagiarism in a school of nursing

AbstractDespite clear policies for handling reported occurrences of plagiarism, and the inclusion of antiplagiarism statements in course syllabi and university calendars, reports of both student and faculty plagiarism in universities has increased dramatically in the past decade. Critics indicate that current approaches to prevent plagiarism in universities are limited by their focus on the individual and by their failure to consider the contextual influences in university settings. Eight faculty members and 10 students in a university school of nursing were interviewed about their understanding of, and response to, plagiarism. The participants viewed plagiarism primarily as a student problem caused by moral breakdown or ignorance. Faculty indicated that they most often overlooked university policy for reporting plagiarism if the offence was deemed as unintentional or caused by personal stress. Students were aware that plagiarism was wrong, but undergraduate students frequently conceptualized it as an ‘academic quirk’. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the research findings to university schools of nursing.

IV-Culpability and Ignorance

When a person acts from ignorance, he is culpable for his action only if he is culpable for the ignorance from which he acts. The paper defends the view that this principle holds, not just for actions done from ordinary factual ignorance, but also for actions done from moral ignorance. The question is raised whether the principle extends to action done from ignorance about what one has most reason to do. It is tentatively proposed that the principle holds in full generality.