Willful Ignorance Research Articles

Well, At Least I Tried: Partial Willful Ignorance, Information Acquisition, and Social Preferences

I investigate whether remaining partially ignorant of the consequences of one’s decision leads to a decrease in prosocial behavior using a laboratory experiment in the style of Dana et al. (2007)’s dictator game experiment, where the dictator can choose whether or not to know the recipient’s payoffs. By introducing a noisy signal about the recipient’s payoffs in one state of the world, I investigate how much information dictators will acquire. I find support for my model’s predictions that information acquisition will be decreasing in costs of information acquisition (the number of signals acquired is significantly greater when information is free than when it is costly), in- creasing in beliefs that the agent’s actions are prosocial (subjects are 56.8% more likely to choose the prosocial distribution when it is revealed), and increasing in the expected prosociality of the available choices (subjects who believe the noisy state is prosocial acquire an additional signal, on average, relative to those who do not). There is evidence that subjects use search to excuse selfish behavior - subjects who choose the hidden distribution when the revealed distribution is prosocial are 20.1% more likely to have searched than those who do not. These findings, taken together, provide sup- port for the intuition that agents often look for opportunities to maintain a veil of ignorance, such that they experience utility from the outcome of their decision, even if their actions are selfish.

On Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice: Editor's Introduction

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one another on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice (epistemic or otherwise) weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things.

How We Write Plagues

How We Write Plagues JAMES UDEN One advantage of writing about historical pandemics is that they have already occurred. From where I sit, as I listen to the loudspeaker on the council truck telling me to stay indoors, it is impossible to know what direction the covid-19 crisis will take. Certainly, aspects of the virus’s social impact have mirrored the trajectory of previous pandemics . Back in February, people in France began circulating the phrase Je ne suis pas un virus, protesting acts of violence against Asian communities and resisting the well-documented tendency for societies to target ethnic minorities as scapegoats for epidemic disease. The President’s labeling of covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” aroused similar protest in the United States.1 At an armed rally at the state house in Lansing, MI, armed protesters demanded the reopening of businesses despite public health advice to the contrary, an act that raised familiar questions about the freedom of the individual versus the health of the collective in times of health crisis. Here in Boston, anti-lockdown protesters assembled at the Massachusetts State House on May 4, chanting “no more dictatorship”—language congenial to Boston’s history of colonial rebellion, though not especially fitting to the crisis at hand. Just one day earlier, a banner had flown over the buildings of Manhattan with the words CAPITALISM IS THE PANDEMIC. Whether the virus will redistribute power and become, in Walter Scheidel’s words, a “great leveler,” remains to be seen.2 arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Hunter H. Gardner, Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 303 pages. $90.00. Brian Walters, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome, 2020. xv + 158 pages. $80.00. 132 how we write plagues Given that we have frequently been reminded that we are facing a pandemic of historic proportions, it is natural that people have turned to history for perspective. Daniel Defoe’s journalistic account of plague in London in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), has catapulted to an unlikely relevance , promoted on the publisher’s website as the “surprise ‘must-read’ for people facing the covid-19 epidemic.” Thucydides ’ description of Athens’s experience of the plague in 430 bc has made news in The Economist, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Historical accounts of plagues are regularly being called upon to offer advice to the present. Yet not all plagues are alike. Historians have rightly protested about parallels being made between covid-19 and the aids crisis, since the current emergency response contrasts damningly with the Reagan government’s protracted silence and willful ignorance throughout the 1980s.3 One problem is the word “plague” itself, a term too suggestive of sin to represent the devastating impartiality of viral disease. “Plagues,” Susan Sontag wrote in aids and its Metaphors (1988), are “inflicted, not just endured.” She argued that the term imposed additional burdens on patients, who were portrayed as suffering some punishment, and could not simply be ill.4 To speak of “plagues” in the plural also suggests a common experience across time, a regular and shared event. Literary accounts of the plague do indeed share many common tropes. Yet there are important differences in the way communities have responded to outbreaks in different eras, and significant divergences in the meaning of disease. Accounts of plagues understandably arouse interest during a pandemic, but they are apt to mislead us, because the plagues so often look the same. One unshakable constant is the analogy between the body and the state, the “body politic.” As has long been recognized, the symbol surfaces across many, unrelated world cultures.5 In seeking to explain a unity composed of many parts, human beings have tended to look to the most immediate parallel— themselves. Although it has been invoked famously to justify James Uden 133 hierarchies within the state (Livy, Shakespeare, Hobbes), the image seems to resonate most intuitively when it conceptualizes danger, when the “health” of the state is threatened by “infection” or “disease.” In 2009, psychologists asked sixty -nine undergraduates at the University of Arizona to read a popular...

The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny

The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny Hillary Coenen (bio) In August of 1940, the United States had yet to enter the Second World War, and Virginia Woolf wrote the widely circulated “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” in part to advise Americans on their approach to the war. Many of Woolf’s works address issues of peace and women’s rights, as does this one. The brief entreaty was written for a symposium addressing “current matters concerning women” (Woolf, “Thoughts” 243). Less than one month after writing the piece, Woolf’s London home was destroyed by a bomb during the London Blitz, and the address was never delivered to the American symposium. Just days before the address was published in The New Republic, Woolf witnessed the bombing and destruction of Tavistock Square, a significant local landmark. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” is an essay inseparable from its time. Over seventy years later, in a notable 2013 interview with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, Malala1 Yousafzai made her first appearance on a major late-night news program. There she described her experience of being threatened and attacked by the Taliban, and she shared why she took on what she knew to be the dangerous task of advocating for girls’ education. The interview occurred three months after she delivered a highly publicized speech at the United Nations General Assembly on what was her 16th birthday, and a year after she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for her advocacy of the rights of women and girls. Both Woolf’s undelivered (but later published) address and Malala’s interview represent public assertions that highlight how investing in education for women and girls can promote peace and justice while resisting violence. Rejection of violence has a long history in feminist scholarship and literature, and this theme has often been linked to care as a value that informs feminine ethics. In philosophy, care as an ethical and moral value has often been contrasted with the more traditional (and supposedly masculine) value of justice.2 While feminist scholars have acknowledged that both care and justice are essential values for ethical thinking and decision-making, in recent years feminist scholarship has fully embraced an ethic of care as a guiding principle. With the landmark publication of Jaqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and [End Page 139] Literacy Studies (2012), feminist rhetorical studies developed a renewed interest in the connection between feminism and care. Scholars in feminist rhetoric have taken up an “ethos of humility, respect, and care” that Royster and Kirsch claim is essential for excellent feminist inquiry (21). This research stance is consistent with the portrayal of feminist thought that Virginia Held upholds in The Ethics of Care. Held claims that “the ethics of care now has a central, though not exclusive, place in feminist moral theorizing” (28). Held responds to Carol Gilligan’s earlier work that distinguishes a “care perspective” from a “justice perspective.” In that response, Held explains that, although feminists who work within an ethic of care “share the goals of justice and equality,” this approach challenges traditional moral theories, in part because it is feminist (26). Feminists have long been faced with the violence of oppression and tyranny supported by willful ignorance and overt hatred. Appropriate and effective responses to these forces need to balance the need for justice and equity with a need to educate and build empathetic communities. Acknowledging these tensions, a pacifist and feminist response would necessarily incorporate care and justice perspectives, as well as notions of humility and respect. Feminist Rhetorical Practices provides “critical terms of engagement” that guide the rhetorical study of texts and contexts that have traditionally been excluded from the rhetorical canon or that apply non-traditional strategies (21). One of these terms is critical imagination, an approach that prompts us to rethink “what is there and not there” (20). Drawing from Jaqueline Royster’s Traces of a Stream, Royster and Kirsch explain that critical imagination involves “account[ing] for what we ‘know’ by...

The benefit of the doubt: willful ignorance and altruistic punishment

Altruistic punishment is often thought to be a major enforcement mechanism of social norms. I present experimental results from a modified version of the dictator game with third-party punishment, in which third parties can remain ignorant about the choice of the dictator. I find that a substantial fraction of subjects choose not to reveal the dictator’s choice and not to punish the dictator. I show that this behavior is in line with the social norms that prevail in a situation of initial ignorance. Remaining ignorant and choosing not to punish is not inappropriate. As a result, altruistic punishment is significantly lower when the dictator’s choice is initially hidden. The decrease in altruistic punishment leads to more selfish dictator behavior only if dictators are explicitly informed about the effect of willful ignorance on punishment rates. Hence, in scenarios in which third parties can ignore information and dictators know what this implies, third-party punishment may only ineffectively enforce social norms.

Corporate Oversight and Disobedience

Over a decade has passed since landmark Delaware corporate law decisions on oversight responsibility, and only a small handful of cases have survived a motion to dismiss. Scholars have puzzled over what it means to have the potential for corporate accountability lodged within the duty of good faith, but almost never brought to fruition in terms of trial liability. This article explores the public-regarding purpose of the obedience and oversight duties in corporate law and provides a descriptive account of how they are applied in practice. The Article argues that the fidelity to external law required by the duty of good faith largely serves a legitimizing role for corporate law. Expressing obligations of legal compliance and oversight within corporate law acknowledges societal interests in the rule of law and preserves the ability of courts to flexibly respond to particularly salient and egregious violations of public trust, should they arise, without upending case law developed over decades. Further, this article examines the body of Delaware law concerning the oversight and obedience aspects of the duty of good faith and argues that they have become functionally linked. In practice to date, Delaware courts have prioritized giving directors broad latitude to take business risk by drawing a line at legal risk, despite the possibility that both types of activity could create social value or harm depending on the circumstances. Under current Delaware case law, courts have allowed Caremark claims to proceed where evidence exists to infer that the board utterly failed to implement a compliance monitoring system or that the directors engaged in disobedience by knowingly managing legal risk or flouting, violating, or ignoring the law. Bringing together these threads of discussion, this Article concludes that corporate law’s public-regarding commitment to the rule of law supports accountability in these instances of disobedience as well as more broadly when fiduciaries act with willful ignorance or an awareness that their efforts at compliance are insufficient.

The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality

Racial economic inequality is a foundational feature of the United States, yet many Americans appear oblivious to it. In the present work we consider the psychology underlying this collective willful ignorance. Drawing on prior research and new evidence from a nationally representative sample of adults (N = 1,008), we offer compelling evidence that Americans vastly underestimate racial economic inequality, especially the racial wealth gap. In particular, respondents thought that the Black–White wealth gap was smaller, by around 40 percentage points in 1963 and around 80 percentage points in 2016, than its actual size. We then consider the motivational, cognitive, and structural factors that are likely to contribute to these misperceptions and suggest directions for future research to test these ideas. Importantly, we highlight the implications of our collective ignorance of racial economic inequality and the challenge of creating greater accuracy in perceptions of these racial economic disparities, as well as outline the steps policymakers might take to create messages on this topic that effectively promote equity-enhancing policies. We close with an appeal to psychological science to at least consider, if not center, the racial patterning of these profound economic gaps.

Animals that Live in the Mirror: On Colonial Bestiaries and Interspecies Architecture

In 1934 Berthold Lubetkin unveiled a new development designed for a peculiar client and located in a curious place. Lubetkin’s “The Penguin Pool” was the second building that he had built in as many years for the London Zoo and it was meant to house the zoo’s newest acquisition of Antarctic penguins. The Penguin Pool was well received amongst architectural critics and the popular press alike and, as a relatively small concrete oval sunk into the ground with two elevated paths extending from the walls (Fig. 1), it represented a particular modernist ideal of visuality. At the same time though, what’s good for viewing subjects may not necessarily be good for the subjects themselves. And what’s good for people may not necessarily be good for penguins. The pool, designed for the eyes of the human spectator, resulted in a lengthy and list of problems for the penguins. Even that most modernist choice of materials – the decision to form the entire living area out of concrete – proved harmful as many of the penguins developed aching joints from having to walk on the hard surface.In taking this architectural episode as one that is emblematic of the broader role of the animal in modern architecture, this article explores the curious relationship between animal, human and environment. Specifically, it argues that the construction choices of Lubetkin’s pool make visible a common theme that extends across all of modern architecture: a willful ignorance of, or a concerted effort to control, biological life. Through an analysis of three related objects: the Penguin Pool, an archive of Le Corbusier’s sketches of animals, writings about his experiences in Algeria and hybridized creatures, and the artist Dan Graham’s installations, My Two-Way Mirror Pavilions, this work draws together these attempts to control biological life with colonial discourses on the animality of the colonial subject and on Neo-Darwinist ideas of natural hierarchy. By exploring these discourses as they are related to an imagined incommensurability and stratification of species, this article highlight the discursive constructs that work against shared, communal, and engaging multi species environments. And against these discursive forces, this work closes with a rereading of both interspecies communication and evolutionary agency by pushing against arguments of interspecies incommensurability and focusing on instead on a call to reconsider the environment as a totality of shared, interspecies, experiences.

Animals that Live in the Mirror: On Colonial Bestiaries and Interspecies Architecture

In 1934 Berthold Lubetkin unveiled a new development designed for a peculiar client and located in a curious place. Lubetkin’s “The Penguin Pool” was the second building that he had built in as many years for the London Zoo and it was meant to house the zoo’s newest acquisition of Antarctic penguins. The Penguin Pool was well received amongst architectural critics and the popular press alike and, as a relatively small concrete oval sunk into the ground with two elevated paths extending from the walls (Fig. 1), it represented a particular modernist ideal of visuality. At the same time though, what’s good for viewing subjects may not necessarily be good for the subjects themselves. And what’s good for people may not necessarily be good for penguins. The pool, designed for the eyes of the human spectator, resulted in a lengthy and list of problems for the penguins. Even that most modernist choice of materials – the decision to form the entire living area out of concrete – proved harmful as many of the penguins developed aching joints from having to walk on the hard surface. In taking this architectural episode as one that is emblematic of the broader role of the animal in modern architecture, this article explores the curious relationship between animal, human and environment. Specifically, it argues that the construction choices of Lubetkin’s pool make visible a common theme that extends across all of modern architecture: a willful ignorance of, or a concerted effort to control, biological life. Through an analysis of three related objects: the Penguin Pool, an archive of Le Corbusier’s sketches of animals, writings about his experiences in Algeria and hybridized creatures, and the artist Dan Graham’s installations, My Two-Way Mirror Pavilions, this work draws together these attempts to control biological life with colonial discourses on the animality of the colonial subject and on Neo-Darwinist ideas of natural hierarchy. By exploring these discourses as they are related to an imagined incommensurability and stratification of species, this article highlight the discursive constructs that work against shared, communal, and engaging multi species environments. And against these discursive forces, this work closes with a rereading of both interspecies communication and evolutionary agency by pushing against arguments of interspecies incommensurability and focusing on instead on a call to reconsider the environment as a totality of shared, interspecies, experiences.

Can the Pain of Vystopia Help to Create a More Compassionate World?

Can the Pain of Vystopia Help to Create a More Compassionate World?

Social Justice, Character Education, and Sport: A Position Statement

ABSTRACTIn this article, we suggest that character education in sport contexts can promote social justice. After defining key terms, we suggest that rethinking competition and the nature of team relationships is required to build a team culture responsive to concerns for social justice. The character of the team provides a nexus within which to develop individual character, which is elaborated in terms of four types of character: moral, civic, intellectual, and performance character. To promote commitment to social justice, character educators can focus on three elements of moral character: moral reasoning, the circle of moral regard, and moral identity. Within civic character, three themes are elaborated: human dignity, full participation, and accountability. The dimensions of critical thinking, willful ignorance, and prioritizing the marginalized are discussed in relation to intellectual character. Performance character is discussed in relation to an ethic of excellence. Finally, conclusions for character educators are elaborated.

Save the planet or close your eyes? Testing strategic ignorance in a charity context

Do people try to avoid unpleasant information about the environmental consequences of their actions? If so, do they react with hostility towards others who provide the unwanted information? Fearing such hostility, do others abstain from providing the information? These are the questions we set out to explore by means of lab experiments presented here. To our surprise, and in stark contrast to related previous literature, we found few indications of willful ignorance. In a binary dictator game with an environmental charity as the recipient, an option to stay uninformed about the effects of one's actions for the charity was infrequently chosen, and did not significantly affect generosity. When another subject might choose to impose information on the dictator, almost all dictators asked for information themselves – but this was not associated with increased dictator generosity. We argue that the phenomenon of strategic ignorance is likely to be less robust and more context-dependent than one might expect based on previous research, and that this result may be important from an environmental policy perspective.

Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don't

This is a book about the legal fiction that sometimes we know what we don't. The willful ignorance doctrine says defendants who bury their heads in the sand rather than learn they're doing something criminal are punished as if they knew. Not all legal fictions are unjustified, however. This one, used within proper limits, is a defensible way to promote the aims of the criminal law. Preserving your ignorance can make you as culpable as if you knew what you were doing, and so the interests and values protected by the criminal law can be promoted by treating you as if you had knowledge. This book provides a careful defense of this method of imputing mental states based on equal culpability. On the one hand, the theory developed here shows why the willful ignorance doctrine is only partly justified and requires reform. On the other hand, it demonstrates that the criminal law needs more legal fictions of this kind. Repeated indifference to the truth may substitute for knowledge, and very culpable failures to recognize risks can support treating you as if you took those risks consciously. Moreover, equal culpability imputation should also be applied to corporations, not just individuals. Still, such imputation can be taken too far. We need to determine its limits to avoid injustice. Thus, the book seeks to place equal culpability imputation on a solid normative foundation, while demarcating its proper boundaries. The resulting theory of when and why the criminal law can pretend we know what we don't has far-reaching implications for legal practice and reveals a pressing need for reform.

Yes, but what about the authority of policy analysts? A commentary and discussion of Perl et al., ‘Policy-making and truthiness: Can existing models cope with politicized evidence and willful ignorance in a post-fact world?’

The paper discusses issues raised in Perl et al. (Policy Sci, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-9334-4 ), specifically the tensions between policy sciences’ search for ways reliably to link results to inputs and activities and the evidence they present for their conclusions that the three main approaches to analysis of policy processes do not focus upon this aspect of policy-making and are so well placed to cope with the ‘post-fact’ political era. The paper disagrees, arguing that this argument rather suggests that a main prop of modern political legitimacy—that policy can be reasonable and rational, and so not necessarily partisan—is under serious challenge, threatening a retreat to a politics of force and manipulation. The paper argues that this is best understood by appreciating that any empirical foundations of policy logics are not and never have been derived through a search for predictive power, no matter what is believed and taught, and told to those who pay for policy work, but are rather evidentially founded metaphors: theories. Correspondingly, in the norms of mainstream policy science, we cannot find any attempt to establish for a given empirical field whether there is or not adequate regularity to support assertions of (albeit with uncertainty) known outcomes. Given this, recent major failures of policy science’s expectations to bear fruit, despite assertions that evidentially based policy is reliably predictive, suggest that (amplified by academic interest in subjective aspects of knowledge construction) populist and popular shifts to reckless treatment of ‘facts’ appear as a not unreasonable reaction to ‘bad situations that policy-makers said would not happen’. The apparent success, reported by Perl et al. of the three main approaches to analysis of policy processes, then appear as somewhat irrelevant to those who pay for policy advice, if policy science is seen, not as a predictive science, but as one amongst many sources of political authority and so political order. The wise response by policy workers is then to reduce the ‘over-sell’ so as to restore their authority, in part by arguing that predictive power may be impossible (or would spend too much of the limited budget), so the mode of engagement should be non-instrumental action, and/or place far greater emphasis upon ensuring that those who are the objects of policy work are given adequate voice (lest they vote for Trump or Brexit). In that these options would imply less inconsistency, it would increase the authority of policy analysts, ceteris paribus.

Shooting the Messenger? Supply and Demand in Markets for Willful Ignorance

We investigate the role of advisers in the transmission of ethically relevant information, a critical aspect of executive decision making in organizations. In our laboratory experiment, advisers are informed about the negative externalities associated with the decision-maker's choices and compete with other advisers. We find that advisers suppress about a quarter of inconvenient'' information. Suppression is not strategic, but based on the advisers' own preferences in the ethical dilemma. On the demand side, a substantial minority of decision makers avoid advisers who transmit inconvenient information (they shoot the messenger''). Overall, by facilitating assortative matching, a competitive market for advisers efficiently caters to the demand for both information and information avoidance. Decision-makers are less likely to implement their preferred option when they are randomly matched to advisers and there is no scope for assortative matching.

Muhammad Kkansu and the Diasporic Other in the Two Koreas

This article examines the life story of Muhammad Kkansu (Chŏng Suil), a once distinguished foreign professor of Arabic history and culture at Dankook University and a prolific scholar on the Silk Road, who was indicted in 1996 on charges of espionage and use of a false identity as an Arab of Filipino-Lebanese descent to enter South Korea. It considers the complex circumstances that shaped his life choices as a diasporic Korean living in China and South Korea's blind and willful ignorance of the North, which ironically enabled a diasporic Korean from China, to pass as an "Arab" right under its nose. In contrast to accounts of North Korean spies, it humanizes the experiences of Kkansu, illustrating how a diasporic Korean learned to dissimulate by adopting an ambiguous identity and navigate the social and political realities of national division and anxieties caused by global and internecine hostilities during the Cold War. His imprisonment did not foreclose the possibility of becoming an academic again; in fact, he reemerged after a presidential pardon in 2003 and authored more than a dozen important monographs and encyclopedias on the Silk Road. While there are many contradictions and gaps about his personal life, Kkansu's life story challenges the master narratives of national culture, homogeneity, belongingness, and identity.

Plausible folk theories: throwing veils of plausibility over zones of ignorance in global governance.

In an age of expertise, where knowledge ostensibly reigns, global governance not infrequently settles for ignorance. To understand this puzzle, this article draws upon extensive empirical research on two sites within the global governance of finance. One is directed to the suppression of money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism by the Financial Action Task Force and International Monetary Fund. Another intends to stimulate the supply of otherwise scarce money to financial markets through global lawmaking by the UN Commission on International Trade Law. In both cases vast enterprises of global regulation and lawmaking proceed on weakly founded justificatory rhetorics designated here as 'plausible folk theories.' Six properties make a folk theory plausible: parsimony, face validity, rhetorical compactness, ambiguity, affinity with extant beliefs, and unexamined premises and logics. Plausible folk theories offer organizational benefits to IOs. They also allow a politics of temporality that may shorten temporal horizons, or weaken and eliminate IO accountability. Finally, three variants of ignorance contribute to choices by international organizations not to get beyond plausible folk theories to justify their regulatory and lawmaking initiatives: inadvertent ignorance, willful ignorance, and strategic or rational ignorance.

Policy-making and truthiness: Can existing policy models cope with politicized evidence and willful ignorance in a “post-fact” world?

From “alternative facts” to “fake news,” in recent years the influence of misinformation on political life has become amplified in unprecedented ways through electronic communications and social media. While misinformation and spin are age-old tactics in policy making, and poor information and poorly informed opinion a constant challenge for policy analysts, both the volume of erroneous evidence and the difficulties encountered in differentiating subjectively constructed opinion from objectively verified policy inputs have increased significantly. The resulting amalgamation of unsubstantiated and verifiable data and well and poorly informed opinion raises many questions for a policy science which emerged in an earlier, less problematic era. This article examines these developments and their provenance and asks whether, and how, existing policy making models and practices developed and advocated during an earlier era of a sharper duality between fact and fiction have grappled with the new world of “truthiness,” and whether these models require serious revision in light of the impact of social media and other forces affecting contemporary policy discourses and processes.

Willful Ignorance and Bad Motives

Does willful ignorance mitigate blameworthiness? In many legal systems, willfully ignorant wrongdoers are considered as blameworthy as knowing wrongdoers. This is called the ‘equal culpability thesis’ (ECT). Given that legal practice depends on it, the issue has obvious importance. Interestingly enough, however, there exists hardly any philosophical reflection on ECT. A recent exception is Alexander Sarch, who defends a restricted version of ECT. On Sarch’s view, ECT is true whenever willfully ignorant agents incur additional blameworthiness for their ignorance. In this paper, I defend an alternative view, according to which ECT is true whenever the motives of willfully ignorant and knowing wrongdoers are equally bad.

From climate to caribou: How manufactured uncertainty is affecting wildlife management

ABSTRACTOver the past decade, declines of Canadian populations of boreal caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) have received considerable attention from scientists, government agencies, environmental nongovernmental organizations, Indigenous communities, and the forest industry. Boreal caribou (also known as boreal woodland caribou) was listed as a threatened species in Canada when the Species at Risk Act came into force in June 2003. Many boreal caribou populations have been shown to be decreasing, in some cases precipitously, and empirical evidence from adult survival and calf recruitment surveys indicates that the cumulative effect of habitat disturbance, including that which results from industrial development, is a key driver in the decline. Yet, as scientific understanding of the decline has become clearer, and agreement among scientists and governments about habitat management requirements has increased, campaigns of denial have intensified in the public sphere. In this paper, we examine parallels with climate change rhetoric prolific in the 2000s and show that willful ignorance disguised as skepticism has resulted in public uncertainty despite robust scientific evidence. We show how these strategies of manufactured uncertainty used in climate change denial campaigns have seeped into wildlife management debates, with pernicious results. In this case, it has successfully delayed efforts to effectively address the decline of boreal caribou, which is protected under federal, provincial, and territorial legislation, and inhibited meaningful dialogue about socially acceptable conservation solutions. © 2018 The Wildlife Society.