Abstract
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.
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Notes
The cases are from Rosen (2003). See also Slote (1982), Zimmerman (1997, 2008), Levy (2011). The idea that one can be morally ignorant of course implies the converse, that there is moral knowledge. Throughout I make this assumption, even going so far as to refer to ‘the moral facts’. This should not be taken to imply any sort of ambitious realism. A modest objectivism will do.
I am not thinking of Harris as a psychopath, in the sense of a psychopath as someone whose moral deviance is innate, from birth. Rather, I am thinking of Harris as someone who probably would have been normal had his upbringing been normal. Obviously, these are stipulations for the sake of the argument.
That is Holly Smith’s phrase for the self-aware act that causes culpable ignorance (Smith 1983). Zimmerman’s and Rosen’s discussions both owe something to Smith’s account of culpable ignorance. (Smith 1983). However, Smith does not commit herself to the claim that acts done in ignorance are only indirectly blameworthy. As she frames the issue, blameworthiness depends on an act being done out of bad motives. In cases of culpable ignorance there is a benighting act, which certainly has bad motives. Her point is that it is hard to say whether earlier bad motives carry forward and become part of the later (ignorant) act. If bad motives are really part of the later act, then the agent is directly culpable for what she does later.
By avoiding the claim that we are responsible for acting in a state M only if we are responsible for that state, Zimmerman and Rosen avoid the danger of a deterministic regress. They both leave the vital space to say that we are responsible for what we do when we know that we are doing it, although of course that too is determined.
Rosen discusses a “ruthless capitalist” who is akin to my moral outliers in (2004, p. 305). Of course, if the moral outliers know that what they are doing is wrong, then they are not off the hook.
Rosen discusses a case of what he calls “bare ignorance of the rational force of moral considerations”. That is a fair characterization of Harris’s ignorance (2004, p. 305).
Moody-Adams’ argument predates both Zimmerman and Rosen’s articles, and her discussion involves much more than a critique of the position they espouse.
Sher (2009) calls the Zimmerman/Rosen view the ‘Searchlight View’, and like me, argues that we need a more character based account of responsibility to make sense of hard cases. Sher discusses the ‘should have known better’ responses in chapter 5.
At points Rosen talks as if what can make an agent blameworthy is “recklessness or negligence” in belief formation. Sometimes this is modified by the word “culpable”, but sometimes not. For example on p. 304 Rosen says that culpable recklessness or negligence can make an agent culpable for ignorance. However, on the next page, the word ‘culpable’ is dropped. Rosen says, “I contend that if you are careful to bear in mind the stipulation that in reaching his conclusion our capitalist has not been reckless or negligent in the management of his moral opinion, you will find it plausible that his moral ignorance is not his fault” (2004, p. 305). That implies that unknowing recklessness might be blameworthiness rendering. The fact that recklessness usually is unknowing lends credence to that interpretation. However, Rosen’s official view is clear: that blameworthiness attaches only to action done in full knowledge that the action is wrong.
There is disagreement about this. Rosen has a firm intuition that it would have taken a moral hero to see that slavery was wrong (he is careful to use non-racially based slavery in his example, because it is more plausible that the evidence against that is unclear. I remain neutral on the question of whether the ancient slaveholders had misleading evidence). Arpaly also thinks that it is clearly possible that one could have a false moral belief as a result of misleading evidence. She gives an example of a young boy raised in an entirely sexist and segregated society (2003, p. 104). On the other side, Harman thinks that we usually do have evidence for the moral truth (though this is not essential to her argument): “It is a hard question what constitutes evidence for moral claims, and in what circumstances a person’s evidence is such that the right response to the evidence—the epistemically responsible response—involves believing the moral truth about a certain matter. But I claim that ordinary people who know the non-moral facts of what they are doing, when they do wrong things, often do have sufficient evidence that their actions are wrong” (2011, pp. 461–462).
Rosen explicitly includes this sort of practical ignorance in his discussion of moral ignorance.
One way in which Harman’s argument differs from Arpaly’s is that Harman is arguing about responsibility of beliefs directly, whereas Arpaly thinks that we are primarily responsible for acts. The other difference, which I discuss above, is that for Arpaly, lack of moral concern applies only in cases where the belief is irrational. Harman thinks that an agent in possession of all the non-moral facts usually has sufficient evidence for the moral facts. She thinks that in all the hard cases under discussion, the agent has sufficient evidence.
See Mason 2013 for more on this.
Harman has a third example: someone who smells a gas leak and then lights a match. This case is under described: most people know that you shouldn’t do this, but some have no idea. The ones who have no idea are surely blameless. For the ones who do know (at some level), the point I make about the level of precautions that it is reasonable to expect applies. Because gas is so dangerous, we should be very cautious.
In his 2003 paper, Rosen appeals to R. J. Wallace’s compatibilist account of moral responsibility, according to which we should blame the agent when it is fair to do so (p. 74). It is not fair to blame someone when they did not know what they were doing. Of course, as this is a compatibilist view, we need to know why it is still fair to blame someone when determinism is true. Wallace’s answer is that it is fair to blame someone when they have made choices that fail to live up to moral standards that we hold them to. These choices must be self-conscious and controlled. Thus we cannot hold people responsible for states of emotion or feeling (Wallace 1994, pp. 131–132). Wallace’s view, like Rosen’s, implies that none of the agents in our hard cases above are blameworthy. They all lack the reasoning capacities that are necessary for attributions of responsibility to be warranted (Wallace 1994, pp. 166–180). Wallace’s view is thus like Rosen’s in that it fails to vindicate our inclination to apportion at least some blameworthiness to these agents.
See Smith (2005) for a useful discussion of the difference between volitionist and attributionist views. See e.g. Watson (1975) for a defense of the attributability view. More recently, Scanlon (1998, 2008), Arpaly (2003, 2006), Smith (2005, 2008) and Sher (2009) have all developed versions of an attributability view. In his later work Watson introduces a distinction between accountability and attributability that he uses to explain our ambivalence about cases like Harris’s. Harris is bad—his badness is attributable to him, but he is not fully accountable because of the terrible upbringing he endured. I discuss that distinction in what follows.
Again, no ambitious realism about morality should be inferred from this.
See especially Smith’s work (2005, 2008, 2012), also Sher (2009), Shoemaker (2011). There has been a lot of discussion about what exactly is required for attributability. Shoemaker (2011) argues that attitudes can be attributable to an agent just because they are his, but more is required for answerability. Shoemaker thinks that an agent must also have access to the reasons for his attitudes in order to be answerable for them. Smith (2012) responds that answerability is the only sort of responsibility, but points out that it is not easy to say what exactly it is for an attitude to be connected to reasons in the right way. Both Smith and Shoemaker think that some sort of attributability can make sense of the whole space of moral responsibility. By contrast, I am using the notion of attributability to define one sort of blameworthiness; the other sort of blameworthiness is defined in terms of akrasia, or is the view often called ‘volitionist’ in the literature of moral responsibility.
So, for example, Robert Harris’s homicidal tendencies are attributable to him, even if they are not the sort of thing that he could give reasons for. My account does rule out attributing things to the agent that reasons could not be given for in principle, such as height and eye color.
Notice that it doesn’t matter whether there was epistemic fault or not on this view. One way to have a bad will is to ignore evidence, but another way is to treat other people badly.
In Watson’s later work (2004, 2011) the appeal to history has dropped out of the picture. Both Watson and Scanlon (2013) think that a lack of moral capacity undermines accountability. In Scanlon’s case this is connected to the way in which a lack of capacity affects someone’s ability to be in a relationship.
Buss (1997) has a very different account of these cases. She argues that those who have had a terrible childhood are justified in their actions. Their reasons, she argues, (particularly their inductive reasons) are different to the reasons a more privileged agent has.
I will leave rewards aside, as the relationship between praiseworthiness and rewards is even less clear than the relationship between blameworthiness and sanctions.
Strawson includes both children and those with who are unfortunate in formative circumstances in the class of people who we cannot apply the reactive attitudes to (in Watson 2003, p. 79). I think we can and do apply the reactive attitudes to children, though in a modified form, and as I argue below, we should see the point about formative circumstances as a separate point.
Note that, as Watson points out in his discussion of Harris (Watson 2004, p. 247) the difference between Robert Harris and the bad apple Robert Harris is not a difference in capacity. Both Scanlon and Watson think that lack of capacity undermines accountability/substantive responsibility. On my view, lack of moral capacity is surprisingly irrelevant: the moral outliers presumably lack a moral capacity (they have no other clear cause for their badness) and yet they are fully blameworthy in the objective sense.
The notion of epistemic damage needs more elucidation. Roughly, the thought is that JoJo may be emotionally stable and average, but that his ability to see the world as it is has been damaged. He takes too seriously the testimony of his inner circle, and does not pay enough attention to other sorts of evidence.
In her discussion of JoJo, Wolf says that JoJo is similar to us in being a product of his environment: he is unavoidably insane and we are unavoidably sane. I am denying this symmetry. JoJo has been damaged by his environment. I say more about the notion of damage elsewhere.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gunnar Bjornsson, Stewart Cohen, Sanford Goldberg, and James Regan for comments on earlier drafts. I am very grateful, for discussion and criticism, to audiences at Dartmouth College, Umea University, Nottingham University, and participants in the 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference at the University of Stockholm where earlier drafts of this paper were presented, and to my colleagues at Edinburgh for numerous formal and informal discussions about these issues.
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Mason, E. Moral ignorance and blameworthiness. Philos Stud 172, 3037–3057 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0456-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0456-7