Must we worry about epistemic shirkers?

ABSTRACT

It is commonly assumed that blameworthiness is epistemically constrained. If one lacks sufficient epistemic access to the fact that some action harms another, then one cannot be blamed for harming. Acceptance of an epistemic condition for blameworthiness can give rise to a worry, however: could agents ever successfully evade blameworthiness by deliberately stunting their epistemic position? I discuss a particularly worrisome version of such epistemic shirking, in which agents pre-emptively seek to avoid access to potentially morally relevant facts. As Roy Sorensen and Jan Willem Wieland have argued, we seem to be faced with a potentially troubling regress when trying to explain what goes wrong in such situations. I argue that the solution to this so-called Shirker Problem is not to be found in complicated and demanding anti-shirking-principles with universal scope and potentially self-reflexive content. Instead, careful consideration of the necessary motivational make-up of genuine shirkers reveals their ignorance to lack the necessary depth to be exculpatory. Since shirkers by definition react to the possibility of the revelation of morally relevant facts with acts of epistemic self-limitation, they necessarily prove guilty of a form of culpable moral recklessness. Epistemic shirking thus does not pose a worrisome problem for ethical theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral responsibility
• Ignorance
• Epistemic condition of moral responsibility
• Wilful ignorance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wilful ignorance (cf. also Lynch 2016; Wieland 2017b; Sarch 2018) also passes under some different labels: Wilful blindness (Simon 2005), affected ignorance (Moody-Adams 1994; N.M. Williams 2008) or strategic ignorance (Wieland 2017a), for example.

2 Versions of this kind of Perspectivism about Ought are defended by Lord (2015), Kiesewetter (2017), and Andrić (2021).

3 Cf. also D. Williams (2021, 7809).

4 See e.g. Harman (2011; 2015).

5 For the political importance of wilful ignorance, see also D. Williams (2021).

6 This is of course precisely what Moody-Adams argues for. Her principal aim is challenging widespread assumptions about the excusing force of cultural membership in societies in which certain unjust practices are so firmly ingrained that ignorance of their injustice borders on universal. In many, if not all of these societies, Moody-Adams argues, most of the ignorance is affected in one way or another, which in turn means that the members are not excused on epistemic grounds.

7 For an extensive argument defending this thesis, see also Lynch (2016).

8 In this nomenclature, I follow Jan Willem Wieland (2015).

9 Though for a thoroughgoing defence of tracing, see Fischer and Tognazzini (2009).

10 In the control case, we can explain the wrongness of the benighting act through the independently plausible principle of Necessary Means Transmission for Ought (Kiesewetter and Gertken 2021):

Necessary Means Transmission for Ought: If S ought to φ, and ψ-ing is a necessary means for S to φ, then S ought to ψ.

The action of [not throwing away the key] is a necessary means for Leroy to make it to the party: all the possible courses of action he can take that will lead him to attend include [not throwing away the key]. Therefore, if he ought to go to the party, by Necessary Means Transmission he also ought to [not throw away the key]. One interesting and tricky difference between the control case and the epistemic case is that this principle is not equally available in the latter. Knowing that he made the promise is not strictly speaking a necessary condition for Leroy showing up at the party. To explain the wrongness of epistemic shirking, other rationales are therefore required.

11 For reasons of economy of language, I will drop the ‘pre-emptive’ modifier in what follows and simply speak about ‘epistemic shirking’. The cases I am interested in, however, are exclusively of a pre-emptive nature (and thus unlike the amnesia pill case).

12 For an overview, see Sarch (2018).

13 I here ignore potential worries about the causal inefficacy of consumer choices that might undermine individual obligations not to purchase items produced under morally inacceptable conditions. For an overview, see Nefsky (2019).

14 Wieland frames his discussion with reference to a slightly different principle:

Access: for all obligations x, an agent s has x only if s can know she has x. (Wieland 2015, 289)

Although I prefer EC over Access both for reasons of generality and extensional adequacy, the differences between EC and Access are not relevant for the central argumentative moves in the following.

15 To specify:I think Block should be read as elliptical, really demanding to refrain from deliberately making the obligation unknowable. Otherwise, it would preclude many actions that we would not usually rate as blameworthy (I will return to this point later).

16 There are further complications that arise regarding Block, at least on the simple formulation laid out here. As spelled out here, Block is specifically concerned with the ‘target obligation’ of not buying the shoes, which crucially features in its content. That being so, making the target obligation unknowable should, ipso facto, make Block unknowable. In shirking on the obligation to buy the shoes, we would therefore automatically shirk on Block as well. I will ignore these further complications in what follows.

17 The term Moderate General Law is mine. Wieland does not himself label the set of O1 and O2 but reaches them after rejecting Weak General Law and Strong General Law as too weak and too strong, respectively.

18 I thank an anonymous referee for Inquiry for pressing me on this point.

19 Note that we thus not only need to show that the principle could be understood by the shirker (if it was read out, for example), but that the shirker could come to know this principle on their own, notwithstanding their persistent attempts of epistemic self-curtailment.

20 Peels laid out this taxonomy in an initial form in Peels (2014) and then in a revised version in Chapter 4 of Peels (2023).

21 In Peels (2023), Peels further distinguishes three subforms of what he originally termed ‘deep ignorance’: Unconsidered Ignorance, (True) Deep Ignorance, and Complete Ignorance (2023, 78–82). Albeit interesting in their own right, these distinctions do not make a difference for the arguments to follow, which is why I will continue using the term ‘deep ignorance’ as an umbrella term encompassing all three subforms, as in Peels’ original 2014 contribution.

22 That is not to say that shirkers could not be disbelievingly ignorant of any proposition, which is why it is important to qualify my statement here. My claim is that epistemic shirkers are necessarily only suspendingly or undecidedly ignorant of propositions such as ‘I could learn about some important obligation by pursuing course of action A’. When it comes to concrete statements of which particular obligations x, y or z these may be, shirkers may very well be blamelessly disbelievingly ignorant. However, their awareness of the general possibility of learning more, coupled with the likelihood that this will overturn their evidential situation with respect to one or more of these more concrete propositions, grounds a requirement not to actively avoid exposure to further evidence. Thanks to an anonymous referee for Inquiry for pressing me to clarify this matter.

23 I thank two anonymous referees for Inquiry for independently pressing me to consider these intermediate cases.

24 As laid out in section 2 above, providing a full account of what it takes to be in a position to know a given proposition unfortunately goes beyond the scope of this paper. However, it appears to me that any precisification of the relevant notion of epistemic accessibility worth its salt should yield the accessibility claim at the heart of my argument: Shirkers, as agents who must have considered that there may be morally relevant information at stake in p, are in a position to know that avoiding information pertinent to p carries a moral risk.

25 For others coming to similar conclusions, see Peels (2014, 13, 2023, Chapter 10) and Harman (2011, 447–450). Alex Guerrero (2007) has argued that there is no reason why this important insight cannot be transferred to moral knowledge as well. Based on such considerations of risk, he concludes a principle of ‘Don’t Know, Don’t Kill’, which forbids taking the lives of beings when one cannot with sufficient confidence conclude that they do not have moral status.

26 We have to be a little careful here. It is not the case that following course B makes it impossible for the shirker to fulfil the obligation x (see footnote 10). Of course, it does make the fulfilment of the obligation a lot less likely. What taking course B does make impossible is to do as x demands because of its moral import.

27 See for example Lerner (2018), Johnson King (2019) and Heering (2024).

28 For a classic treatment of these kind of exemptions due to what we may call moral insanity or pathological evil, see Watson (2004).

29 I thank an anonymous referee for Inquiry for pressing me to say more about alternate grounds for blameworthiness in many instances of shirking behaviour.

30 This paper has had a comparatively long history. Over the years, I have received helpful comments from many people on drafts in wildly different stages of development. I thank Maike Albertzart, Francesca Bunkenborg, David Heering, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Thomas Schmidt, Razvan Sofroni and two anonymous referees for Inquiry for their helpful written comments. Material from this paper was also presented at conferences and colloquia in Berlin and Gothenburg. I am grateful to audiences and organisers for the helpful exchanges and feedback. Work on this paper was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Project number: 503995582).