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Abstract
It is intuitive that circumstantial ignorance, even when culpable, can mitigate blameworthiness for morally wrong behavior. In this paper I suggest an explanation of why this is so. The explanation offered is that an agent’s degree of blameworthiness for some action (or omission) depends at least in part upon the quality of will expressed in that action, and that an agent’s level of awareness when performing a morally wrong action can make a difference to the quality of will that is expressed in it. This explanation makes use of Holly Smith’s (1983. “Culpable Ignorance.” Philosophical Review 92 (4): 543–571) distinction between benighting and benighted actions as well as a notion developed here called “capture.”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Randy Clarke, Matt Talbert, Alfred Mele, Gabriel De Marco, Kyle Fritz, Sam Sims, Adam Hamilton, Brett Castellanos, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and for helpful discussion at the Florida State University Writing Group.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Daniel J. Miller is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Government and History at Fayetteville State University, working primarily on ethics, the philosophy of action, and moral psychology. His most recent work focuses on blameworthiness and ignorance as well as the ethics of blame.
Notes
1 Smith (Citation1983) briefly discusses this (557–558), as does Björnsson (Citation2017, 147).
2 This principle is held in one form or another by a number of other authors writing in the relevant literature, including Zimmerman (Citation1997, 411), FitzPatrick (Citation2008, 601–602), Levy (Citation2009, 741), Fischer and Tognazzini (Citation2011, 390), and Smith (Citation2011, 118).
3 I use “blameworthy” and “culpable” interchangeably. Rosen’s understanding of culpability and blameworthiness make it clear that he also uses these two terms interchangeably.
4 Rosen (Citation2003) also makes this distinction, calling the first type factual (or non-moral) ignorance, and the second moral ignorance. FitzPatrick (Citation2008) and Talbert (Citation2013) both use the term “circumstantial ignorance.”
5 The account of quality of will that I offer in Section 2 is similar to that of Arpaly (Citation2002) and Talbert (Citation2012) insofar as it is framed in terms of an agent’s responsiveness to moral reasons.
6 Cody may have non-occurrent beliefs that, taken together, entail that by acting he is taking a more serious risk (e.g., that drinking large amounts of alcohol can result in death and that the pledges are drinking large amounts of alcohol), and nevertheless fail to make the relevant inference. One might wonder whether, if this is so, it makes a difference to Cody’s blameworthiness in the action. The view I propose in this paper implies that this is so only if his failure to become aware of the risks, F, is the result of some prior behavior, B, conjoined with the foresight that B may result in the type of result of which F is an instance. This implication (concerning what I understand as the indirect expression or display of negative quality of will) will become clearer in Section 3.
7 I leave it open that an agent may desire that his action result in harm to another person without intending that it do so because of a failure to meet certain epistemic constraints on intention. Plausibly, intending that one’s action result in harm H requires that the agent must at the very least lack the belief that the action will not or probably will not result in Mele (Citation1992) discusses this epistemic constraint on intention (176).
8 We can suppose that these actions are morally wrong because of the risk of harm that they pose to others.
9 I say that ill will may be expressed in an action or omission because the agent’s awareness of the risk of harm in these cases plays a motivational role in the agent’s performance of the action. Because this is not so for lack of due regard, I speak of lack of due regard being displayed in an action or omission.
10 In this counterfactual Cody suffers from moral ignorance. It is a separate question whether his moral ignorance in this supposed counterfactual would mitigate his blameworthiness in that counterfactual; at this point I am only concerned with whether his circumstantial ignorance in the actual case can mitigate his blameworthiness in the actual case. Notably, Cody’s circumstantial ignorance in the actual case precludes moral ignorance.
11 I am grateful to Sam Sims for suggesting that one might maintain this view.
12 Whether Cody would be blameworthy for his negative quality of will in this counterfactual depends upon the conditions on blameworthiness for non-voluntary states (e.g., beliefs, attitudes). Theorists disagree over whether agents can be directly blameworthy for non-voluntary states, or whether blameworthiness for non-voluntary states always traces back to blameworthiness for behavior. Those who hold the latter view (called volitionism) point out that one’s attitudes, beliefs, etc. are not under an agent’s direct control as behavior typically is. If such control is required for direct blameworthiness, then an agent might be bad without being blameworthy for being bad (Levy Citation2005). And if volitionism is true, then the distinction I draw here leaves open two possibilities. First, an agent might be blameworthy for having a certain quality of will (if it is traceable to earlier blameworthy behavior) without being blameworthy (or being less blameworthy) for acting while having that quality of will, since (due to ignorance) the quality of will may not be expressed or displayed in the action. Second, an agent might be blameworthy for acting in a way that displays a negative quality of will (something often under an agent’s direct control) without being blameworthy for having that quality of will, since one’s quality of will may not be something traceable to earlier behavior. I do not take a stand here on whether volitionism is true. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers from Philosophical Explorations for suggesting that I expand upon the significance and implications of this distinction.
13 An anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Explorations points out an interesting implication of this: in some cases an agent could have been blameworthy for a consequence more serious (e.g., a death) than what he is actually blameworthy for (e.g., some minor harm) without thereby being more seriously blameworthy for that consequence (i.e., blameworthy to a greater degree). On my view, the seriousness of the consequence does not directly affect the degree of the agent’s blameworthiness for that consequence. Rather, an agent’s blameworthiness for consequences is largely determined by whether and how those consequences are related to the agent’s internal states (e.g., beliefs, desires, intentions). I take this to be favorable implication, at least for those who believe that consequential luck should play as small of a role as possible in affecting an agent’s blameworthiness.
14 This distinction is important for understanding certain views about the conditions on blameworthiness. For example, McKenna (Citation2012) seems to require the expression or display of negative quality of will in action (and not merely having a negative quality of will) for blameworthiness for morally wrong actions (57–64).
15 Björnsson (Citation2017) maintains that an agent is blameworthy for some behavior only if it is explained by the agent’s quality of will (151–152). While all actions that express ill will are explained (at least in part) by the agent’s ill will (because the agent’s desires motivate him), it is less clear whether the same goes for all actions that display lack of due regard, since it seems that lack of due regard needn’t play any causal role in bringing about an action that displays it. If Rosen was aware that he is putting arsenic in my tea but merely indifferent to my well-being, then his lack of due regard is displayed in his action (since he performs the action in light of this awareness) but wouldn’t cause it. Rather, his lack of due regard would only make it so that he wouldn't be motivated to refrain from performing it.
16 I leave it open whether such an agent is blameworthy at all for a morally wrong action performed from ignorance (where that ignorance is blameless). As noted above (n. 2), it is widely maintained that blameless circumstantial ignorance excuses.
17 While some theorists believe that culpability for ignorance must somehow trace back to some earlier act for which the agent is blameworthy, others argue that agents can be directly culpable for ignorance (Adams Citation1985; Smith Citation2005). Though I maintain that ignorance is culpable if it is the foreseen upshot of some earlier failure for which an agent is blameworthy, I do not take a stance here on whether all culpability for ignorance must trace back to an earlier failure in this way.
18 Smith calls the former kind “benighting acts,” and the latter kind “unwitting wrongful acts,” although I will (following Ginet Citation2000) call them “benighted” acts or actions. As I note parenthetically here, there can be benighting and benighted omissions as well as actions. For simplicity I often use the terms “benighting action” and “benighted action” to refer to both.
19 Arpaly (Citation2002) maintains that the degree to which one is motivated by certain reasons affects the degree to which one is praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action (233). Because I am concerned here with considerations that may affect the degree to which an agent’s quality of will captures certain wrong-making features, I focus on the considerations related to an agent’s awareness rather than those related to the strength of an agent’s desire. It is important to note, though, that because an agent can only be motivated by some wrong-making feature through an awareness of it, considerations concerning awareness and those concerning desire will often be interrelated in bearing on an agent’s degree of blameworthiness.
20 There is reason to think that this is not so in cases of ill will, since, regardless of what the agent’s subjective probability of H’s obtaining is, in such cases the agent intends or desires that H will obtain (and not merely that it might). I offer an example of this below.
21 Although I opt to use the term “feature,” these can be understood as wrong-making properties of an action.
22 In Miller (Citation2017) I argue that, given certain commitments, “foreseeability theorists” have reason to abandon their view in favor of an actual foresight version of the tracing strategy.
23 This is not to say that, at the time of his benighting act, Leonard foresaw what the benighted act would be “in all its florid particularity,” (to borrow a phrase from Fischer and Tognazzini Citation2009, 538). He would not have known, for example, exactly where he would kill Teddy, what each of them would be wearing, what particular weapon he would use to do it, and so on. My claim here is that Leonard was aware, at the time that he set himself up to kill Teddy, of all of the features of that action that would make it morally wrong.
24 McKenna (Citation2009) suggests that it does not make sense to blame Leonard for his actions, since “an agent who simply could not remember his acts could not see the blame or the punishment as responding to the character traits in him as they were revealed in his actions” (39). Even so, McKenna explains, this does not preclude Leonard from being blameworthy for his actions. In the end, however, McKenna claims that, if Leonard is responsible and blameworthy for his actions, “his moral responsibility is so vanishingly minimal that it seems not to amount to much” (41). Part of the reason for this judgment, I take it, is that Leonard’s agential capacities are severely impaired by his continual memory loss. In order to avoid this broader concern about Leonard’s agency for the case I discuss here, we can imagine a similar case in which an otherwise normally functioning agent intentionally induces the sort of memory loss and ignorance that comes naturally to Leonard with the aim of killing someone out of ignorance.
25 Depending on the nature of doctor’s motivational state when omitting to look at his patient’s medical chart, it may also be that this failure expressed ill will.