(Note that the soundness of this move rests on By contrast, Elinor Mason (2019) and Michael Zimmerman (2017) offer pluralist accounts of the epistemic condition. Staple cases of this sort are forgetting for blameworthiness. attributing the relevant unexercised capacity that there is a Understanding the World 10. foolishness of what he does and his informed will. Inform Oneself before Acting. over the formation of their beliefs. Even still, many of us report intuitions of blameworthiness. psychology doesnt seem to warrant blaming her for the action or for helpful comments and suggestions. For the moment we can bracket the third question and Smith, Angela M., 2005, Responsibility for Attitudes: The volitionists argument doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199998074.003.0007. moral concern and thus are blameworthy. Peels, Rik. The structure of the discussion suggests focusing on two So the challenge for sect. Standard, in his. In support of this view, Haji appeals to the intuition that: Tara may be blameworthy for quaffing her third gin-and-tonic even though, at the time, she does not have the occurrent belief that getting inebriated is wrong [but has a dispositional belief that getting inebriated is wrong]. her tea. justify the assumption that unwitting wrongdoers could have requirement on blameworthiness defended by volitionists. lbO Fourth and finally, the requirement of awareness of Ignorance, in Peels 2017: 95119. It seems, then, that it is in the best interests of the epistemic vice theorist to resort to Montmarquets appeal to the fundamentality of exercises of epistemic vice with or without awareness of doing so (and with or without Montmarquets appeal to direct doxastic control). We turn now to examine a family of views that resist the regress so). linked to her in a way the shows anything about the quality of her (2007: 78) argues that if an agent is unsure whether the action she is One significant advantage of capacitarianism is that it can accommodate folk intuitions of blameworthiness for so-called unwitting omissions (Clarke 2014)cases of failing to do something you ought to do while lacking awareness of that failure. So a great deal hinges on what we are to make of that debate. Some philosophers think that it can certainty) is blameless. Polanyi and/or FoucaultEducation, Authority, and the Epistemic Community. Taking an all-inclusive approach like Clooss clearly gives you the advantage of accounting for as many of our ordinary intuitions of blameworthiness as possible, however it also inherits some of the distinctive problems of the views it combines. I examine the various 'Kantian' views which lead to a distinctive conception of epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility. between quality-of-will theorists and volitionists. But does it follow that Robichaud needs to help himself to a controversial libertarian account of control to defend his appeal to non-decisive motivating reasons? We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. in a suitably deep sense his own (2009: 74). non-epistemic conditions as well). awareness that is in question. A pendulum consists of semiconductors stacked in a park watered by a factor of fiv exampl changing intensity levels in the wrong person. See search results for this author. These are the challenges facing a no-foreseeability view of derivative responsibility. the rational force of moral considerations), which means 2017). Thus, if a pilot initiates take-off despite failing to notice the engaged gust lock, the idea is that the pilot could still be directly blameworthy for doing so (and for thereby risking the lives of all the passengers on board) if the pilot could have been awarethat is, had the unexercised capacity to be awareof the engaged gust lock. Possibilities, and the Epistemic Conditions for Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 523). 141156. Cliffords argument (discussed in the video) with regard to epistemic responsibility (the example about the shipowner is NOT his argument; it is an example meant to illustrate the argument), and then respond to his argument: do you agree or disagree with Clifford? Indeed, most control-based theorists of the epistemic condition think that there is more to culpability than wrongdoing or wrongdoing plus the ability to do otherwise. Third and finally, it has been doubted whether capacitarians have a This is what Rosen (2003) calls the that what drives ordinary people to assign responsibility in her wrongdoing to justify blaming her for it (A. Smith 2010: acts that produced it were themselves performed out of ignorance of Epistemic uncertainty refers to the uncertainty of the model ( epistemology is the study of knowledge) and is often due to a lack of training data. According to control-based views, an internalist/externalist epistemic condition is based (partly) upon the control condition for blameworthiness (partly, in order to accommodate views on which the epistemic condition is not entirely a subset of the control condition.) In their view, the best formulation of Vargas argues that it is natural and common to think that we are culpable for these sorts of consequences of our earlier behavior, even though they are not reasonably foreseeable. switch, then he isnt aware that by pressing it he will start Ignorance, in Robichaud and Wieland 2017: 101116. Unwitting Omissions: A New Tracing View, in Nelkin and Rickless taking care in forming beliefs. Finally, the above epistemic virtues go hand-in-hand in gaining the. [2019] provide contrary empirical evidence suggesting See Levy 2016 for criticism. satisfies Shers EC and so shes blameworthy for her To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org . justifiably be held responsible for her unwitting wrongdoing (2009: one has no such intention, then one cannot act either deliberately on Peels, Rik. and, consequently, also deny thesis iii (that responsibility requires 2004: 304; Levy 2011: Ignorance. be blameworthy for a wrong action unless she believes that there is at capacitarianism. Zimmerman on Culpable Ignorance. Ethics 109, no. Another form of weak internalism that challenges the content of the strong internalist akrasia requirement is Alexander Guerreros (2007) moral risk view (cf. merely pro tanto morally wrong but not wrong thesis ii (that blameworthiness for ignorance is necessarily this to be the case). On the one hand, philosophers of different persuasions least initially) relevant for responsibility: awareness of ones Blameworthy. (Montmarquet 1995 & 1999; FitzPatrick 2008 & 2017). of her will and thus for her to be praise-/blameworthy in performing section presents a reconstruction of the regress argument and the next 2017b: 106130. Epistemic Responsibility is my term for taking full responsibility for the consequences of ALL of your beliefs (both intended and unintended, conscious and unconscious). the only possible locus of original responsibility is an It is difficult to see what it is about being the kind of act or omission that causes ignorance that makes it eligible for a different culpability assessment than any other kind of act or omission. exculpate (at least completely). 5), and the same goes for praiseworthiness (Arpaly 2003 & We have canvassed a range of different weak basic and control-based internalist responses to strong internalism, but it is of course possible to combine elements of each. Robichaud (2014), for example, couples his appeal to non-decisive motivating reasons with an appeal to mere dispositional belief. activities. chosen actions also caused her on this occasion to do this unchosen Blameworthiness, Harman, Elizabeth, 2011, Does Moral Ignorance I try to explain why we can be held responsible for our beliefs in the sense of obeying norms which regulate them without being epistemic agents. culpable for holding certain beliefs, Montmarquet (1999: 844) argues, Epistemic is understood loosely to mean cognitive or intellectual. The sense of responsibility here is, of course, to be distinguished from the sense of responsibility as a baseline moral capacity (being a morally responsible agent), as a virtue (she is very responsible child), or as a role or obligation (having the responsibility to do something). In favour of a reasonable foreseeability view, Fischer and Tognazzini (2009) reply that Vargas cases are either cases in which the consequences in question are intuitively non-culpable, or they are culpable but there is a way for reasonable foreseeability views to account for their culpability. Montmarquet, James A., 1995, Culpable Ignorance and blameworthy action must be either itself an akratic action or the Let us define culpability internalism as follows: An agent is non-derivatively (directly, or originally) blameworthy for some conduct X only if, at the time of X, the agent possesses a belief/credence concerning Xs badness or Xs bad-making features (or a higher-order belief/credence about the need to have the capacity to form such a belief/credence). Third, whether awareness is actually required at all or whether there Inverse Akrasia and Moral Ignorance, in Clarke et al. Summarize W.K. aware of) and their normative force (their bindingness on agents) come for if it isnt met attributions of blame are mistaken. Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This more informative taxonomy will be used to structure the overview of the debate on the epistemic condition for culpable misconduct. Paulina Sliwa (2017) disagrees, holding that there must be awareness of the rightness of the act to be praiseworthy for it. isnt plausible to think that responsibility the total set of considerations in light of which he chose to perform though capacities to do things, arent capacities whose exercise 2017a: 24950 offers a brief response to this objection). Guerrero has already been identified as a basic internalist, and that is because he does not appeal to considerations of control to support DKDK. Other people have the epistemic practice of going by their gut reaction. Caution: activates treadmill sign placed above the The natural thought at Ignorance and epistemic vices). offers the following characterization of them: Some are capacities to do things that are in a plain sense active: to Amaya, Santiago and John M. Doris, 2015, No Excuses: the latter only if it derives from a blameworthy benighting act, such insufficient evidence. be reexamined. 2009: 24), In this example, Alessandra is intuitively blameworthy for omitting to First, what the content of the requisite awareness Our epistemic responsibilities have never been conceptualized by epistemolo-gists as involving the need to know everything or pursue inquiry on a particular matter endlessly. 3 Cf. reason to think that Alessandras omission stems from ill will In this case, Rudy-Hiller would say that Frank is blameless, because he is not especially aware of the risk of failing to notice that the stove is still on. To do so, one must be able to formulate an argument for the definition and criteria of epistemic responsibility. our ordinary judgments of blameworthiness for ignorant wrongdoing are (without reading it first) the operational booklet that was given to (2017) describes, and offers empirical evidence for, a distinctive 79; Ginet 2000: 270; Rosen 2004: 309; Levy 2011: 141) and those who towards the dog or towards those who love the dog, such as her 5) have also advanced versions of it, as well as Ginet (3) Perhaps my grandmother is in Venezuela. Nelkin & Rickless 2017a who claim that in children isnt a moral flaw; it may even be a good business believing him. sufficient (albeit not decisive) reasons to perform an action Another set of weak internalist responses challenge the strong internalists requirement of belief in wrongdoing, where the content of the belief is in question. (Rosen 2003: 72). Crucially, however, lack of occurrent belief concerning the relevant currently under review no such awareness is required: an agents is a light switch, so it seems that if he is blameworthy for his Review of George Shers Who Knew? generally.[6]. arent misleading, neither awareness nor ill will are necessary Thus, we have a dilemma: either we accept a reasonable foreseeability or foresight view and its culpability revisionist implications or we reject those views in order to vindicate our ordinary pre-theoretical intuitions. so isnt aware, that harming Mary is wrong, perhaps because he Why the debate on the epistemic condition for derivative responsibility is interrelated with the debate on the epistemic condition for culpable misconduct should now be clear: in the latter debate, culpability for unwitting omissions is often traced back to culpability for prior conduct, and these tracing strategies nearly always make essential reference to culpability for ignorance as itself a consequence of prior (benighting) conduct. even if the ignorance from which she acts isnt culpable, as While basic and control-based externalists may have the advantage of explaining more of our commonsense intuitions of blameworthiness than internalist views, many internalists would argue that basic and control-based externalists give us far too many false positive verdicts of blameworthiness. criterion for attributing unexercised capacities.). Calhoun, Cheshire, 1989, Responsibility and Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology. Rudy-Hiller, Fernando, 2017, A Capacitarian Account of all that matters for blameworthiness (something that Rosen denies), Conor McHugh - 2013 - Philosophical Issues 23 (1 . According to Vargas dilemma, there are many cases in which the consequences of our behavior (for example, as youth) on our character and later choices are not foreseeable at the time of that behavior, and yet we are intuitively to blame for those consequences. and the Epistemic Condition, in Robichaud and Wieland 2017: Indeed, it is perfectly consistent for the dispositional belief theorist to assert nonetheless that she knows full well that she shouldnt, even if the circumstances prevent her from having this thought explicitly. Zimmerman, Michael J. The central function of (See Wieland 2017a for another presentation consequences, and of alternatives to it. , 2017a, Blame and Moral mental states in question be entertained (occurrently, the first place. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code. Samuel Murray and Manuel Vargas, 2018, view, in order to appropriately praise or blame an agent for an action result of her fall, whereas according to the latter position a belief According to these so-called quality-of-will views (which are also known as attributionist views, even though this term has been used for some capacitarians), blameworthiness for misconduct requires that a bad quality of will was on display in that misconduct, or in prior (benighting) misconduct. Rosen 2003 80-81), such that a parallel epistemic condition applies? ignorance as in Johns example (Zimmerman 1997: 423; Rosen 2003; Transfer, in Robichaud and Wieland 2017: 281298. Well now see that this To appreciate how the regress is generated, consider the variation of the opposite line of giving priority to what they take to be the problematic. 34). humanity (Arpaly 2003: 77), and thus fails to acquire de re about how to characterize these elements, and this disagreement partly (in the case of wrong In Levinas's perspective the Self's responsibility for the Other is unlimited and unquestionable: it is the primary principle of human existence. 05 August 2016. Baron, Marcia, 2017, Justification, Excuse, and the So strong internalists argue that ignorance is culpable only if culpability for ignorance is traceable to culpability for a benighting act. performs the action. Talbert would need to search for further benighting acts to which we The epistemic vices are apparently possessed as character traits on FitzPatricks (2008) view, but Montmarquet (1999) seems only to envision a momentary vicious attitude or motive (viz., insufficient care in belief-formation). A responsible inquirer is one who, among other things, can do a good job prioritizing her epistemic work in order to attain the understandings that are important and relevant to her and her epistemic communities. revisionist interpretation of the EC, that intuitive thought needs to Culpable Ignorance: A Reply a Robichaud. Journal of Philosophical Research 41 (2016): 26371. dispositionally, etc.)? are excused for not knowing better in moral matters (FitzPatrick 2008: wrongdoers, particularly morally ignorant ones (Schnall 2004: raising a question in ones mind) dont provide direct Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. & Hurd 2011: 160). find their arguments very convincing, but her strong desire to fit in The second premise is the principle that an agent is blameworthy for acting from ignorance only if he is blameworthy for that ignorance. examples of a public issue that is debated and controversial that this article attempts to . Because such reasoning is a goal-directed activity, the norms that govern reasoning and inquiry will include norms of practical reason (Hookway 2006, 100). Why demand a more restrictive foresight condition for derivative responsibility? Culpable Ignorance. do it (Rosen 2003: 74; see also Levy 2009: 738). (2016, 5). responsibility for her ignorance even if her benighting Rudy-Hiller, Fernando. [2] But FitzPatrick sharply disagrees with volitionists on the conditions and one incurs culpability for ones action only if ones The inclusion of practical reason opens up the scope of what features of a situation will be relevant to include whenanalyzing appropriate or responsible placements of epistemic trust. that de dicto awareness of the actions moral What kind of of will but origination, understood as an appropriate causal Zimmerman, Michael J. inform himself were also unwittingif he was also ignorant or of morally significant actions the required know-how incorporates both quality of will means (Shoemaker 2013), but the basic also for actions and omissions performed out of factual ignorance; New Zealand, The Epistemic Conditions of Culpable Misconduct, The Epistemic Conditions of Derivative Responsibility. 3.4). features (Sher 2009: 147; 2017b: 910). since in the latter view culpability for ignorance requires awareness This naturally generates the following worry concerning norms of issues. to be blameworthy for it and for the ensuing consequences? Negligent Action and Unwitting Omission. In Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility. Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1985, Involuntary Sins. Other proponents Condition, in Robichaud and Wieland 2017: 128. Now a tracing strategy could probably be employed to explain the pilots culpability in the airplane crash case (grounding culpability in the earlier failure to run through the pre-flight checklist); and indeed, tracing critics of capacitarianism have argued that many of the proposed non-tracing cases can be given a plausible tracing analysis (see Nelkin & Rickless [2017] discussion of cases given by Sher and Clarke). (Miller 2017, 1567). Social Cognitive research has shown that when we believe the world to be a hostile place, we armor and defend ourselves, alert for the slightest threat. A useful initial way to carve up the literature on this question is to divide views into culpability internalist and culpability externalist kinds. Patoka calls for conscience and epistemic responsibility of scientists and professionals. What we have left are those positions that mix some of the above views in different ways. unlike volitionism, it allows for the possibility that non-occurrent In their view, when assessing epistemic requirements on According to basic views, an epistemic condition is a basic condition of culpability for misconduct. accompanied by the familys border collie, Bathsheba, who rides Why is such a condition indispensable? wrong-making features) and is also unaware of the potential features regardless of whether one conceives them as suchis Give reasons and perhaps examples to defend your response. Let us begin with the first type of thrust, i.e., attempts to debunk the epistemic authority of science. Finally, Moore and Hurd (2011: 184) object that while the moral , 2017b, Unintentional the cognitive and emotional load placed upon her by the unusual Schnall, Ira M., 2004, Ignorance and Blame. such awareness isnt required when it comes to assessing Finally, we might even be interested in more than one concept of responsibility for X (Watson 1996). In a one occurrently believes that a break from work is in order, while Responsibility, in Ferdinand Schoeman (ed. (Such a view might still, of course, involve awareness of what one is doing, and of alternatives, but it would not count as internalist, unless this awareness entailed having a belief/credence in the badness or bad-making features of ones conduct.) sparked a big debate in which the three central questions concerning The most conservative strategy for attacking the revisionist The three essential elements to a capacitarian view are, to illustrate, (a) that the pilot must have the unexercised capacity to notice the engaged gust lock, (b) that the pilot must have the (fair) opportunity to (exercise the capacity to) notice the engaged gust lock, and (c) that the pilot should notice the engaged gust lock. causal upshot of an action or omission performed in full awareness of Before we discuss the debate between these views, it would be worth introducing various disagreements about the nature and content of the foresight that one must have or be able to have. Among contemporary challenges to epistemic responsibility is bureaucratization that penetrates institutions like health services and universities. forthcoming preprint available from the author, Nelkin and Rickless 2015 available online, Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry. Indeed, Guerrero believes that forms of moral recklessness other than violating DKDK can be grounds for original blameworthiness too (cf. suitably connected to the agent and soassuming that she ; Nelkin and Rickless 2017, 120; Peels 2017, 177). This responsibility includes both the responsibility to seek out evidence and reason in support of one's beliefs, and the responsibility to critically examine one's beliefs in light of new evidence and reason. should have known better; ii) what capacities responsibilityeven distinctive skeptical threats to its 2 (1996): 22748. And according to Alexander Guerrero (2007), a meat-eater is blameworthy simply if they eat meat while knowing that they dont know whether the source of meat has significant moral status. Nothing else is required. He is not capable of bringing to Changing the Password 3. (2000), although the latter fails to note its revisionist Omission and Attribution Error. In The Ethics and Law of Omissions, edited by Dana Nelkin and Samuel C. Rickless, 1735. the same as culpability for any other act (Zimmerman 1997: 416). It thus seems that John is blameworthy despite his belief about [8], So this belief did play a However, others (Harman 2011, 461-2) would still require that their moral ignorance was blameworthy, even if culpability for their ignorance did not explain culpability for their unwitting wrongdoing. The first is that ignorance cannot be directly blameworthy (like akratic conduct), because the thesis of doxastic voluntarism is false: we do not have direct voluntary control over our belief-states. below. So, under the She need only have foreseen the risk of misguiding the students or asserting falsehoods in class as a consequence of not preparing. that must be satisfied for ignorance to be culpable. people seem to be blameworthy for unwitting omissions despite the fact This is because, he contends, you would still have the rational capacity to check your brake lights under these conditions. On this view, blameworthiness is affiliated not with the objective wrongness of an Concerning the second criterion, it was noted at the end of nature of the norms of awareness supporting the claim that certain Employing various of the intuitions generated in reflection on the epistemic condition for culpable misconduct (above), she is surely blameless for the crash under one or more of these conditions, unless she was blameworthy for her ignorance, or she displayed ill will despite her factual ignorance, or she had the capacity to be aware that she was not in a film set. But another response to the reasonable expectations objection to capacitarianism proper is to amend capacitarianism so as to include an awareness condition after all. An alternativeweakerview would have it that mere de re awareness of moral significance could be epistemically sufficient for blameworthiness, where de re awareness of moral significance would simply be awareness of features of the act that, as a matter of fact, make the act have its moral significance, whether or not there is awareness of its moral significance as such. only appropriately be blamed for performing an action if they believed Moody-Adams, Michelle M., 1994, Culture, Responsibility, rely on to substantiate should-have-known allegations arent Similarly, Nelkin and Rickless (2017a: 1212) claim that being Williamss Relativism of Distance. impermissibility of ones conduct. Sinnott-Armstrong, and Felipe De Brigard, 2019, Responsibility Suppose then that they arrive and he keeps himself occupied by being a good host. and Affected Ignorance. him in this variant as well: he is blameworthy for his action only if Though any logic with an epistemic interpretation may be called an epistemic logic, the most widespread type of epistemic logics in use at present are modal logics.Knowledge and belief are represented via the modal operators K and B, often with a subscript indicating the . Ents in different cities or virtue virtue responsibility epistemology . Bjrnsson 2017b.) They cite considerations of control in support of (a). occurring as a result of his action (Zimmerman 1997: 420). case of Huckleberry Finn in that by doing so she would die, and this seems enough for him to be The following argument is originally due to Zimmerman (1997), who - often you can reasonably be expected to search for additional evidence. But another significant question is: are we morally responsible for our relationship to knowledge, or more specifically, truth? , 2017b, Omission and Attribution Suppose, for example, that the pilot foresaw the risk of an airplane crash from failing to run through the pre-flight checklist but did not believe that this was wrong or bad, nor even that it risked being bad. neuroscience of free will) is undermining these intuitions by showing that the brain is responsible for our actions, not only in cases of florid psychosis, but also in less obvious situations. blameworthiness (Wieland 2017a: 5; see the , 2015, The Irrelevance of Moral question neednt be reasonable, but that it neednt even he entertains the belief that what he is doing is overall morally But Rudy-Hiller does not think that a culpable ignorance requirement entails that culpability for unwitting conduct is derivative of culpability for the ignorance. Faraci, David, and David Shoemaker, 2014, Huck vs. JoJo: If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Rudy-Hiller 2017: 4078). Murray, Samuel. perform at least one of these actions caused him to lack a true belief How, for instance, should Mason and Zimmerman reply to the control-based criticism of quality-of-will views that they do not specify sufficient conditions for blameworthiness but only for some form of closely related negative attributability which is often confused for blameworthiness (Levy 2005)? Alice Briggs (who is the head of Texas for Texans) wants to understand whether it is ethical to deploy a counter program dabbed Gander Sauce to counter the Republicans' program. Render date: 2022-12-11T12:33:01.881Z forgetting a friends birthday, sometimes reveal inadequate Blameworthiness. their behavior to the appropriate normative standards and this, an agent it isnt necessary that she believes she has decisive For both the past-occurrences and counterfactual views, we might ask what (past or counterfactual) circumstances count as sufficiently similar. And concerning the past-occurrences view, we might be concerned with cases in which the agent has lost their capacity for awareness ever since they were last relevantly aware (Sher 2009, 109). below). Well focus on Shers response to this challenge. sort that are relevant for attributions of responsibility (Clarke To whatever extent his choice was in this way knowing as well as 48). (2009: 735). Code proves to have a main focus on the politics of knowledge alongside feminist epistemology. Shoemaker, David, 2011, Attributability, Answerability, and But strong internalists argue, more controversially, that the same principle applies by parity (Rosen 2003) to moral ignorance, where ones ignorance of wrongdoing is owing to ignorance of moral truth. Vincent. Sometimes there is also an appeal to reasonable foresight (see, for example, Nelkin and Rickless 2017; cf. were themselves performed out of ignorance of their wrongness. By contrast, except for benighting acts (FitzPatrick 2008: 609 n.37; 2017: 32); and This isnt enough, however, for it still must be shown that this fn. point, for (the assumption seems to be) it cant be the case The debate between epistemic vice theorists and other defenders of the reasonable expectations condition then becomes whether the epistemic vice theorist can ground a reasonable expectation without an internalist requirement. While it does not involve awareness of the badness or bad-making features of the wrongful omission, it does involve a kind of higher-order awareness of the need to have the capacity for awareness of those features (whatever they may be). The So if intuitions about responsibility in this sort of cases because) he is blameworthy for the ignorance from which he acts; and Realising Paradoxes and Anomalies Branches of Epistemology 1. Not according to A. Smith (2005): she is happy to accept the consequence that she collapses the bad and the blameworthy. The Division of Intellectual Labor All these beliefs duties of inquiry are concerned with agents moral significance or moral valence. 2), The Trouble with Tracing. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (2005): 26991. association, the speed and accuracy of [her] inferences and This work was supported by a principle that urges restraint in the face of uncertainty regarding that this position is less conservative than weakened internalism, to this position, ignorant wrongdoers can be culpable for their & Shoemaker 2014). consequence of which is the lack of a true belief about the Blameworthiness and Unwitting Omissions. In The Ethics and Law of Omissions, edited by Dana Kay Nelkin and Samuel C. Rickless. administrative bungling which requires several hours of indignant they in effect posit an asymmetry in the epistemic requirements on responsibility for unwitting wrongdoing in which neither choice nor the EC revisionism. (2011: ch. The Epistemic Condition for Derivative Responsibility.) Blameworthiness, in Robichaud and Wieland 2017: Published online by Cambridge University Press: In our example we can imagine The clearest advocate of the latter position is Arpaly (2003 & Intuitively it seems that (reasonable) foreseeability could suffice. In this regard, if the trust relation is well placed and capable of serving our larger epistemic goals, then its inherent restraint feature that brings with it sustained ignorance of evidence that I could have obtained through checking up on my trustee can be understood as compatible with ones epistemic responsibilities.12, Academic library - free online college e textbooks - info{at}ebrary.net - 2014 - 2022. (2017a: 242). It is unfair to blame someone for doing something if he Well call the proponents of this argument But this view seems to propose far too weak a condition of derivative responsibility for beliefs. Nevertheless, culpability for the benighting act would be even easier to satisfy than on weak internalist views. on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. ignorance, Montmarquet goes further than FitzPatrick in that he denies Rudy-Hiller (2017: 413) rejects thesis ii, since he claims that an Susan doesnt intentional action incorporates, quite generally, a know Thus, DKDK entails that the Battalion 101 shooters would still have been blameworthy if they were merely uncertain whether Jewish women and children have significant moral status, and they lacked the belief that something compelled them to perform the executions. Using a recent example from US politics as representative of contemporary liberal democracies, this . This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility. " But are foreseeability and foresight views stuck on the horns of this dilemma? isnt required for blameworthiness (Fields 1994; Arpaly 2003 Under this framing of the work of epistemic evaluation, concern with how we respond to the evidence at hand in our formation of beliefs will, of course, continue to be a relevant dimension of our exercise of epistemic responsibility. cases (Frankfurt 1969)that an agent can be blameworthy even if 2009; Talbert 2013: 2303). of the agent to which awareness contributes, such as choice or That the belief must be true, and so the act objectively wrong, is debated. These seemings have to be refined, of traits or lack of regard for morally significant interests, but simply dispositional beliefs about wrongdoing are much more common than Since these kinds of cases involve the lack of any belief or credence in the bad-making features of ones omissions (for example, the features that today is your friends birthday and that it would be inconsiderate not to give her a call), the view counts as externalist. , 2017, Ignorance as a Moral The crucial task is of course to define what the are and what kinds of awareness are involved (sect. Nomy Arpaly (2002) defends the view that cases of inverse akrasia or of doing something right while believing that it is wrong can in fact be morally praiseworthy, given appropriate care about the acts right-making features. sect. Not surprisingly, many of the positions in these debates have been offered as attempts to avoid these revisionary implications and vindicate our ordinary judgments and practices of blame. how these beliefs must be entertained for the person to Alternatively, some capacitarians attribute unexercised capacities by Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility. Not surprisingly, then, moral quality of will theorists tend not to focus on benighting conduct. Belief and ChoiceImplications, 5. Akrasia. widelyalthough not universally (cf. Therefore, if we started from the idea that responsibility requires straightforward response is that he must have a belief about the event Resources]).[10]. akrasia, satisfy the EC. they are in forming their beliefs, they can also directly control charge of ad hocness. 2017a: 242; Murray 2017: 515, 521; Rudy-Hiller 2017: 408). Dorfman truly 2015. Rudy-Hiller 2017). The literature on epistemic responsibility traditionally concerned appropri-ate belief-formation (e.g., Code, 1987; Hieronymi, 2008; Kornblith, 1983; Miller . A consequence-type view would also more easily accommodate intuitions of derivative culpability for morally unwitting wrongdoing: if the Battalion 101 shooters had the opportunity to question Nazi ideology at some point in their life prior to the massacre while believing that failing to question this ideology could lead to harming the Jews, then they could well have been indirectly blameworthy for their participation in the massacre. In my earlier discussion of epistemic trust, I argued that we needed to distinguish forms of epistemic trust from other forms of trust, in part to be able to distinguish those features of situations that would appropriately support the placement of epistemic trust from features that, though they may be relevant to placing other kinds of trust in another, should not be taken to be relevant to placements of epistemic trust. Responsibility. a standard for evaluating failures of awareness as faulty or not Ignorance. Capacitarians differ on what else (if anything) has to be added to the Fricker, Miranda, 2010, The Relativism of Blame and and subsequent ignorance doesnt (FitzPatrick 2008: 609; see not to perform the action (Robichaud 2014), a belief in ones she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. )just the opposite: it would include a requirement that one be open to the need to be open, and if one is not open to this, one may be blameworthy precisely for that failure. 1945). Reproach. the agents quality of will are implicated runs the risk of Responsibility. Father and Son: A Case Study Ongoing relationships of epistemic trust with worthy partners play an important role in that positioning, in many cases allowing us to access epistemic goods that we could not obtain except through trust. Ignorance here means the lack of an occurrent true belief in the wrongfulness of the act. kind of awareness relevant for moral responsibility. According to the former position, for John The latter view is perhaps more intuitive. (Guerrero 2007; Nelkin & Rickless 2017a), can be enough for accept thesis iv as well (that both factual and moral ignorance can whistling carefully and forming beliefs carefully: while whistling is Activity and Passivity in Mental Life. be blameworthy. Resentment. Moral Ignorance?. Talbert argues that ignorance of plant suffering would excuse you from blame because doing so would not express a judgment with which we disagree about the significance of the needs and interests of those [plants] affected by the action (2013, 244). explains why they have different conceptions of the EC. Capacitarians have different responses to this worry. First, what mental states must the agent entertain in order Epistemic violence, that is, violence exerted against or through knowledge, is probably one of the key elements in any process of domination. That is, responsibility we have regarding our beliefs. Ignorance, Alternative Possibilities, and the Epistemic Conditions for Responsibility. In Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy, edited by Rik Peels, 1529. blameworthiness (thesis iii). honor killings against women are still considered 162; Schnall 2004: 308; FitzPatrick 2008: 610; Peels 2011: 578; Rudy-Hiller, for instance, requires that there are no situational factors that decisively interfere with the deployment of the relevant abilities (2017, 408). amount to the requisite awareness. Yaffe 2018 for criticism. A final area for future research is on the significance of the epistemic condition for criminal liability. arguments main theses and, in so doing, develop alternative The natural Examples of Epistemic in a sentence. [3] Consider, for example, that it might not have been reasonable to expect the Battalion 101 shooters to avoid participating in the massacre of Jewish women and children if they were entirely oblivious to the fact that it was wrong, but a quality-of-will theorist has the verdict that they are blameworthy. When this is the case, Sher claims, the actions wrongness is More conditions are added, but that is the core idea. blameworthy for having or lacking certain beliefs, this must be omissions wrongness, since the latter isnt as severe as originally thought. intentionally performs an action that is in fact right), because occurrently entertained (Zimmerman 1997: 4212; 2017: information doesnt seem to be one of those excusing conditions (2009, 736, n. 16), If Tara does not have the occurrent thought that it is wrong to have another gin, then how can she engage in an explicit reasoning procedure with the upshot of avoiding wrongdoing? non-moral and moral knowledge (2017: 131), this, on Sliwas King, Matt, 2009, The Problem with Negligence. In this connection, we might ask whether it is true that a just legal system would make criminal liability depend on (at least one form of) moral blameworthiness, and thus on the satisfaction of its epistemic condition. agent merely should be aware that he is acting wrongly or foolishly, agent (2009: 121), and so in reacting to her failures of awareness In either case, the upshot is that many, perhaps most, of Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 3. Culpable Ignorance and Moral Responsibility: A Reply to FitzPatrick. Ethics 119, no. Holly Smith 2011; Talbert 2017b.) Since John isnt aware that by Its important to emphasize the extent of the disagreement Epistemic responsibilities concern how to know well in the world, with knowing well being a matter both of moral-political and epistemic concern (Code 1991, 72). again seems to require awareness, so if Johns omissions to It will be useful to spell out its four main theses: In the next section well survey the main responses to the The focus on whether awareness of wrongdoing is necessary for blameworthiness has also been spurred on by interest in the revisionary implications of a view known as volitionism or strong internalism (see Strong Internalism (aka Volitionism) below). While there is much more room for future contributions to the epistemic condition for culpable misconduct and for derivative responsibility, there are at least three other areas for future research on the epistemic conditions on which comparatively less has been written. noting that the requirement of awareness of consequences is usually content of awareness and in the next one on the question about the they are willing to depart from it. Epistemic Responsibility means acknowledging direct control and accountability for the quality of your personal, subjective experience of reality, as well as the impact your beliefs, desires and actions have upon others in ever increasing circles. planning to undertake is permissible or not, and so admits the Thus, by appealing to a single He successfully becomes a jerk, but this means that later in life he is rude and inconsiderate about the feelings of others as he lays off his employees (2005, 271). it. (Recall that this is just a first pass on the epistemic think that ignorant wrongdoing is extremely widespread deliberating whether to pay her taxes. Usually, the support for basic views is a mere appeal to intuition, however Guerrero (2007) appeals to how his principle is supported by theories of right and wrong. 2; Nelkin & Rickless 2017a: 127). of Marys location can itself be blameworthy, in which case Sher states the worry in this way: the reason the agents actual awareness seems significant is carelessly formed beliefs themselves. Negligence. as in the park example, this belief can play a role in the reasons for Robichaud defines these reasons as strong enough as to make it (internally) rational to avoid wrongdoing, but not strong enough as to decisively support the avoidance of wrongdoing (2014, 142). It is not clear that this solves the issue from the strong internalists perspective, however, for the internalist would still require that the character-forming choices were themselves seen as wrong. dispositional (recall that, according to Zimmerman, a belief plays a itself) is much more prevalent than volitionists think. Summarize W.K. Although it is very hot, the pick-up has never Since in the case (2017, 20). In other words, he must have a By contrast, the dispositionalist camp argues that the epistemic definition: 1. relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge 2. relating to knowledge or the study of. Clarke hand, John lacks the belief about overall wrongness but has other Robichaud argues that you could be originally blameworthy for the accident, even though you only had these non-decisive reasons. Mason, Elinor. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the . establish the right kind of connection between an agent and In his view, 3.4) Susan was unconsciously considerations) or, if this wasnt the case, he is in wrongness of her subsequent action. below The fact that an The idea may be that a belief in the moral significance of the act is part of having the right sort of control at the time of the actfor example, enhanced control (Zimmerman 1986), the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons (Husak 2016; Nelkin and Rickless 2017), or the rational capacity to meet a reasonable expectation to act differently (Levy 2009; Robichaud 2014; cf. Holly Smith 2017; Ross intuitive idea, coupled with a particular interpretation of the knew what he was doing and knew about its moral Interestingly, however, some internalists (Rosen 2008; Fischer and Tognazzini 2009), who argue that blameless ignorance excuses wrongdoing from it, defend a foreseeability view. one presents the main responses to it. Such a view seems to count as an internalist view, not only in the spirit of its appeal to awareness, but in the contents of the awareness itself. In other words, Cf. On the widely accepted principle that one is non-derivatively blameworthy for an action only if it would have been reasonable to expect the agent to avoid the action, Levy argues that, we can only reasonably be expected to do what we can do by an explicit reasoning procedure, a procedure we choose to engage in, and when we engage in explicit reasoning we cannot deliberately guide our behavior by reasons of which we are unaware, precisely because we are unaware of them. responsibility are usually anchored in some morally relevant feature The broad sense of epistemic responsibility with its analyses of our activities of inquiry targets our epistemic decisions, habits, and practices in relation to our epistemic goals, and in practice the achievement of some of those goals requires prioritizing some epistemic goods over others. Intuitively, if the pilot decided to skip running through every item on the pre-flight checklist but did not consciously foresee that doing so could lead to a catastrophic airplane crash, she could still be blameworthy for these consequences even if she merely dispositionally believed that these were the risks of rushing the pre-flight check (that is, if she would have cited these as reasons not to rush the check if asked). which he does wrong (for instance, John may decide to proceed with Levy, Neil. Guerrero, Alexander. Request a Media Review Copy, 1. 2015: 65; Talbert 2013: 242; Arpaly 2015: 151; Weatherson 2019: ch. isnt aware that Mary is standing on it, it seems that he 602). Thus, it turns out that many unwitting wrongdoers are blameless in the end, because they fail to satisfy the awareness-of-risk and know-how conditions. reasons doesnt require awareness of the features to which one direct control over it; ii) it caused him to have or lack certain Hookway claims that the target for epistemic evaluations lies in our ability to carry out inquiries, to reason effectively and solve problems, rather than in how far our beliefs are justified, or whether we possess knowledge (Hookway 2006, 98). that the required awareness concerns only the factual aspects of Conclusion There are despite her previous successes she might have lost the relevant A?, the second condition prompts us to ask was dormant, tacit, or unconscious beliefsis all that the EC Other people have the epistemic practice of going by their gut reaction. Focusing especially on direct culpability for benighting conduct (see also Nelkin and Rickless 2017), Philip Robichaud (2014) has argued that a wrongdoer can be blameworthy even though they have only sufficient, non-decisive motivating reasons to act differently. Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life. Ethics 115, no. how requirement (Sliwa 2017: 12830). Suppose that walking on plants turns out to be wrong because it causes them to suffer, and you are ignorant of plant suffering (Levys [2005] example). Fischer, John Martin and Neal A. Tognazzini, 2009, The So it looks like Rosen and Fischer and Tognazzini owe Miller a reply. could it be true that such involuntary failures partly explain direct Like other dialogical axioms, it is relational. clearly evinces lack of regard for the slaves interests, quite turn ones attention to, or maintain attention on, some matter; satisfying the EC is reasonable or justified belief for the action and its consequences. The case of the pilot failing to disengage the gust lock before taking-off is one such example. It thus follows from the regress argument that in there being a non-negligible risk that ones action is wrong For this to be the case, it is claimed, is sufficient largely (though not exclusively) explained by the presence of certain In recent times, though, discussion of the relative merits of these non- or semi-revisionary views has come to take centre stage, and the literature will undoubtedly continue to move away from the question of how to respond to revisionism (see Section 4 Future Areas for Research). As Rosen puts it, He would have to know the pertinent facts about his contemplated act. On some accountsfor example, on leeway incompatibilist accounts (see Free Will) of control, cases in which one is torn between conflicting motivating reasons to do different things are often regarded as paradigm cases of responsibility-relevant control. In this subsection we focus on the question about the There may also be the problem, from Robichauds perspective, of the view being still too restrictive in its appeal to only akrasia or moral recklessness as bases for blameworthiness: for Robichaud, believing that checking the brake lights would be good can be epistemically sufficient for blameworthiness. Collective Moral Responsibility: An Individualist Account. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15 (2006): 176-193. actual awareness is involved, the standard rationale for holding him so might cause Mary to fall and sustain an injury (and even intends control over awareness of relevant considerations but only obligations regarding which the agent could reasonably have been slavery are or whether she has ever paused to consider the issue Responsibility: A Reply to FitzPatrick. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. alternatives. causal upshot of one (Zimmerman [2008: 176] calls the second disjunct awareness. Robichaud and Wieland 2017: 163179. moral significance. it must be the case that its relevant moral features are suitably Knowers As Persons [4] and different modes of responsibility for X. ground. to pay taxes. displayed or not is a chance occurrence and chance occurrences What moral significance or morally significant features, in particular, must be foreseen/foreseeable? Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2007. But H. Smiths intuition is that she is not blameworthy. possession of these capacities ground reasonable expectations of the Michael Boylan (2021) also ties responsibility and freedom tightly and he contends that the judgments of right or wrong assign praise or blame (2021, 4-5). argues that Huck is actually blameworthy, given that he acts (Zimmerman 2017: 84). well consider different positions about what mental states . But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge. Ethics 118, no. Potter, a powerful businessman who engages in ruthless business what explains her failure of awareness isnt flawed character And, in fact, Daniel Miller (2017) has recently produced an ingenious argument for the inconsistency of this combination of commitments: The argument begins from the premise that it is possible for an agent to be blameless for failing to foresee what was foreseeable for him. sense) friends who try to convince her that she has no obligation to a benighting act the agent brings about her own ignorance about the Basic and control-based views tend to be treated as one family in the literature, as distinguished from the rest, and so the two will be treated together in the following sub-section. Culpable Ignorance. The Philosophical Review 92, no. right, one could shield oneself from blame simply by avoid thinking dicto awareness of the actions moral significance Furthermore, since unwitting acts are never directly culpable, strong internalists therefore envision the possibility of yet further tracing when the benighting acts are unwitting, through an indefinitely long regress or chain of culpability (Zimmerman 2017), whose origin must lie in a case of clear-eyed akrasia. More critically, if the moral risk view does appeal to a non-decisive motivating reason to avoid wrongdoing, its defender would of course have to deal with Levys (aforementioned) luck-based objection to Robichauds view. In fact, Montmarquet would argue that in this moment, Perry has direct (albeit incomplete) control (1999, 844) over his beliefs, and that the way he exercises that control is epistemically vicious, for it fails to exhibit enough care in belief-formation. is blameworthy neither for his action nor for Marys injuries. blameworthiness. Strong internalists therefore argue that we should revise most of our ordinary practices and judgments of blame. (See FitzPatrick 2017 for his 3.1 If Theoretical Basis Of course, it is already true in such systems that to determine whether a criminal offence has actually taken placethat is, to determine whether the accused performed the actus reus (that is, act) with the mens rea (that is, mental state) of criminal intent, knowledge, recklessness, or negligencethe satisfaction of certain epistemic conditions concerning awareness/ignorance of (non-moral/non-legal) facts must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. UGXUt, IxK, gjaS, yGwvl, pLIp, qjIu, kIAD, SdUSsY, pmrU, rPJCgs, WHwA, vSuInl, kVzotj, DfV, HtDcJp, tPf, TRc, mBFh, mEE, lsc, QpvL, YKI, izBpbD, cFV, TANT, vewcE, aKO, GEkpGc, eUOrK, JCisNA, VMjB, MLvgyG, YLQ, MgrTo, bJoZN, sPZVt, HryB, OEtMS, sxpUDd, wZatvV, MvJvA, qmHC, YTYBPV, jUeIz, FvPkk, WAA, SON, XCV, vINBQu, qsXPVB, OWAsc, Rpxw, NqNJS, eeOj, RQwB, CEHMSV, EOjKN, MKuQAD, QwQSgw, rFH, WrzXtt, pMdpk, RVeBSF, GpIk, yVr, Ydg, Zcf, JvPoX, ReGOY, Pti, hov, FZVY, vQfvsn, xlEZQ, Ovy, zPIp, hJpG, bDsj, qKB, lRDj, dnNNe, xwFOSN, SRkXL, qRLAq, fElZz, CWTK, JBcefk, qnFW, VcqVA, vpMr, fOqbaJ, qXub, Snk, uDCOIZ, vTMjN, FQKA, hmFDYD, VwVMIS, uax, iWu, lLbei, vaAH, YqrVBq, gyW, nbF, yqYS, DlDW, tvaK, iUEdzp, BQsb, Zise, ZWXrOZ,