Zimmerman on culpable ignorance

Ethics

Volumn 109, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 842-845

  Montmarquet, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033162125     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233949     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. On the account Descartes offers in Meditation IV, culpable ignorance would have to be explained as part of the broader phenomenon of culpable error. If, for instance, I affirm as certain that which I do not completely understand, I will be culpably ignorant of my lack of genuine certainty. A very different account is suggested by some of Aristotle's remarks in the Nichomachean Ethics (bk. 3, chap. 5), to the effect that culpable ignorance would result from character traits (carelessness, etc.) for whose existence or subsequent development one was culpable.
2. See, for instance, my Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), chaps. 3-4.
3. Michael J. Zimmerman, "Moral Responsibility and Ignorance," Ethics 107 (1997): 410-26.
4. Therein lies the difference (see pp. 417-18. n. 12) between Zimmerman's view and Holly Smith's in "Culpable Ignorance,' Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543-71. The latter requires some "benighting act" for which the agent would be culpable, but the wrongness of which she need not be aware. I criticize this view from an opposite perspective in "Culpable Ignorance and Excuses," Philosophical Studies 80 (1995): 41-49.
5. Therein lies the difference (see pp. 417-18. n. 12) between Zimmerman's view and Holly Smith's in "Culpable Ignorance,' Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543-71. The latter requires some "benighting act" for which the agent would be culpable, but the wrongness of which she need not be aware. I criticize this view from an opposite perspective in "Culpable Ignorance and Excuses," Philosophical Studies 80 (1995): 41-49.
6. Compare in this regard Gilbert Ryle's treatment of "minding" in The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 137.