Moral responsibility and normative ignorance: Answering a new skeptical challenge

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 589-613

  FitzPatrick, William J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54949132168     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/589532     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. For an excellent survey of the central issues and arguments, see John Martin Fischer, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," Ethics 110 (1999): 93-139.
2. See Gideon Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 295-313.
3. There are interesting similarities and points of overlap between Rosen's argument and Michael Zimmerman's earlier argument in "Moral Responsibility and Ignorance," Ethics 107 (1997): 410-26. I shall focus here, however, on Rosen's more recent argument, which I find particularly lucid and challenging.
4. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 295.
5. The argument is easily extended to cover responsibility for bad events as well (e.g., the negligent engineer's responsibility for the bridge's collapse), taking this to be a function of responsibility for bad actions leading to them. On these and related cases, see Holly Smith, "Culpable Ignorance," Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543-71, at 552-55 and 564ff. For simplicity I will focus just on responsibility for bad actions.
6. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 298-99.
7. Ibid., 299.
8. Ibid., 304.
9. Ibid. See also Smith, "Culpable Ignorance," 548, though Smith focuses only on circumstantial ignorance, such as a doctor's ignorance of the effects of a procedure on a certain kind of patient.
10. Rosen grants, for the purposes of this argument, that ignorance fails to excuse if it is indeed culpable, and he settles for raising skeptical worries about our knowledge of the culpability of ignorance. There are, however, interesting questions about whether even culpable ignorance might mitigate responsibility. See Smith, "Culpable Ignorance."
11. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 308-9.
12. Ibid.
13. See Jeneen Interlandi, "An Unwelcome Discovery," New York Times Magazine, October 22, 2006, sec. 6, 98.
14. Rosen distinguishes "ordinary weakness of will" from the sort of clear-eyed akrasia he is interested in by saying that "the ordinary moral weakling . . . may initially judge that A is the thing to do, but when the time comes to act, loses confidence in this judgment and ultimately persuades himself (or finds himself persuaded) that the preferred alternative is at least as reasonable" ("Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 309).
15. Ibid.
16. Aquinas discusses this most unfortunate blunder to illustrate exculpating circumstantial ignorance in Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 19, art. 6.
17. As Rosen notes, all ignorance is, or implies, normative ignorance inasmuch as even ordinary circumstantial ignorance leads to a failure to appreciate the truth about the balance of reasons in connection with the action ("Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 304). I shall follow him in distinguishing between this sort of derivative normative ignorance and basic normative ignorance, such as ignorance of moral principles, which latter will be discussed further below.
18. Smith gives a similar example involving a doctor administering what turns out to be a harmful treatment ("Culpable Ignorance," 543, 548).
19. See Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 312 n. 11. Whether she can legitimately be held legally responsible is another matter, which I shall set aside.
20. This may have been true in Poehlman's case, for example: he took steps to hide his data tampering not (if he is to be believed) because he knew that the data tampering was wrong but because he recognized that others would regard it that way and his purposes would thus be thwarted if it were brought to light. His hiding his bad behavior was thus consistent with his acting nonakratically.
21. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 308.
22. Our knowledge of the occurrence of akrasia does not, of course, approach anything like Cartesian certainty. This is not a problem, however, as Rosen is not relying on such overblown epistemic standards in his argument. If he were, then the obvious response would be just to grant the argument right up through step ix, and even the first part of the conclusion, and then simply to reject the final part of the conclusion about suspending judgments of responsibility: for there is no reason to think we should suspend our judgment about something just because we lack Cartesian certainty. Thanks to Jim Klagge for this point.
23. This case, based on Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), is a development of a more generic case discussed by Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 305.
24. Ibid., 308, my emphasis.
25. Ibid., 305. When I say that Potter's case does not plausibly fall into the category of genuinely "hard cases" in morality, I mean this in relation to his cultural context, which I am taking to be roughly our own. Something can in this sense count as a hard case in one cultural context or time but not in another. Slavery, for example, is even further from being a hard case at present, but, as discussed in a note below, it may have been a genuinely hard case for someone in Aristotle's circumstances, where even reasonable efforts at critical reflection may not have sufficed to make the moral facts clear. We might also speak of some cases as intrinsically hard cases, meaning that they remain difficult even for ideally informed and reflective agents because of a real balance of competing legitimate moral considerations. I shall here mostly set aside cases of widespread, culturally based moral ignorance.
26. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 6, art. 8, in Treatise on Happiness, ed. John A. Oesterle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 79.
27. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1113b35-1114a2, though Aristotle here adds the condition that the law not be difficult to know. This leaves it open that ignorance of the law might excuse in cases where the law is unreasonably difficult for a person to know.
28. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 312 n. 8. For example, it may be the case both that a doctor ought to have known about a certain side effect of a procedure, since it had been described in a medical journal supplement, and that she is not culpable for her failure to know this, since her nurse accidentally disposed of the supplement before she saw it. See Smith, "Culpable Ignorance," 548.
29. I shall focus on fairly central and familiar cases of contemporary bad behavior done from moral ignorance in what Calhoun refers to as "normal moral contexts," as opposed to "abnormal moral contexts," which are trickier. (See Cheshire Calhoun, "Responsibility and Reproach," Ethics 99 [1989]: 389-406.)
30. This is partly because (like Calhoun) I do not wish to go as far in rejecting mitigated responsibility in cases of widespread cultural ignorance as Michele Moody-Adams does, e.g., in "Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance," Ethics 104 (1994): 291-309.
31. Moody-Adams denies that culturally based widespread ignorance (e.g., in the case of historical agents) can constitute a serious impediment to moral responsibility. While it is true that appeals to what she calls the "inability thesis" based on cultural limitations are often spurious, Paul Benson has made a good case that some such claims, properly formulated, have considerably more merit that Moody-Adams allows. See Paul Benson, "Culture and Responsibility: A Reply to Moody-Adams," Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (2001): 610-20.
32. For a similar criticism that Moody-Adams is too quick to attribute affected ignorance even in cases of widespread culturally based ignorance, see Tracy Isaacs, "Cultural Context and Moral Responsibility," Ethics 107 (1997): 670-84.
33. Rosen, "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," 304.
34. See Benson, "Culture and Responsibility," 613-14.
35. As an alternative strategy, Rosen could perhaps try just rejecting the relevance of R altogether, developing his appeal to akrasia independently of it. As will become clear later, however, this would just undermine any real motivation for that appeal.
36. This case thus contrasts with a case such as ancient Greek views on slavery. As Benson points out, in the latter case, "the very practice of slavery typically limited severely the evidence about slaves' moral dignity that some in the society, especially aristocrats like Aristotle, could be expected to have access to. . . . His aristocratic social circumstances may have occluded his access to good evidence about the rational capabilities of persons subjected to enslavement, thus preventing him from being able to discern those capabilities" (Benson, "Culture and Responsibility," 611). Without going into the merits of this particular claim, I think it is clear that it would be implausible to claim any similar cultural occlusion of relevant evidence in the case of the contemporary ruthless businessman, for reasons I go on to develop in the text.
37. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 6, art. 8.
38. For an argument that many cases of wrongdoing stemming from normative ignorance involve affected ignorance and are thus culpable, see Moody-Adams, "Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance." Moody-Adams seems, however, sometimes to conflate Aquinas's idea of affected ignorance with the other form of ignorance he distinguishes from it (described below in the text). For example, the fourth form of affected ignorance Moody-Adams distinguishes (301-2) - where an agent fails to acknowledge her fallibility and so is ignorant of this and thus led into further ignorance (e.g., bigotry) and error (e.g., suppressing protest of bigotry) - is not really affected ignorance in Aquinas's sense: it is not ignorance resulting from a choice to remain ignorant as such (as in her examples of deliberately making sure one does not get certain unwanted information or Aquinas's example of wanting an excuse to continue sinning), but ignorance resulting from bad choices exhibiting a certain character defect, such as delusions of infallibility. The latter sort of ignorance will be important to my discussion below.
39. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 6, art. 8.
40. Rosen would presumably want to press this line of objection against the sort of defense of responsibility for character traits recently offered by Jonathan Jacobs in Choosing Character: Responsibility for Virtue and Vice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), an account with which I am largely sympathetic.
41. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1114a3-1114b25;
42. and Jacobs, Choosing Character.
43. Why not throw out the original/derivative distinction altogether and just say from the start that Potter is originally responsible for his bad business practices? The reason is that we cannot understand why he is culpable for these actions without appeal to the fact that he is operating from ignorance that is culpable because at various times in the past it would have been reasonable to expect him to have done certain epistemically relevant things differently. He is responsible for the bad present behavior only because he is responsible for something else in the past. By contrast, I have argued that, when we are assessing those earlier epistemically debilitating choices themselves, things are different: we can understand the relevant claims about reasonable expectation without appeal to reasonable expectations in connection with even earlier past behavior.
44. It will not do to claim that premise iii is just stipulative. One cannot just stipulate what is in fact a substantive claim that the only way to be directly responsible for a bad action (as opposed to being responsible for it by being responsible for something else) is to do it despite knowing the balance of reasons against it. And if one did that, treating "originally responsible" as a technical term subject to that stipulation, then this would just raise new difficulties for premise i, which would now just leave out some relevant possibilities in a question-begging way (namely, the possibility argued for in the text, of direct responsibility for certain epistemically debilitating choices without akrasia).
45. This account shares the "root idea" sketched by James Montmarquet that "a certain quality of openness to truth- and value-related considerations is expected of persons and that this expectation is fundamental, at least in the following regard. The expectation is not derivative of or dependent upon one's (at the moment in question) judging such openness as appropriate (good, required, etc.) - 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." See James Montmarquet, "Zimmerman on Culpable Ignorance," Ethics 109 (1999): 842-45, 845. The vices cited in CI above are relevant precisely because their exercise violates the condition of openness.
46. Those who deny that the decisions in these spheres have largely been bad ones can, as always, find another example for illustrative purposes.
47. This is a major theme of Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006)
48. and also of Ron Suskind's "Without a Doubt," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, sec. 6, 44-106. Suskind characterizes a "faith-based presidency" as one in which "open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker."
49. Paul Krugman, "Questions of Character," New York Times, October 14, 2005, Editorial Desk, 25.
50. (Krugman is here quoting his own words from 2000, making the point that these impressions are not new.) See also Suskind, "Without a Doubt," and Woodward, State of Denial, for detailed discussion and a variety of examples. Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser and treasury official in previous Republican administrations, summed up similar criticisms this way (quoted by Suskind, 46): "This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis."
51. Suskind, "Without a Doubt," 49.