Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy

Rik Peels, Rik Peels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317369547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This edited collection focuses on the moral and social dimensions of ignorance—an undertheorized category in analytic philosophy. Contributors address such issues as the relation between ignorance and deception, ignorance as a moral excuse, ignorance as a legal excuse, and the relation between ignorance and moral character. In the moral realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse; some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character; and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Ignorance has certain social dimensions as well: it has been claimed to be the engine of science; it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy; and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. Together, these contributions provide a sustained inquiry into the nature of ignorance and the pivotal role it plays in the moral and social domains.

1 Introduction

Rik Peels

Why Ignorance?

Toward the end of World War II, the German military assembled a fleet of three ships—the SS Cap Arcona, the SS Deutschland, and the SS Thielbek—in the Bay of Lübeck. Subsequently, they filled them with 10,000 concentration camp survivors. On May 3, 1945, Arthur Coningham, commander in the British Tactical Air Force, ordered the attack on all German ships in the Baltic, including these three ships. All three ships were sunk. Most of the SS guards survived, but an estimated 7,800 camp survivors died.¹ Whether Coningham is to blame for this tragedy seems to crucially depend on the status of his ignorance regarding the situation on board: was he blameworthy for his ignorance or not?

That ignorance has crucial moral and social dimensions is true not only for such unique and extreme historical cases such as what has come to be known as the Cap Arcona incident. As Holly Smith has pointed out, being responsible for one’s ignorance and being held responsible for one’s ignorance are pervasive phenomena in our society.² This applies, first of all, to ignorance of facts. People say things like “The prime minister shouldn’t have been ignorant about the large-scale fraud” and “You should have been ignorant about that: what she does at home is not your business.” On a larger scale, there are certain facts about, say, the slavery footprint of the clothes we buy and the harm done to nature and animals in the production of certain foods, and it seems that in at least some cases we are culpably ignorant if we fail to do a quick check before we buy a product if we can easily assess whether it has been produced by fair trade. Of course, it is controversial to what extent our ignorance is culpable in such cases.

We sometimes also hold each other responsible for being ignorant of certain norms. Since the Spring of 2014, thousands of IS fighters in Iraq and Syria have been violating human rights by raping, torturing, and murdering.³ In January 2014, staff members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered in a terrorist attack and in November 2015, more than a hundred people were killed in further terrorist attacks in Paris. A common response in the West has been that these fighters and terrorists are deeply ignorant of the rights that people have, such as the right to education for men and women and the right not to be physically harmed. Of course, IS fighters and terrorists see this differently. In fact, some of them consider people in Western democratic societies ignorant of certain religious, moral, and social norms—not of the fact that IS fighters embrace these norms, but of the truth or correctness of these norms.

Yet, there has been relatively little philosophical reflection on the moral and social dimensions of ignorance. Philosophical ethics has traditionally focused on responsibility for actions, omissions, and harmful consequences of actions and omissions, such as someone’s death. Epistemology has largely confined itself to analyzing knowledge and what is necessary for knowledge, such as epistemic justification. It has paid relatively little attention to what one might think of as the opposite of knowledge, namely ignorance.⁴ In another volume that I edited with Martijn Blaauw, entitled The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance (Peels and Blaauw 2016), several philosophers have explored core epistemological questions regarding ignorance, such as what the nature of ignorance is,⁵ what varieties of ignorance there are, whether ignorance comes in degrees, and what its epistemic value, if any, is. In the volume at hand, the authors turn to the moral and social rather than the epistemic dimensions of ignorance. This is desperately needed, given its moral and social significance and its relative neglect in philosophy.

A second reason to pay attention to the moral and social dimensions of ignorance is that doing so will build bridges between ethics and epistemology, two fields that have often been working independently. Fortunately, this has changed somewhat during the last two decades or so, for instance, in the field of so-called virtue epistemology: it seems that, in order to fully understand intellectual virtues such as thoroughness and open-mindedness, we need ideas, insights, theories, and accounts from both ethics and epistemology.⁶ But it seems that many phenomena that span both fields remain largely untouched. The chapters in this book will draw from both epistemological and ethical sources, as ignorance is explained in terms of its relations to belief, knowledge, epistemic justification, uncertainty, and truth, and ethical and social ideas and hypotheses regarding (joint) responsibility, blame, obligations, and excuses are brought to bear on it.

There are at least three important areas in philosophy in which ignorance has received some attention. The first is the so-called field of agnotology.⁷ In this field, philosophers and social scientists have studied culturally induced ignorance, especially ignorance created by the publication of misleading or inaccurate scientific data. Here, we should think of governmental suppression, media neglect, and manipulation of information in business, for instance, in the tobacco industry. Agnotology, however, focuses primarily on the creation of ignorance by public institutions rather than, say, responsibility for one’s own ignorance. Also, in opposition to the authors of this volume, few of those who contribute to the field of agnotology have a background in analytic philosophy.

Second, the study of the moral and social dimensions of ignorance—especially collective ignorance—plays a crucial role in the debate on the epistemology of race and ignorance.⁸ It is widely acknowledged that certain groups, such as racial minorities, suffer not only from specific acts of oppression, but also from hermeneutical injustice.⁹ There is ignorance about these minorities, and sometimes even ignorance within these minority groups, that has everything to do with social structures that influence how people think about them and how they think about themselves and interpret their own experiences.¹⁰

A third issue that has been given ample philosophical attention and in which ignorance plays a crucial role is the so-called tracing problem. That ignorance can excuse has been acknowledged ever since Aristotle.¹¹ This gives rise to a thorny problem, though, which is referred to as the ‘tracing problem.’ For, it seems that if one violates an obligation to inform oneself in order not to be ignorant, one does so either from akrasia, that is, from weakness of will and against one’s better judgment, or from ignorance. However, akrasia is often thought to be rare. And if one acts from ignorance, one is either excused by such ignorance or blameworthy for that ignorance. One is blameworthy for that ignorance, it seems, only if one violated an earlier obligation, and one did so either from akrasia or from ignorance. And so the regress gets started. It would follow that we are almost always excused and hardly ever blameworthy for what we do and fail to do. The tracing problem has received much attention recently. Yet, it is not clear that a plausible solution has been put forward.¹² This is crucially important for an ethics of ignorance, for if there is no plausible solution, it would follow that we are blameworthy only if we act from akrasia or from something that traces back to akrasia, and that would mean that we are significantly less often blameworthy than our current practices of holding each other responsible imply.¹³ Three of the essays in this volume provide important new contributions to this debate by exploring under which conditions ignorance excuses.

This book also contains other novel philosophical contributions to debates regarding ignorance. The epistemic conditions for responsibility and blame are scrutinized, several moral questions regarding ignorance are addressed that have received little or no attention in the literature, and three important social dimensions of ignorance are explored. Each of these essays takes a rigorous approach by applying the tools of analytic philosophy to these issues.

Outline

Now, let me give an overview of the chapters in this volume. The first two essays discuss the relations between ignorance and moral responsibility in general. There are all sorts of questions one could ask regarding the relations between ignorance, on the one hand, and moral responsibility, moral blame, moral excuses, and so forth, on the other. For example, which kind of ignorance does moral responsibility require and which kind of ignorance does moral blame exclude? These essays zoom in on two relations, namely that between moral responsibility and ignorance of alternatives, and that between ignorance and being exempt from moral blameworthiness.

Carolina Sartorio’s paper examines the relation between moral responsibility, ignorance, and alternative possibilities. It focuses on the epistemic conditions for blameworthiness, which she takes to be a form of responsibility. In other words, it focuses on the conditions that we must meet in order to be blameworthy for things and that have to do with our beliefs or, more generally, our epistemic states. It starts with a discussion of cases where, although we have alternative possibilities, we believe that we don’t. In those cases, our ignorance of the relevant facts about the world, which results in the absence of a true belief in alternatives, seems to relieve us of blameworthiness. These cases seem to support the view that blameworthiness requires a belief in alternatives. However, there are other scenarios, namely some special versions of so-called ‘Frankfurt-style’ cases that seem to suggest the opposite. This gives rise to an interesting puzzle. Toward the end of the paper, Sartorio provides a sketch of a solution to this puzzle and defends it. On this solution, blameworthiness doesn’t require belief in alternatives, but a more general kind of awareness of the moral significance of one’s behavior.

In her paper, Elinor Mason discusses when one is exempt from moral blameworthiness. She starts out her discussion with drawing attention to a problem for pure quality of will accounts of blameworthiness. The problem is that it seems that agents whom we would normally think of as exempt can have bad wills: children, psychopaths, and so on. Still, we would not blame children and psychopaths, or at least not to the same degree as properly functioning, adult human beings. The most common justification of exemptions appeals to lack of moral capacity—as Susan Wolf puts it, a capacity to see and be guided by the true moral reasons. According to Mason, though, talk of capacity is not very useful in this context. It is not what an agent has the capacity to do or be that matters, but their actual quality of will. Capacity is relevant only insofar as it affects quality of will. She defends the view that what exempts agents from ordinary blameworthiness, and indeed praiseworthiness, is moral ignorance. First, she argues that when we consider the broad range of cases where it is plausible that agents are exempt, it becomes obvious that we do not have a clear way to fix the counterfactuals relevant to capacity. Then she argues, via a discussion of Wolf’s asymmetry thesis, that the ignorance component is much more important to exemptions than the motivation component. Finally, she addresses the worry that moral knowledge may include the capacity to be motivated by morality. She argues that to understand morality is to understand that it is reason giving, but that that doesn’t necessarily entail motivation.

The next three essays focus on an issue that has received much attention in ethics lately, namely the conditions under which ignorance counts as an excuse. Sometimes excuses have been taken to be speech acts performed by someone in order to defend herself or someone else for doing or failing to do something.¹⁴ The authors in these three essays, though, take excuses to be states of affairs that, if actualized, render one blameless. This is because one may be excused for something even if there is no one who actually excuses one for it: one may have violated an obligation and yet be blameless due to some obtaining factors. Marcia Baron in her paper explores when ignorance counts as an excuse and when it counts as a justification. Michael Zimmerman defends the so-called Origination Thesis, which, together with a few other premises, impli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ignorance, Alternative Possibilities, and the Epistemic Conditions for Responsibility
• 3 Moral Incapacity and Moral Ignorance
• 4 Justification, Excuse, and the Exculpatory Power of Ignorance
• 5 Ignorance as a Moral Excuse
• 6 Tracing Cases of Culpable Ignorance
• 7 Is Making People Ignorant as Bad as Deceiving Them?
• 8 Radical Evaluative Ignorance
• 9 Living with Ignorance in a World of Experts
• 10 Risk—Knowledge, Ignorance, and Values Combined
• 11 Ignorance as a Legal Excuse
• 12 Ignorance, Technology, and Collective Responsibility
• Contributors
• Index