The (In)Elasticity of Moral Ignorance

Ignorance enables individuals to act immorally. This is well known in policy circles, in which there is keen interest in lowering moral ignorance. In this paper, we study how the demand for moral ignorance responds to monetary incentives and how the demand curve for ignorance reacts to social norm messages. We propose a simple behavioral model in which individuals suffer moral costs when behaving selfishly in the face of moral information. In several experiments, we find that moral ignorance decreases by more than 30 percentage points with small monetary incentives, but we find no significant change with social norm messages, and we document strong persistence of ignorance across moral contexts. Our findings indicate that rather simple messaging interventions may have limited effects on ignorance. In contrast, changes in incentives could be highly effective. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (2019), makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: (1) Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? (2) Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding (1), I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding (2), I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn.

Incompetence, Psychopathy, and Fair Opportunity

Fair opportunity supports a modified version of the Model Penal Code insanity test, against the narrower M’Naghten test. The Andrea Yates case is introduced as a paradigmatic insanity defense. Recent arguments that psychopaths should be excused because their psychological deficits prevent them from developing cognitive competence about moral norms are considered and rejected. Moral blindspots involving selective discrimination raise questions about selective incompetence. In general, the selective nature of these blindspots implies that agents with blindspots have the capacity to correct their moral ignorance and so should not be excused.

Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan on Omissions and Normative Ignorance: A Critical Reply

Reflections on Crime and Culpability seeks to elaborate, extend, and occasionally qualify the insights reached by Larry Alexander and Kim Ferzan in their influential prior collaboration, Crime and Culpability. They deftly explore any number of new issue that all criminal theorists should be encouraged to address. In my essay, I discuss and challenge their positions on omissions as well as on moral ignorance. Their treatment of the latter issue is a clear improvement over that in their earlier book. But their views on omissions suggest to me that they should have had reservations about some of the most fundamental claims of their overarching theory.

Moral Ignorance as a Basis for State Deviant Activities

The state of legal regulation of certain social relations often leads to the violation of the rights of citizens or even to their encouragement of illegal activities. The reason for this situation is the moral ignorance of legislators (other lawmakers), who choose, often purposefully, deviant behavior. The development and implementation of constitutional and legal offense, which determines the punishment for moral ignorance of state (municipal) authorities, that is, the use of an unlawful goal or unlawful methods of regulating legal relations, according to the author of the article, can create an effective barrier for offenses.

Excuse without Exculpation

Can moral ignorance excuse? This chapter argues that philosophical debate of this question has been based on a mistaken assumption: namely that excuses are all-or-nothing affairs; to have an excuse is to be blameless. The chapter argues that we should reject this assumption. Excuses are not binary but gradable: they can be weaker or stronger, mitigating blame to greater or lesser extent. This chapter explores the notions of strength of excuses, blame mitigation and the relationship between excuses and moral responsibility. These ideas open up some principled middle-ground between the two positions staked out in the literature. Moral ignorance may well excuse but it does not exculpate.

Moral Testimony Goes Only So Far

This paper argues for answers to two questions, and then identifies a tension between the two answers. First, regarding the implications of moral ignorance for moral responsibility: “Do false moral views exculpate?” Does believing that one is acting morally permissibly render one blameless? It does not. Second, in moral epistemology: “Can moral testimony provide moral knowledge?” It can (even granting some worries about moral deference). The tension: If moral testimony can provide moral knowledge, then surely it can provide justified false moral belief. But surely there is no blameworthiness in a case in which a person acts on a justified false moral belief. So surely some false moral views do exculpate. This tension can be resolved by adoption of the view that moral testimony cannot provide justified false moral belief; this view relies on the fact that whether a belief is justified is sensitive to an agent’s total evidence.