This paper takes on several distinct but related tasks. First, I present and discuss what I will call the ''Ignorance Thesis,'' which states that whenever an agent acts from ignorance, whether factual or moral, she is culpable for the act only if she is culpable for the ignorance from which she acts. Second, I offer a counterexample to the Ignorance Thesis, an example that applies most directly to the part I call the ''Moral Ignorance Thesis.'' Third, I argue for a principle-Don't Know, Don't Kill-that supports the view that the purported counterexample actually is a counterexample. Finally, I suggest that my arguments in this direction can supply a novel sort of argument against many instances of killing and eating certain sorts of animals.
Philosophers spend a lot of time discussing what consent is. In this chapter, Alexander Guerrero suggests that there are also hard and important epistemological questions about consent and that debates about consent often mistake epistemological issues for metaphysical ones. People who defend so-called “affirmative consent” views sometimes are accused of, or even take themselves to be, offering a new, controversial view about the nature of consent. Guerrero argues that this is a mistake. The right way of understanding “affirmative consent” is as a view about what is required, epistemically, before one can justifiably believe that another person has consented. This view will be justified, if it is, because of background views about epistemic justification and the way epistemic justification interacts with moral norms governing action. Guerrero concludes by discussing the implications of this view for the morality and law regarding consent.
There are many ways of evaluating legal and political institutions. This chapter introduces a new way to evaluate legal and political institutions: in terms of their sensibility. I define sensibility as the ability to appreciate and to respond to the world as it is, with two distinct components: (1) appreciating (or understanding or knowing) the world as it is, and (2) responding to the world in light of this appreciation. The first of these concerns the epistemic capacities of institutions. The second of these concerns the agential capacities of institutions. Having introduced the idea of sensibility, the chapter then focuses on a comparison of two different institutional arrangements—(1) electoral representative systems and (2) lottocratic systems of government, as introduced in this chapter—in terms of their epistemic quality or expected epistemic quality. I begin by drawing attention to several concerns about the sensibility of electoral representative institutions, focusing particularly on epistemic pathologies of those institutions. The second part of the chapter discusses an alternative kind of political institution, which I call a lottocratic political institution, and argues that we might well expect these institutions to be more sensible alternatives, at least under some conditions, on epistemic grounds. The negative contribution of the chapter, then, is to raise a series of challenges to the sensibility of electoral representative institutions. The positive contribution of the chapter is to suggest a direction for future institutional thinking, empirical study, and experimentation.
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