Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution

Guerrero, Alexander A.

doi:10.1007/s11098-007-9143-7

Cited by 145 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 9 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…Responses to Rosen have argued that the agents Rosen discusses are blameworthy after all, because they either should have (Moody-Adams (1994) 12 , Guerrero (2007), Fitzpatrick (2008,) or could have (Harman (2011) known better. These responses are all, in various ways, trying to show that blameworthiness depends on epistemic fault, though it is not as simple as the fault that Rosen is looking for.…”

Section: Epistemic Faultmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral ignorance and blameworthiness

Mason

2015

Philos Stud

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In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf's JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers (people who, despite a normal background, behave in odious ways). All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance.I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances.

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Section: Epistemic Faultmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral ignorance and blameworthiness

Mason

2015

Philos Stud

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“…p. 64) to be ''beyond dispute.'' See Guerrero (2007). 18 Thus this approach can lead to enormous uncertainty about whether people are culpable for particular acts.…”

Section: False Starts and A Fresh Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mistake of Law and Culpability

Husak

2010

Criminal Law, Philosophy

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When does a defendant not deserve punishment because he is unaware that his conduct breaches a penal statute? Retributivists must radically rethink their answer to this question to do justice to our moral intuitions. I suggest that modest progress on this topic can be made by modeling our approach to ignorance of law on our familiar approach to ignorance of fact. We need to distinguish different levels of culpability in given mistakes and to differentiate what such mistakes may be about. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach with special attention to how to contrast offenses from defenses. The alternative I tend to favor probably should not be implemented in existing penal codes. As a result, we are likely to remain dissatisfied with the decisions made by our criminal justice system about the exculpatory effect of ignorance of law.

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“…The prudential reasons on one side and uncertain moral reasons on the other. See Guerrero (2007), Moller (2011), andWeatherson (2014), inter alia, for discussion of these cases.…”

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confidence: 99%

Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

Tarsney

2018

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? One common response to this challenge proposes a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: where does the threshold come from, and why should it take any one value rather than another? Threshold views also seem to violate "ought" agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). The stochastic dominance approach also allows a principled, albeit intuitively imperfect, response to the agglomeration problem. Thus, I argue, deontologists are better equipped than many critics have supposed to address the problems of decision-making under uncertainty.

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Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution

Cited by 145 publications

References 9 publications

Moral ignorance and blameworthiness

Moral ignorance and blameworthiness

Mistake of Law and Culpability

Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

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