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Don’t know, don’t care?

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My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is ignorant of the precise nature of what she cares about; one in which someone does not reflect on the significance of what she cares about in a particular set of circumstances, and one in which someone cares deeply about two morally significant considerations while being mistaken about their relative significance. I argue that these agents all clearly care at least “adequately” about everything morally significant, including the very considerations that in fact make their acts wrong. This creates theoretical room for a way of thinking about culpable moral ignorance that respects the key concerns of those in the voluntarist tradition who have held that moral ignorance is typically blameless, within an approach to thinking about moral responsibility according to which we are blameworthy for that which manifests poor quality of will; caring adequately does not require moral omniscience, but motivated moral ignorance and moral ignorance that reflects indifference to things that matter morally are still blameworthy. My thesis also suggests a fruitful change of direction for quality-of-will theorists: we should articulate the nature and structure of the standards for adequate caring, i.e. those that specify what it is to care “adequately”. I close by offering an initial proposal as to what these standards might look like and identifying four promising avenues for further research on this topic.

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Notes

  1. By “thick properties” I mean the properties referred to by thick concepts (on which see e.g. Roberts 2013; Vayrynen 2013). I assume that there are such things. Others deny this. I will not get into that dispute in this paper.

  2. This kind of example has been discussed in the existing literature, in which it is common to use the phrase “hard cases” to refer to cases in which two values are at stake and their relative degrees of value are unclear (se e.g. Rosen 2002, 70; FitzPatrick 2008, 600, n. 24). However, prior discussion of this phenomenon has been led astray by a focus on examples that are bad illustrations of it. The main examples in the literature involve slaveholders who do not realize that slavery is morally questionable, men who do not realize that women are their moral equals, a former U.S. president who did not realize that it is wrong to use nuclear weapons against civilians in order to end a war, and a businessman who cannot tell whether his business practices are “reprehensibly ruthless” or “permissibly aggressive” (Rosen 2008, 305). These all seem like such clear cases of motivated moral ignorance that it is hard to take them seriously.

  3. Incompatibilism has a long and storied history. For a sophisticated contemporary defense, see Levy (2011).

  4. For excellent discussions of motivated moral ignorance see Moody-Adams (1994), Mills (2007), Alcoff (2007), and Pohlhaus (2012). Cf. the discussions of willful ignorance in Yaffe (2018) and Zimmerman (2020).

  5. The popularity of this approach is largely due to the enduring influence of Strawson (1962). For more contemporary discussions, see, for instance, Arpaly (2002), Arpaly and Schroeder (2013) and Smith (2005). Harman cites Arpaly as a view that can support her position on culpable moral ignorance.

  6. See e.g. Stocker (1979) for a discussion of the depressive, Campbell (2007) for a discussion of paradigm shift, and Svavarsdóttir (1999) for a discussion of jerks. Notice that Harman’s claim that believing an act wrong on the basis of a consideration is a way of caring about that consideration entails the wrong verdict about all these cases. It entails that the depressive is doing fine when it comes to moral caring; though her affective and motivational states are numbed, she cares about a great many things, since she has moral beliefs. It downplays the work that the paradigm-shifter must do to integrate her moral character, suggesting that she need to nothing to bring her moral caring in line with her moral beliefs since this work is already done. And it suggests that the jerk who is indifferent to morality displays a great deal of moral care, because he believes that certain features ground wrongness. This is all clearly incorrect.

  7. See e.g. Rosen (2002, 66): “Given the intellectual and cultural resources available to a second millennium Hittite lord, it would have taken a moral genius to see through to the wrongness of chattel slavery. The example is meant to show that blameless moral ignorance is a possibility.” (To repeat: I disagree with Rosen about this example—see fn. 2).

  8. Here I follow a trend in the literature on moral responsibility, wherein questions about blameworthiness are often phrased in terms of what “could reasonably be expected” of someone. Notice that this allows for agent-relativity in the standards for adequate caring; it may be that, for a single morally significant thing, the degree of care that it’s reasonable to expect one person to have for this thing is higher or lower than the degree of care that it’s reasonable to expect another person to have for the thing. (This might be so, for instance, if one person has experienced psychological trauma that makes caring more difficult for them, or if one person has special obligations toward the morally significant thing in question.) If there is agent-relativity, then the standards for adequate caring will place the threshold for caring adequately about a certain thing in different places for different people.

  9. This way of thinking about the standards for adequate caring is suggested by Holly Smith’s classic paper on culpable ignorance (1983), which construes ill will in terms of blameworthy “configurations” of attitudes. For Smith, what are blameworthy are things like someone’s not caring enough about x to override her concern for y and cause her to act so as to promote x, rather than someone’s not caring enough about x simpliciter. But notice that, if there are relative standards, then NON-VIOLENT PROTEST as I have described it may be impossible. For it might be that, whichever of non-violence and preventing harm is in fact more important in John and Xavier’s circumstances, he who cares more about the other consideration thereby fails to care adequately by violating the relative standards.

  10. This might be because, given the agent’s limited cognitive capacities, their degree of concern for x “crowds out” their degree of concern for y. (Thanks to Jennifer Matey for this suggestion.) I am unsure of the extent to which this is a genuine cognitive phenomenon. And I suspect that, in some “crowding out” cases, the agent can and should eliminate the conflict by doing psychological work to increase their total capacity for moral caring.

  11. See the related remarks on “obvious” moral facts in Groll and Decker (2014). I am grateful to Daniel Star for helpful discussion of this point.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Mount St. Mary’s University, at the Concordia Workshop on Virtue and Moral Reasoning Under Oppressive Social Conditions, at the Princeton-Michigan Metanormativity Workshop 2018, at New York University, at Southern Methodist University, at Syracuse University, and at the Pacific APA 2018. I am very grateful to participants in all of these talks for their formative feedback, and especially to Kelly McCormick and Michael McKenna for their comments at the APA. And, of course, I am very grateful to Cindy Holder for the opportunity to publish in this special issue of Philosophical Studies.

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Johnson King, Z.A. Don’t know, don’t care?. Philos Stud 177, 413–431 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01399-6

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