16/11/2018
Moral ignorance is a concept in which it is held that ignorance of the moral implications of an action excuses the perpetrator of said act from moral blame. This form of ignorance is described by Gideon Rosen as the “failure to know a general moral rule”. [1] Just as factual ignorance – not knowing that you were trespassing on someone’s property, to use Rosen’s example – can excuse a person from blame, so too, it is held, can ignorance of morality excuse. [2] This moral ignorance, I contend, does not actually excuse individuals from blame for immoral actions and for participating in and supporting wrongful institutional practices. I shall show this by first explaining the argument of those who hold to moral ignorance being sufficient to excuse a person of blame (for supporting a wrongful institutional practice), I will then highlight what I deem to be the key failure of the argument in support of moral ignorance – that it must lead to either an arbitrary apportioning of blame or a world wholly devoid of moral blame – and outline my counter position. I will also pre-empt what I feel to be the main way in which a person may object to my position and defend it. This will demonstrate that moral ignorance does not excuse individuals from blame for participating in or supporting wrongful institutional practices.
Such practices are defined by Nigel Pleasants as immoral acts which are “chronically embodied in lawful, socially accepted, collectively sustained practices”. [3] These can be both historic – such as support for the institution of slavery or the sexism embodied in depriving women of suffrage – and ongoing practices; all that matters is that they were accepted by society as morally justifiable and “only after their demise or abolition” are they seen for the wrong that they are. [4] Wrongful institutional practices are not directly equivalent to the culture of the society which performs them but they are inextricably bound up in the culture of that society. Neil Levy argues that “cultural membership can be ethically disabling”, a claim which Pleasants is supportive of when he similarly argues that the cultures “…may have impaired [the people’s] ability to appreciate the wrongness…” of such practices as slavery or women’s disenfranchisement. [5] This therefore means that the argument for moral ignorance, primarily as a result of one’s cultural framework, has a direct link to wrongful institutional practices – the individuals of a society which perpetrates a wrongful institutional practice can potentially be morally ignorant (owing to their cultural framework) and so excused from blame for supporting that wrongful institutional practice. To be excused is not to be justified, a morally wrong act or practice is still held to have occurred, the case is merely being made that the individual who performed that action or supported that practice is not to be morally blamed.
In discussions of this, the example of slavery in Ancient Greece is often used to examine the claims being made. Supporters of moral ignorance argue that people at the time cannot be blamed for their participation in the practice of slavery because the culture in which they existed rendered them incapable of determining the immorality embodied in that practice. The ignorance which these people were suffering from is also something for which they are not culpable – if they were responsible for their ignorance it would have to be by “an act or omission…concerning which [they were] not ignorant…” and as their whole environment overwhelmingly supported these practices and engendered ignorance this condition is plainly lacking – so the argument goes. [6] The main issue I perceive at play in this argument is that the supposition that ignorance of morality excuses individuals from blame entails a peculiar ontology; namely, that the only people who deserve to be blamed for immoral actions are people possessing some form of akrasia – a phenomenon I contend exists only rarely if at all. I tackle this and demonstrate how maintaining this ontology leads to the proponent of the moral ignorance defence having to engage in an arbitrary system of apportioning blame.
In order to argue that there are morally ignorant people because of cultural impairment, who are excused from blame for a wrongful practice, a claim that two distinct groups of people exist must also be made. The first group is comprised of people who are exonerated of guilt due to their culturally determined moral ignorance, the second group is made up of people who are guilty because they were not morally ignorant – they knowingly, both factually and morally, committed a wrongful act. This latter group suffer from an akrasia – they knowingly act against their better judgement. Take for example, a pre-Columbian Aztec who sacrifices someone and a brutal murderer of modern times who takes somebody else’s life in an equally grim fashion; the former is excused owing to their cultural framework inducing moral ignorance, the latter is held to be blameworthy. In order for the second individual to be blameworthy and the former to not be, the Aztec must be morally ignorant and the latter not – they must know that they were doing wrong and yet have done that wrong anyway, devoid of ignorance. I believe that no such person exists for, in the case of our hypothetical murderer, though he knows that murder is wrong and chose to murder anyway he was still ignorant; he was ignorant of the true ‘hierarchy’ of morality, not of the moral principle at play. The murderer weighs up the rights, duties, obligations and goods bound together which make murder wrong and judges them to be less than the non-moral rights, duties, obligations and goods embodied by something achieved as a result of murder.
This is acknowledged by Rosen when he speaks of “normative ignorance” in relation to the hypothetical figure of Bonnie. [7] The normatively ignorant are not blind to a “moral rule” but instead of the value of that rule in relation to some other principle – the “reason giving force” of the moral principle they know exists. [8] A further implication of this understanding is that it seems plausible that the Aztec could have known the moral rule at play during his sacrifice –that killing is bad for example – yet, similarly to our murderer, put another consideration of higher import. This allows us to avoid a view of other cultures as primitive and their members as underdeveloped for having been unable to determine morality, a state which Michelle Moody-Adams notes that the proponents of the moral ignorance defence tend to fall into. [9] Rosen himself makes the case that if someone scrupulously examines an action and after this analytical process comes to a wrong conclusion, deeming a thing of lesser morality to be higher, then that person is excusable from blame because of the effort they have gone to. [10] He uses Truman’s deliberation over the bombing of Hiroshima to exemplify this. [11] Rosen complicates his articulation of normative ignorance by ascribing Bonnie’s normative ignorance to an illness she previously suffered from. [12] Removing the illness condition though, it still seems the case that the majority of those who commit morally wrong acts are in some way normatively ignorant. That normative ignorance is bound up in the value of moral rules – our murderer does not deny that it is immoral to kill, he even puts stock in morality, he merely places another consideration of even higher status and it is in that sense that he too is morally ignorant. As such, the juxtaposed classes of the ignorant-excused and knowing-blameworthy are untenable; the Aztec is akin to the hypothetical murderer as both are acting under some form of moral ignorance and, by Rosen’s own arguments, the murder is in the better moral position for having at least engaged in the process of moral analysis.
One may here take issue with my line of argument, contending that the difference in the forms that the Aztec’s and the murderer’s ignorance takes – normative and moral – are non- trivial for the purposes of apportioning blame to one but not the other. Further analysis though of their ignorance demonstrates that the distinction is minimal and most definitely trivial. My argument rests on a view of morality as prescriptivist with moral statements being akin to commands to follow rules. A morally ignorant person is ignorant of the moral rule or ‘law’ at play in a situation, a normatively ignorant person may be argued to know the rule but to not understand its import with this distinction being the delineating factor in determining moral wrong between the two situations. Both though are essentially ignorant in the same way; the morally ignorant person does not know the moral rule, the normatively ignorant knows a maxim (e.g. “do not kill”) but plainly does not know that it is a law or rule the obedience of which is mandatory. To act in contradiction to the moral law is to not know the moral law. Both then are ignorant of the moral law, one does not know it at all and the other does not know that it is a law so ultimately does not know it at all either. Ignorance can therefore be defined as not knowing a relevant moral maxim (moral ignorance) and not understanding that this maxim is a law despite knowing said maxim (normative ignorance); both senses are instance of ignorance of the moral law. This clearly demonstrates the triviality of the distinction between moral and normative ignorance and so such a distinction cannot be grounds for upholding the moral ignorance defence.
Because of this, the Aztec and the murder are demonstrably alike in their ignorance and so if the former cannot be blamed, neither can the other. This is an absurd state of affairs as it seems right to apportion blame to at least the murderer, yet, this state of affairs is one that the proponent of the moral ignorance defence must necessarily accept. To apportion blame to the murderer and not to the Aztec would be to devolve into an inherently arbitrary system of ascribing blame. Moral ignorance is therefore demonstrably not a sufficient condition for excusing an individual from performing a wrong act and for supporting a wrongful institutional practice from blame. It has however been demonstrated that moral ignorance is a necessary condition for moral wrong – though it is not sufficient in itself for moral wrong as one can be ignorant of the moral law and yet still act unwittingly in the same manner as one who knows the moral law.
Moody-Adams makes the case that an individual’s “…ignorance of what she ought to do is, in general, no excuse for wrongdoing…” arguing that “…ignorance of what one ought to do can generally be traced to some personal failure.” [13] Applying this principle, our hypothetical murder is blameworthy and so too is the Aztec and the Ancient Greek slaveholder. Levy disagrees though, making the case that infants and the cognitively dysfunctional are excused from the moral blame for an action; in an alike manner, those who are rendered ignorant of morality by their culture are similarly deserving of excuse from moral blame. [14] This can be extended to our murderer too as his immorality is derived from ignorance. Either extreme, of wholesale culpability or wholesale exoneration could be adopted at this juncture; the instinct to want to blame somebody is not good enough grounds in itself for adopting the former position. Rosen and Michael Zimmermann seem to favour the latter stance with Zimmermann arguing that Rudolph Höss and Adolph Eichmann are “…not to blame for what they have done.” [15] Zimmermann argues that to apportion blame wrongly is to commit an injustice and so ought to be avoided at seemingly all costs. [16] What though is the impact of this stance, of apportioning blame as I and Moody-Adams would?
As Levy puts it moral blame is not equivalent to legal blame and though moral blame should inform legal and policy implications it is not directly reducible to them. [17] On top of this though a further caveat is necessary to understand the position being advocated and it is demonstrable through the claim which many of the aforementioned philosophers make, that of the child being excused from moral blame. When a child does a wrong act, such as hurting an animal for fun, we do in some sense blame the child. It is rebuked and sanctioned in some way – told off with stern words which, even if they induce tears, are deemed justified – and some form of education (or re-education) takes place. It is this latter part which is key; if blame is apportioned to those who support wrongful institutional practices and those who do wrong from a place of moral ignorance then a form of re-education takes place. Re- education not just of themselves but of everyone around them. In not excusing the murderer for his ignorance we re-educate him as to the gravity of the wrong he has committed and others in society are educated of this import also. Similarly, if we blame the Aztec who performs human sacrifices or the Ancient Greek slave-holder, though we cannot educate them, we do educate those in our own society as to the import and gravity of wrongful actions and inculcate a level of evaluation on their part towards their own institutionalised practices. This latter effect is in line with what Rosen seeks, people to evaluate their morality. By contrast, to be so fearful of apportioning blame as to exonerate people of even the most heinous of transgressions, seems to have an adverse effect on society with less evaluation and a reduction in the perceived value of morality and immorality.
This potentially gives us an insight into why it is the case that the moral ignorance defence is so commonly accepted in today’s society. In discussions of the nature of historic societies it is often said that “x society cannot be blamed for some moral wrong for they were not to know any better” – the inclination is to not apportion blame because the society and many (if not all) of its members could not have known better. It is my belief that the moral ignorance defence is often made for historic institutional practices because we in modern society fear that future generations may well look back on what we do and find us wanting. Society in 100 years may look at our common practices such as meat eating, rampant fossil fuel consumption etc. and deem them morally wrong and so we hold to the moral ignorance defence in the hope that, should we exonerate our predecessors, our successors will likewise exonerate us.
To conclude then, moral ignorance because of cultural framework is insufficient to excuse an individual from blame for supporting or participating in wrongful institutional practise. This is because, to assert the moral ignorance defence, the perpetrator of individual wrongs must also be excused from blame as they too are demonstrably morally ignorant in a normative sense. Two options are then opened, one of excuse and the other of blame for all wrongdoers and it is arguably beneficial to adopt the latter position as it encourages ethical thinking, self-evaluation and adherence to moral codes in our own society even when blame is being apportioned to historic wrongful institutional practices. Therefore, moral ignorancecannot and should not be held to excuse an individual from blame for practicing or supporting a wrongful institutional practice.
Notes
[1] Gideon Rosen, ‘Culpability and Ignorance’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2003), 64.
[2] Rosen, ‘Culpability and Ignorance’, 62 -63.
[3] Nigel Pleasants, ‘Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception’, The Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008), 96.
[4] Pleasants, ‘Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception’, 96.
[5] Neil Levy, ‘Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility’, The Monist 86 (2003), 147; Pleasants, ‘Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception’, 97.6 Levy, ‘Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility’, 148.
[7] Rosen, ‘Culpability and Ignorance’, 75.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Michelle Moody-Adams, ‘Culture, Responsibility and Affected Ignorance’, Ethics 104 (1994), 308 – 309.
[10] Rosen, ‘Culpability and Ignorance’, 70 -71.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid, 77 – 78.
[13] Moody-Adams, ‘Culture, Responsibility and Affected Ignorance’, 294.
[14] Levy, ‘Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility’, 146.
[15] Michael J. Zimmermann, ‘Controlling Ignorance: A Bitter Truth’, The Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002), 489.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Levy, ‘Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility’, 146.
Bibliography
Levy, Neil., ‘Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility’, The Monist 86 (2003), 145-163.
Moody-Adams, Michelle., ‘Culture, Responsibility and Affected Ignorance’, Ethics 104 (1994), 291-309.
Pleasants, Nigel., ‘Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception’, The Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008), 97-115.
Rosen, Gideon ‘Culpability and Ignorance’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2003), 61-84.
Zimmermann, Michael J., ‘Controlling Ignorance: A Bitter Truth’, The Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002), 480-493.