there are cases where the fact that an agent fell short of a belief norm is a necessary condition for their being culpably ignorant. This is a direct challenge to the conflation objection. If it is sound, it lends support to the idea that the belief norms are a central component of morality and our discourse about moral responsibility. It supplies the necessary positive defense of the expansionist idea that there can be moral reasons to have certain beliefs.
4.4 BELIEF NORM VIOLATIONS ARE NECESSARY FOR
CULPABLE IGNORANCE
The defender of morality-based belief norms might argue that there are cases of culpable ignorance that are not explained by locating a prior failure to conform to an action norm. If these cases exist, the agent’s culpability must be grounded on the fact that she fell short of a belief norm. Two things about each case must hold.
(1) The agents are ignorant, but still morally responsible for their ignorant action.
(2) Their ignorance is not traceable to a prior actional epistemic norm failure that would have provided them with evidence against their false belief.
The first case I will discuss comes from Sher, though it should be stressed that he does not offer these cases as part of a defense of (1) and (2). I utilize them only because they are useful and imaginative. The first case is:
Hot Dog: Alessandra, a soccer mom, has gone to pick up her children at their
elementary school. As usual, Alessandra is accompanied by the family’s border collie, Bathsheba, who rides in the back of the van. Although it is very hot, the pick-up has never taken so long, so Alessandra leaves Sheba in the van while she goes to gather her children. This time, however, Alessandra is greeted by a tangled tale of misbehavior, ill-considered punishment, and administrative bungling which requires several hours of sorting out. During that time, Sheba languishes, forgotten, in the locked car. When Alessandra and her children finally make it to the parking lot, they find Sheba unconscious from heat prostration. 81
Because she forgot, Alessandra is unaware that Sheba needs relief from the heat of the car. Since unawareness is a kind of ignorance, and since many find it intuitive that Alessandra is morally responsible for Sheba’s condition, this case seems to meet the first condition above. Alessandra’s ignorance about her need to remove Sheba would qualify as culpable only if she fell short of an epistemic norm of some kind. In this passage Sher seems to suggest that the norm is a belief norm:
“The reason Alessandra should have remembered Sheba is that she was under an obligation to protect the dog that she could not fulfill without remembering where the dog was.”82
A norm requiring that Alessandra remember Sheba is probably best understood as a norm
81 ibid. p. 24. 82 ibid p.111.
requiring an occurrant belief. Sher goes on to propose that this belief norm, which might be thought of as “purely epistemic” given that it requires a belief rather than an action, is “rooted in the “oughts” of morality and prudence”.83 The relevant question for our purposes is whether (2) is true – whether there are no prior fallings short of an actional epistemic norms. If (2) is true, then the only epistemic norm on which Alessandra’s culpability can be based is the belief norm Sher mentions. In this case, however, it seems clear that (2) is false. In fact there may be several candidate actional norms to which Alessandra was subject, her compliance with which would have prevented her from forgetting Sheba. Both of these turn on the idea that Alessandra was engaging in risky behavior. The risk is constituted both by the hostile environment that Sheba is in and the fact that Alessandra is putting herself in a position where her memory of Sheba’s hostile environment is all she can rely upon. Presumably, the fact that Sheba is in the car and that Alessandra is inside the school precluded her from hearing Sheba’s cries of distress. Given this account of the risk Alessandra is running, the first actional epistemic norm that Alessandra violates is one calling for her to adopt some strategy that will aid her memory. She could simply say over and over to herself as she walks into the school not to forget Sheba. She could set a timer on her phone that would go off after a few minutes and almost certainly remind herself about Sheba. Less obviously, she could take carry Sheba’s playtoy in her hand, which would also function as a reminder. All three of these actions would have aided her memory and decreased the likelihood of forgetting Sheba. Given the gravity of the risk that Alessandra was running, it is more than plausible to think that she had such actional obligations. Since the actions that these norms require are belief-producing, these are standard examples of actional epistemic
norms discussed in chapter three. The fact that Alessandra did not perform any of these actions contributed to her temporary lack of awareness about Sheba. Since there is an actional epistemic norm violation that leads to Alessandra’s ignorance, condition (2) is false. Contrary to what defenders of morality-based belief norms might attest about this case, there is an actional epistemic norm violation that establishes Alessandra’s
culpability both for her ignorance and her subsequent omission.
It is crucial to note that it does not matter for my purposes here that Alessandra was not aware of these actional epistemic norms. The argument that I am objecting to holds that belief norms must be part of morality because there are cases of morally
responsible ignorant agents whose only violation was that of a belief norm. In the case of Alessandra, there are plausible actional epistemic norms that she also violated, and so the claim that the belief norm violations are necessary is, so far, false. To object that the actional epistemic norms from which Alessandra falls short cannot ground her
responsibility for her wrong action because she lacked awareness of them (the actional epistemic norms) is to impose a different kind of epistemic condition. These
“searchlighter” objections could be raised against both belief norms and actional epistemic norms, and, while searchlighter views definitely merit discussion, that discussion is orthogonal to the problem of deciding whether belief norms or actional norms are relevant to the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. These matters can actually cross-classify. You can be a searchlighter and maintain that belief norms are relevant to moral responsibility, though of course you would have to knowingly fall short of these belief norms. Alternatively, a searchlighter might maintain that only actional epistemic norms are relevant. Yet another alternative is to deny the searchlighter
condition while maintaining that belief norms are relevant to moral responsibility. Finally, one might deny the searchlighter view and affirm that only actional epistemic norms are relevant. What matters for my purposes here is to challenge the argument that belief norms are part of morality because they are necessary for explaining why agents like Alessandra are responsible for their ignorant actions. This is claim can be challenged by showing that Alessandra also violated an actional norm, and the question of her
awareness of the norm is irrelevant.
Another example that Sher discusses for which it would be natural to think that only a belief norm that is violated is:
Home for the Holidays: Joliet, who is afraid of burglars, is alone in the house.
Panicked by sounds of movement in her kitchen, she grabs her husband’s gun, tiptoes down the stairs, and shoots the intruder. It is her son, who has come home early for the holidays.84
As Sher notes in his discussion of Joliet, this is a straightforward example of negligent behavior. In cases of negligence, an agent’s ignorance is enculpating because, although she does not believe that she was doing something wrong, we think that she should have believed this. Presumably, Joliet thought it was permissible to shoot her intruder without asking who was there, though, given the risk of significant harm or death that shooting them poses, it is uncontroversial to think that she should have known it was
impermissible to shoot first and ask questions later. As stated, this is an example of a belief norm – it says that the agent should have believed that she was placing the intruder
at an unacceptable level of risk. The important question for my purposes is whether this norm affords the only explanation for Joliet’s culpability. I think that the answer is no, since there are several actions that she could have undertaken that would have provided her with evidence against her belief in the permissibility of her actions. The most obvious example of this would be the act of asking the intruder to identify herself. It seems more than plausible to accept that in cases such as this, there is an actional epistemic duty of this kind on the gun wielder. Indeed, something like this norm is probably part of any gun safety curriculum. Since this actional epistemic norm exists, it is not necessary to appeal to a belief norm in order to ground Joliet’s moral responsibility.
I have shown that in both of these cases there are actional epistemic norms that the agents fall short of, thereby obviating the need for the appeal to belief norms. We can establish that an agent’s ignorance is culpable by reference to actional epistemic norms. In the two cases above, the agent’s ignorance was easily traceable to some failure to provide oneself with evidential considerations that would diminish the likelihood of believing falsely. While I have only discussed two cases, I think there is a general lesson to take from them. The claim that we must appeal to belief norm violations in order to establish culpable ignorance is a very strong claim. Thus, it can be fairly easily
undermined. Since it is not a further condition on any successful counterexample that the agent be aware of the actional epistemic norm is violated, then it should be fairly easy to show that one exists. This is obviously only a tentative conclusion for which I have provided inductive evidence. Thus, I would like to buttress my conclusion with a formula for discovering actional epistemic norms that correspond with the alleged morally-grounded belief norm. Take the target true belief and ask what action could the
agent have performed that would have decreased the likelihood of having that false belief. If that action is not profoundly dissimilar from other standard norms of
investigation or reflection, then there will be an actional epistemic norm requiring that action. I say that it must not be profoundly dissimilar from other actional epistemic norms in order to rule out wacky ways of securing the relevant true belief. For instance, Joliet would not have an actional epistemic norm requiring her to install under her son’s skin a special microchip that helpfully alerts anyone already in the house to his identity and presence. As I discussed above, a simple question should suffice.
One last argument can be made in support of my contention that there will always be an actional epistemic norm. Assume that for a given belief norm, that there is no action the agent could perform that would have decreased the likelihood of having the false belief. If there was nothing that the agent could have done that would have
functioned as an epistemic aid, then there is an important sense in which her false belief cannot be attributed to the agent. If the reason that that prior actions are impotent in aiding the agent is that acquiring the belief in question simply outstrips the agent’s cognitive or emotional capacities, then I think it is implausible to think that there is a requirement that the agent form the target belief.
In this section, I argued against the claim that belief norm violations are necessary for handling certain cases of culpable ignorance. This necessity claim was intended to show that there are cases where we are not conflating action norms, which are a non-controversial part of action-guiding morality and belief norms, which are not. If sound, it would have offered a positive argument for the dual-basis view about belief norms. Without this argument, the dual-basis view seems unmotivated. In the following
section, I argue that prospects are actually worse for the dual-basis view.
Before moving on to these other objections, I must address an objection to the line of argument I have taken in this section. It is simply that the agents in question might not have been aware of the actional epistemic norms that I enlist. Let’s assume that I am right, and that Joliet, for example, was under an actional epistemic obligation to inquire into the identity of the person in her home. My claim that the appeal to belief norms is not necessary in order to capture cases of culpable ignorance is seems vulnerable to the challenge that I have merely pushed things back a step. Once again, the regress problem has reared its head. If Joliet was unaware of the fact that she should have taken steps to identify the person in her home, then it seems natural to ask whether this ignorance is culpable. Joliet’s ignorance about her investigative obligations might trace back to a witting wrong action, in which case the regress can terminate without appealing to a belief norm. She may have chosen not to take the gun safety course, while she knew full well that she would be placing others at risk because she would be unaware of many serious moral obligations that come with gun ownership. However, in the absence of this witting refusal to learn about gun safety, she might still have been ignorant. In that case, it seems quite natural to claim that thought she did not know that she should have
investigated the intruder’s identity, there was a belief norm that required her to do so. In short, she should have known that she should have investigated. If this is a live
possibility, then I seem only to have postponed the necessity of belief norms for
capturing the culpability of Joliet’s ignorance. The same worry can be transposed to the case of Alessandra. If her failure to set a reminder alarm on her watch was an unwitting failure, in the sense that she did not realize that she was under an actional obligation
requiring her to do so, we might be compelled to ground her culpability in the fact that though she did not know she should have set a reminder, she should have known. As with Joliet, Alessandra would have fallen short of a belief norm requiring her to know what her actional epistemic obligations were. In both cases, belief norms are still necessary.
Unfortunately, a complete response to this objection will have to wait until I consider the arguments of the rest of the chapter. If these arguments succeed, I will have provided independent reasons for thinking that the belief norms I just alluded to – norms requiring agents to believe that they are subject to actional obligations – are problematic. In chapter five, I will take this result and apply it to cases that are similar to Alessandra’s and Joliet’s. I will argue that there are strong reasons to doubt that culpable ignorance can be established via belief norm violations.