LA CONSUMACIÓN DEL MATRIMONIO

Orthodoxy on culpable ignorance and moral responsibility endorses two general conditions concerning blameworthiness for unwitting wrongful acts.34 _{The first}

condition indicates that being blameworthy for ignorance that the unwitting act is wrong is necessary for being blameworthy for the unwitting act. The second condition indicates that being blameworthy for the benighting act that resulted in the unwitting act is necessary and sufficient for being blameworthy for ignorance that the unwitting act is wrong. More explicitly, the conditions are:

34 _{Proponents of such an orthodox stance include Michael Zimmerman (1997), Ginet (2000), Rosen} (2004), FitzPatrick (2008), and Levy (2009).

(I) S is blameworthy for the unwitting wrongful act only if S is blameworthy for her ignorance that the unwitting wrongful act is wrong; and

(II) S is blameworthy for her ignorance that the unwitting wrongful act is wrong iff S is blameworthy for a benighting act (at least one such act) that led to the unwitting wrongful act.35

Applying (I) and (II) to the case of the mother who gave her infant a pill unwitting of the wrongness of doing so, as unbeknownst to her the pill contained a fatal dose of a narcotic painkiller, we get: the mother is blameworthy for giving her infant the pill only if the mother is blameworthy for her ignorance that giving her infant the pill is wrong36_{; and, the mother is blameworthy for her ignorance that giving her infant the}

pill is wrong just in case she is blameworthy for at least one benighting act (e.g., failing to read the label prior to administering the medicine, or keeping the infant’s medicine too close to her pain medicine) that resulted in giving her infant the pill.

There are further orthodox commitments in the literature. It is important to specify these orthodox commitments. When people argue against orthodoxy it helps to bear in mind what claims they are rejecting. These commitments are related to conditions (I) and (II), but they are not equivalent to them. These commitments focus on what it takes to establish derivative or indirect blameworthiness, which is when

35 _{Wieland (2017a: 9) proposes these principles. He uses abbreviation ‘A1’ for the benighting act, and} abbreviation ‘A2’ for the unwitting act. I opted to not use the abbreviations to avoid confusion.

36 _{Recall the mother is ignorant of the circumstantial fact that she is not giving her infant medicine but} is instead administering a high dose of a narcotic.

blameworthiness for the unwitting act derives from blameworthiness for the benighting act. Here are the conditions.37

Transfer Condition: If an agent is blameworthy for a benighting act (or the

ignorance that results from such an act), and the agent has no further excuses for the unwitting wrongful act, then the agent is blameworthy for the unwitting wrongful act (or a consequence of the act).

Necessary Condition: An agent is blameworthy for an unwitting wrongful act

only if an agent is blameworthy for a benighting act.

Explanatory Condition: An agent is blameworthy for an unwitting wrongful act

(partly) because an agent is blameworthy for a benighting act.

Parity Condition: The Transfer Condition, Necessary Condition, and

Explanatory Condition apply to both factual ignorance and moral ignorance.

Responsibility as Accountability Condition: The conditions above apply to

responsibility as accountability.38

According to the Transfer Condition, blameworthiness for a benighting act (or the resulting ignorance) can transfer to blameworthiness for an unwitting wrongful act (or a consequence of that act). This connects to tracing conditions on moral responsibility. If the Transfer Condition is true, blameworthiness for an unwitting wrongful act traces back to blameworthiness for a benighting act. For this transfer of

37 _{These conditions come from Wieland (2017a). Wieland is the first to systematize them. I have adapted} the claims by placing labels on them and putting them in descriptive language instead of the abbreviated symbols used by Wieland.

38 _{Responsibility as accountability is a species of a desert-entailing conception of responsibility.} Roughly, a person deserves blame for performing an action given that it is appropriate to hold the person accountable for their action by way of the reactive attitudes. Thanks to Greco for requesting clarification of this point.

blameworthiness to occur the Necessary Condition and Explanatory Condition must hold. That is, blameworthiness for a benighting act is both necessary for and explanatory of blameworthiness for an unwitting wrongful action.39 _{The Transfer}

Condition does not automatically fall out of conditions (I) and (II).40

By contrast, the Necessary Condition falls directly out of conditions (I) and (II).41 _{The Necessary Condition implies how ignorance can serve as an excuse}

condition for responsibility for a wrongful action. If the agent is not blameworthy for a benighting act, then the agent is not blameworthy for the resulting unwitting wrongful act. The ignorance is blameless and thereby qualifies as an excuse condition. The Explanatory Condition occurs because not all necessary conditions are explanatory conditions. Additionally, blameworthiness for a benighting act only partially explains blameworthiness for an unwitting wrongful act, as additional conditions may explain blameworthiness, such as a control condition or an autonomy/authenticity condition.

39 _{For more on the Transfer Condition, see Robichaud and Wieland (2017: Ch. 16).}

40 _{Upon closer inspection, it is unclear that the Transfer Condition is derivable from (I) and (II) without} an assumption that reverses the necessity found in principle (I). That is, an agent being blameworthy for an unwitting act, such as prescribing the drugs, is necessary for that agent being blameworthy for the ignorance that the unwitting act is wrong. Such a principle seems necessary to derive the Transfer Condition from (I) and (II). Taking the right-to-left direction of the biconditional in (II) and this alternative necessity condition, plus performing a disjunctive syllogism, results in deriving the conditional found in the Transfer Condition. It is possible to endorse this alternative necessity principle or reject the Transfer Condition. This is to deny that blameworthiness for the unwitting act must trace to blameworthiness for a benighting act. I explore this approach later in the dissertation and allow original blameworthiness to terminate at blameworthiness for the unwitting act. It need not always inherit its blameworthiness from some other act that explains it or to which it can be traced. Wieland is the first to systematize these conditions, and it is unclear that many people have thought about the connections between (I) and (II) and deriving the additional conditions. It may turn out that all such conditions are not properly classified as orthodoxy. I thank Hanser and Hieronymi for urging me to consider the connections between (I) and (II) and the further conditions.

41 _{Using the left-to-right direction of the biconditional in (II) coupled with the conditional in (I) results} in the conditional found in the Necessary Condition.

The Parity Condition indicates that the above conditions all apply to factual ignorance and moral ignorance. Wieland notes that, “One rationale for parity is the existence of duties to inquire into factual and moral issues. If factual ignorance traces to failures to inquire into factual matters, why not think that moral ignorance traces to failures to inquire into moral matters?” (Wieland 2017a: 11).

Lastly, the Responsibility as Accountability Condition indicates that all the conditions apply to the kind of responsibility referred to as accountability. On this understanding of responsibility, if an agent is blameworthy for a benighting act, then the agent could have reasonably been expected to have avoided performing the benighting act. Likewise, if an agent is blameworthy for an unwitting wrongful act, the agent could have reasonably been expected to have avoided performing the unwitting wrongful act. Recalling the slaveholder cases, “the slaveholder is blameworthy to the extent that she could reasonably have been expected to question her practices and, indeed, to stop them” (Wieland 2017a: 11). Responsibility as accountability tracks our reasonable expectations of the agent in light of the evidence the agent had (or could have easily had), the difficulty and complexity of inquiry and information gathering, and the pursuant difficulty of forming and revising beliefs.