Investigation is a paradigm belief producing action about which we seem to have actional norms. We think that we have obligations to check the tire pressure before making a long drive and that people should keep track of the time if they have an upcoming
appointment. Consider the example of an agent trying to settle the question of whether to check the time. This is an action that has a straightforward epistemic upshot. If an agent performs it, then, on the assumption that one’s clock or watch is reliable, one will form a belief about what time it is. The question of whether to check the time can be settled by a variety of considerations. One class of considerations seems to be grounded in the
agent’s desires, goals, or plans. A true belief about what time it is will be relevant to someone who is baking a cake, running a marathon, or throwing a party. Certain desires, goals, and plans can ground reasons for checking the time. I will refer to reasons
grounded in desires, goals, or plans as aim-relative reasons. A second class of
not about the agent’s aims. The clearest examples of ‘objective’ reasons are moral reasons. Consider, again, the child who has a curfew. This time, assume that the child is morally obligated to avoid unnecessarily worrying her parents and that her parent’s will worry if she misses her curfew. Since a true belief about what time it is will trigger the child’s memory of the curfew, and since she will avoid unnecessarily worrying her parents by remembering the curfew, we can say that she has a reason to check the time, even if at the moment in question she doesn’t have an intention, desire, or plan to check the time. I will call reasons for action that are not grounded in the agent’s aims aim-
neutral reasons. These reasons to act are grounded in facts that are ‘external’ to the
agent’s desires or plans. They might involve moral reasons, as the example with the curfew suggests. But, they might also involve reasons related to the agent’s well being. When we say that an agent has a reason to inquire into the reputation of a graduate
program that she is considering, we might be appealing to an external reason of this kind. Williams famously discussed external reasons that involve the plans and desires of other people.71 These are still grounded in the desires and plans, so there is a sense in which they are aim-relative. However, they are still neutral with respect to the agent in question. This is distinction is admittedly cursory, and it glosses over a huge range of debates about the source of reasons. The aim-relative vs. aim-neutral distinction will suffice for the purposes of understanding different actional reasons and the different actional epistemic norms they might support.
Now that I have distinguished between two types of reasons for belief-producing actions, we can now think about the actional epistemic norms to which they correspond.
71 B. Williams, “Internal and External Reasons’, in His Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, vol. 1981 (Cambridge
Aim-relative reasons for acting would support norms that call for a given action, so long as the agent has the relevant desire, goal, or plan. In the case of checking the time, the norm would take the form of a conditional: If someone desires to keep an appointment, then she should check the time. By building in the aim that grounds the reason for checking the time, the norm secures the appropriate application class – it does not apply to people who do not want to keep their appointments or to people who simply lack appointments. The same schema could be applied in order to discover other kinds of epistemic norms. Given an agent S, a desire, goal or plan D, and an action A with reliable epistemic upshot p:
Aim-Relative Actional Norm: If S’s D would be satisfied or completed by
believing truly that p, and if S would believe truly that p by A-ing, then S should A.
The central question is whether an actional epistemic norm of this kind is relevant to the culpable ignorance thesis and the ignorant action thesis. Are ignorant agents who fall short of aim-relative actional norms culpably ignorant, and does their culpable ignorance ground moral responsibility for subsequent actions on that ignorance? I think that the answer to both of these questions is no.
It is important to focus on the fact that the culpability in the culpable ignorance thesis is supposed to be transferrable and establish culpability for the subsequent action. I will argue that the features of the agent that are revealed when an aim-relative actional norm of this kind is violated, do not establish culpability for subsequent action on that ignorance. That an agent fails to comply with an aim-relative actional norm that is underwritten by aim-relative reasons for action such as those discussed above may reveal
something about the agent’s ability to satisfy her desires, fulfilling her goals, or
complying with her plans. Consider again the agent who wanted to keep an appointment, and imagine that she failed to check her watch, thereby falling short of the aim-relative actional norm requiring her to check it. If this agent has a false belief about the time, then her ignorance is owed to her failure to act in accordance with an epistemic norm, in this case, an aim-relative actional norm. Let’s assume that she is culpably ignorant because she fell short of this norm. According to the ignorant action thesis, she would be morally responsible for any wrong action on the basis of that ignorance. The problem is that her failure to check the time in this case tells us only that she is disposed to act in ways that frustrate her desires or plans. That the agent possesses this disposition reveals that she suffers from a kind of prudential irrationality – she has certain goals and desires, and these desires function as the basis of actional epistemic norms that require certain investigations, periods of reflection, etc. But this sort of prudential irrationality is a poor candidate for grounding the claim that and agent is morally responsible for subsequent wrong actions on that ignorance. That an agent fell short of an aim-relative actional epistemic norm does not seem at all relevant to the question of whether she is morally responsible for subsequent ignorant action.
To see why this is so, consider the fact that agents form beliefs in prudentially irrational ways all the time. We frequently fail to investigate issues that are relevant to satisfying our desires or ends. People on diets fail to count calories, students fail to check paper deadlines, and mountain-climbers fail to check the weather conditions. There is a straightforward sense in which the ignorance that results from these epistemic failures is attributable to them. For example, we may want to criticize the dieter for not doing what
would further her dietary goals, but this criticism seems to be of an importantly different nature than the moral criticism that is directed at agents who are morally responsible for bad or wrong actions. Though these agents are falling short of aim-relative actional norms, this does not seem to bring the agent into contact with the wrongness of any subsequent wrong action in a way that justifies the claim that they are morally responsible.
Another way of understanding this gap is to focus on the agent’s reasons-
responsiveness. As I discussed above, the reasons that support the dieter’s norm to count her calories are strictly aim-relative (on the assumption that she is not so overweight that she has health-related reasons to count calories). It is only because the agent wants to lose weight or improve her fitness that she has a reason to count calories. The agent who does not respond to these reasons is failing to respond to reasons she has and is subject to criticism. However, as I have been assuming throughout this dissertation, the reasons that someone fails to respond to in the case of wrongful or bad action, are not aim- relative in the relevant sense. They are not grounded in features of the agent’s set of desires and goals. It is possible that an agent whose ignorance is owed to failures to respond to the aim-relative reasons that underlie aim-relative actional epistemic norms is otherwise a moral saint, perfectly responsive to all of the moral reasons that make certain of her options bad or immoral. In as much as questions of moral responsibility involve being responsive to moral reasons, an agent’s responsiveness to reasons for investigating and reflecting that are grounded solely by her desires and goals is irrelevant to the question at hand, namely whether and when ignorance that is traceable to failures to investigate make agents responsible for their ignorance and subsequent wrong or bad
action. If this is right, then aim-relative actional epistemic norms are not relevant to culpable ignorance and moral responsibility.
A feature of recognizing this distinction between aim-relative reasons (with their corresponding norms) and aim-neutral reasons (with their corresponding norms) is that one can give accurate analyses of cases where an agent’s ignorance is both culpable and traceable to aim-relative actional norm violations but where the culpability does not seem to rest on these norm violations. Consider an engineer who wants to perpetuate her good reputation in the industry by designing a highway overpass that is structurally sound. Because the engineer has this desire, she has an aim-relative actional epistemic norm to assess earthquake risk near the sight of construction. To fill in the details of the case, imagine further that:
a. She fails to assess earthquake risk
b. She maintains the false belief that there is no earthquake risk c. She designs an overpass that is not resistant to earthquakes d. Drivers are killed when the overpass falls during an earthquake
In this case, the engineer falls short of an aim-relative actional norm, forms or maintains a false belief and acts on it. Intuitively, she is morally responsible for designing a bridge that is earthquake susceptible and for the deaths of the drivers. If this intuition is reliable, then what reason is there to resist the claim that the engineer was culpably ignorant because she fell short of an aim-relative actional norm and that her blameworthiness for the deaths traces to this culpable ignorance? I think the reason is fairly clear, and it points toward an important feature of any viable account of the culpable ignorance thesis. Although it is true that the engineer has an epistemic norm requiring her to assess the
earthquake risk, this norm is supported by not merely by aim-relative reasons given by her reputational concerns, but by moral reasons as well. This epistemic norm is supported by weighty moral reasons having to do with risk of harm that her ignorance presents. It strikes me that one plausible explanation for the intuition that the engineer is morally responsible is the fact that the obligation to assess earthquake risk is underwritten by moral reasons, which themselves have nothing to do with the engineer’s desires or goals. In this case, the aim-relative actional epistemic norm happens to coincide with an actional epistemic norm that requires the same investigation into earthquake risk.
However, this second norm is underwritten by moral reasons that are neutral with respect to the agent’s aims. In the final section of this chapter I will explore the possibility of grounding an agent’s blameworthiness for ignorant actions on the violations of epistemic norms that are backed by moral reasons.