Benighting acts are wrong because they violate duties of inquiry.30 Smith’s cases
involved deficient investigation, deficient inference, and preventing subsequent discovery. The agent’s performed acts or omitted to perform acts that resulted in impairment of their ability to attain true beliefs concerning the wrongness of their acts. They impaired their epistemic position (i.e., their position with respect to the attainment of truth and knowledge). We can group these different ways of impairing one’s epistemic position under the violation of duties of inquiry. But, why focus on violation of duties of inquiry? Why not be more direct and claim that the agents
30 This claim is made by Wieland (2017a) in his introduction to the state of the art on the epistemic condition. I follow Wieland on this point and give some reasons for thinking it is the way to go. Should a better approach to capturing this emerge, I remain open-minded in that regard. I do not intend much to hang on endorsing duties of inquiry as the best way to explain why benighting acts are wrong. Thanks to John Greco for requesting clarification of the status of this claim.
violated duties of belief? The agents ought to have believed that they were doing something wrong; they are guilty of failing to have beliefs that they ought to have.
A common reason for focusing on duties of inquiry as opposed to duties of belief in assigning culpability for unwitting wrongful acts is that belief-formation is not under direct voluntary control. If belief-formation were under direct voluntary control, an agent could decide to believe something and, on that basis alone, come to believe that thing. Most epistemologists do not think we can form beliefs at will in such a manner.31 Thinking that it is most reasonable to hold people accountable for things
they can readily control prompts the idea that it is not most reasonable to hold people accountable for having or lacking particular beliefs.32 Instead, it is reasonable to hold
people accountable for doing or failing to do things that can indirectly impact the beliefs they come to have. The notion of inquiry involves mental or physical acts people have direct voluntary control over that can indirectly influence the beliefs agents come to have. Such acts include reflection, reasoning, introspection, and evidence gathering. Belief-forming agents have duties of inquiry. They are reasonably held responsible for gathering or failing to gather evidence, reflecting or failing to reflect, and so on. What is the nature of such duties of inquiry?
Inspired by a suggestion made by Holly H. M. Smith (2014) that duties of inquiry are objective and derivative, Wieland (2017a: 9) observes:
31 For defense of belief-formation being voluntary see Weatherson (2008) and Steup (2008). For an argument against doxastic voluntarism see McHugh (2011), and for an account of why we are unable to believe at will see Hieronymi (2006) and Hieronymi (2009).
32 This assumption will not necessarily be endorsed by theorists that focus on moral responsibility in terms of attributability or answerability. Some theorists in this camp think the involuntariness of belief- formation is an important aspect of what makes us responsible for the things we believe. It is because our beliefs cannot be changed at will that they are rightly regarded as reflecting our commitments or the things we value. For more on this perspective, see Hieronymi (2008).
Pharmaceutical company directors, doctors, engineers, and parents have the duty not to expose certain classes of people to avoidable risk of harm, and the fact that performing certain inquiries would allow them to satisfy this duty is what grounds a duty to carry out these inquiries. In other words, it would be wrong for these agents to expose others to an avoidable risk of harm and to fail to perform prior actions that would diminish this risk of exposure. In short: the
benighting [act] is wrong because the unwitting [act] is wrong. The
wrongness of a doctor’s failure to read her journals is derived from the wrongness of prescribing harmful drugs. Cases of moral ignorance are subject to a similar treatment. It is wrong for the slaveholder to fail to question her practices because it is wrong to keep slaves.
An agent performing a benighting act violates a duty of inquiry. Failing to improve one’s cognitive position might involve failure to gather relevant evidence, failure to scrutinize one’s beliefs or evidence through reflection, introspection, or reasoning. The wrongness of such a benighting act stems from the wrongness of the unwitting act.33 Why is this the case? The duty of inquiry stems from the fact that satisfying that
duty will facilitate satisfying other duties. Satisfying the doctor’s duty to read the relevant research will facilitate the doctor satisfying the duty to help patients and not expose them to avoidable risk of harm. We can make this more precise:
Derivativeness of Duties of Inquiry: S has a duty to inquire D1 because she has
some other duty D2 that is such that conforming to D1 will enable her to see
33 Recall that a goal in this literature is to explain how objective wrongness can come apart from blameworthiness. Given that we are considering wrongful actions in the objective sense, the benighting act is objectively wrong due to inheriting its wrongness from the wrongness of the unwitting act, which is by stipulation objectively wrong.
that she has D2 (or will enable her to see how she can conform to D2). (Wieland 2017a: 8)
We can relate this back to the relationship between benighting acts and unwitting wrongful acts. Benighting acts are wrong because unwitting wrongful acts are wrong and performing a benighting act, such as failing to satisfy one’s duty to inquire, puts one in a position such that one cannot see that the unwitting act is wrong. What type of duties are these duties?
The duties or obligations at issue are epistemic obligations that receive their authority from their connection to moral duties. They are epistemic obligations that are part of a standard of due care or, as Gideon Rosen (2004) classifies them, they are part of taking “precautions against negligent harm.” For Rosen the duties are instantiated with reference to the person of reasonable prudence:
As you move through the world you are required to take certain steps to inform yourself about matters that might bear on the permissibility of your conduct. You are obliged to keep your eyes on the road while driving, to seek advice before launching a war and to think seriously about the advice you're given; to see to it that dangerous substances are clearly labeled, and so on. These obligations are your procedural epistemic obligations. Again, they are impossible to codify. But again, the person of ordinary prudence provides a serviceable heuristic. In any given case we can ask whether the agent's ignorance derives from a failure to do what any reasonably prudent person in his circumstances would have done in order to see to it that he was adequately informed…these procedural obligations are always obligations to do (or to
refrain from doing) certain things: to ask certain questions, to take careful notes, to stop and think, to focus one's attention in a certain direction, etc. The procedural obligation is not itself an obligation to know or believe this or that. It is an obligation to take steps to ensure that when the time comes to act, one will know what one ought to know. (Rosen 2004: 301)
Duties of inquiry (or procedural epistemic obligations) are obligations that serve moral ends and put one in a position to act in an informed manner at the time of action. Violating these epistemic obligations, which derive their wrongness from their connection to moral obligations, results in one being culpably ignorant. This analysis raises an important question: What necessary and sufficient conditions hold concerning blameworthiness for benighting acts, which involve violations of duties of inquiry, and blameworthiness for subsequent unwitting wrongful acts?