Over the past 25 years, philosophers have begun to address the long-standing neglect of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. Several prominent accounts have emerged, each attempting to answer a fundamental question: when does ignorance excuse an agent from moral responsibility, and when does it not? In this book, Michael Zimmerman solidifies his position as one of the most prominent defenders of what he calls the “pretty radical” view that “all blameworthiness rests on, or is rooted in, non-ignorant, that is, witting wrongdoing” (21). This “origination thesis” is radical mostly because, on the plausible assumption that most ignorance doesn’t have this inculpating etiology, it entails that many commonsense assignments of moral responsibility for ignorant action will be mistaken.
Although Zimmerman is not the only defender of the origination thesis (Rosen 2004; Levy 2014), this book contains most extensive, careful, and powerful arguments for it. Coming in at 376 pages, this is by far the longest book on the topic, but its structure is straightforward. It centers around iteratively revising the 14-premise “Argument from Ignorance” that is introduced in chapter 1 and undergoes seven revisions over the subsequent eight chapters. These chapters focus on the nature of moral responsibility, blame, and blameworthiness; the nature of ignorance; the relevant notion of control; and finally, the nature of culpable ignorance, negligence, and recklessness. The final chapter addresses some challenges to the argument from ignorance and contains the final revision of the argument.
Before discussing some of the details of this journey, it is worth commenting on how this book can (and perhaps should) be read. I think the intended way is to consume it as one extended argument that leads to the most refined version of the argument from ignorance that has ever been on offer. But there is another option, which is more forgiving to the reader, given the wide scope of the topics and the density of argumentation, and that is to start with the first three chapters (which address the fundamentals) and then select which dimensions of the argument from ignorance that you find the most interesting. Read this way, one finds that there actually are three more or less coherent books contained in this one book. These would have the titles: Ignorance, Moral Responsibility, and Control; Ignorance, Moral Responsibility, and Negligence; and finally, Ignorance, Moral Responsibility, and Varieties of Blame.
Zimmerman starts chapter 1 by describing an imagined case of a mother who took thalidomide in the 1960s in an effort to minimise morning sickness. Intuitively, the mother’s ignorance of the teratogenic effects of thalidomide constitutes an excuse: we would not say that she was responsible for the act of taking thalidomide or for its effects on the child. Zimmerman contrasts the mother with an R&D employee of the drug company who investigated the safety of thalidomide in a slipshod way before approving it and allowing the drug to be rushed to the market. This sloppy scientist was of course also ignorant of the teratogenic effects of the drug, but Zimmerman notes that they may also have been ignorant of the claim that they ought to have conducted more (careful) research. For Zimmerman the question of whether the scientist is blameworthy for the negative effects of the mother’s use of thalidomide turns on whether they were blameworthy for not knowing that more research was called for. If they weren’t blameworthy for this ignorance, then the scientist is actually no different from the mother. Zimmerman says that this follows from
Premise 2: If one committed some act or omission that was wrong while ignorant of the fact that it was wrong, one is to blame for it, and thereby to blame for any of its consequences, only if one is to blame for one’s ignorance. (19)
Neither the mother, nor this version of the scientist meets the clause in bold. Zimmerman notes that it is of course possible that the scientist was to blame for their ignorance that they ought to do more research, but on pain of regress, this can only be established by finding some wrongful piece of behavior in the etiology of their ignorance for which they were fully aware that it was wrongful. The reason that the regress can only stop in this way rests in part on the following:
Premise 4: One is to blame for something only if one is in control of that thing. (19)
Zimmerman argues (at some length in chapter 4) that we are only ever indirectly in control of our ignorance in virtue of being directly in control of some piece of behavior that causes our ignorance. Furthermore, he argues that one is indirectly to blame for one’s ignorance only if one is directly to blame for whatever action caused their ignorance. Thus, in order for the scientist to be to blame for their ignorance, they must be directly to blame for some upstream wrongful failure to forestall their ignorance, and in order for them to be directly to blame for this wrongful failure, they can’t have been ignorant that it was wrongful (lest premise 2 would apply to it all over again).
The purpose of chapters 2 and 3 is to spell out the terms in the title of the book. In chapter 2, Zimmerman explains what sense of moral responsibility is at issue, namely moral blameworthiness. This much is already apparent in the formulations of the argument from ignorance (and premises 2 and 4 above). The discussions of both the nature of blame and what it is to be worthy of blame are careful and wide-ranging, and many of the critical discussions of the relevant literature make real progress. It contains much that is illuminating, especially when it examines the conceptual inter-relationship between thin accounts of blame, which involve judgements about an agent’s falling short of some hypological standard, and thick accounts of blame, which involve directing a negative response towards the agent. (More on this later.) In chapter 3, Zimmerman asks what ignorance comes to. He argues that what matters for moral responsibility is not the lack of knowledge, but the absence of belief about the moral permissibility of their actions.
In chapter 4, Zimmerman conducts an extended examination of the nature of control. The argument from ignorance contains a premise that references control, and this chapter zooms (way) in on this concept. The number of distinctions in this chapter is dizzying, but the core takeaway of the chapter is straightforward enough. What’s at stake in premise (4) is “volitional control”, and Zimmerman helpfully distinguishes between direct and indirect control. Thus, the sloppy scientist would have direct control over the decision not to conduct more research, while they would only indirectly control subsequent events such as the drug getting rushed through approval, the mother having access to it, and their own ignorance that the drug was harmful. This chapter clocks in at about 70 pages, and, for readers whose interests are in the more normative questions surrounding blame and responsibility, it will be mostly omittable. For what it is—an extended and extremely careful discussion of an important philosophical concept—it’s really good, even great at times. But, as a chapter in a stepwise defense of the argument from ignorance, it’s probably too much of a good thing.
In chapters 5–9, Zimmerman pivots to discuss matters that will strike many readers as closer to the heart of the main topic of the book, and this is where the radicalness of his view comes into clearer relief for many. The topics of these chapters are (a) so-called tracing views of culpable ignorance, (b) negligence, (c) recklessness, (d) moral ignorance, and (e) challenges to the argument from ignorance. Although in chapter 5, Zimmerman defends the plausible view that indirect blameworthiness for unwitting actions can be traced to prior wrongful acts for which the agent is directly blameworthy, things get more controversial in chapter 6, in which it is argued that ‘purely’ negligent agents cannot be blameworthy and in chapter 7 in which it’s argued that reckless mismanagement of one’s beliefs is only inculpating when the reckless agent is aware that they are wrongfully running a risk. If the sloppy scientist only fails to occurrently believe they are acting wrongly, they too have an excuse and are no more blameworthy than the mother.
In Zimmerman’s important and illuminating final chapter, Zimmerman confronts the critics of the argument from ignorance head on. Specifically, he discusses objections to premises 2 and 4 (listed above) and in the last pages makes a significant concession. The objections to Premise 2 center on pure negligence cases in which an agent’s ignorance that they are acting wrongly fails to trace to a relevant prior wrong action, yet in which there is strong reason to think that they are nevertheless blameworthy. Zimmerman discusses Randolph Clarke’s view that “even when an agent’s failure to notice, think of, or remember something is due to an objectionable quality of will, direct blameworthiness for unwitting wrongful conduct is not ruled out” (312). The task for Zimmerman, then, is to enquire into theories that tie an agent’s quality of will to blameworthiness. The extended discussion of views according to which an agent’s moral responsibility rests on their de re rather than de dicto (lack of) concern for doing what is right is probably too diversionary. For a book focused on whether agents are to blame for ignorant actions, the extended and highly technical discussion of whether de dicto vs. de re reasons responsiveness suffices for praiseworthiness is slightly distracting. Zimmerman moves on to discuss attributionists, such as A. Smith, who argue that we can be to blame for mental attitudes such as beliefs and even “patterns of unreflective thought” (Smith 2005, 262) over which we lack volitional control. Thus, attributionists deny Premise 4. The attributionist position can make sense of why we think that the attitudes and actions of, for example, racists and homophobes are worthy of blame even though the relevant judgments and attitudes are not under their control and even though they are unaware that their attitudes and actions are morally objectionable.
Faced with these lines of critique, Zimmerman makes a significant and very surprising concession. He grants that we react to such racists and homophobes by engaging in a fitting form of moral blame, one that is not ruled out by the argument from ignorance. Still, he maintains that the argument from ignorance still holds for a certain kind of thick blame, namely punishment, which is defined as “the intentional imposition of harm” that is “contrary to one’s deserts unless one is in control of that for which one is being punished” (336). Armed with a distinction between blamec which is a form of blame that requires robust voluntary control over one’s actions and called blamen which is a (class of) form(s) of blame that do not have this requirement, the argument from ignorance undergoes its last revision and all instances of “blame” become blamec (341).
Zimmerman was right to worry that this might strike some viewers as anticlimactic (335), and the reader can be forgiven for wishing that this distinction and the framing of the argument from ignorance it entails were provided way back in Chapter 2, where the nature of moral responsibility and blame was discussed. I think many readers (though of course not all) would be happy to accept that the conditions for justified punishment simply are stronger than the conditions for justified (perhaps unexpressed) resentment or disdain, and thus the position defended in the book may be less radical after all.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to think that Zimmerman was guilty of purposely burying the lead; the book captures Zimmerman’s context of discovery as much as it provides the context of justification, and so the late-breaking concession makes some sense. With Zimmerman’s scope narrowed in this way, interlocutors may not actually be as troubled by the views defended in the book. Still, it’s undeniable they have much to learn from reading it given the sheer breadth of topical coverage, and the extreme care, precision, and fairness with which Zimmerman moves through the material.
REFERENCES
Levy, Neil. 2014. Consciousness and Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press.
Rosen, Gideon. 2004. “Skepticism about Moral Responsibility.” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1): 295–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2004.00030.x.
Smith, Angela M. 2005. “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life.” Ethics 115 (2): 236–71.