archives@tulane.edu / This dissertation examines the relationship between ignorance and responsibility. Ignorance is often treated as an excuse, but there are times when ignorance does not excuse. Ignorance that does not excuse is usually known as culpable ignorance. Since ignorance is largely an epistemological concept, the difference between culpable and exculpating ignorance suggests a connection between epistemology and theories of responsibility that has gone relatively unexplored. The following work explores this connection and argues that incorporating epistemological theories will help provide a robust account of both the ignorance excuse and culpable ignorance. The project begins by pointing out that some highly intuitive accounts of culpable ignorance seem remarkably like theories of epistemic justification. As such, epistemic justification seems like the best candidate for an epistemological concept that might share a connection with the culpable ignorance literature in moral philosophy. I argue that there is a theory of epistemic justification that captures our intuitions regarding culpable ignorance. Its close connection to our practices gives us good reason to think that, if this theory of justification is right, then the following is true: one’s ignorance exculpates only if it is justified, and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it is not justified. I call this the Justification Thesis. Once I establish the Justification Thesis, I defend it against various possible objections. First, the Justification Thesis is a derivative account of culpable ignorance, and it is often thought that derivative accounts are forced into responsibility skepticism. I argue that this is not true. Second, it is often thought derivative accounts like the Justification Thesis are open to a large class of counterexamples. I examine a few common alleged counterexamples and argue that they trade on ambiguities that, I suggest, are shared by every purported counterexample. When disambiguated it turns out they are not counterexamples after all. Third, some question whether ignorance with moral content exculpates. I argue that the Justification Thesis captures our intuitions regarding moral ignorance. Finally, I address a challenge to the initial assumption that culpable ignorance does not excuse and argue that this challenge is mistaken. / 1 / Nathan W. Biebel

My central aim in the dissertation is to defend an account of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility that distinguishes culpable ignorance from non-culpable ignorance. The view that I defend is that ignorance is culpable just when an agent flouts or ignores moral reasons that underlie her epistemic norms or obligations. This view is a quality-of-will theory of moral responsibility that emphasizes the agent’s reasons-responsiveness. It holds that only relevant epistemic obligations are those that require acts of investigation or reflection. In the dissertation, I examine extant theories of culpable ignorance and suggest that they all fall short in some important respect. Then, I propose and defend an account in which epistemic norms play a leading role. I analyze the nature of epistemic norms and their normativity, and I argue that agents who ignore or flout actional investigative norms and then act on subsequent false beliefs are connected to the wrongness of their action in a way that establishes their blameworthiness. I also argue that epistemic norms that require agents to hold certain beliefs or make certain inferences are not relevant to culpable ignorance. Finally, I explore the implications of my view for certain interesting cases of moral ignorance. I discuss ignorance that results from an agent’s social or historical circumstances, ignorance that stems from pure moral deference, and ignorance that is explained by epistemic difficulty of getting certain moral facts right. There are two striking outcomes of my research. The first is that reflection on the epistemic condition shows that one cannot think deeply about moral responsibility without also engaging issues in epistemology relating to the nature and normativity of belief, and issues in normative ethics relating to what our moral obligations actually are. The second striking outcome is that bringing these rather disparate topics together, as I attempted to do, reveals that much of our ignorance is actually non-culpable, and that many of our beliefs about the blameworthiness of ignorant agents are unwarranted.