On Culpable Ignorance: Answering the Debate between Epistemic Vice and Internalism

Abstract

Imagine I invite you over for tea. I ask you if you want any sugar in your tea and you say “yes, please!” So I take the sugar bowl out of my cupboard and spoon some sugar into your tea. Little do I know, someone had snuck into my house in the middle of the night and switched out the sugar in my sugar bowl with arsenic. You drink the arsenic tea and fall deathly ill. By putting what I think is sugar into your tea, I cause you to fall ill and potentially cause your death. But all along, I had no idea that the contents of my sugar bowl was arsenic, not sugar. Am I blameworthy for poisoning you?

The topic of when an agent can be held responsible, or culpable, in cases where they did not know what they were doing has gained attention in recent years. The field of culpable ignorance aims to look at when agents are culpable for unwitting wrongful acts performed from ignorance, and what criteria must be fulfilled to judge an agent as morally responsible for her wrongdoing.

I am to defend a version of what is called the Epistemic Vice View held by William FitzPatrick, which states that normative ignorance can be culpable if it is a result of epistemic vices such as arrogance, laziness, or dismissiveness, given that the agents could have reasonably remedied their ignorance had they not exercised such epistemic vice. However, it has been met with critique. I focus on Neil Levy’s Internalist critique, which states that what an agent can reasonably know and have done is a state internal to the agent herself.

I argue that Levy is incorrect in his internalism because his theory is founded on two false assumptions. In doing so, I hope to defend FitzPatrick’s Epistemic Vice View. I argue that the Epistemic Vice View captures our intuitions about blameworthiness, while also avoiding the extremes of both excusing all ignorance and condemning all unwitting wrongdoing. My defense contributes to the broader debate by offering a nuanced standard for culpable ignorance, one that preserves the integrity of moral responsibility without requiring radical revision of our practices of blame.

In the first chapter, I introduce the topic of culpable ignorance, and delineate the main ways theorists aim to solve the issue. In the second chapter, I outline the debate between William FitzPatrick and Neil Levy. Finally, in the third chapter, I pose critiques to Levy’s internalist position.