Shyun J. Ahn 安 丁 秀賢

While walking around the base, I listen to a podcast ranging from philosophy to East Asian politics. A philosophy podcast I particularly like is Philosophy Bites, and I often check out familiar names or intriguing topics. Gideon Rosen’s 14-year-old talk on moral responsibility caught my attention because it satisfies both conditions.

In the podcast, Rosen gives three types of ignorance in which an individual is not morally responsible for his or her act (I tweaked some examples to clarify the case and added my explanations, so these explanations aren’t verbatim from Rosen).

1. Factual ignorance: You poisoned and killed a neighbor by giving a cup of tea without knowing that it was poisoned. You are not morally responsible although you might be responsible for your action otherwise (e.g., legally).
2. Blameless moral ignorance: You’re from the period when owning slaves, indentured servants, or grossly underpaid house servants was uncontroversial across the world. It would be considered blatantly immoral to extract labor from fellow humans—and even non-human animals—in 2024, but there was no such understanding in your and neighboring societies. That is, the immorality of such acts was simply beyond anyone’s imagination. So, you own slaves and extract their labor. Yes, you’re morally mistaken, and such an act cannot be justified. Nonetheless, you wouldn’t be morally responsible for it (Note that this is different from the Nazi’s situation, in which their acts, albeit accepted by other like-minded people, were controversial even then).
3. Normative Ignorance: You know moral facts and what morality requires of you, but you’re ignorant about the normative strength of moral reasons. Though you act morally in most cases, you think that a moral requirement is a simple suggestion in certain situations and choose your interests over a moral requirement. For example, you, a college student, are deciding whether to cheat or not. You know a moral fact, i.e., it’s immoral to cheat. But you also want to pass the course. After giving many thoughts, you decide to cheat because you mistakenly think that a moral imperative, “Do not cheat,” is a mere suggestion that does not hold normative strength over “I want/need to get a good grade.”

As Rosen acknowledges, blameless moral ignorance is controversial, but I agree with him. We can and must say slavery is immoral and whoever owned slaves acted morally wrong. Nonetheless, holding them morally responsible as if they can make the same informed judgment as us on the topic is blatant presentism. Put differently, we could be acting morally wrong without even imagining it, only to be recognized by the future generation. Are we morally responsible for them?

However, I found the argument for the third type odd. How is it possible to know a moral fact while being ignorant of its normative strength? You might know “killing people for fun is immoral” as a fact, but if you don’t know that it overrides your self-interest, do you know it as a moral fact? Without knowing its normative strength, the knowledge of a moral proposition isn’t any different from the knowledge of an amoral descriptive fact like “the national flag of Japan has two colors.” In short, knowing the proposition’s prevailing normative strength is what distinguishes the knowledge of moral fact from the knowledge of other kinds.

Let me walk you through the argument above. Consider the following propositions: “Killing people is immoral” and “I like vanilla ice cream.” When we say the former, we also accept the following normative claim: “Don’t kill people” or “We ought to not kill people.” In contrast, “I like vanilla ice cream” does not have the same normative force. I like vanilla ice cream, but I might think I shouldn’t have it because I’m concerned about my weight (1: A moral proposition has normative strength).

Now, one might ask how a normative but amoral proposition, such as “I should exercise more,” compares. Obviously, this proposition has normative strength. But this proposition still doesn’t carry the same normative strength as “killing people is immoral” because it’s not globally applicable. Someone on the Earth is likely overexercising, and she might have to exercise less to stay healthy. Therefore, “I should exercise harder” only pertains to me. “Killing people is immoral,” in contrast, applies to everyone (2: A moral proposition has normative strength and is globally applicable).

Now to a harder case: “Staying healthy is good.” As a value judgment, unlike “I like vanilla ice cream,” an individual who says this would also accept that we should stay healthy. It has a normative force like a moral proposition. Moreover, staying healthy is good for everyone, not just for me, you, Alex, or Sarah next door. Nevertheless, “we should stay healthy” is restricted by many conditionals, especially moral requirements. That is, we should stay healthy only if we can do so without hurting or deceiving others. The same goes for “making a lot of money is good,” “looking at a beautiful artwork is good,” etc. On the other hand, a moral proposition is not conditioned by personal interests. “We shouldn’t kill people only if it makes us money or gets us A+ on the test,” obviously sounds absurd. The only conditionals that can restrict a moral proposition seem to be life-and-death-related, such as “Killing people is immoral unless it is to protect your or others’ lives.” (3: A moral proposition has normative strength and is globally applicable and mostly unconditional).

As such, a moral proposition overrides other ordinary propositions in its normative strength. Knowing something is moral is knowing these. To be clear, this is not to deny the possibility of being ignorant of the normative force of moral reasons. For example, toddlers and little children might not grasp the normative strength of moral reasons although their parents have told them, “Punching other kids is bad.” Though they understand what their parents say at a face level, i.e., they should not push other kids, they might not understand that it, as a moral statement, has more normative strength than “playing with a toy by myself is fun.” People who are mentally compromised might also have the same issue. In all these cases, they don’t understand the normative strength of a moral proposition as a whole, not individual moral propositions. That’s to say, they’re ignorant of the normativity of moral reasons on a categorical level, and they hold no moral responsibility. However, as my examples demonstrate, this third category is applicable only to a small group of individuals. It does not apply to a cheating student or lying Bill Clinton (another example given by Rosen), who have knowledge of what is moral on a categorical level. If they understand what is moral and know cheating is immoral, they also know that “do not cheat” has a stronger normative force than their self-interest. Failing to follow through is merely a sign of self-deception or weakness of will.