Abstract
Suppose that you are a doctor and that you prescribed a drug to a patient who died as a result. Suppose further that you could have known about the risks of this drug, and that you are blameworthy for your ignorance. Does the blameworthiness for your ignorance ‘transfer’ to blameworthiness for your ignorant action in this case? Many are inclined accept that such transfer can occur and that blameworthiness for ignorant conduct can be derivative or indirect in this way. In this paper, we motivate a new problem for transfer proponents. Extant accounts cannot satisfactorily distinguish between agents who are blameworthy for their ignorance and their resulting ignorant conduct and agents who are blameworthy for their ignorance but not for their resulting ignorant conduct. We defend a solution that we call the ‘concern constraint’ that clearly distinguishes these cases. Our solution is distinct from the much discussed foreseeability constraint (according to which blameworthiness transfers only when the ignorant action is foreseeable), and it is less restrictive than Holly Smith's quality of will condition (according to which blameworthiness never transfers). We argue that any account of derivative or indirect blameworthiness for ignorant action should take the concern constraint on board.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3-26 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Philosophy and Phenomenological Research |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 27 Oct 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2019 |
Funding
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper was fully collaborative. We would like to thank: two referees of the journal, Ryan Cox, Taylor Cyr, Machteld Geuskens, Alex Guerrero, Liz Harman, David Ludwig, Ben Matheson, MatthéScholten, George Sher, Jojanneke Vanderveen, and audiences in Amsterdam and Boulder. Thanks also to the Nether-lands Organization for Scientific Research for their support through two Veni grants. Email: [email protected]; [email protected] 1 Cases like this have been discussed in the literature since Smith (1983).
