Consider an all-too-familiar scene. John and Martha are visiting Barry—their adult son—and his family for a holiday. After a delicious dinner he played no role whatsoever in helping to prepare, John promptly seats himself comfortably in an armchair in front of the living room television and ignores what goes on around him. Martha helps clear the table while Barry’s partner Alicia starts in on the dishes. Barry begins to move the children toward bed, helping them to locate their pajamas and brush their teeth. Everyone but John seems to notice and attend to the (seemingly never-ending) work of the household. John contentedly enjoys whatever show or game he has settled on.
I think many of us have experienced something like this—the confounding difficulties of navigating gendered asymmetrical expectations of the work of the household. They tend to become even more obvious and prominent when generations gather together. This post is being published at the beginning of November, and I imagine many of us are bracing for time with extended family, time we both treasure and dread. I think many of us think that John is to blame for failing to attend to and help Barry, Alicia, and Martha. But frustratingly, moral philosophy has a surprisingly difficult time making out how this could be so.
Suppose John is genuinely unaware of the fact that dishes need to be done and small children need help getting ready for bed (and is unaware that he is, in fact, capable of helping with these demands). According to many versions of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility, John’s blameworthiness for wrongfully failing to help with the demands of the household is diminished or excused in virtue of his ignorance surrounding those demands. Correlatively, were Martha to sit down in front of the television rather than help to clear the table, she would be more blameworthy than John because of her knowledge and awareness of those demands: she does not have the relevant ignorance available to appeal to as an excuse.
(In this post, I focus on sexism and the ways in which society’s expectations and demands of attention and knowledge are different for men and women. This is not the only way in which the epistemic condition on moral responsibility is unfair. We also demand a certain kind of knowledge from Black folks, disabled folks, Black women, and folks of many other marginalized groups. If I am right about these differential demands of attention and knowledge, the condition will also be problematic for these reasons.)
Of course, almost no theorists think all ignorance excuses. But many think that at least some non-culpable, non-moral ignorance excuses. Generally, agents may be responsible for some of their ignorance (which is often called “culpable ignorance”): this ignorance is generally agreed not to excuse. But agents can also be innocently mistaken about some things, and this ignorance is generally agreed to excuse. For example, Elizabeth Harman argues for the very strong conclusion that all moral ignorance is culpable and so no moral ignorance excuses. But even she thinks that non-moral ignorance can sometimes excuse:
It is clear that ignorance is sometimes exculpatory. In particular, nonmoral ignorance can be exculpatory. Consider Anne, whose husband Bert is ill. She gives Bert what she has every reason to believe is the cure to his illness; in fact it is poison. Anne does something morally wrong: she poisons her husband. Is she blameworthy? It seems not. At least she is not blameworthy if she was responsible in managing her beliefs. The following seems true: Anne is blameworthy for poisoning Bert only if she has violated a procedural moral obligation regarding the management of her beliefs (only if she has failed to adequately investigate or to take the evidence seriously (328).
Though other moral responsibility theorists disagree with Harman that moral ignorance never excuses, most generally agree with her that non-culpable, non-moral ignorance does excuse. Zoë Johnson King points out that “everyone agrees that mistakes of the [non-moral] variety sometimes at least partially excuse” (719). Holly Smith claims that “[i]gnorance of the nature of one’s act is the preeminent example of an excuse that forestalls blame” (543). Daniel J. Miller claims even more broadly that a number of prominent moral theorists accept the “Blameless Ignorance Principle (BIP): If an agent is blameless for their ignorance then they are blameless for acting wrongly from that ignorance” (275).
Defenders of BIP need not agree with me that John poses a problem for their view. They can respond to John’s case by arguing that John’s ignorance is not blameless. That is, they can try to explain why John is blameworthy for wrongfully failing to help with the demands of the household despite his ignorance of those demands by arguing that John should know about those demands. He is blameworthy concerning his ignorance of the household demands in the first place. And since he is blameworthy for his ignorance, he is also blameworthy for his wrongful conduct that arises from that ignorance. It looks like the John case is not a problem for BIP. In fact, it seems like it might be evidence for BIP since it seems to be a clear case of someone who is culpable for their ignorance and is therefore not excused.
This seems to capture John as blameworthy despite his ignorance. “Good!,” you might think, “I wanted to blame John.” Unfortunately, due to gendered asymmetry with respect to demands of attention, I am skeptical that a solution like this has any chance as a universal reply to cases like John’s. Suppose we grant that John is culpable for his ignorance. In virtue of what earlier mistake is his ignorance culpable? Perhaps John’s ignorance is an example of so-called “weaponized incompetence”, whereby men don’t learn household work or complain that they are worse at it than women so that they can avoid contributing to the household. If so, John’s purposefully failing to learn caregiving work could ground his culpability for his ignorance and, thus, for his wrongful failure to help.
I certainly think cases like this are possible: I don’t at all mean to deny that some men act this way. But I’m skeptical that men’s purposeful strategic ignorance can explain all of the cases where women seem to notice and attend to housework and childcare while the men around them do not. That’s just not the way structural injustice works. It doesn’t seem like it’s an accident that Martha is the one who happens to know and notice that dishes need to be cleared while John does not: the knowledge gap between them seems better explained by patterned systems of gender injustice than by happenstance. I don’t think it’s plausible that men are individually blameworthy for their ignorance in all cases where women notice and attend to the needs of those around them while men do not. How did it come to be that they fail to notice? Were they ever taught to pay attention in the first place? Isn’t ignorance that is fully explained by structural injustice sometimes blameless?
If their ignorance is blameless, as it seems to me it must be in at least some cases, then they will be excused from failing to help. And this looks like it will amplify gendered structural injustice. Not only will women be enculturated to notice and pay attention to the needs of those around them, but they will also be blameworthy for failing to respond to those needs once they have noticed them since they will not be ignorant. This is true even if their ignorance about others’ needs would have been blameless had they been ignorant. Now that they know about those needs, they are not excused on the basis of ignorance since they are not ignorant. Men, on the other hand, will be enculturated not to worry so much about the needs of those around them. But because this ignorance (at least sometimes) is excused, they are not blameworthy for failing to respond to those needs.
Another way of putting this idea is to notice that a commitment to BIP allows for a kind of “spoiling” when it comes to agents’ moral goodness. If agents’ nonmoral ignorance is nonculpable, then they are excused from the actions that arise out of that ignorance. If their nonmoral ignorance is culpable, then they are not excused. But this means that you can remove excuses from agents by informing them about nonmoral facts that are relevant to their obligations. They won’t be excused by an appeal to nonmoral nonculpable ignorance anymore, not because their ignorance is culpable (like John’s), but rather because they are no longer ignorant. And this is just in the individual case. We might think it is unproblematic if certain folks lose access to excuses by gaining information. But we should be worried, I think, about potential questions of justice that arise when facts about the unjust social world ground a vast discrepancy in excuses from moral responsibility across social groups.
To see what I mean, it will be helpful to have more examples in mind. None are, of course, individually convincing. But considering a few examples helps to illuminate the phenomenon in question. I think that the clearest cases are ones in which the informed agent—the agent who is not ignorant—has knowledge that it would not have been reasonable to demand of them that they have. Call this knowledge “supererogatory knowledge.” Whereas a supererogatory agent performs a good action that she is not required to perform (that it would not be reasonable to demand that she perform), an agent who has “supererogatory knowledge” knows about, through cultivated attention, nonmoral facts about the world that it would not be reasonable to demand she know. Some examples might include:
(1) The graduate students in Julia’s department share their difficulties with Julia because they feel comfortable doing so. So Julia knows about the difficulties the graduate students face. Robert is much less often approached, but not due to any fault on his part: he is welcoming and regularly in his office and available. But since he is unaware of the difficulties his graduate students face, he does not take steps to address them.
(2) Bradley and Jayla’s child James suffers from generalized anxiety and needs to be connected with pediatric mental health services. It is wrong for James not to receive this care. Jayla notices that James needs this care and works to provide it for him. Bradley does not help because he does not notice that James exhibits signs of anxiety: he is unfamiliar with what it looks like when a child needs mental health services, not because he is willfully skeptical of the importance of mental health more generally but because he is innocently unaware.
Due to unjust gender asymmetries when it comes to demands on time and attention, the women in the scenarios notice and attend to others’ needs while the men remain unaware of them, excused from their wrongdoing by their innocent ignorance.
How might we proceed? One possibility is to try to argue that I am wrong: Robert and Bradley are not innocently ignorant. Their ignorance is culpable: one ought to pay attention to the signs and symptoms of anxiety in one’s children, and one should do a better job of paying attention to the needs and difficulties of one’s graduate students. However, I think we should resist the temptation to think of all such ignorance as culpable. There is just a vast amount of information in the world that we have to navigate, and it is very difficult to do so effectively as an individual.
Another possibility some find attractive is for women who notice others’ needs to call on men to help meet them. I’m not opposed to women asking for help from their caregiving partners and colleagues, but I think a proposal like this fails to take the nature of the problem seriously on its own terms. Women should not have to be the needs-noticers, sorting out what needs to be done and delegating it to the men in their lives. (A relatively famous internet comic, “You should’ve asked,” comes to mind.) Rather, men need to cultivate attention to notice problems, too, and we need to change the structure of the world so that it is less unjust regarding gender norms and expectations. Everyone needs to see noticing the needs of those around them as part of their responsibility. I think, in the end, we have to recognize that features of our moral practices like BIP edify structural injustice along gender lines (and likely along others as well). We might even notice that, in some sense, it is “reasonable to demand” that women know more about caregiving and housework because they are so often exposed to and educated about these things while men are not. So, the problem doesn’t arise only in the supererogatory knowledge cases. Rather, we need to work to eliminate unjust and asymmetrical societal expectations about demands of attention. Don’t just make the boys do laundry. Make them change diapers, too. And perhaps even demand that they notice when the diapers are stinky in the first place.
I have argued that any epistemic condition on moral responsibility, even a very weak condition that only excuses in cases of nonculpable nonmoral ignorance, reifies gendered structural injustice due to gendered asymmetry in the demands of attention. It doesn’t seem to me that we can eliminate the epistemic condition on moral responsibility entirely: sometimes genuine ignorance does seem to excuse. But we need to work to eliminate the gendered asymmetry in the demands of attention. In some ways, this is unsurprising: many of us already knew that. But I think what’s surprising, at least to me, is that our very moral responsibility practices are part of the problem: allowing ignorance to excuse once again lets the privileged off the hook, not just because they don’t have to change but because they aren’t even blameworthy for not changing.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
J. L. A. Donahue
J. L. A. Donohue is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include moral, social, and political philosophy, especially moral complicity and interpersonal deliberative obligations. She is also interested in ethics and technology, medical ethics, feminist epistemology, and issues of justice wherever they arise. When she is not doing philosophy, she likes to play ultimate frisbee, stand up paddle board, and play board games.
