This testimony is from a family member of a maintenance engineer, Kevin Holding, killed in an accident at work, crushed by machinery that he was working on. His family do not know the cause of the accident, nor do they know why it took a long time for rescue equipment to arrive to try, unsuccessfully, to save him.
The situation faced by Holding’s family members is obviously extremely painful. They desperately want to know what happened to their loved one. And it is striking that as individuals and as societies we expend enormous amounts of effort to find out the truth. These kinds of cases point to a plausible candidate for a basic prudential bad or detractor from well-being.
What would it be for something to be a basic prudential bad or detractor from well-being? The kind of value I have in mind here is that which is relevant when we talk about something being good or bad for someone. Among the things that are good or bad for someone, there is an important distinction between those things that are good or bad for them only by leading to other good or bad things and those that are, themselves, good or bad for the person. Money is good for someone but only in virtue of what else it can produce. By contrast, pain is bad for people, independently of its further effects.
With these distinctions in place, here is the view I want to persuade you of: that a kind of ignorance—failing to understand a significantly bad event in your life or that of a loved one—is a basic prudential bad. The fact that this is a basic prudential bad explains and rationalizes the fact that we pity people who are in this situation and why we expend enormous effort to remove such ignorance.
Now, one kind of skeptic might contend that, actually, the reasons that we have for removing ignorance in these cases don’t stem from its being a basic bad. Rather, they might contend, we want justice for victims, or to bring offenders to justice, or to learn lessons that we can apply in future. I do not deny that these reasons are also present. It is clearly important to know if someone was culpable for Holding’s death and have them face the consequences if so. And if there are lessons to be learned about the design of such equipment that could prevent future accidents, that is obviously very important, too. What I would deny, though, is that these are the only kinds of reasons to establish the facts in situations like these.
One way to see that is to imagine a different kind of case where the possibilities just don’t generate these kinds of reasons. Suppose your loved one goes missing in a national park and their body is found some time later. They might have taken their own life, or they might have misread their map and died from a medical episode. They might have been killed by a wild animal. To not know the circumstances of their death would be bad for you, I wager, and so we have reasons to try and find out, even if we can rule out any involvement by another agent and any kinds of future-oriented reasons.
I am going to assume henceforth that situations like the one we started with are bad for the people within them (and that this explains some but not all of the reasons we have in such cases). There is something bad there. The interesting question is what that bad thing is. The view that such ignorance is a basic bad will be resisted in at least two ways.
Pain and Anguish
First, you might think that what is bad for people in these situations is the pain and anguish that they experience in virtue of not knowing. The Holding family are clearly in great pain caused by not knowing what happened to their loved one. Given that pain is very plausibly a basic bad and obviously present here why assume that another basic bad of ignorance is present, too?
It is undeniable that the pain and anguish that these family members feel is bad for them. So, my view is not that ignorance is the only harm here. Rather, I think that the pain is bad and that the ignorance is, too. But how then to adjudicate between these two possibilities: that it is just the pain or that it is the pain and the ignorance? Here I think that two considerations favor the latter, pluralist, view.
First, to think that the pain is the only thing that is bad for them is to think that their ignorance is neutral in its own right. But our experience in these cases is not merely that we just happen to be pained when actually such things are neutral. The experience of such cases is that this ignorance merits pain, anguish, and pity.
To see the difference, imagine that you have a friend who experiences (genuine) pain whenever they hear the sound of a dog barking (not on account of some prior bad experience or association, it is just a strange feature of their psychology). In this situation you would think that the friend’s pain is bad for them, but it wouldn’t seem to be merited by its object. (Indeed, one aspect of the situation that seems pitiable is that something so thoroughly banal causes them pain.)
A second reason to think that pain cannot be the only bad in these situations is that, of course, it cannot cover situations where someone isn’t anguished but where ignorance still seems bad for them. For example, take someone who accepts a radically mistaken view of what happened to themselves or their loved one in some significantly bad event. Here they do not take themselves to be ignorant and so cannot be anguished by their ignorance. But such ignorance still seems bad for them.
Imagine that your loved one has a failed kidney transplant. They believe that the procedure failed because of the background rate of failure, but you discover that the surgeon was intoxicated on the day. In this case their ignorance seems pitiable. You would have reasons to tell them. (Note that this remains true even if those reasons could be outweighed, if finding out would be so detrimental to them). But, of course, this cannot be explained by the badness of their anguish at not knowing; they think they know.
Wanting to Know the Truth
A different explanation, which also rivals my own, is that what is bad for people like the Holding family is that they want to know the truth, and their desire is frustrated. One appealing feature of this explanation is that it can find something that is bad for people in the situation where they do not know that they are ignorant (such as the kidney transplant relative case just considered). Even if you do not know that your desire to know the truth has been thwarted, it can still be true that it has.
So, can we explain all of the badness in these situations in terms of the thwarting of our desire to know the truth? I think not, for the following reasons.
If my desire to know the truth about what happened to me or a loved one is thwarted, then either of two things would improve the situation: My desire might be fulfilled (I come to know) or I might desire to be ignorant (matching my desire to my state of ignorance). Thus, on this proposal, we should be indifferent between someone finding out the truth and their forming a desire to be ignorant. But this seems hard to accept.
A deeper worry is that this view seems unable to capture the importance of ignorance about one’s own life and that of loved ones. To see this, imagine you have a relative who is desperate to know what happened to Amelia Earhart or Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 or some other such case. It does not seem plausible that the thwarting of this desire, no matter how strongly held, is positively bad for them. Maybe it would be good for them if they were to find out, but they do not seem an object of pity at all simply in virtue of not having this desire fulfilled. (Note that if you’re supposing that they are anguished by their unfulfilled desire, then this is to slide back into the previous view. To keep them distinct we must imagine that they strongly want to know but do not feel anguish in not knowing).
I’ve have tried to motivate a candidate for a basic prudential bad: ignorance of what happened to yourself or a loved one in a significantly bad event. To put the view in a pithy slogan, some of what you don’t know hurts you.
