Difficulty & quality of will

Implications for moral ignorance

Bibliographic Data

ID21702802
AuthorsAnna Hartford (0000-0001-6993-3800, Brain-Behaviour Unit, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume25
Issue2
Pages141-158
Publication date2022-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophical Explorations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1386-9795 • E-ISSN: 1741-5918
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13869795.2022.2042585
OpenAlexW4221111120
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited18

Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – and set out to demonstrate that these factors are only blame-mitigating where, and to the extent that, they complicate ascriptions of insufficient concern. Matters become more complex, however, when we turn to difficult circumstances that seem to generate such objectionable attitudes. This is arguably the case with epistemic difficulty and certain instances of moral ignorance. Here I argue that certain difficult circumstances diminish the sense in which false moral beliefs are genuinely revelatory of the agents who hold them. In particular, I draw on the distinction between difficulty that generates objectionable attitudes, and objectionable attitudes that generate difficulty. I argue that the former, but not the latter, can plausibly be viewed as blame mitigating, and that this would apply to (limited) cases of moral ignorance

Blame · Epistemology · Ignorance · Moral disengagement · Moral responsibility · Political science · Computer Science · Free Will and Agency · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

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