Responsibility for strategic ignorance

Jan W. Wieland

pp. 4477-4497

in: Cameron Buckner, Ellen Fridland (eds), Cognition, Synthese 194 (11), 2017.

Abstract

Strategic ignorance is a widespread phenomenon. In a laboratory setting, many participants avoid learning information about the consequences of their behaviour in order to act egoistically. In real life, many consumers avoid information about their purchases or the working conditions in which they were produced in order to retain their lifestyle. The question is whether agents are blameworthy for such strategically ignorant behaviour. In this paper, I explore quality of will resources, according to which agents are blameworthy, roughly, depending on their moral concern. The account I will propose—the Maximal Account—has three innovative features: (1) it utilizes a suitable concept of maximal moral concern, (2) it offers an accountability version of the account which significantly differs from the more familiar attributability variant, and (3) it maintains that agents without maximal concern are blameworthy (in some sense, to some degree).