Does culpable ignorance excuse?

It is widely held that if you do wrong in culpable ignorance (ignorance that you are blameworthy for), you are culpable for the wrong you do. I have long though think this is mistaken—instead we should frontload the guilt onto the acts and omissions that made one culpable for the ignorance.

I will argue for a claim in the vicinity by starting with some cases that are not cases of ignorance.

1. One is no less guilty if one tries to shoot someone and misses than if one hits them.

2. If one drinks and drives and is lucky enough to hit no one, one is no less guilty than if one does hit someone, as long as the degree of freedom and knowledge in the drinking and driving is the same.

3. If one freely takes a drug one knows to remove free will and produce violent behavior in 25% of cases, one is no less guilty if involuntary violence does not ensue than if involuntary violence does ensue.

Now, let’s consider this case of culpable ignorance:

4. Mad scientist Alice offers Bob a million dollars to undergo a neural treatment that over the next 48 hours will make Bob think that Elbonians—a small ethnic group—are disease-bearing mosquitoes. Bob always kills organisms that he thinks are disease-bearing mosquitoes on sight. Bob correctly estimates that there is a 25% chance that he will meet an Elbonian over the next 48 hours. If Bob accepts the deal, he is no less guilty if he is lucky enough to meet no Elbonians than if he does meet and kill one.

This is as clear a case of culpable ignorance as can be: in accepting the deal, Bob knows he will become ignorant of the human nature of Elbonians, and he knows there is a 25% chance this will result in his killing an Elbonian. I think that just as in cases (1)–(3), one is no less guilty if the bad consequences for others don’t result, so too in case (4), Bob is no less guilty if he never meets an Elbonian.

For a final case, consider:

5. Just like (4), except that instead of coming to think Elbonians are (disease-bearing) mosquitoes, Bob will come to believe that unlike all other innocent human persons whom it is impermissible to kill, it is obligatory to kill Elbonians, and Bob’s estimate that this belief will result in his killing an Elbonian is 25%.

Again, Bob is no less guilty for taking the money and getting the treatment if he does not run into any Elbonians than if he does run into and kill an Elbonian.

Therefore, one is no less guilty for one’s culpable ignorance if wicked action does not result. Or, equivalently:

6. One is no more guilty if wicked action does result from culpable ignorance than if it does not.

But (6) is not quite the claim I started with. I started claiming one is not guilty for the wicked action in cases of culpable ignorance. The claim I argued for is that one is no guiltier for the wicked action than if there is no wicked action resulting from the ignorance. But now if one was guilty for the wicked action, it seems one would be guiltier, since one would have both the guilt for the ignorance and for the wicked action.

However, I am now not so sure. The argument in the previous paragraph depended on something like this principle:

7. Being guilty of both action A and action B is guiltier than just being guilty of action A, all other things being equal. (Ditto for omissions, but I want to be briefer.)

Thus being guilty of acquiring ignorance and acting wickedly on the ignorance would be guiltier than just of acquiring ignorance, and hence by (6) the wicked action does not have guilt. But now that I have got to this point in the argument, I am not so sure of (7).

There may be counterexamples to (7). First, a politician’s lying to the people an hour after a deadly natural disaster is not less guilty than lying in the same way to the people an hour before the natural disaster. But in lying to the people after the disaster one lies to fewer people—since some people died in the disaster!—and hence there are fewer actions of lying (instead of lying to Alice, and lying to Bob, and lying to Carl, one “only” lies to Alice and one lies to Bob). But I am not sure that this is right—maybe there is just one action of lying lying to the people rather than a separate one for each audience member.

Second, suppose Bob strives to insult Alice in person, and consider two cases. In one case, when he has decided to insult Alice, he gets into his car, drives to see Alice, and insults her. In the other case, when he gets into the car he realizes he doesn’t have enough gas to reach Alice, and so he buys gas, then drives to see Alice, and then insults her. In the second case, Bob performed an action he didn’t perform in the first case: buy gas in order to insult Alice. But it doesn’t seem that Bob is guiltier in the second case, even though he did perform one more guilty action. I am also not sure about this case. Here I am actually inclined to think that Bob is more guilty, for two reasons. First, he was willing to undertake a greater burden in order to insult Alice—and that increases guilt. Second, he had an extra chance to repent—each time one acquiesces in a means, that’s a chance to just say no to the whole action sequence. And yet he refused this chance. (It seems to me that Bob is guiltier in the second case, just as the assassin possessing two bullets and shooting the second after missing with the first—regardless of whether the second shot hits—is guiltier than the assassin who after shooting and missing once stops.)

While I am not convinced of the cases, they point to the idea that in the context of (7), the guilt of action A might “stretch” to making B guilty without increasing the total amount of guilt. If that makes sense, then that might actually be the right way of account of accounting for actions done in culpable ignorance. If Bob kills an Elbonian, he is guilty. That is not an additional item of guilt, but rather the guilt of the actions and omissions that caused the guilt stretches over and covers the killing. This seems to me to mesh better with ordinary ways of talking—we don’t want to say that Bob’s killing of the Elbonian in either case (4) or (5) is innocent. And saying that there is no additional guilt may be a way of assuaging the intuition I have had over the years when I thought that culpable ignorance excuses.

Maybe.

A final obvious question is about punishment. We do punish differentially for attempted and completed murder, and for drunk driving that does not result in death and drink driving that does. I think there pragmatic reasons for this. If attempted and completed murder were equally punished, there would be an incentive to “finish the job” upon initial failure. And having a lesser penalty for non-lethal drunk driving creates an incentive for the drunk driver to be more careful driving—how much that avails depends on how drunk the driver is, but it might make some difference.