## 1. The Epistemic Condition


### 1.1 Contents of Awareness



We can start with this intuitive thought: for an agent to be
praise-/blameworthy for an action, she must be aware of certain
things. Thus, what the EC seems to require, at least initially, is
awareness. As we will see, the debate revolves around three main
issues. First, what the *content* of the requisite awareness
is, i.e., of which things an agent needs to be aware of. Second, what
*kind* of awareness is required, i.e., which mental states are
involved and in what way these mental states must be entertained.
Third, whether awareness is actually required at all or whether there
can be, in Sher's (2009) phrase, "responsibility without
awareness". For the moment we can bracket the third question and
pursue the intuitive thought that responsibility does require
awareness. In this subsection we focus on the question about the
content of awareness and in the next one on the question about the
kind of awareness relevant for moral responsibility.



Imagine that John presses a wall button that activates a treadmill in
which Mary is standing still, causing her to fall to the ground and
break an arm. Let's assume that the action is objectively wrong,
since it harmed Mary for no good reason, e.g., to save her from an
incoming bullet. Now let's try to determine what it would take
for John to be blameworthy for it. Assume first that John satisfies
all non-epistemic conditions on moral responsibility, like possessing
whatever kind of freedom/control is required for blameworthiness. Now
ask: of which things must John be aware at the time of action in order
to be blameworthy for it and for the ensuing consequences? There are
four plausible epistemic requirements involved: awareness of action,
of moral significance, of consequences, and of alternatives.
We'll take them in turn.



First, the requirement of *awareness of action* (Mele 2010;
Sliwa 2017). To be responsible for his action, John must be aware of
what he is doing. If John falsely believes that the button is a light
switch, then he isn't aware that by pressing it he will start
the treadmill and so it seems that he can't be blamed for
Mary's fall and for her injuries. Similarly, if John correctly
believes that pressing the button will start the treadmill but
isn't aware that Mary is standing on it, it seems that he
isn't blameworthy either. These seemings have to be refined, of
course, since John's ignorance of the button's function or
of Mary's location can itself be blameworthy, in which case
(most think) it fails to exculpate (Ginet 2000: 271). (For the classic
discussion of what it takes for ignorance to be culpable see Holly
Smith 1983 and
 sect. 2
 below. For discussions of whether culpable ignorance excuses, see
Holly Smith 1983 and 2017; Montmarquet 1995.) The lesson, then, is
that for an agent to be *directly* blameworthy for an
action--that is, blameworthy in a way that doesn't derive
from previous instances of blameworthiness, such as culpability for
the ignorance from which she acts--she must be aware that she is
performing the action in question, and be aware of it under an
appropriate description (Anscombe 1963; Levy 2014: 37). In this case,
John must be aware that by pressing the button he is activating the
treadmill with Mary on it or, alternatively, that by pressing the
button and activating the treadmill he is causing Mary to fall to the
ground. (Recall that this is just a first pass on the epistemic
requirements on responsibility. We'll see later on
 (sect. 3.4)
 that many philosophers deny that one must be aware of what one is
doing in order to be directly responsible for it.)



Second, the requirement of *awareness of moral significance*.
For John to be blameworthy, he has to be aware of the action's
moral significance or moral valence. In other words, he must have a
belief about the action's being wrong or, alternatively, a
belief about the presence of whatever features make the action wrong
(its wrong-making features). The first kind of belief amounts to
*de dicto* awareness of moral significance, because it involves
awareness of the action's wrongness *so conceived* (Haji
1997: 543; Zimmerman 2002a; 2008: 191-2; 2017: 85; Rosen 2004:
307; Levy 2011: 141; Sliwa 2017: 131-2). The second kind of
belief amounts to *de re* awareness of moral significance,
because it involves awareness of those features of the action that are
*in fact* morally significant, regardless of whether the agent
is *also* aware of the moral significance they actually have
(Harman 2011: 465; 2015: 59-60, 67; Talbert 2013: 242;
Littlejohn 2014: 144; Levy 2014: 37). If when John presses the button
he entertains the belief that what he is doing is overall morally
wrong, he has *de dicto* awareness of the action's moral
significance. (If, alternatively, he believes that his action is
merely *pro tanto* morally wrong but not wrong
all-things-considered, he lacks that awareness.) If, on the other
hand, John lacks the belief about overall wrongness but has other
beliefs about the action's wrong-making features, e.g., that it
will harm Mary, he has *de re* awareness of the action's
moral significance. The position according to which the relevant
awareness is *de dicto* awareness entails that moral knowledge
(or at least moral beliefs) is necessary for responsibility (Sliwa
2017), whereas the position according to which the relevant awareness
is *de re* awareness denies the necessity of moral knowledge
(Harman 2011 & 2015; Talbert 2013; Weatherson 2019: ch. 5).
We'll see below
 (sect. 3.3)
 that this is a key dispute concerning the epistemic requirements on
praise-/blameworthiness.



Third, the requirement of *awareness of consequences*. In a
natural description of the case, we would say that John is responsible
for Mary's breaking an arm, that is, that he's blameworthy
for the latter
 event.[2]
 Call this the consequence of John's action. What kind of
awareness is required for John to be blameworthy for it? The
straightforward response is that he must have a belief about the event
occurring as a result of his action (Zimmerman 1997: 420). However,
there is disagreement about what the content of this belief must be.
Some philosophers (Zimmerman 1986; Vargas 2005) think that it must be
very specific, in the sense that the agent has to believe that an
event of *exactly* the kind that occurred could result from her
action, whereas others (Fischer & Tognazzini 2009; King 2017: 272;
Nelkin & Rickless 2017a: 126) think that a belief with a more
general content suffices. According to the former position, for John
to be blameworthy for the consequence of his action he must have
entertained the belief that Mary would (or might) break her arm as a
result of her fall, whereas according to the latter position a belief
that someone would (or might) be harmed is enough. It's worth
noting that the requirement of awareness of consequences is usually
stated in terms of "reasonable foreseeability" rather than
actual foresight (Vargas 2005; Fischer & Tognazzini 2009; Sartorio
2017; cf. Zimmerman 1986; Nelkin & Rickless 2017a). As will become
patent later on, the dispute about how to understand this requirement
is part and parcel of the broader dispute about whether the EC
requires occurrent awareness
 (sect. 2)
 or, rather, the capacity to gain the requisite awareness (sects.
 3.2,
 3.4).



Fourth and finally, the requirement of *awareness of
alternatives*. Some philosophers argue that an agent can't
be blameworthy for a wrong action unless she believes that there is at
least one alternative (and permissible) course of action open to her.
For instance, Levy writes (see also Wieland 2017a: 2; Guerrero 2007:
89):



> 
> 
> Perhaps it need not be the case ... that agents need genuine
> access to alternative possibilities when they choose and act, but they
> do need *epistemic* access to a range of alternatives: they can
> only appropriately be blamed for performing an action if they believed
> that alternatives were available to them, and understood the
> significance of these alternatives. (Levy 2011: 111)
> 
> 
> 



Applying this idea to our example, John would be blameworthy only if
he believed that he could have pursued an alternative and permissible
course of action, such as refraining from pressing the button.
However, not everyone agrees that this is a genuine epistemic
requirement on responsibility. For instance, Sartorio (2017)
argues--on the basis of a variation on the classic Frankfurt
cases (Frankfurt 1969)--that an agent can be blameworthy even if
she believes, or even *knows*, that she couldn't have
done otherwise, as long as this belief doesn't interfere with
her own deliberation about whether to perform the wrong action.



In sum, there are four different things awareness of which seems (at
least initially) relevant for responsibility: awareness of one's
action under an appropriate description, of its moral significance, of
its potential consequences, and of alternatives to it. Next
we'll consider different positions about what mental states
amount to the requisite awareness.


### 1.2 Kinds of Awareness



In the previous section we identified several plausible epistemic
requirements on moral responsibility. They constitute the
*content* of the awareness that, at least initially, seems to
be demanded by the EC. Now we'll focus on the *kind* of
awareness that is in question. We'll pursue two questions.
First, *what* mental states must the agent entertain in order
to possess the relevant awareness? Second, *how* must the
mental states in question be entertained (occurrently,
dispositionally, etc.)?



Let's begin with the first question. It was pointed out at the
outset that one of the alternative labels for the EC is
'knowledge condition' and this may naturally suggest that
awareness in this context is nothing but knowledge. Returning to the
example, this would mean that John satisfies the EC just in case he
*knew* what he was doing and *knew* about its moral
significance, its potential consequences, etc. However, many
philosophers have argued that knowledge proper isn't required
for blameworthiness (Rosen 2008: 596; Haji 2008: 90; Peels 2014:
493-4; Baron 2017: 58-9). To see why, consider this case
presented by Rosen:



> 
> 
> Dorfman poisons Mrs. Dorfman by putting what he takes to be arsenic in
> her tea. The stuff is indeed arsenic and Mrs. Dorfman dies as planned.
> But Dorfman does not *know* that the stuff is arsenic (or that
> his act subjects his victim to an unjustifiable risk of death)
> because: The chemist who sold Dorfman the arsenic is a famous liar
> ... [G]iven the chemist's well-known track record of
> selling sugar as arsenic to would-be poisoners, Dorfman had no
> business believing him. Dorfman's pertinent beliefs are true,
> but they do not amount to knowledge because they are based on
> insufficient evidence. (Rosen 2008: 596)
> 
> 
> 



The key point is that Dorfman's lack of knowledge about the
wrong-making features of his action is irrelevant for assessing his
blameworthiness, for he is as blameworthy as he would be had he knew
that the stuff was indeed arsenic. Therefore, whatever mental state
Dorfman was in at the time of carrying out his plan, it must suffice
for satisfying the EC. It's natural to think that the relevant
mental state is simply true belief (Peels 2014: 493). Dorfman truly
believed that he was pouring arsenic into her wife's tea and
that by doing so she would die, and this seems enough for him to be
blameworthy (assuming he also satisfied other non-epistemic conditions
on responsibility). Some philosophers think that mere true belief
isn't enough, though, and claim that what is needed for
satisfying the EC is *reasonable* or *justified* belief
instead (Timpe 2011: 18; Ginet 2000: 270). This would entail that
Dorfman satisfies the EC only if it was reasonable for him to believe,
or if he was justified in believing, that what the chemist handed over
to him was indeed arsenic and thus that he would poison his wife by
pouring the substance in her tea (perhaps it was reasonable and
justified if Dorfman had never heard about the chemist's
reputation as a liar).



However, still other philosophers think that not only the belief in
question needn't be reasonable, but that it needn't even
be *true* (Zimmerman 2008: 198; Haji 1997: 526; Levy 2014: 36).
On this view,



> 
> 
> blameworthiness is affiliated not with the objective wrongness of an
> action but with whether a person takes herself to be doing wrong in
> performing an action. (Haji 1997: 526)
> 
> 
> 



This entails that an agent can be blameworthy for performing a morally
neutral, or even a morally right action (Zimmerman 2008: 201),
provided that she acts on the belief that her action is wrong (see the
case of Huckleberry Finn in
 sect. 3.3
 below). In defense of this position, it has been argued that there is
a particular kind of culpability that one incurs when one knowingly
defies what one takes to be the requirements of morality (Levy 2011:
142; Zimmerman 2017: 91), regardless of whether one gets them
right.



Assuming that awareness involves some or another type of belief,
let's turn now to the second question broached above, namely
*how* these beliefs must be entertained for the person to
possess the relevant awareness. The main dispute here is between those
philosophers who think that the pertinent beliefs must be
*occurrently* entertained (Zimmerman 1997: 421-2; 2017:
79; Ginet 2000: 270; Rosen 2004: 309; Levy 2011: 141) and those who
think that it's enough if these beliefs are
*dispositionally* entertained (Haji 1997: 531; Peels 2011: 580;
Timpe 2011: 18; Levy 2013: 167; 2014:
 34).[3]
 According to the 'occurrentist' camp, an agent satisfies
the EC only if, at the time of action, she consciously believes that
her action is right/wrong and consciously contemplates some of its
possible consequences (Zimmerman 1997: 421). Otherwise, and for the
purposes of attributions of responsibility, she is ignorant of
relevant considerations and so, in principle (recall the possibility
of culpable ignorance), she has an excuse for her wrongdoing
(Zimmerman 2017: 79; see
 sect. 3.1
 below for an argument in favor of this position). As we'll see
below
 (sect. 2),
 the occurrentist interpretation of the EC plays a central role in a
revisionist argument against commonsense attributions of
responsibility.



By contrast, the 'dispositionalist' camp argues that the
occurrentist interpretation of the EC is too strict and would let too
many intuitively blameworthy wrongdoers off the hook. For one, if one
forgets a relevant piece of information and as a consequence does
something wrong--if, say, one forgets about the dietary
restrictions of the infant one is babysitting and then feeds her food
to which she is allergic--one seems to be, absent excusing
conditions, blameworthy (Peels 2011: 580; see also Husak 2011).
Crucially, however, lack of occurrent belief concerning the relevant
information doesn't seem to be one of those excusing conditions
(Amaya & Doris 2015: 267). Also, if the occurrentist position were
right, one could shield oneself from blame simply by avoid thinking
about the moral status of one's action, and that's
implausible (Guerrero 2007: 74; Timpe 2011: 23; Robichaud 2014: 150;
Levy 2014: 31). These considerations lead to the position that tacit,
dormant, dispositional, or unconscious beliefs can, at least in many
cases, amount to the kind of awareness that is required for moral
responsibility (see
 sect. 3.1
 below for more arguments in favor of this position).


## 2. The Epistemic Condition and Revisionism



So far we have pursued the intuitive idea that responsibility requires
awareness and reviewed several positions concerning the content and
kind of awareness that is in question. We'll now see that this
intuitive idea, coupled with a particular interpretation of the
content and kind of the requisite awareness, leads to a regress that
threatens to undermine attributions of responsibility quite generally.
The following argument is originally due to Zimmerman (1997), who
offered slight variations in his 2008 and 2017. Rosen (2004) and Levy
(2011: ch. 5) have also advanced versions of it, as well as Ginet
(2000), although the latter fails to note its revisionist
implications. We'll call the proponents of this argument
'volitionists', and the position they espouse concerning
the EC 'revisionism'. The volitionists' argument
sparked a big debate in which the three central questions concerning
the EC mentioned at the outset--about the content, kind, and
necessity of awareness--have been thoroughly explored. This
section presents a reconstruction of the regress argument and the next
one presents the main responses to it.



To appreciate how the regress is generated, consider the variation of
our initial example in which John falsely believes that the wall
button is a light switch. Since John isn't aware that by
pressing the button he is activating the treadmill, he fails to
satisfy the requirement of awareness of action under an appropriate
description and, *a fortiori*, he also fails to satisfy the
requirements concerning awareness of moral significance and of
consequences. Therefore, since John is unaware that pressing the
button is wrong (or, alternatively, unaware of the action's
wrong-making features) and is also unaware of the potential
consequences of doing so, we may think that, at least in principle, he
is blameworthy neither for his action nor for Mary's injuries.
John's unawareness or, as it's often put, John's
*ignorance* would play the role of an *excuse* for his
wrongdoing, where an excuse is a consideration that blocks the
attribution of blame to an agent who has performed a wrong action
(Austin 1957 [1962]; Kelly 2012; Franklin 2013. For detailed
discussions of the ignorance excuse see Rosen 2008; Peels 2014; Baron
2017). As it was noted above, however, John's ignorance can
itself be blameworthy or culpable, and it's
widely--although not universally (cf. Holly Smith 2017; Ross
1939: 163-4)--accepted that culpable ignorance fails to
exculpate (at least completely). Thus, it if turns out that John is
culpable for his ignorance of the button's true function, he
might well be blameworthy for unwittingly activating the treadmill and
for unwittingly causing Mary's injuries. Notice that if this
were the case, John's blameworthiness for his unwitting action
and its consequences would be *derivative* (or
*indirect*) rather than *original* (or *direct*):
it would derive from a prior instance of blameworthiness, namely his
blameworthiness for his ignorant state (Zimmerman 1997: 414-5;
Rosen 2004: 300). (See King 2017 for criticism of the idea that
blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing must be explained in terms of
the original/derivative distinction, and see Wieland and Robichaud
2017 for a thorough discussion of different ways of cashing out the
idea that there is a "transfer" of blame in these
cases.)



So now the crucial question becomes: What would it take for John to be
blameworthy for his ignorance? John's ignorance of the fact that
his action is wrong is rooted in his mistaken belief that the button
is a light switch, so it seems that if he is blameworthy for his
ignorance it must be because he is blameworthy for having this belief
or for lacking the correct belief about the button's
 function.[4]
 So what would it take for John to be blameworthy for having certain
beliefs or lacking others? In answering this question volitionists
appeal to the thesis of doxastic involuntarism, according to which we
lack direct control over our beliefs, that is, we can't decide
at will what to believe (Williams 1973; Alston 1988; Zimmerman 2002a;
Rosen 2004: 302; Levy 2007; 2011: 128-31). So if John is
blameworthy for having or lacking certain beliefs, this must be
because there was *something* John did such that: i) he had
direct control over it; ii) it caused him to have or lack certain
beliefs; iii) doing such a thing is all-things-considered wrong; and
iv) he is blameworthy for having done it. (Notice that, on this view,
responsibility for ignorance is also derivative.) The natural
candidate that satisfies clauses i to iii is what Holly Smith (1983)
calls a "benighting act": an action or omission the
consequence of which is the lack of a true belief about the
impermissibility of one's conduct. In other words, by performing
a benighting act the agent brings about her own ignorance about the
wrongness of her subsequent action. In our example we can imagine
several benighting acts John may have performed, such as discarding
(without reading it first) the operational booklet that was given to
him when he was hired at the fitness center, not asking a colleague to
show him around before touching anything, not reading the conspicuous
"Caution: activates treadmill" sign placed above the
button, etc.



Any of these actions and omissions satisfies clauses i to iii above:
i) John has direct control over keeping (and reading) a booklet or
reading a sign or asking questions; ii) John's failure to
perform at least one of these actions caused him to lack a true belief
about the button's function; and iii) any of these actions and
omissions is, in the relevant context, all-things-considered wrong,
since John was under a 'procedural epistemic obligation'
(Rosen 2004: 301) to inform himself about the functioning of the
place. Wrongness, however, isn't the same as blameworthiness, so
we still need to know (clause iv) if John is blameworthy for any of
these benighting acts (H. Smith 1983: 548). The natural thought at
this point is that culpability for a benighting act requires exactly
the same as culpability for any other act (Zimmerman 1997: 416).
Therefore, if we started from the idea that responsibility requires
awareness, we'll conclude that one is blameworthy for a
benighting act only if, at the time of performing it, one is aware of
what one is doing, of its moral significance, of its potential
consequences, and of alternatives to it. This entails that John is
blameworthy for any of the benighting acts described above only if
either he performed any of them in full awareness (including awareness
of the probable consequence of leaving him ignorant of relevant
considerations) *or*, if this wasn't the case, he is in
turn blameworthy for this further lack of awareness.



It becomes clear at this point that in trying to establish
John's blameworthiness for the original action we are facing a
regress. John would be blameworthy for his unwittingly activating the
treadmill and its consequences only if his ignorance of the
button's function was itself culpable, which in turn requires
that such ignorance derives from a *culpable* action or
omission (a benighting act). But culpability for a benighting act
again seems to require awareness, so if John's omissions to
inform himself were also unwitting--if he was also ignorant or
unaware of the need to read the operational booklet, say--we
would need to search for *further* benighting acts to which we
could trace back this extra piece of ignorance. For the regress to
terminate, the agent's ignorance must be at some point the
causal upshot of an action or omission performed in full awareness of
all the relevant facts (including the relevant *moral* facts.
See below). As Rosen puts it,



> 
> 
> He would have to know the pertinent facts about his contemplated act.
> He would have to know that it was wrong. And he would have to know
> that in the circumstances, all things considered, he should not do it.
> He would then have to act despite this knowledge. (Rosen 2004:
> 307)
> 
> 
> 



An action performed in this way would be an *akratic* action,
that is, an action performed while occurrently and *de dicto*
(Rosen 2004: 309) believing that it's all-things-considered
wrong to do it. It thus follows from the regress argument that
"the only possible locus of original responsibility is an
akratic act" (Rosen 2004: 307), and this entails that every
blameworthy action must be either itself an akratic action or the
causal upshot of one (Zimmerman [2008: 176] calls the second disjunct
'the Origination Thesis'). This is the 'akrasia
requirement' on blameworthiness defended by volitionists. The
akrasia requirement is a surprising result with troubling revisionist
implications, because when we make ordinary judgments of
blameworthiness we rarely (if ever) check to see whether it is met
(Zimmerman 2017: 84). According to the argument, however, we should,
for if it isn't met attributions of blame are mistaken. And the
problem isn't merely that the soundness of the argument would
force us to take extra steps before blaming others; rather, the
problem is that it can be speculated that ignorant wrongdoing very
rarely has such non-ignorant (or akratic) origins (Zimmerman 1997:
418; Levy 2011: 131). Moreover, it has been argued that it would be
very difficult, or even impossible, for us to ascertain whether the
akrasia requirement has been met on any particular occasion (Rosen
2004: 308). In either case, the upshot is that many, perhaps most, of
our ordinary judgments of blameworthiness for ignorant wrongdoing are
unwarranted.



And indeed things can get worse, for volitionists claim that this
argument applies to *all* kinds of ignorance, not just factual
ignorance as in John's example (Zimmerman 1997: 423; Rosen 2003;
2004: 304; Levy 2011:
 118-23).[5]
 Consider a variant of the case in which John is aware that pressing
the button will activate the treadmill and foresees as well that doing
so might cause Mary to fall and sustain an injury (and even intends
this to be the case). But suppose that John doesn't believe, and
so isn't aware, that harming Mary is wrong, perhaps because he
was raised in an extremely sexist society in which it's widely
assumed that men are allowed to harm women in response to perceived
threats to their manhood (think of the many places in which
'honor killings' against women are still considered
acceptable). In this variant, John acts from *moral ignorance*,
not factual ignorance, and yet volitionists claim that since John is
unaware that what he's doing is wrong, the argument applies to
him in this variant as well: he is blameworthy for his action only if
he is blameworthy for his (moral) ignorance, and he is blameworthy for
the latter only if it derives from a blameworthy benighting act, such
as knowingly refusing to question his sexist beliefs. If these
conditions aren't met, volitionists claim that John is excused,
because according to them non-culpable ignorance, be it factual or
moral, always exculpate. This is what Rosen (2003) calls the
'Parity Thesis'. (Husak 2016 offers a book-length defense
of the idea that *legal* ignorance also excuses, which has
several points in common with the volitionists' position. See
Yaffe 2018 for criticism.)



Rosen (2004: 305-6; see also Levy 2011: 141) even claims that if
an agent is aware that her contemplated act is morally wrong but fails
to believe that it's *all-things-considered* wrong,
perhaps because she believes that sometimes self-interest trumps
morality, she also acts from ignorance (in this case, ignorance of
'the rational force of moral considerations'), which means
that the regress argument also applies to her. Thus, volitionists
think that ignorant wrongdoing is *extremely* widespread
(especially because they think that lack of occurrent belief counts as
ignorance), and this is why the regress argument applies to all
wrongdoers except for akratic ones. Therefore, the argument ultimately
threatens to undermine attributions of responsibility quite
 generally.[6]



It seems to most philosophers that something has gone awry at this
point, for (the assumption seems to be) it can't be the case
that the requirements of the EC are so stringent that most ordinary
wrongdoers, particularly *morally* ignorant ones (Schnall 2004:
308), fail to meet them and so turn out to be blameless after all
(FitzPatrick 2008: 610; Peels 2011: 578; Clarke 2014: 162). The
challenge is to articulate what exactly is wrong with the regress
argument. It will be useful to spell out its four main theses:


1. *Derivative Blameworthiness for Actions*. An agent is
blameworthy for a wrongful action performed out of ignorance only if
(and because) she is culpable for the ignorance from which she
 acts.[7]
2. *Derivative Blameworthiness for Ignorance*. Ignorance is
culpable only if it derives from a benighting act performed in full
awareness.
3. *Awareness*. Relevant awareness (for ordinary actions and
benighting acts) involves occurrent and *de dicto* beliefs
about the action's overall wrongness.
4. *Parity*. Theses i and ii apply to all kinds of
ignorance.



In the next section we'll survey the main responses to the
regress argument. Each of these responses denies one or more of the
argument's main theses and, in so doing, develop alternative
interpretations of the EC. (See Wieland 2017a for another presentation
of the competing positions in this debate.)


## 3. Responses to Revisionism



Volitionists argue that the intuitive thought that responsibility
requires awareness, pursued to its ultimate consequences, subverts
ordinary judgments of blameworthiness. So, in order to respond to the
revisionist interpretation of the EC, that intuitive thought needs to
be reexamined. Responses to revisionism vary according to how much
they are willing to depart from it. Some philosophers agree that
responsibility requires awareness, but argue that the requisite
awareness doesn't necessarily involve an *occurrent*
belief concerning the action's *overall* wrongness
 (sect. 3.1,
 'Weakened internalism'). Other philosophers claim that,
while awareness of wrongdoing is required for culpability for actions,
such awareness isn't required when it comes to assessing
culpability for ignorance itself
 (sect. 3.2,
 'Ignorance and epistemic vices'). A third group maintains
that the required awareness concerns only the factual aspects of
one's action, not the moral ones, at least not conceived in a
*de dicto* way
 (sect. 3.3,
 'Quality of will'). Finally, some philosophers contend
that in certain cases awareness isn't required at all: agents
can be blameworthy for fully unwitting acts provided that certain
other conditions are met
 (sect. 3.4,
 'Capacitarianism'). Despite their differences, what these
positions have in common is the goal of denying the akrasia
requirement on blameworthiness.


### 3.1 Weakened Internalism



The most conservative strategy for attacking the revisionist
interpretation of the EC accepts the bulk of the regress argument
(theses i, ii and iv) but denies that occurrent awareness of
wrongdoing (that is, clear-eyed akrasia) is necessary for
blameworthiness (thesis iii). According to this position, a weaker
*kind* of awareness--constituted by dispositional,
dormant, tacit, or unconscious beliefs--is all that the EC
requires (Haji 1997; Peels 2011; Timpe 2011; Husak 2011; Levy 2013
& 2014: ch. 2; Nelkin & Rickless 2017a: 127). Other proponents
of this strategy deny that the *content* of the requisite
awareness must involve a belief in the action's overall
wrongness and claim that a belief in there being sufficient reasons
not to perform the action (Robichaud 2014), a belief in one's
acting from morally reproachable reasons (Sartorio 2017), or a belief
in there being a non-negligible risk that one's action is wrong
(Guerrero 2007; Nelkin & Rickless 2017a), can be enough for
blameworthiness. (See also Levy 2014 [ch. 2] who claims that
responsibility requires awareness of the *facts* that give the
action its moral valence rather than awareness of moral wrongness. Cf.
Levy 2011 [ch. 6, esp. 141] and
 fn. 3
 above.) We'll call this position 'weakened
internalism': 'internalism' because, like
volitionism, it assumes that what the EC requires is the presence of
certain mental states that track the action's moral valence as
it appears to the agent (Levy 2009); 'weakened' because,
unlike volitionism, it allows for the possibility that non-occurrent
mental states, as well as beliefs that fall short of full-blown
akrasia, satisfy the EC.



In defense of the volitionist position, Zimmerman offers this
argument:



> 
> 
> if a belief is not occurrent, then one cannot act either with the
> intention to heed the belief or with the intention not to heed it; if
> one has no such intention, then one cannot act either deliberately on
> or deliberately despite the belief; if this is so, then the belief
> plays no role in the reason for which one performs one's action;
> and one incurs culpability for one's action only if one's
> belief concerning wrongdoing plays a role in the reason for which one
> performs the action. (1997: 421-2)
> 
> 
> 



In reply, the weakened internalist argues that it's false that
only occurrent beliefs play a role in the reasons for which one acts,
and so it's false that an occurrent belief concerning wrongdoing
is necessary for knowingly doing wrong (Peels 2011: 581-2). Take
a non-moral example first: one can decide to go to the park because
one occurrently believes that a break from work is in order, while
also (albeit dispositionally) believing that the park is a nice place,
that one's friends frequently gather at the park, that there are
often amusing performances taking place there, etc. All these beliefs
can play a role in the reasons for which one decides to go to the
park, even though they are dispositional rather than occurrent.
Something similar holds in cases of wrongdoing: returning to our
example, suppose that while John is preparing his attack on Mary, the
only beliefs he occurrently holds concern various aspects of his plan
and ways of carrying it out undetected. Still, he may hold the
dispositional belief that what he is planning to do is wrong and, just
as in the park example, this belief can play a role in the reasons for
which he does wrong (for instance, John may decide to proceed with
this plan despite dispositionally believing it's wrong to do
so). It thus seems that John is blameworthy despite his belief about
wrongdoing not being occurrent (Timpe 2011: 23; Levy 2014: 31). If
this is correct, then clear-eyed akrasia isn't necessary for
blameworthiness.



This contention can be bolstered by appealing to cases of
self-deception (Haji 1997: 537-9). Suppose that Susan is
deliberating whether to pay her taxes. Lately she has been spending
significant amounts of time with some libertarian (in the political
sense) friends who try to convince her that she has no obligation to
pay taxes because the government is illegitimate. Susan doesn't
find their arguments very convincing, but her strong desire to fit in
leads her to form a conscious judgment that she shouldn't pay
her taxes. At the same time, however, she has an unconscious or
dispositional belief that it's all-things-considered wrong not
to pay taxes. If Susan ends up not paying taxes, it seems correct to
say that she did so *despite* her (dispositional) belief that
her omission is all-things-considered wrong. So this belief did play a
role in the reasons for which she acted, even though it was merely
dispositional (recall that, according to Zimmerman, a belief plays a
role in one's reasons if one either acts *on* the belief
or *despite* the belief). Susan was "unconsciously
aware" (Haji 1997: 544) that not paying taxes is wrong and this,
according to the weakened internalist, suffices for satisfying the
requirement of awareness of moral significance and thus for Susan to
be blameworthy. So, once again, clear-eyed akrasia isn't
necessary for blameworthiness. On the further assumption that
dispositional beliefs about wrongdoing are much more common than
occurrent ones, the weakened internalist position would have shown
that the revisionist consequences of the regress argument aren't
as severe as originally thought.



Another line of argument exploited by weakened internalists denies
that the *content* of the requisite awareness must involve a
belief in the action's overall wrongness. For instance, Guerrero
(2007: 78) argues that if an agent is unsure whether the action she is
planning to undertake is permissible or not, and so admits the
possibility that it *might* well be wrong, she can be
blameworthy for carrying it out even in the absence of clear-eyed
akrasia and even if her ignorance (which is manifested here as lack of
certainty) is blameless. (Thus Guerrero, unlike other weakened
internalists, deny thesis i of the regress argument, since in his view
ignorant wrongdoing can be culpable in the absence of culpable
ignorance.) This is because there is an independently plausible moral
principle that urges restraint in the face of uncertainty regarding
the potential harms that our actions might bring about (2007: 79).
Similarly, Nelkin and Rickless (2017a: 121-2) claim that being
aware of doing something that poses a risk of forgetting relevant
information can anchor responsibility for unwitting wrongdoing, even
in the absence of an akratic decision to assume the risk.



In turn, Robichaud (2014) claims that a belief in there being
sufficient (albeit not decisive) reasons to perform an action
satisfies the requirement of awareness of moral significance, which
entails that one can be blameworthy for performing an action one
believes there are sufficient (albeit not decisive) reasons to avoid.
(Relatedly, Sartorio [2017: 24-8] argues that one can be
blameworthy if one is aware that one is acting from morally
reproachable reasons, regardless of whether one is also aware that
one's action is overall morally wrong.) In so arguing, Robichaud
denies an important implicit assumption in the regress argument,
namely that an agent can rationally comply with an obligation (moral
or epistemic), and thus can reasonably be expected to do so, only if
she believes that she ought to comply with it and therefore believes
she has decisive reasons in its favor (Levy 2009). On the contrary,
Robichaud argues that for a course of action to be rationally open for
an agent it isn't necessary that she believes she has decisive
reasons in its favor; a belief concerning sufficient reasons is enough
(Robichaud 2014: 142). See Levy 2016 for criticism.


### 3.2 Ignorance and Epistemic Vices



The next position we'll consider goes a step further in
rejecting the idea that responsibility requires awareness. According
to this position, ignorant wrongdoers can be culpable for their
ignorance (and for actions performed out of it) even if the benighting
acts that produced it were themselves performed out of ignorance of
their wrongness. For this to be the case, it is claimed, is sufficient
if in performing benighting acts agents exhibit *epistemic
vices* that explain why they failed to improve their epistemic
position. On this view, then, the regress in the volitionists'
argument doesn't necessarily terminate in an episode of
clear-eyed akrasia; it can also terminate in epistemically vicious
conduct, regardless of whether the agent conceives it as such
(Montmarquet 1995 & 1999; FitzPatrick 2008 & 2017). Notice
that this position is less conservative than weakened internalism,
since in the latter view culpability for ignorance requires awareness
that one has sufficient reasons to comply with certain epistemic
obligations (Robichaud 2014: 145). By contrast, in the position
currently under review no such awareness is required: an agent's
epistemic vices might blind her to these reasons, and yet she can be
blameworthy for ignorance resulting from her failure to comply with
her epistemic obligations (Montmarquet 1999: 845; FitzPatrick 2008:
606).



Philosophers who espouse this position thus deny thesis ii of the
regress argument (according to which ignorance is culpable only if it
derives from a benighting act performed in awareness of its wrongness)
and, consequently, also deny thesis iii (that responsibility requires
occurrent and *de dicto* beliefs about the action's
overall wrongness), *but only* regarding benighting acts. So
they in effect posit an asymmetry in the epistemic requirements on
blameworthiness: while blameworthiness for ordinary actions does
require awareness of wrongdoing, blameworthiness for benighting acts
and subsequent ignorance doesn't (FitzPatrick 2008: 609; see
Levy 2009: 741 for criticism of this asymmetry). A further consequence
is that they accept thesis i (that blameworthiness for actions
performed out of ignorance is always derivative) for all actions
except for benighting acts (FitzPatrick 2008: 609 n.37; 2017: 32); and
accept thesis iv as well (that both factual and moral ignorance can
exculpate) (FitzPatrick 2008: 602; 2017: 35).



FitzPatrick (2008) illustrates this position with the case of Mr.
Potter, a powerful businessman who engages in ruthless business
practices while thinking they are "permissibly
aggressive", therefore acting from ignorance of their wrongness.
FitzPatrick (2008: 601, 609) agrees with volitionists that Mr. Potter
is blameworthy for his ruthless business behavior only if (and
because) he is blameworthy for the ignorance from which he acts; and
also agrees that if it turned out that he's blameless for the
latter, he'd be blameless for the former as well (2008: 602).
But FitzPatrick sharply disagrees with volitionists on the conditions
that must be satisfied for ignorance to be culpable. In his view,
ignorance is culpable when it results from the violation of epistemic
obligations regarding which the agent *could reasonably have been
expected* to comply given her cognitive capacities and the
opportunities provided by her social context, and when such violation
is due to the agent's epistemic vices such as
"overconfidence, arrogance, dismissiveness, laziness, dogmatism,
incuriosity, self-indulgence, contempt, and so on" (2008: 609).
According to FitzPatrick, when this is the case the agent bears direct
responsibility for her ignorance even if her benighting
acts--i.e., the acts that evinced the epistemic vices just listed
--were themselves performed out of ignorance of their wrongness.
(FitzPatrick's position, according to which culpability for
unwitting wrongdoing is partially explained by the fact that the
ignorant agent should and could have known better has important
similarities with the capacitarian view discussed in
 sect. 3.4
 below.)



This conception of culpable ignorance has been criticized on the
grounds that it isn't reasonable to expect epistemically vicious
agents like Mr. Potter to do anything substantial to avoid or remedy
their ignorance, at least not in the sense of 'reasonable
expectation' relevant for attributions of responsibility (Levy
2009; Talbert 2013: 230-3). Levy argues that agents are
blameworthy only "if it is reasonable to expect them to conform
their behavior to the appropriate normative standards" and this,
in turn, requires that "conforming their behavior to normative
standards is something they can do rationally (and not merely by
chance or accident)" (2009: 735). However, Levy argues, the
notion of rationality relevant here is a "thoroughly internalist
one", having to do with "what I can decide to do as the
result of engaging in reasoning", that is, by deliberating on
the reasons I think I have for pursuing different courses of action
(2009: 735). But in this internalist sense of 'rational',
it isn't rational for Mr. Potter to do anything to correct his
moral outlook, given that by his lights the challenges to it that he
encounters can rightly be dismissed as irrelevant. Levy concedes that
in so thinking Mr. Potter exhibits epistemic vices, "but because
he does not conceive of them as vices, he has no internal
reason" for mending his ways and so it isn't reasonable to
expect him to do so (2009: 737). (See FitzPatrick 2017 for his
response.)



In his arguments against the akrasia requirement on culpable
ignorance, Montmarquet goes further than FitzPatrick in that he denies
the thesis of doxastic involuntarism that plays an important role in
the regress argument. While FitzPatrick's objective is to
establish direct culpability for "epistemically debilitating
*choices*" (2008: 609, italics added),
Montmarquet's main claim is that culpability for
*beliefs* themselves can be "fundamental and
underived" (1995: 43). This is because, in his view, agents
possess "direct (albeit incomplete) control" (1999: 844)
over the formation of their beliefs. He agrees with volitionists
that



> 
> 
> if an agent is culpably ignorant of some fact, there will always have
> been some possible act or omission, but for which this ignorance would
> not have existed, (1995: 42)
> 
> 
> 



but he thinks that talk of benighting acts distracts us from the true
source of culpable ignorance, which is an "intellectually
irresponsible attitude" and associated beliefs rather than
"the acts and omissions to which that attitude and those beliefs
led [the agent]" (1995: 43).



In order to support his contention that agents can be directly
culpable for holding certain beliefs, Montmarquet (1999: 844) argues,
against Zimmerman 1997, that agents can in fact directly control their
beliefs by exercising direct control over the degree of care with
which they form them. He offers the analogy of whistling carefully:
one can directly control the care one exerts in whistling, but this
doesn't imply that the whistling itself is only indirectly in
one's control; on the contrary, one directly controls both. If
the analogy holds, given that agents can directly control how careful
they are in forming their beliefs, they can also directly control
their beliefs themselves and so it would follow that agents can be
directly blameworthy for forming beliefs carelessly and for the
carelessly formed beliefs themselves. In response, Zimmerman (2002a;
2008: 183-9) points out a disanalogy between the cases of
whistling carefully and forming beliefs carefully: while whistling is
itself an action, believing something isn't an action but a
(mental) state, which can be the *result* of the action of
taking care in forming beliefs. However, since we don't have
direct control over the results of our non-basic actions (taking care
in forming beliefs being one of them), Zimmerman concludes that we
lack direct control over our beliefs and so we can't be directly
responsible for them (2008: 188-9).


### 3.3 Quality of Will



We turn now to examine a family of views that resist the regress
argument by appealing to Strawson's (1962 [2003]) influential
idea that praise-/blameworthiness tracks the agent's quality of
will. There are different ways of cashing out what exactly
'quality of will' means (Shoemaker 2013), but the basic
idea is this: an agent is praiseworthy for an action or an attitude
that accords with the demands of morality if the performance of the
action or the holding of the attitude arises from proper regard or
concern for another person's morally significant interests.
Conversely, an agent is blameworthy for an action or attitude that
conflicts with the demands of morality if the performance of the
action or the holding of the attitude arises from lack of proper
regard or concern for those same interests. The key insight that
quality-of-will theorists bring to bear on the debate over the EC is
that an agent need *not* believe that her action is right/wrong
(or that she has reasons in favor or against doing it, or that she is
doing something morally risky) for the action to express the quality
of her will and thus for her to be praise-/blameworthy in performing
it. For example, when an ancient slaveholder beats her slave she
clearly evinces lack of regard for the slave's interests, quite
irrespectively of what her owns views about the permissibility of
slavery are or whether she has ever paused to consider the issue
(Rosen 2003: 72). Thus, if an agent's evinced quality of will is
all that matters for blameworthiness (something that Rosen denies),
the slaveholder is manifestly blameworthy. On this view, then, *de
dicto* awareness of the action's moral significance
isn't required for blameworthiness (Fields 1994; Arpaly 2003
& 2015; Harman 2011 & 2015; Talbert 2013 & 2017a;
Littlejohn 2014; Mason 2015; Bjornsson 2017b; Weatherson 2019:
ch. 5), and the same goes for praiseworthiness (Arpaly 2003 &
 2015).[8],
 [9]



What kind of awareness is required according to quality-of-will
theorists? In their view, when assessing epistemic requirements on
responsibility



> 
> 
> we should consider what a wrongdoer needs to know in order for her
> actions to express the attitudes and judgments that make blame
> appropriate. (Talbert 2013: 242)
> 
> 
> 



Quality-of-will theorists usually agree that for actions to express
the relevant attitudes and judgments *factual* awareness is
required: the agent has to be aware of what she is doing and what the
probable consequences of her action are (Talbert 2017a: 47, 53; Harman
2011: 465; 2015: 67; Arpaly 2015: 151). (Angela Smith 2005 & 2017
disagrees, arguing that failures of factual awareness, such as
forgetting a friend's birthday, sometimes reveal inadequate
moral concern and thus are blameworthy. See also Bjornsson 2017b:
152. Cf. Holly Smith 2011; Talbert 2017b.) As we just saw, they also
agree that *de dicto* moral awareness isn't required.
However, they disagree on whether *de re* moral
awareness--awareness of the action's right-/wrong-making
features regardless of whether one conceives them as such--is
required or not. Some think it is (Talbert 2013: 242; 2017a: 53;
Harman 2011: 465; 2015: 67), while others think it isn't.



The clearest advocate of the latter position is Arpaly (2003 &
2015). In her view, quality of will is essentially related to
responsiveness to moral reasons, understood as



> 
> 
> [wanting] noninstrumentally to take courses of action that have those
> features that are (whether or not [one] describes them this way)
> right-making and not to take courses of action that have those
> features that are (whether or not [one] describes them this way)
> wrong-making features. (Arpaly 2003: 79)
> 
> 
> 



The key claim Arpaly defends is that responding in this sense to moral
reasons doesn't require awareness of the features to which one
is responding. Her central example is the much-discussed case of
Huckleberry Finn, who helps Jim the runaway slave to escape despite
believing that he is acting wrongly in "stealing" from
Jim's "owner". Huck does the right thing and,
according to Arpaly, does it for the right reasons, namely in response
to Jim's humanity (Arpaly 2003: 77). At the same time, however,
Huck is unaware that he is helping Jim *because* he is a person
like himself (although he *is* aware that he is facilitating
Jim's flight). He "is not capable of bringing to
consciousness his nonconscious awareness" of Jim's
humanity (Arpaly 2003: 77), and thus fails to acquire *de re*
awareness of the central right-making feature of his action. Since
Huck seems to be praiseworthy despite lacking moral awareness (both
*de dicto* and *de re*), Arpaly concludes that this kind
of awareness isn't required for praiseworthiness, and something
parallel holds for blameworthiness (Arpaly 2015: 151-2).



Not everyone agrees with Arpaly's verdict on this case, however.
Sliwa (2017) challenges the intuition that Huck is morally
praiseworthy, arguing that praise is ordinarily bestowed only on those
agents who *intentionally* do the right thing. Given that Huck
doesn't know what the right thing to do in his situation is, he
can't do the right thing intentionally (although he
intentionally performs an action that is in fact right), because
intentional action incorporates, quite generally, a "know
how" requirement (Sliwa 2017: 128-30). Since in the case
of morally significant actions the required know-how incorporates both
non-moral and moral knowledge (2017: 131), this, on Sliwa's
view, supports the thesis that praise-/blameworthiness does require
moral knowledge (and thus moral awareness). (Zimmerman 2008: 201
argues that Huck is actually *blameworthy*, given that he acts
on the belief that his action is overall morally wrong.)



It's important to emphasize the extent of the disagreement
between quality-of-will theorists and volitionists. The former
initially reject thesis iii of the regress argument, since they deny
that *de dicto* awareness of the action's moral
significance is necessary for praise-/blameworthiness. But this
rejection ultimately leads them to deny *all* four of the
regress argument's main theses. Since quality-of-will theorists
maintain that moral knowledge isn't required for
praise-/blameworthiness, they thus hold that moral ignorance (even if
blameless) doesn't stand in the way of either praise or blame,
therefore denying thesis iv (the Parity Thesis) (Harman 2011: 465;
2015: 65; Talbert 2013: 242; Arpaly 2015: 151; Weatherson 2019: ch.
5). Also, since in their view what matters for blameworthiness is
whether the agent exhibits ill will in performing some action,
blameworthiness for ignorant wrongdoing can be direct--it
needn't derive from culpability for ignorance. This amounts to a
rejection of thesis i when moral ignorance is at stake (Harman 2011
& 2015; Talbert 2013; Arpaly 2015; Weatherson 2019: ch. 5).
Finally, and in opposition to thesis ii, some quality-of-will
theorists claim that moral ignorance can be directly blameworthy,
given that one's mistaken moral beliefs may reveal an inadequate
degree of moral concern (Harman 2011: 460; 2015: 68; see also Adams
1985: 19. Cf. Arpaly 2003: 105-6). Thus, after rejecting all the
basic theses of the regress argument, quality-of-will theorists
conclude that culpability for ignorant wrongdoing (and for ignorance
itself) is much more prevalent than volitionists think.



For instance, on Talbert's (2013 & 2017a) account it will
often be the case that morally ignorant wrongdoers are blameworthy,
because



> 
> 
> [e]ven if a wrongdoer is ignorant of the fact that her behavior is
> wrong, and even if this ignorance is not her fault, her actions may
> still express the contemptuous judgment that certain others do not
> merit consideration, that their interests do not matter, and that
> their objections can be overlooked. (Talbert 2013: 234)
> 
> 
> 



Talbert concedes that if a wrongdoer's moral ignorance
isn't her fault, it may well be the case that she's unable
to rationally do the right thing. But far from showing that
she's thus blameless, what this shows according to Talbert is
that "having subjective rational access to avoiding an action is
not a requirement on being properly blamed for that action"
(Talbert 2013: 239; cf. Bjornsson 2017b: 149). This stands in
sharp opposition to one of the volitionists' central
convictions--a conviction that grounds their commitment to the
importance of *de dicto* moral awareness--namely that
"It is unfair to blame someone for doing something if he
blamelessly believes that there is no compelling moral reason not to
do it" (Rosen 2003: 74; see also Levy 2009: 738). Talbert
responds to the charge of unfairness by claiming that there is nothing
unfair in blaming someone who knowingly (in the factual sense) and
deliberately has harmed us, even if we concede that it isn't
reasonable to expect her to have avoided her moral ignorance and acted
rightly (Talbert 2013: 238; 2017a: 53. See also Scanlon 2008:
186-8; Arpaly 2003: 172-3; 2015: 155; Harman 2015: 66).
However, by divorcing blameworthiness from reasonable expectations
about avoiding wrongdoing, Talbert's position, and that of other
quality-of-will theorists, is vulnerable to the charge that it misses
the crucial connection between blameworthiness and desert, namely that
blameworthy agents *deserve* certain negative reactions and
adverse treatment partly because, and only if, it was reasonable to
expect them to do better (FitzPatrick 2017: 33; Levy 2011:
194-5).



It becomes apparent at this point that the disagreement between
quality-of-will theorists and the rest concerning the EC is ultimately
grounded on different conceptions of responsibility and
blameworthiness (Wieland 2017a: 5; see the
 Conclusion
 below). On the one hand, philosophers of different persuasions
regarding the EC--volitionists, weakened internalists, epistemic
vice theorists, and capacitarians--appeal to elements associated
with responsibility as *accountability*, such as the relevance
of the agent's capacities and opportunities to avoid wrongdoing
and the concomitant reasonable expectations. (Of course, they disagree
about how to characterize these elements, and this disagreement partly
explains why they have different conceptions of the EC. See for
instance the exchanges between FitzPatrick 2008 & 2017 and Levy
2009 & 2011: ch. 5; between Clarke 2017a and Levy 2017; and
between Robichaud 2014 and Levy 2016.) On the other hand,
quality-of-will theorists appeal to elements associated with
responsibility as *attributability*, such as the centrality of
the agent's "moral orientation" (Talbert 2017a: 48)
or "deep self" (Wolf 1987) for blameworthiness and the
comparative irrelevance of historical factors about how the agent came
to have the moral orientation or deep self she has (Arpaly 2003:
172-3; Harman 2011: 462; Talbert 2017b: 19) or whether she could
have avoided wrongdoing (Scanlon 2008: 186-8; Talbert 2017a:
48). For the distinction between different types of responsibility see
Watson 1996, Shoemaker 2011, and Zimmerman 2015.


### 3.4 Capacitarianism



The fourth type of response to the regress argument is the one that
departs more radically from the idea that responsibility requires
awareness. According to it, agents can be directly blameworthy not
only for actions and omissions performed out of moral ignorance, but
also for actions and omissions performed out of factual ignorance;
that is, for *fully* unwitting wrongful conduct. (Recall that
quality-of-will theorists restrict their claims to morally ignorant
wrongdoing. Again, exceptions are Angela Smith 2005 & 2017 and
Bjornsson 2017b.) Since what all the adherents to this position
have in common is the idea that blameworthiness in these cases is
largely (though not exclusively) explained by the presence of certain
capacities possession of which makes the agent capable of acquiring
the relevant awareness, their position can be dubbed
'capacitarianism'. In their view, the best formulation of
the EC is disjunctive (Sher 2009: 87): agents satisfy the epistemic
requirements on responsibility either if they are aware of the
relevant factual and moral considerations or if they *should and
could be aware* of them given the available evidence, the
opportunity to adequately process it, and their cognitive capacities.
Capacitarians differ on what else (if anything) has to be added to the
second disjunct, but they all agree that a central element in the
explanation of blameworthiness for ignorant wrongdoing is the fact
that the agent should and could have known better than she did
(FitzPatrick 2008 & 2017; Sher 2009; Clarke 2014 & 2017a, b;
Murray 2017; Rudy-Hiller 2017; Amaya & Doris 2015; Murray &
Vargas 2018 [Other Internet Resources]; Vargas 2018 [Other Internet
 Resources]).[10]



An important motivation for this view is to account for cases in which
people seem to be blameworthy for unwitting omissions despite the fact
that: i) the omissions and attendant failures of awareness
aren't explicable in terms of ill will; and ii) blameworthiness
can't be traced back to a previous failure to discharge some
obligation (Sher 2017b). Staple cases of this sort are *forgetting
cases*, such as this one (see also Clarke 2014: 164-5):



> 
> 
> *Hot Dog*. Alessandra, a soccer mom, has gone to pick up her
> children at their elementary school. As usual, Alessandra is
> accompanied by the family's border collie, Bathsheba, who rides
> in the back of the van. Although it is very hot, the pick-up has never
> taken long, so Alessandra leaves Sheba in the van while she goes to
> gather her children. This time, however, Alessandra is greeted by a
> tangled tale of misbehavior, ill-considered punishment, and
> administrative bungling which requires several hours of indignant
> sorting out. During that time, Sheba languishes, forgotten, in the
> locked car. When Alessandra and her children finally make it to the
> parking lot, they find Sheba unconscious from heat prostration. (Sher
> 2009: 24)
> 
> 
> 



In this example, Alessandra is intuitively blameworthy for omitting to
let the dog out of the van. But her wrongful omission is fully
unwitting: she's unaware not only of its wrongness but even of
the fact that she's omitting to do something she ought to do in
the first place. Importantly, as the case is described there is no
reason to think that Alessandra's omission stems from ill will
towards the dog or towards those who love the dog, such as her
children (Sher 2009: 37, 91; see also Clarke 2017a: 246; King 2009:
584-5; Amaya & Doris 2015: 266; Murray 2017: 516). Rather,
what explains her failure of awareness isn't flawed character
traits or lack of regard for morally significant interests, but simply
the cognitive and emotional load placed upon her by the unusual
situation at the school (Sher 2009: 131), which, by assumption,
wasn't overwhelming enough to excuse her for her omission (see
Amaya & Doris 2015: 263). Finally, it's implausible to try
to account for Alessandra's blameworthiness by positing a
previous failure to discharge some obligation of due care--like
setting the alarm on her phone to remind her of the dog--since
the situation was unpredictable (Sher 2009: 35-6) and intending
to let the dog stay in the car for a couple of minutes doesn't
seem to be wrong (cf. Nelkin & Rickless 2017a who claim that in
this sort of cases there usually *is* a previous violation of
an obligation related to preventing the episode of forgetfulness). The
omission in question is just a regrettable but, according to
capacitarians, culpable mistake (Amaya & Doris 2015; Murray 2017:
516). So if intuitions about responsibility in this sort of cases
aren't misleading, neither awareness nor ill will are necessary
for blameworthiness. (Levy [2017] and Talbert [2017b] offer
empirically-based error theories according to which intuitions in
these cases *are* misleading because people tend to
misattribute lack of moral concern to unwitting wrongdoers based
solely on the consequences of their actions, and this mistaken
attribution is then used as grounds for blaming them. But Murray
*et al.* [2019] provide contrary empirical evidence suggesting
that what drives ordinary people to assign responsibility in
forgetting cases is mainly the presence of an adequate opportunity to
remember rather than the level of concern the forgetful agent
displayed toward what she was supposed to do.)



The challenge for capacitarians is then to explain three things: i)
what *norms* support the claim that unwitting wrongdoers
*should* have known better; ii) what *capacities*
justify the assumption that unwitting wrongdoers *could* have
known better; and iii) why its being true that an unwitting wrongdoer
should and could have known better grounds responsibility for
unwitting
 wrongdoing.[11]



Before going into the details of how capacitarians answer these
questions, let's see what theses of the regress argument are
denied by them. All capacitarians (with the exception of FitzPatrick,
see fn. 10) reject theses i and iii, since they are united in the
beliefs that blameworthiness for unwitting conduct can be direct and
needn't trace back to culpable ignorance (against thesis i), and
also that factual awareness--and *a fortiori* occurrent
and *de dicto* moral awareness--isn't necessary for
direct responsibility (against thesis iii). Since capacitarians
usually focus on factual rather than on moral ignorance, they usually
leave thesis iv (Parity) untouched (but see Sher 2017a). However, they
seem to be committed to accepting it, given that a crucial aspect of
the capacitarian view is that agents are excused for their unwitting
wrongdoing whenever isn't reasonable to expect them to know
better due to an unfavorable epistemic situation (Sher 2017a; Clarke
2017a: 242; Murray 2017: 515, 521; Rudy-Hiller 2017: 408). But since
sometimes a situation is epistemically unfavorable for forming correct
*moral* beliefs (FitzPatrick 2017: 34-6), it follows from
the capacitarian view that at least in some such circumstances agents
are excused for not knowing better in moral matters (FitzPatrick 2008:
602). Finally, there is disagreement among capacitarians whether
thesis ii (that blameworthiness for ignorance is necessarily
derivative) is true or not. Clarke (2014: 171, 173; 2017a:
245-6) tentatively accepts it, since he thinks that failures of
awareness aren't culpable if they don't result from a
culpable benighting action or omission. At the same time, he denies
that culpability for ignorant wrongdoing necessitates culpability for
the underlying ignorance (Clarke 2017a: 246), thus avoiding the
regress in the volitionists' argument. In Clarke's view,
then, an agent can be blameworthy for an unwitting wrongful action
even if the ignorance from which she acts isn't culpable, as
long as such ignorance is substandard--and therefore faulty
(Clarke 2017a: 245). (Note that the soundness of this move rests on
the defensibility of the distinction between culpable and faulty
ignorance. See Rudy-Hiller [2017: 416] for criticism.) By contrast,
Rudy-Hiller (2017: 413) rejects thesis ii, since he claims that an
agent is directly blameworthy for her ignorance if she is capable of
gaining the required awareness and there is no significant impediment
to the exercise of the relevant cognitive capacities.



Let's return now to the three central questions capacitarians
must answer to give plausibility to their view. The first concerns the
nature of the norms of awareness supporting the claim that certain
unwitting wrongdoers should have known better. The central function of
these norms is to set a standard against which failures of awareness
are evaluated to determine which ones are defective and which
don't. When failures of awareness aren't defective, it
isn't the case that the involved agents should have known better
and thus they are excused for their unwitting wrongdoing.
Capacitarians agree that norms of awareness are sensitive to the
agent's cognitive capacities and circumstances (Sher 2009: 110;
Clarke 2014: 167; Murray 2017: 516; Rudy-Hiller 2017: 413; FitzPatrick
2017: 37). They also agree that these norms are derivative, in the
sense that both their content (the considerations agents should be
aware of) and their normative force (their bindingness on agents) come
from another set of norms, namely moral ones. In other words,
it's because awareness of certain considerations is necessary
for fulfilling moral obligations that such awareness can be demanded
of agents (Sher 2009: 111-2; Murray 2017: 515).



It's crucial to note that the norms of awareness capacitarians
rely on to substantiate should-have-known allegations aren't
duties of inquiry. While norms of awareness directly demand awareness
of relevant considerations, duties of inquiry impose obligations to
undertake information-gathering actions that contribute to the
occurrence of such awareness (Rosen 2004: 302; 2008: 600-1; H.
Smith 2014; Wieland 2017a: 6-8). In other words, while norms of
awareness are concerned with agents' *states* of mind,
duties of inquiry are concerned with agents'
 *activities*.[12]
 This naturally generates the following worry concerning norms of
awareness: given that "becoming aware is not something we do but
something that happens to us" (Sher 2009: 112; see also Rosen
2004: 302; 2008: 600), one might wonder whether the should-have-known
criterion can be used to undergird blameworthiness after all. If
failures of awareness escape the agent's direct control, how
could it be true that such involuntary failures partly explain direct
responsibility for unwitting wrongdoing? (Nelkin 2011: 679-80;
Nelkin & Rickless 2015).



Capacitarians have different responses to this worry. Sher (2009:
147-8) ultimately rejects the control condition on moral
responsibility in favor of an origination requirement (see below).
Clarke, who holds on to the control condition, denies that norms of
awareness give rise to moral obligations; in his view, they merely set
a standard for evaluating failures of awareness as faulty or not
(2014: 167). Rudy-Hiller (2017: 418) advances a notion of control
according to which agents do have responsibility-relevant control over
their states of awareness and so they can be morally obligated to
remember or notice morally significant considerations. Finally, Murray
(2017) describes, and offers empirical evidence for, a distinctive
'vigilance' capacity that enables agents to become aware
of relevant considerations and which, according to him, affords them
direct control over the degree of awareness they display.



The second central question for capacitarians is which capacities make
it true that an unwitting wrongdoer could have known better. Clarke
offers the following characterization of them:



> 
> 
> Some are capacities to do things that are in a plain sense active: to
> turn one's attention to, or maintain attention on, some matter;
> to raise a question in one's mind or pursue some line of
> inquiry; to make a decision about whether to do this or that. Others,
> though capacities to do things, aren't capacities whose exercise
> consists in intentional action. These include capacities to remember,
> to think of relevant considerations, to notice features of one's
> situation and appreciate their normative significance, to think at
> appropriate times to do things that need doing. (2017a: 242)
> 
> 
> 



Capacitarians then appeal to the idea of unexercised capacities to
explain why certain unwitting wrongdoers could have been aware of
relevant considerations: it's because those wrongdoers possess
the requisite cognitive capacities, but failed to exercise them
despite the absence of significant impediments, that they could have
known better (Clarke 2017a: 242; 2017b: 67; Murray 2017: 520;
Rudy-Hiller 2017: 407; Vargas 2018: 15 [Other Internet
Resources]).



Several objections can be raised at this point. First, notice that
even cognitive capacities that issue in intentional actions (such as
raising a question in one's mind) don't provide direct
control over awareness of relevant considerations but only
*favor* its occurrence, which remains out of one's
control (Rosen 2004: 302; Montmarquet 1999: 845). So, under the
assumption that control is required for responsibility, it remains
unclear how failures of awareness contribute to explaining direct
blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing (Nelkin & Rickless 2015.
For a similar objection stated in terms of choice rather than control,
see Moore & Hurd 2011: 164). Second, and relatedly, the claim that
possession of these capacities ground reasonable expectations of the
sort that are relevant for attributions of responsibility (Clarke
2017a: 242; 2017b: 67) can be disputed, for since the exercise of some
of these capacities isn't under our control, whether they are
displayed or not is a chance occurrence and chance occurrences
can't ground reasonable expectations (Levy 2017: 255. Clarke
2017a: 249-50 offers a brief response to this objection).



Third and finally, it has been doubted whether capacitarians have a
convincing story about what it takes to have the relevant unexercised
cognitive capacities (Levy 2014: 124-5; Moore & Hurd 2011:
160-1). Sher, for instance, relies on a counterfactual account
of capacities, according to which saying that someone was capable of
noticing, remembering, thinking of something, etc., "is only to
say that he would have remembered [noticed, thought of] in an
*appropriate* range of alternative situations" (2009:
114, italics added). The crucial task is of course to define what the
appropriate range is, since, intuitively, one doesn't have a
capacity to X if one would only very rarely successfully X in a range
of relevant scenarios. For instance, it might be argued that
Alessandra can't be credited with the possession of the relevant
cognitive capacity if we assume, plausibly, that she would only very
rarely remember the dog in a range of similar situations to the one
she actually confronted. If one were to respond that it suffices for
attributing the relevant unexercised capacity that there is *a*
counterfactual scenario in which Alessandra does remember the dog,
this would objectionably lower the bar for attributing unexercised
capacities, with the consequence that many intuitively blameless
unwitting wrongdoers would turn out to be blameworthy after all (Levy
2014: 125). (See Vargas 2013 [ch. 7] and Vargas 2018 [Other Internet
Resources] for a version of the counterfactual account that attempts
to give more precision to the 'appropriate range'
criterion for attributing unexercised capacities.)



Alternatively, some capacitarians attribute unexercised capacities by
appealing not to counterfactual scenarios but to the agent's
past performances in similar situations (Clarke 2014: 166; 2017a: 244;
Rudy-Hiller 2017: 407-8). This move raises problems of its own,
however, since, on the one hand, an agent might possess a relevant
cognitive capacity--for instance a quite good capacity to
remember certain considerations--despite the fact that she often
fails to exercise it perhaps because she doesn't care much about
those considerations (Nelkin & Rickless 2015; see also Nelkin
& Rickless 2017a: 112-3). On the other hand, an
agent's past performances aren't necessarily a good proxy
for attributing her a certain unexercised capacity *now*, since
despite her previous successes she might have lost the relevant
capacity in the meantime and so it would be unfair to fault her for
her current lack of awareness (Sher 2009: 109).



The third central question for capacitarians is why the truth of the
should-and-could-have-known-better clause contributes to explaining
blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing and what, if anything, has to
be added to the explanation. Sher states the worry in this way:



> 
> 
> the reason the agent's actual awareness seems significant is
> that it implies that the act's being wrong or foolish is among
> the total set of considerations in light of which he chose to perform
> it. To whatever extent his choice was in this way knowing as well as
> willing, the act, qua instance of wrong or foolish behavior, is in a
> suitably deep sense his own. However, and in stark contrast, when an
> agent merely should be aware that he is acting wrongly or foolishly,
> there is no comparably direct connection between the wrongness or
> foolishness of what he does and his informed will. Hence, where no
> actual awareness is involved, the standard rationale for holding him
> responsible does not appear to be available. (Sher 2009: 74)
> 
> 
> 



Another way of putting the worry is this: since attributions of
responsibility are usually anchored in some morally relevant feature
of the agent to which awareness contributes, such as choice or
good/ill will (Amaya & Doris 2015: 254), an account of
responsibility for unwitting wrongdoing in which neither choice nor
the agent's quality of will are implicated runs the risk of
appearing *ad hoc* (King 2009: 587). So the challenge for
capacitarians is to show that their account isn't *ad
hoc* and, at the same time, to provide a "morally plausible
desert basis for blame" in cases of unwitting wrongdoing (Moore
& Hurd 2011: 160).



We'll focus on Sher's response to this challenge.
Concerning the charge of *ad hocness*, Sher argues that, quite
generally, the crucial morally relevant feature implicated in
attributions of responsibility isn't choice, control, or quality
of will but *origination*, understood as an appropriate causal
relation between the agent and her action's right-/wrong-making
features (Sher 2009: 147; 2017b: 9-10). So, in Sher's
view, in order to appropriately praise or blame an agent for an action
it must be the case that its relevant moral features are suitably
connected to her (Sher 2009: 82). One way in which this suitable
connection occurs is when the agent is aware of those features and
chooses to perform the action in light of them, thus making the action
"in a suitably deep sense his own" (2009: 74). Another way
(in the case of wrong
 acts)[13]
 in which the suitable connection occurs is when the agent's
unawareness of the action's wrong-making features is defective
in the sense indicated above *and* such unawareness is caused
by the agent's constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits.
When this is the case, Sher claims, the action's wrongness is
suitably connected to the agent and so--assuming that she
satisfies other non-epistemic conditions as well--she can
justifiably be held responsible for her unwitting wrongdoing (2009:
86-8, 118). For instance, if we assume that Alessandra could
have recalled the dog, and also that her failure to do so was caused
by constitutive features of her psychology such as her solicitousness
to her children and her anxiety about conflict (2009: 92), she
satisfies Sher's EC and so she's blameworthy for her
unwitting omission (assuming, again, that she satisfies other
non-epistemic conditions as well). Thus, by appealing to a single
notion--origination--that allegedly grounds responsibility
both in cases of witting and unwitting wrongdoing, Sher meets the
charge of *ad hocness*.



This isn't enough, however, for it still must be shown that this
purely causal origination relation is a morally plausibly desert basis
for blame. Sher (2009) claims that it is, because the psychological
features he classifies as constitutive of the agent--her cares,
values, beliefs and emotional makeup, but also her patterns of mental
association, "the speed and accuracy of [her] inferences and
decision-making" (2009: 86) and even "the relevant
neurophysiological mechanisms" (2009: 122) that produce her
thoughts and actions--"sustain her normal patterns of
intellectual functioning" (2009: 122) and make her a responsible
agent (2009: 121), and so in reacting to her failures of awareness
(and subsequent wrongdoing) caused by those psychological features we
are reacting to the whole person as the source of those failures
(2009: 92). Sher (2009: 91; 2017b: 10) emphasizes that the
psychological features that cause failures of awareness and explain
the agent's blameworthiness needn't be moral flaws
themselves. For instance, Alessandra's solicitousness to her
children isn't a moral flaw; it may even be a *good*
trait, and yet it remains true that if it caused Alessandra's
unawareness it partially explains her blameworthiness for her
omission. In sum, Sher's view is that the origination relation
explains why blaming unwitting wrongdoers is appropriate because it
ensures that the whole person was implicated in the wrongdoing for
which she is blamed.



However, many authors have found this aspect of Sher's position
problematic. Levy claims that while it's very plausible that
origination is *a* condition on moral responsibility, it
isn't plausible to think "that responsibility
*consists* in origination" (2014: 127). The fact that an
agent's failure of awareness causally originates in her
psychology doesn't seem to warrant blaming her for the action or
omission's *wrongness*, since the latter isn't
linked to her in a way the shows anything about the quality of her
will (Levy 2014: 128; see also Talbert 2017a: 57; Bjornsson
2017b: 143). Similarly, while agreeing with Sher that agents can
sometimes be held directly responsible for their failures of awareness
and subsequent wrongdoing, Angela Smith (2010) argues that this is so
only when those failures exhibit a *rational* connection to the
agent's evaluative judgments. By contrast, a purely
*causal* connection of the sort Sher defends "cannot
establish the right *kind* of connection between an agent and
her wrongdoing" to justify blaming her for it (A. Smith 2010:
523). Finally, Moore and Hurd (2011: 184) object that while the moral
relevance of conscious choice for blameworthiness is intuitively
clear, it isn't at all clear how the fact that the agent's
"psychophysical apparatus that characteristically causes her
chosen actions also caused her on this occasion to do this unchosen
action" could analogously make blame appropriate. They thus
dispute Sher's (2009: 140) contention that conscious choice and
failures of awareness (caused in the way he indicates) are equally
good ways of satisfying the origination relation and grounding
 blameworthiness.[14],
 [15]


## 4. Conclusion



We have surveyed the five main positions regarding the EC on moral
responsibility. Intuitively, being morally responsible for some action
or event requires awareness of certain things. As we have seen,
however, there is great controversy about how to characterize the kind
and content of the requisite awareness and, more fundamentally, about
whether awareness is actually required at all or not. A natural
question is: how can we adjudicate the dispute among the different
positions? The structure of the discussion suggests focusing on two
criteria (Wieland 2017a: 26): i) what position fits best with our
intuitions about responsibility in different cases; ii) what position
merges best with the right conception of responsibility.



Concerning the first criterion, many philosophers take it as a given
that theorizing about moral responsibility must be constrained by our
ordinary judgments and intuitions. So if an account of the EC clashes
with those judgments and intuitions, that gives us a *pro
tanto* reason to reject it and, conversely, being able to
accommodate them is a point in its favor (Sher 2009: 17; Clarke 2014:
162; Schnall 2004: 308; FitzPatrick 2008: 610; Peels 2011: 578;
Montmarquet 1999: 845; Arpaly 2015: 155). Other philosophers reject
this "methodological conservatism" (Levy 2017) and take
the opposite line of giving priority to what they take to be the
correct theory of responsibility, even if it implies that a good many
of our ordinary judgments and intuitions are misguided (Rosen 2004:
296; Zimmerman 2008: 205). In order to break the stalemate in the
theory vs. intuitions dispute, some have advanced an error theory of
intuitions of blameworthiness in cases of unwitting wrongdoing which,
if correct, would entail that failing to accommodate them
shouldn't be hold against an account of the EC (Levy 2017;
Talbert 2017b); while others have offered empirical evidence to
support the very same intuitions (Murray *et al.* 2019). Yet
other philosophers have presented empirical evidence concerning
ordinary intuitions of praise-/blameworthiness in cases of moral
ignorance that appears to support the quality-of-will theorists'
view that moral knowledge isn't required for either (Faraci
& Shoemaker 2014). Thus, one way of settling the debate on the EC
is to pursue this discussion on the preeminence, reliability, and
content of ordinary intuitions about responsibility.



Concerning the second criterion, it was noted at the end of
 section 3.3
 that the disagreement between quality-of-will theorists and the rest
is partially grounded on competing conceptions of responsibility, and
this suggests that settling the debate on the EC partly depends on how
this broader dispute is resolved. Some philosophers think that it can
be shown that one conception is the only correct one (Levy 2005; A.
Smith 2012), but the consensus seems to be that the different
conceptions are all valid, since each of them captures different
aspects of our responsibility practices (Watson 1996; Shoemaker 2011;
Zimmerman 2015). If the latter view is correct, it's entirely
possible that certain epistemic requirements apply to some types of
responsibility but not to others (Mason 2015; Zimmerman 2017) and,
consequently, it might well be the case that there are different EC
depending on the type of responsibility we focus on.