Under what conditions is a person morally responsible for something they have done? Two conditions commonly endorsed as requirements for moral responsibility are freedom and knowledge. The person must have acted freely, and they must have known what they were doing. Corresponding to the two main requirements are excusing conditions. They absolve agents of moral responsibility for what they have done. A common excuse condition on the freedom side is external causal forces. If a strong gust of wind blows my car door into someone thereby injuring them, then I am not morally responsible for injuring them. I did not have the right sort of control over the car door hitting them to be responsible for injuring them. A common excuse condition on the knowledge side is ignorance. If I did not know that I was spooning cyanide instead of sugar into someone's coffee, then I am not morally responsible for poisoning them. But, there's a catch. External forces and ignorance fail as excuses when I am culpable for the forces having their influence or for putting myself in a position to be ignorant. In this dissertation, I focus on whether ignorance is an excuse. This move is strategic. Under the influence of the perennial free will debate, most of the focus in the literature on moral responsibility has been on the freedom or control condition. This is unfortunate. It has left the knowledge or epistemic condition massively underdeveloped by comparison. My dissertation aims to contribute to rectifying this imbalance in the literature.
نام شخص به منزله سر شناسه - (مسئولیت معنوی درجه اول )