The Ethics of Ignorance

Abstract

Dissertation Advisors: Ned Hall, Susanna Siegel

The Ethics of Ignorance

Abstract

Most of us think that being unwittingly ignorant— as we are when we forget a friend’s birthday or remain blind to glaring social injustices—is a bad thing. But if ignorance is so bad, why aren’t we required not to be ignorant? On the standard view that ignorance is the lack of knowledge, ignorance can be no more epistemically evaluable than absences. I develop a theory of ignorance that illuminates and resolves the major paradoxes that arise for the ethics and epistemology of ignorance. What kinds of epistemic shortcomings attach to ignorance? What obligations, if any, do we have not to be ignorant? This dissertation offers answers to those questions.

Part I addresses the paradox of the evaluability of absences: absences are neither good nor bad, rational nor irrational. I first show that there exists an array of counterexamples to the common view that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, with sources in psychology, scientific theory, and everyday life where someone is ignorant because they fail to consider obvious and relevant possibilities. I then use these examples to argue for a substantive form of ignorance that is an attitude like belief. Many take it as evident that ignorance is just the state of not knowing. But I argue that this is incorrect: not knowing is neither necessary nor sufficient for some cases of ignorance. If epistemic evaluability is going to have any bearing, ignorance must be more than mere not knowing.

Part II is the test case for ignorance’s epistemic evaluability. I start by addressing a second paradox about ignorance and responsibility. If we follow the standard line that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, then ignorance is not something that we can be responsible for. Some have confronted this paradox by suggesting that a theory of responsibility for ignorance (esp. ignorance of racial injustices) rests on our social obligations. On such a view, we are responsible for our ignorance just in case it harms others or further perpetuates social inequities. But such a theory suggests that we are only responsible because we have let down our communities since we owe it to those around us not to be ignorant. I argue for a kind of substantive ignorance that takes an attitude form where agents are just as responsible for ignorance as they would be for belief. In the dissertation, I call this attitude ignoring to distinguish it from the common, passive form of ignorance. Ignoring, according to my view, structures an inquiry so that we are responsible when we fail to consider obvious and relevant answers to an open inquiry. Importantly, the responsibility is agent-centered; it is not based on others, but on the idea that we owe it to ourselves to be as rational as possible.

Part III applies my theory of ignorance to a problem in perception. Hallucinations, illusions, and attentional blindness are all forms of ignorance where perceivers ‘miss out’ on information in their environment. In this chapter I identify another kind of misperception, which I call perceptual ignorance. Perceptual Ignorance is the perceptual analogue to the cognitive state of ignoring. When someone is perceptually ignorant, they have literal blind spots that result in errors in early perception, which lead to judgments that are unwarranted. I use Bayesian perceptual processing to model the problem as one of the missing hypotheses within a set of priors. Perceptual ignorance not only explains how ignorance manifests as a type of prejudice, but also presents a surprising critique for Bayesian theories of perception in general. Omissions are evidence of malfunctions in updating, which undermines Bayesian models as paragons of proper functioning.

So, it is up to us to resolve our ignorance, but this task is one that we can all meet. That is part of the larger narrative of an agent-centered ethics of ignorance. Taken together, the chapters are distinct, yet imbricated arguments for a theory of ignorance. This dissertation makes the case that ignorance is the kind of thing that is epistemically evaluable—it can be epistemically better or worse; and that as better or worse it places demands on us to be our best rational selves.