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Zimmerman's work is devoted to the so-called Argument from Ignorance, aimed at defending the thesis that the moral judgement of a certain person for some bad action committed due to ignorance can be appropriate only if this ignorance itself was due to some other morally reprehensible action of this person, which he committed knowing that he was acting badly.
Zimmerman recognizes that in order to be morally responsible for a certain event X, a person must have a certain degree of control over that X. He distinguishes between direct (or direct) and indirect (or indirect) moral responsibility for events in relation to which a person has, respectively, direct or indirect control. In order for a person to have indirect control over X (and could be indirectly responsible for X), a person must have direct control over what caused X. At the same time, as the author shows, we never have direct control over our lack of certain beliefs. This means that for actions committed due to ignorance, we can only be indirectly responsible and only if this ignorance itself was due to something that we directly controlled and, accordingly, in respect of which we had sufficient knowledge, which leads to the thesis mentioned above. This thesis, Zimmerman emphasizes, is revisionist: it goes against a lot of everyday cases of imposing moral responsibility, which means that if the Argument from ignorance is correct, we should reconsider some of our usual practices of imposing guilt and punishment. We will discuss how successful Zimmerman's argument is at our seminar. The details of this argument are presented by Artem Besedin, and Vadim Vasiyiev critically analyzes them. Then goes the discussion.
The participants of the discussion: Evgeny Loginov, Oksana Cherkashina, Anton Kuznetsov, Anna Kostikova, Vadim Vasilyev.
