When Do False Beliefs Exculpate? (Pt. I)

Another month of pandemic… and another philosophical puzzle from me to distract you from it. This time, the puzzle concerns beliefs and specifically whether acting under the guidance of false beliefs can exculpate someone of a moral wrongdoing.

Another month of pandemic. . . and another puzzle from me to distract you from it. For those of you who missed it so far, I’ve been doing philosophical pandemic puzzles since March, all of which are still available in the Philosophy Talk blog archive. As much as I enjoy doing these, I hope it will only be a few more months before I can bring the series to a close!

My first puzzle was about beliefs (are they under voluntary control?), and this one is too.

The present puzzle question is this: when do false beliefs exculpate someone of a moral wrongdoing?

My focus is specifically on moral wrongdoing, rather than prosecutable legal violations.

Consider a scenario involving the tragic death of an animal. A veterinarian has two dogs in her care, and the dogs look very similar. Call them Fred and Rufus. Let’s say that for whatever reason, Fred needs to be put down. However, the vet, falsely believing that Rufus is Fred, puts down Rufus. 

It is clear that the vet may be guilty of carelessness and even negligence. But we wouldn’t want to say that she was guilty of murdering Rufus, even though she did intentionally kill the animal whose name was Rufus (assume for the sake of argument that the term “murder” can in principle apply to the killing of animals). Effectively, then, her false belief that this dog [the one she was looking at] is Fred exculpates her of murder. So, in some way or another, false beliefs can (at least sometimes) morally exculpate.

That suggests something like the following, which we can call the false belief criterion of exculpation:

FBCE: If a person performs an action guided by a false belief, and that act would not count as a particular moral offense if the belief were true, then the person is not guilty of committing the offense. 

Applying this to the vet case, we see that it works nicely. She would not count as committing murder if her belief about the identity of the dog had been true (after all, Fred did have to be put down), so by FBCE the action that she did perform (guided by her in fact false belief about the dog’s identity) does not count as murder either.

I think there’s something along these lines that has to be right. And in a way, it’s gestured at already by the familiar children’s cry, “I didn’t do it on purpose!” But a puzzle arises if we apply FBCE to another sort of case.

Consider a case of a person indoctrinated with a racist religious ideology. Call her Sarah. Sarah believes (falsely, of course) that all people (or merely apparent people, on her view) of a certain race R are not in fact human persons but rather just human bodies that are controlled by remote demons as if by invisible puppet strings. Now suppose that this indoctrinated person goes and kills an individual, James, whose race is R, in an apparent attempt to stave off the demon invasion.

Is Sarah guilty of murdering James, morally speaking?

Here I have a strong intuition and inclination to say yes, that was indeed murder. I assume you have the same strong intuition.

But if that intuition is correct, then our false belief criterion of exculpation can’t be quite right. For apply it to the case of the murder of James. 

This is, of course, hard to contemplate, but bear with me. Suppose it were true that every human body that fit the description of being R was in fact merely a puppet controlled remotely by demons. So the live bodies themselves would be more like zombies that merely appeared to be intelligent due to their being directed by intelligent agents (the demons). If that were true, then slaying one of these live bodies would not in fact be murder (after all, the remote demon would still be alive). That means that if FBCE were correct, however, then Sarah’s act of killing James would not be murder, since it was guided by beliefs that would render her not guilty, if they were true.

So much the worse for FBCE, right?

But we clearly need to have something to put in its place—or at least a way of qualifying it—for otherwise false beliefs would never be an excuse, which they clearly are, as shown by the vet case.

What, then, should we put in the place of FBCE? What’s the principle we need here?

This, I think, is a very difficult problem, if one wishes to have an entirely general solution (one that will cover all cases of actions guided by false beliefs). So you may wish to start in a piecemeal way. Start by making a list of the salient moral differences between the two cases I just presented, and then look to see if those differences generalize to other cases you discover.

Good luck looking for a solution. And be on the lookout for my own attempted solution (or my own with a little help from Aristotle) later this month!

 

Image by Mylene2401 from Pixabay