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Moral Responsibility and Epistemic Vice: A Reply to FitzPatrick on Rosen’s
Moral Responsibility Skepticism
By: 002-01-8020
Georgia State University
1/16/14

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This paper focuses upon a reply by William J. FitzPatrick (2008)1 to a skeptical argument
concerning moral responsibility and blameworthiness first developed by Gideon Rosen (2004).2
In essence, Rosen’s argument attempts to undermine our epistemic justification for making
positive attributions of moral responsibility. Rosen’s skeptical argument attempts to make us
question whether the blameworthiness that accompanies most bad acts is in fact justified. Rosen
develops an excusing condition that he argues must be met if any judgments of blameworthiness
are to retain epistemic, and moral, legitimacy. Rosen’s excusing condition utilizes the concept of
akrasia. An act is considered akratic when one knowingly acts against one’s better judgment,
despite knowledge of the potential consequences. Rosen argues at length that we can never know
for certain whether an act is genuinely akratic or not; hence we are never justified in our positive
judgments of blameworthiness. In other words, Rosen is asking how it is possible to blame
someone for something if we cannot look back into their past and find instances where they were
acting akratically, i.e. in a willfully ignorant fashion. Rosen thinks that if we cannot find
instances in a person’s past where they acted against their better judgment that bear on whatever
action they are now being treated as responsible for, then we cannot hold them morally
responsible. Rosen thinks that since we cannot actually locate any such instances in people’s
causal histories we are left with skepticism regarding moral responsibility claims. FitzPatrick
thinks that Rosen’s skeptical conclusion is mistaken; he thinks that it is in fact possible to locate
instances of akrasia in people’s causal histories. FitzPatrick argues that guilt is a reliable
1 FitzPatrick, William J. "Moral Responsibility And Normative Ignorance: Answering A New
Skeptical Challenge." Ethics: An International Journal Of Social, Political, And Legal
Philosophy 118.4 (2008): 589-613. Philosopher's Index. Web. 20 Sept. 2014.
2 Rosen, Gideon. "Skepticism About Moral Responsibility." Nous-Supplement: Philosophical
Perspectives 18. (2004): 295-313. Philosopher's Index. Web. 8 Sept. 2014.

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indicator of akrasia; he claims that an agent can know they are acting akratically (acting against
their better judgment) by experiencing guilty emotions during that action. I will focus on arguing
against FitzPatrick’s claim that guilt is a reliable indicator of akrasia. First, I will provide a
reconstruction of Rosen’s original argument and discuss FitzPatrick’s primary objection. I will
then develop my own objection to FitzPatrick’s argument. Specifically, I will argue that it is
possible to lack guilty feelings during an akratic action; thereby demonstrating that guilt is not a
consistently reliable indicator of akrasia. If I am correct, then this particular aspect of
FitzPatrick’s alternative account fails and the brunt of Rosen’s original skeptical conclusion
remains intact. I will now provide a reconstruction of Rosen’s original argument.
FitzPatrick summarizes Rosen’s argument as follows: if an agent carries out a bad action
of some sort, they either do so with full awareness that it shouldn’t be done (akrasia), or they are
acting from either circumstantial or normative ignorance (2008, p. 592-593). If an agent acts
akratically they are responsible, but if they act out of ignorance, whether or not they are
responsible depends on whether or not their ignorance is culpable (2008, p. 593). The caveat is
that their ignorance is culpable if and only if they’re also found to be responsible for whatever
caused that ignorance, and so on (potentially) ad infinitum (2008, p. 593). Culpability is not
reached until and unless a relevant episode of akrasia can be located, in either the current action
under scrutiny or in whatever causal antecedents contributed to the ignorance of that current
action (2008, p. 593). But if it cannot be determined whether or not an act is of a genuinely
akratic sort, then we are not warranted in attributing blame to any particular bad action (2008, p.
593).

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Essentially, Rosen argues that agents should “suspend judgment” and, hence,
blameworthiness, regarding attributions of moral responsibility (2004, p. 295-296).3 One can still
concede that an act was wrong, but Rosen thinks we cannot say one is blameworthy for any bad
action (2004, p. 295-296). Rosen discusses two types of responsibility, original and derivative.
An agent X is derivatively responsible for an act A when X is independently responsible for B,
where B is understood as some prior act or omission that lead to A (2004, p. 299). Rosen
assumes as a “background principle” that derivative responsibility necessarily presupposes
original responsibility. If X is genuinely responsible for A, then A is either a “locus of original
responsibility” or some such locus exists in A’s “causal history” (2004, p. 299). In essence, “If X
does A from ignorance, then X is culpable for the act only if he is culpable for the ignorance
from which he acts” (2004, p. 300). An action committed from ignorance cannot be a viable
“locus of original responsibility” because responsibility for ignorant actions is always of a
derivative sort (2004, p. 307). Rosen assumes as a further premise that ignorance is culpable if
and only if it derives from a failure to attend to the relevant “procedural epistemic precautions,”
which are to be understood as “certain steps required to inform yourself about matters that might
bear upon the permissibility of your conduct;” they are implicit obligations to inform oneself
about what to do and not do when the time to act arrives (2004, p. 301).
In essence, responsibility for ignorant action is “doubly derivative,” meaning that an
agent is responsible for their ignorant act if and only if it can also be shown that they are
responsible for the ignorance that precipitated that act; and they are responsible for that
ignorance if and only if they are also responsible for failing to follow the relevant procedural
epistemic obligations (2004, p. 303). Normally, actions done from normative and/or epistemic
3 “Responsible” and “culpable” should be treated as interchangeable throughout this paper.

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ignorance are assumed to be few and far between, but Rosen asserts “it is a crucial premise in the
skeptical argument that [their] proper scope is ultimately much broader” (This broad scope is
what FitzPatrick is objecting to in part, but I will turn to that momentarily) (2004, p. 306). Rosen
says committing a bad action without ignorance would require that an agent know the relevant
facts about the act, recognize that act as wrong, know that they should not do it, and then act
regardless (2004, p. 307). For Rosen, then, any act that fits the description above can be
considered akratic, i.e. an act done “despite the agent’s considered judgment that all things
considered he should be doing something else” (2004, p. 307). For Rosen, the sole possible locus
of “original responsibility” is an akratic act; any and all culpable bad actions must be “the causal
upshot of a genuinely akratic act or omission” (2004, p. 307). The skeptical worry that Rosen
highlights is that when we attempt to assign moral responsibility for any bad action, it cannot be
definitively ruled out that the relevant agent be excused of moral responsibility due to acting
from non-culpable ignorance. This possibility cannot be definitively ruled out because it cannot
be confidently asserted that the relevant agent’s act is of a genuinely akratic sort. Hence, the
possibility that the relevant agent’s ignorance is non-culpable cannot be excluded, because it
cannot be confidently asserted in any particular case of bad action that it correctly derives “from
an act of genuine akrasia” (2004, p. 309-310). I will now discuss FitzPatrick’s specific objection
to this argument, before responding with my own objection to FitzPatrick.
FitzPatrick finds Rosen’s account unsatisfactory because his akrasia condition is too
strong and cannot reasonably be met (2008, p. 590-591). FitzPatrick’s alternative account of
moral culpability traces “epistemically debilitating choices” to the indulgence of certain “vices”
in contexts where an given agent could have “reasonably” known better and taken steps towards
moral improvement (2008, p. 606). FitzPatrick claims the question is always “what we can

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reasonably expect a person to know, or to take steps to know, given his or her social context and
basic capabilities and given the level of difficulty of the knowledge in question” (2008, p. 612).
Essentially, FitzPatrick argues that agents can still be morally responsible and remain
blameworthy owing to “culpable circumstantial or normative ignorance,” and that claims of
reasonable (epistemic) expectations remain defensible without Rosen’s strong akratic condition
(2008, p. 590-591, 603). It is not the case, according to FitzPatrick, that we are incapable of ever
determining if an agent is or is not acting akratically (2008, p. 595). FitzPatrick supports this
claim by motivating the intuition that we do in fact have a consistently reliable way to ascertain
whether or not one has acted akratically. The “experience of guilt or shame” that agents often
feel while acting, according to FitzPatrick, is firm enough evidence that a given agent was indeed
acting akratically (2008, p. 595). FitzPatrick notes that these feelings of akratic guilt “will often
be mild, as in routine cases of overindulgence or procrastination, and may be overlooked” (2008,
p. 595). FitzPatrick also notes that “in more serious cases, there will also be psychological
pressures to suppress such feelings, especially after the fact: it is more comfortable to tell oneself
that one’s thinking just got clouded and that it really seemed the right thing to be doing at the
time” (2008, p. 595). According to FitzPatrick, we have “strong prima facie evidence that the act
was not done out of normative ignorance,” where normative ignorance is said to arise from
ignorance traceable to certain extenuating circumstances, such as poor upbringing or mental
illness (2008, p. 595). FitzPatrick says that, “if it had been, then we would think, at least at the
time of acting, that we were acting well and therefore that we had nothing to feel guilty about or
ashamed of” (2008, p. 595). Hence, contra Rosen; there is no skeptical problem when a given
agent is honest with both themselves and others.

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In fact, even if they are dishonest (either with themselves, as in cases of self-deception,
or with others for whatever reason), FitzPatrick still thinks we have “enough circumstantial
evidence” to attribute akrasia because oftentimes the “alternative of ignorance is just so
implausible that the principle of charity requires the attribution of akrasia” (2008, p. 598). In
other words, there is often enough evidence to confirm or make a solid inference that someone
acted akratically even if they lied to themselves or others about doing so in some way, be it
through trying to willfully deceive others or by trying to hide evidence of their having acted
akratically. This is because it is assumed that if someone acted akratically and then attempted to
deceive themselves or others about doing so, that they must have felt guilty about that akratic
act, and it is this experience of guilt that provides the circumstantial evidence noted above. So,
generally speaking, if we can reliably determine whether or not a person felt guilty we can also
determine whether they acted akratically or not. Doing so purportedly provides a consistently
reliable method of making positive attributions of akrasia in agents. Hence, there are numerous
concrete cases involving our own actions and others where it is possible to know “by any
reasonable epistemic standards” whether or not an action can be traced back to an akratic
episode (2008, p. 599). Therefore, according to FitzPatrick, the conclusion of Rosen’s argument
must be rejected (2008, p. 599). With an understanding of both Rosen’s original argument and
FitzPatrick’s objection in mind, I turn now to my objection of FitzPatrick’s account of guilt in
making positive attributions of akrasia in agents.
FitzPatrick’s objection to Rosen’s skeptical conclusion crucially depends upon an agent
experiencing guilt during a bad act. FitzPatrick thinks that guilt co-occurs with instances of
akrasia often enough that it can function as a reliable indicator of akratic action in all agents.
However, I do not think that guilt can form the basis for a consistently reliable indicator of

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akrasia in any given agent. My objection is that it appears plausible that an agent could possess
an “epistemic vice” of the sort discussed by FitzPatrick such that they either lacked feelings of
guilt entirely, or could successfully suspend any influence upon their actions that such feelings
might otherwise have. By utilizing FitzPatrick’s own account of epistemic vice I hope to
undermine his objections validity through a demonstrated case of self-contradiction. My claim is
not that agents lack the experience of guilty feelings entirely. Rather, I do not think that the mere
possibility of an agent sometimes experiencing guilt during some action can be reliably used to
identify particular instances of akratic actions. I will now develop my objection more fully.
Rosen’s skeptical conclusion leaves us unable to make justifiable attributions of moral
responsibility and FitzPatrick attempts to refute Rosen’s skeptical conclusion by demonstrating a
possible way to reliably discern instances of akrasia in an agent’s causal history. FitzPatrick
provides examples of “mild” cases where guilt is indicative of akrasia (such as procrastination or
overindulgence) (2008, p. 595). FitzPatrick utilizes such cases to ground his claim that, “the
presence of guilt or shame at the time of acting is therefore often good evidence of akrasia,
which diminishes the plausibility of general skepticism about attributions of akrasia” (2008, p.
595). FitzPatrick is committed to advancing guilt as a reliable indicator of akrasia because it is
how he argues against Rosen’s skeptical conclusion (that we cannot make justifiable claims of
moral responsibility because we cannot trace the causal etiology of an action to an instance of
akrasia). Without FitzPatrick’s account of guilt functioning as an indicator of akrasia, Rosen’s
final conclusion concerning our inability to make positive judgments of akrasia and, hence,
attributions of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, remains intact.

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FitzPatrick argues that guilt can function as a reliable indicator of akrasia, but I do not
think that it is able to function or serve as a consistently reliable indicator of akrasia. By this I
mean that guilt can, at best, function as an indicator of akrasia only in the sorts of “mild” cases
that FitzPatrick discusses; but it cannot function cart blanche as an indicator of akrasia. I think
that a lack of properly guilty feelings could form the basis for an epistemic vice that is consistent
with FitzPatrick’s account, but nevertheless undermines it. One can understand what I mean
when I posit lack of guilt as an epistemic “vice” more clearly by understanding the opposite, i.e.
the epistemic “virtue” of honesty. A person who possesses the epistemic virtue of honesty would,
presumably, recognize the feelings of guilt that may arise during an akratic act and reflect upon
them accordingly in moderating their current and future conduct. In contrast, a person who
possessed an epistemic vice such that they could not recognize guilt, suspended feelings of guilt
at the time of acting, or lacked guilty feelings entirely, would necessarily fail to reflect upon any
such guilty feelings during an akratic act.
I realize that “failing to recognize”, “suspending”, and “lacking feelings of guilt entirely”,
are subtly different from one another. Lacking feelings of guilt seems to entail an inability to
recognize guilt, but suspending guilty feelings remains different. It is a further question whether
such a person would also fail to reflect upon guilty feelings before and after an akratic act. Here,
my objection focuses specifically upon guilty feelings’ arising during the performance of an
akratic act, since that is the time period both Rosen and FitzPatrick appear to focus on. However,
I do not see any immediately apparent reason why my objection would be inconsistent with
failing to reflect upon guilt before or after an akratic act; especially when one considers that
given that said person necessarily fails to recognize guilt they could not, presumably, reflect
upon it before an akratic act any more so than they could during or after said act.

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Let’s say that, broadly speaking, person X fails to attend to or acknowledge feelings of
guilt that might arise during the course of any of their actions, akratic or otherwise. For whatever
reason, person X simply does not recognize the feelings of guilt that more epistemically virtuous
people recognize while committing some bad act. Person X might recognize what others process
as guilt at the time of performing some action, but nevertheless suspend attending to those
considerations at that time. In extreme cases, Person X might entirely lack guilty feelings
altogether, such that they could neither recognize nor suspend any such guilty feelings even if
they did experience them. An agent with such an epistemic vice would not actively attend to
whatever “guilty” thoughts might accompany or result from any given action. They would
passively receive those thoughts and feelings without actively qualifying them as being of a
“guilty” sort. Let us further assume that even if they did recognize guilt they would suspend
attending to it at the relevant point in time. In other words, they would ignore those guilty
feelings at the time of acting and they would do so without having to actively think about it. In
essence, an individual with this (crippling) epistemic vice would lack the capacity to have or to
usefully reflect upon the experience of guilt. Hence, it appears safe to infer that an agent with
this epistemic vice would lack feelings of guilt during an akratic action.
Conceivably, an agent could routinely exercise this epistemic vice to their detriment, just
as they could for any other epistemic (or moral) vice. Moreover, they could do so without being
subject to FitzPatrick’s qualification that because an agent could have been “reasonably”
expected to educate themselves and “repair” their epistemic vice, that they should have done so,
and if they failed to do so they are culpable for its continued exercise (2008, p. 607-608). In
other words, FitzPatrick’s account implicitly assumes that because an agent “could” have

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remediated their vice, that they “should” have done so. But the vice I developed above is not
subject to this qualification. I will now explain why this is so.
The thoughts and emotions that I presently experience are at least partially shaped by
what sensory data I receive. But I do not actively control the thoughts and emotions that I
experience as a result of this passive reception of sensory data. When I have a thought or
experience an emotion (or vice versa), I do not control its appearance, i.e. its formation and
momentary existence in my mind. Which is not to deny the possibility of actively bringing or
maintaining some thought in mind; this is something we can clearly do and is a necessary
component of thinking in general. This is just to say that at least some thoughts and emotions
arise without cognitive activity on my behalf. The thought of a pink elephant that arose in my
head just now did so without my actively willing it, I made no cognitive effort to bring it to my
mind. My claim is that agents are not wholly responsible for how or when they experience any
given thought or emotion that is not a result of their having actively thought or felt it. So, it
seems vague at best to say that I am responsible for the thought of the pink elephant that I just
had because I did not control its appearance in my mind. Similarly, agents are, at the very least,
rendered less responsible for failing to feel any given thought or emotion. If I watch a sad movie
and fail to experience any feelings of sadness we would not necessarily say that I am responsible
for that emotional failure; rather, it is simply the case that for whatever reason the expected
emotion did not arise within me. Similarly, if agent X fails to experience the emotion of guilt
during their actions, it seems unfair to attribute responsibility for those actions to them,
especially if guilt is supposed to function as an indicator of that actions negative status, as
FitzPatrick would argue it does.

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For instance, if an agent in possession of the epistemic vice developed above were to act
akratically they would not experience any guilt. Guilt, broadly construed, is generally considered
a negative feeling. Guilt is often a motivator for changing a behavior, or the thoughts that lie
behind a given behavior. However, if one possessed an epistemic vice such that the experience of
guilt was consistently suspended or unrecognized, then it seems plausible to claim that such an
agent could not reasonably be expected to “repair” said epistemic vice, precisely because they
lack one of the key precursors to an important form of motivation in changing behavior (i.e.
guilt). If an agent lacks guilt as a motivational precursor for changing their behavior, then it
seems to follow that they also lack the ability to change specific actions that fall under the
broader scope of that behavioral pattern. Hence, it seems incorrect to attribute responsibility or
blame to an agent for that akratic action because they lack a key motivating force (guilt) in
changing the behavior that contributed to that akratic action.
FitzPatrick might object at this point on several fronts. First, he might object on the
grounds that there are other possible motivations at work in changing behavior besides guilt.
Second, he might object that an agent who possessed the epistemic vice I developed above
“could reasonably have been expected, in the circumstances, to take steps that would have
corrected his moral ignorance and improved his character but that he instead chose to behave in
ways that merely indulged and reinforced his character defects” (2008, p. 608). To the first
objection I happily concede that there might indeed be other factors at play that govern how
behavior and actions are changed. However, they are presumably not as relevant as guilt is as an
indicator of akrasia to FitzPatrick; if they were, it seems that FitzPatrick would have at least
mentioned them. To the second objection, I would argue that correcting one’s moral ignorance
is, arguably, easier than correcting one’s epistemic ignorance, and that correction of the former

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depends heavily upon correction of the latter. Guilt may serve as an effective motivational force
for changing one’s moral vices, but I doubt that it would be as effective for epistemic vices,
especially of the particular sort that I developed above. Remediating an epistemic vice involving
the lack of recognition or suspension of guilt at the time of any given act would, presumably,
require a different set of motivations. FitzPatrick does not, so far as I can adduce, offer any
potential examples of the sort of alternative motivations that would be needed instead of guilt to
“take steps” needed to change such an epistemic vice (2008, p 608). Therefore, I think it is safe
to conclude that FitzPatrick’s account does not achieve its goal of denying the final skeptical
conclusion of Rosen’s argument because his alternative account is subject to the concerns raised
by my objection above.
This paper discussed an objection by William J. FitzPatrick to a skeptical argument
concerning moral responsibility and blameworthiness first developed by Gideon Rosen. A brief
reconstruction of Rosen’s original argument was provided before moving to a discussion of one
of FitzPatrick’s key objections. In turn, I provided my own objection to a key aspect of
FitzPatrick’s objection to Rosen’s linkage of moral responsibility and akrasia. Essentially,
FitzPatrick argued that guilt is a reliable indicator of akrasia, he argued that it is in fact possible,
contra Rosen, to know whether or not akrasia was involved in the history of some action
performed by a given agent; hence we have justification for denying Rosen’s overall conclusion
(2008, p. 599). I disagreed with FitzPatrick’s vice-based account and his appeal to guilt as an
indicator of akrasia by arguing for an epistemic vice that remains consistent with his account
whilst simultaneously undermining its validity. An individual with the epistemic vice I argued
for would lack the capacity to usefully reflect upon the experience of guilt. They could not
recognize guilt or might lack it entirely in extreme cases. If they did recognize what others might

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call guilt, they would suspend attending to it until some later time apart from the action that
precipitated it. Thus, at least for these individuals, guilt could not serve as a consistently reliable
indicator of akrasia, as FitzPatrick argued it could. So, contra FitzPatrick, the presence of guilt is
not good evidence of akrasia and we still have reason to take Rosen’s skeptical conclusion
regarding attributions or moral responsibility seriously (2008, p. 595). FitzPatrick’s account
leaves room for the sort of “vice” I developed above, thereby diminishing the pull of his
objection to Rosen (2008, p. 595). In the future, attention might turn to the metaethical question
of the relationship between epistemic and moral vices and the question of whether or not it is
possible to feel guilty for not feeling guilty.