Methodological conservatism and the epistemic condition

The claim that agents are morally responsible for actions the wrongness of which they fail to be aware of only if they are responsible for their occurrent ignorance strikes many philosophers as unacceptable, because it is too revisionary: it entails that many of the everyday judgments that we are disposed to make are false. Agents satisfy these conditions too infrequently for our everyday judgments to be vindicated. These philosophers maintain that it is a theoretical virtue to preserve as many of our everyday judgments as possible. This chapter attempts to show that we ought not to strive to preserve as many of our everyday judgments about responsibility as we might think. It offers an error theory for why we are often disposed to judge that individuals are responsible when we are implicitly committed to thinking that they are not.