HAIG lecture

Kate Biederman, ACM/Mellon post-doctoral fellow in philosophy, will give a lecture on Oct 28th titled “Moral Responsibility and Assessment: The Case of George W. Bush.” Biederman will examine how moral theories assess and attribute responsibility to agents. One of the persistent problems of moral theories is that they do not sufficiently account for cases in which an agent is ignorant of relevant facts,=features, or consequences of his/her actions. Ignorance is often treated as a mitigating factor that can excuse our responsibility for acting. However, in certain cases moral agents should be assessed in virtue of their ignorance. Biederman will evaluate three different scenarios involving George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to go to war with Iraq. In these scenarios Biederman shows how conditions for moral assessment inadequately deal with the occurrence of ignorance in our moral lives. Further, these scenarios aim to illuminate the significance of belief in the moral domain with respect to our action-guiding practices.