Aristotle on when Ignorance is an Excuse

Abstract

Ignorance is sometimes an excuse: in certain circumstances, if a person has done something wrong, she is blameless if she did not know what she was doing. What are those circumstances, and why is ignorance sometimes considered a legitimate excuse and sometimes not? At first glance, Aristotle’s response to these questions is quite rigorous: a legitimate appeal to ignorance as an excuse requires an appropriate causal history of ignorance and action, and the corresponding mental state of the agent and the observers. Thus, it seems that the agent’s ‘I didn’t know’ is a genuine excuse only if the agent was subjected to bad luck. In this paper, I try to show that these strict conditions can still be somewhat relaxed, and that there are many actions in which ignorance can be a legitimate excuse even though they do not belong to the type of genuine involuntary actions.