Negligence is not Ignorance

Recent interest in the epistemic condition on moral responsibility has raised a new challenge to the view that persons are directly responsible for negligent conduct. According to an influential argument, the epistemic condition on responsibility requires genuine, clear eyed akrasia. All other kinds of wrongdoing, including negligence, constitute ignorant wrongdoing. My aim in this paper is to defend direct responsibility for negligence against this challenge by arguing that negligence does not constitute ignorant wrongdoing. In distinguishing negligence from ignorant wrongdoing, I do not dispute the idea that negligence is involves unawareness. Rather, I argue that there is a difference between failing to bring a relevant fact to mind at the appropriate time and being genuinely ignorant of some relevant fact. Standard cases of negligence involve failing to bring a relevant fact to mind, not genuine ignorance. To support the significance of this distinction, I appeal to the notion of fairness. Fairness supports understanding the epistemic condition on responsibility as requiring not occurrent beliefs but rather reasonable internal access to the relevant beliefs and thereby enables me to defend direct responsibility for negligence.