Responsibility for Ideological Beliefs
This chapter answers three questions in the affirmative: (1) Can individuals be morally blameworthy for their ideological beliefs? (2) Can individuals or organizations be morally blameworthy for forming a social-epistemic environment that creates or exacerbates the risk that individuals will come to have and sustain ideological beliefs that are either intrinsically bad (e.g., racist beliefs) or very likely to cause morally bad behavior? (3) When individuals or organizations culpably create such a social-epistemic environment, does their blameworthiness for doing so reduce or cancel the blameworthiness of those whose beliefs are negatively influenced by that environment? This chapter argues that one is blameworthy for believing something if believing it is either intrinsically bad or morally risky and one is responsible for believing it. The analysis operates with a relatively uncontroversial conception of ideology that is commonly employed by social scientists. An ideology is a set of beliefs, attitudes, and belief-management mechanisms that provide a shared evaluative map of the social world.
