Dr Christopher Cowley gives an interview with Dr Silvia Panizza about his talk on The Ethics of Ignorance and Clumsiness. If somebody harms me deliberately, I blame them. Now for blame to 'work', I have to assume that they understood enough of what they were doing, and that they were free enough to refrain from doing it. In other words, I assume they chose to harm me. But what if they are ignorant and therefore did not understand what they were doing? Sometimes I blame them, sometimes I might excuse them for their ignorance. How does that work? And what if they are clumsy, or insensitive, or unimaginative, or just plain stupid? How much can I blame them for such cognitive defects? These kinds of fault appear both in morality and in law, and is the topic for this conversation.

Christopher Cowley teaches the philosophy of law and the philosophy of autobiography, and Silvia Panizza is a Teaching Fellow, both at the UCD School of Philosophy. Both are members of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life