Ignorance of Your Values Is No Excuse |
Most non-lawyers (myself included) probably don’t recognize the Latin “ignorantia juris non excusat,” we know the translation: “ignorance of law excuses no one.” It’s an idea as old as law itself and perhaps best summed up by Thomas Jefferson (1787), who wrote: “…ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended” (para. 2).
On its face, Jefferson’s point seems reasonable. If all you had to do was feign ignorance to get a case dismissed, there’d be crowds of people wandering around with blank stares and airtight alibis (“Nobody told me arson was frowned upon.”).
Then again, Jefferson might have softened his claim if he'd slogged through today’s obscure, outdated, and still technically enforceable laws[1]—which raises the question: Should we really apply this idea universally, including to morality?[2]
That question—whether ignorance can absolve moral responsibility—is central to a recent piece by Licon (2025). He introduces the idea of morally mandatory knowledge: In some cases, we’re not just better off knowing something—we're morally obligated to know it.
Licon focuses on a kind of intentional ignorance—what he calls strategic ignorance. It appears when people suspect—rightly—that learning more would obligate them to act differently. So, they stay in the dark. Not because they don’t care but because they suspect they’d care too much. And acting on that concern would be inconvenient, costly, or deeply uncomfortable.
Licon argues that this kind of ignorance becomes morally problematic when two conditions are met:
Put those together, and ignorance stops being neutral. It becomes evasive—less “I didn’t know better” and more “I had a pretty good idea and chose not to look.”
Take someone who suspects their favorite coffee brand uses questionable labor practices. They’ve seen headlines, skimmed a tweet about it, and vaguely recall a documentary mentioned somewhere. But they don’t look further—not because they think it’s all fine but because they suspect it’s not. Knowing more would make every........