Review of Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of Ignorance, by Michael J. Zimmerman

Abstract

Under pervasive epistemic limitations, traditional objective and subjective accounts of moral obligation prove inadequate: the former ignores unavoidable ignorance, while the latter errantly tethers duty to subjective belief. Resolving this requires a prospective account, wherein moral obligation depends on maximizing expectable value relative to the evidence available to an agent at the time of action. This evidential framework extends to interpersonal rights and risks, implying that permissible actions—such as lethal self-defense—and reciprocal entitlements are modulated by epistemic access. Merged with a probabilized possibilism, the prospective model establishes that an agent ought to perform an act if every alternative maximal course of action is prospectively inferior, thereby preserving the principle that obligation implies capability while decoupling moral failure from blameworthiness. Epistemic conditions on backward-looking responsibility dictate that blameworthiness tracks an agent’s actual beliefs rather than evidential standards. Consequently, wrongdoing from ignorance incurs culpability only if traced to a directly culpable, non-ignorant origin—a condition infrequently realized in practice. Despite its systematic scope, this framework exhibits a notable theoretical vulnerability in failing to clearly demarcate the nature and limits of what constitutes immediately available evidence. – AI-generated abstract.