08 January 2021
For last month’s pandemic puzzle, I posed the title question of this blog, noting that I meant it in a
moral sense (rather than a legal one):
When do false beliefs exculpate?
The idea is that sometimes having a false belief exculpates one of a wrongdoing, but other times not and perhaps even the opposite.
My example of a false belief that
does exculpate was a vet who accidentally puts down the wrong dog, because it looks almost identical to the one she was in fact supposed to put down: maybe she was careless (which is bad), but her false belief about the identity of the dog she put down exculpates her of murder (which is much worse).