Culpable for moral ignorance

[RevertAlan]

What is the level of culpability for moral ignorance? Are individuals held accountable for not being responsible to learn morality? Are individuals rewarded on earth or in heaven for learning morality? What is a good argument for the importance of learning the Catholic teachings? I am looking for a good counter argument to the stance some take that can best be summed up as ignorance is bliss. What I mean by this is that some will say that since it is not a sin if you don’t know it is a sin, then why should I learn about what sin is. Isn’t sin damaging to one whether or not one is aware it is a sin, if so what is the reason sin is damaging even if one isn’t aware of it being a sin?

 

[Lady_Marchmain]

Why is arsenic poisonous even if you don’t know that it is, or even know that it’s arsenic? Is the “ignorance is bliss” person willing to drink from all 5 glasses knowing only one is poison? Or would he prefer to learn which it is to avoid it, and subsequent death? Moral death works the same way. But I am simplifying, this is not all the principles of morality, but just to show we make choices and they hurt or help us and we can’t pretend one choice isn’t really there.

As for “not knowing” - we are culpable beyond just what we may have been taught by our parents or read in a book, due to the Natural Law.

We do not need a reward for morality, in this life or the next. To use an old cliche, morality is its own reward. You shape your life, your views, your behavior with your morality, and you refine it thru knowledge. That puts you on a path up or down, of your own making.

 

[RevertAlan]

Ignorance in erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed can often be imputed to personal responsibility, when a man ‘takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through habit of committing sin’. In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.

ref CCC 1790-1791
scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a6.htm

ref Gaudium et Spes 16
vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html

Willful ignorance can increase the culpability of sin, especially if it demonstrates a hardness of heart. Such an attitude increases culpability.

ref CCC 1859
scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a8.htm

So I have learned that one isn’t responsible when the ignorance is invincible, though when it is willful or vincible ignorance then there is definitely a responsibility for the error.

 

[slywakka250]

Why is arsenic poisonous even if you don’t know that it is, or even know that it’s arsenic? Is the “ignorance is bliss” person willing to drink from all 5 glasses knowing only one is poison?

This analogy presumes that all people recognize the reality of “spiritual death.” The ignorance is bliss person happily drinks all 5 glasses with no worries. He has no reason to believe that the arsenic danger exists. This is what ignorance is about. The absolute reality and absolute morality, is not present to this persons mind. He is unaware of the existence of moral life and spiritual death, even if he has heard about it all his life. It is not present to his mind as a reality, like other things he encounters in his daily life, such as interactions with family and friends. the “spiritual battle” is just one theory among many about the meaning of life.

 

[RevertAlan]

I agree that they don’t see or are aware of the spiritual reality and objective truth. They operate from their own perspective of relative truth and in extreme cases argue against spiritual consequences of sin, since they don’t readily experience material or physical consequences.