I had a somewhat heated discussion on here a long time ago with someone who disliked the adage “Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence” because they insisted that:
not knowing something is always the consequence of not learning it (true, though only superficially);
not learning something is a choice (ditto);
and choosing not to learn something that would help you avoid harming other people is malice (uhhh... sometimes?),
including cases where you don’t know what you don’t know (no?!? That’s, like, the most important exception when judging other people’s behavior as ethical or unethical! Not knowing you don’t know something is an almost impossible epistemic hole to get out of without outside help!)
So, in their mind, incompetence (which they framed as willful ignorance) can always be resolved to some level of malice.
And it rubbed me the wrong way because it seemed tantamount to saying that not being able to do something is malice, too, if that also is equivalent to choosing not to learn to do it, thus making not being able to do something if it’s not physically impossible for you malicious. So if I’m about to accidentally run into someone and the only way to avoid it is by doing a backflip, but I haven’t spent the last ten years training to be a gymnast, I’m, on some level, maliciously running into them. It was this really frustrating reframing of “not knowing you were about to harm someone” as, essentially, “choosing not to know things that will help you avoid harming someone.”
This is obviously horrible and not a good ethical stance, because there’s limited time in every human life to learn things and people’s ability to choose how to dedicate the time available to them is precious—but it’s also not an accurate way of modeling other people’s behavior. People aren’t maliciously not knowing things at you. They’ve lived a different life, they’ve learned different things, and they’ve gotten to this particular place and time by a different route that led them to a different body of world-knowledge from you. If you frame that as malice, as unethical behavior, how can anyone ever hope to be ethical if they aren’t you?
(I stopped engaging before learning if this person held themself to the same standard, but I can’t decide if that would make it any better or not. It was a frustratingly pessimistic conversation about how to model other people’s motives.)
Anyway, all of this is to say I just saw someone write, “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice,” and that struck me as a much better way of framing the situation. Incompetence (or ignorance of ethical behavior, which is really what that first person was fixating on, I think) can obviously be harmful, and when it gets harmful enough it fails to be relevant whether an accurate model of the actor’s motives places them as malice or incompetence. If someone’s hurting you, you don’t get to say they did it on purpose, maliciously, if that’s not true—but you do get to say ignorance isn’t an excuse.
