Café Philo Bristol and Bath

Note: Café Philo is a way of meeting interesting, inquiring people who enjoy talking about life's big issues and conundrums in a convivial atmosphere, rather than a heavy-duty philosophy seminar. Read more about our approach here.

Moral blind spots are cases where people or societies sincerely see themselves as decent, yet fail to notice serious wrongs embedded in their own beliefs or practices. They are not usually a matter of explicit cruelty but of systematic inattention, rationalisation, and social normalisation. Institutions such as slavery, public torture, and the legal subordination of women were once treated as natural or even virtuous, and only later recognised as grave injustices. The idea of a “blind spot” highlights this gap between self-image and moral reality.

We can distinguish several patterns here. Sometimes people literally lack crucial concepts or facts, and so cannot yet see an issue as moral at all (a kind of genuine moral ignorance). Sometimes they see the facts but interpret them in purely technical or economic terms, so the ethical dimension drops out of view. In other cases they do register some unease, but resolve the tension through rationalisation, group loyalty, or deference to authority, pushing doubts to the margins of attention. There are also cases where people know something is wrong yet remain silent from fear, convenience, or career incentives; the silence of many then helps the blind spot persist as if nothing were wrong.

This topic connects closely with classic debates about moral realism and relativism, because talk of “blind spots” and “moral progress” seems to presuppose that some practices are genuinely worse or better, even when insiders think otherwise. It also raises questions about responsibility under moral ignorance: to what extent are individuals or cultures blameworthy for wrongs they could not easily recognise at the time? Psychological research on ethical blindness underlines how framing, overconfidence in one’s own goodness, diffusion of responsibility, and distance from victims all make moral failures more likely and less visible.

Thinking about moral blind spots naturally leads to the idea of moral progress and “future-proofing.” Many accounts describe history as a gradual expansion of the circle of beings we take seriously: across lines of class, gender, race, species, and now perhaps even to ecosystems or AIs. If we suspect we too, as individuals and as a society, have our own serious blind spots, what should the appropriate response be? Some possibilities at the institutional level might include: practices that amplify dissenting voices, protect whistleblowers, foster open debate, and build in ethical reflection to professional and political life. For us as individuals, perhaps Cafe Philo discussions like this one could be one small step towards reducing our own blind spots?

Questions to ponder:

• What practices of today might look as obviously wrong to our descendants as slavery or child labour look to us?
• Are societies with moral blind spots blameworthy in the same way as individuals?
• Can we be responsible for what we cannot yet see as wrong?
• Which current institutions are most vulnerable to moral blind spots, and why?
• If we really believed we had serious moral blind spots now, what concrete habits would we adopt to address this?

Resources
Gerald Jones, Moral Blind Spots – I strongly recommend reading this before the meeting if you are able – by far the best popular article I’ve found on this topic

Another accessible overview if you want a second perspective: Moral Blind Spots

Moral_blindness (Wikipedia)

Stumbling Into Bad Behavior – short NYT article

I went to prison for my ethical blind spots. You don’t have to. Richard Bistrong – a business-focussed account (TED video)