DreamsJUDGE

Ignorance from the Latin ignorantia , is the condition that qualifies the ignorant , that is, the person who does not know about certain things that he could or should know. In certain cases, the term ignorance is associated with “crudeness”, understood as rudeness in the manners or ignorance of those “good manners” that, in general, are attributed to those who wanted or could follow an educational path .

human ignorance

The area of ​​”mandatory” knowledge includes knowledge of the law that cannot be ignored. The Latin phrase ” ignorantia legis non excusat ” synthetically expresses the legal maxim regarding the presumption of knowledge of the law. In turn, its meaning is “The law does not forgive the ignorant”, which means that it is assumed that the law is always available for the knowledge of the generality of the citizens. This criterion, except in some exceptions, is considered unavoidable by jurisprudence .

Next, we show you the types of ignorance and what their characteristics are.

Ignorance about a topic is defined as “rational” when the cost of gathering enough information about a topic to make an informed decision outweighs the reasonable potential benefit expected from the decision, that is, irrational, necessary to arrive at an answer.

Thus, this fact can have consequences for the quality of decisions taken by a large number of people, as in the case of general elections in which the probability that an individual vote will change the outcome is very small.

This term, coined by Anthony Downs, is almost always found in the economic field , especially in relation to the theory of public election. However, it is also used in other disciplines that study rationality and choice, including epistemology in philosophy and game theory.

example of rational ignorance

An example of this type of ignorance can be the case of a businessman who has to choose between two candidates to whom he offers to carry out a task at a price of 50 reais per hour. The time required to complete the task can be longer or shorter depending on the skills of the person performing it, so the entrepreneur will want to find the worker who finishes the job as quickly as possible. Suppose the cost of another day of interviewing candidates is 100 reais.

If the entrepreneur has already deduced from the interviews that both candidates will complete the task in a period between 195 and 205 hours, he can consider that the simplest thing would be to select the best candidate through some simple application method such as, for example, tossing a coin, in the instead of spending the necessary 100 reais to determine who is really the best for the job. This would save a maximum of 100 reais in labor costs.

In social psychology, the pluralistic type of ignorance is a process that involves people when they are within a group . Each thinks that the others have more information about the situation in the face of an ambiguous event. For this reason, people observe the behavior of others to try to interpret it correctly, possibly without taking into account that others do the same. This fact leads to a high probability of inactivity.

Generalizing is a process that occurs when several members of a group mistakenly think that they have different perceptions, beliefs or attitudes about the rest of the group. However, they behave like others in the belief that, as everyone behaves the same way, opinions within the group will be unanimous.

That is, as everyone has the same perception and behaves as if they are in complete agreement with the others, each will think that he is the only one who disagrees. This, in turn, will reinforce the propensity to conform , as people tend to conform to what they perceive as consensual opinion rather than acting on their perceptions and beliefs.

Although ignorance is real, for example, in cases where the offender was not aware of the incriminating law, this does not justify the subject in the eyes of the law, since each citizen has a general duty to inform himself of the laws in force. in your country. Therefore, we understand as “inevitable” a situation of absolutely exceptional ignorance in which the agent subject is involved.

Some examples of the kind of unavoidable ignorance are:

• Social isolation : the subject, due to a total lack of socialization , cannot be aware of the law that he subsequently failed to comply with. For example, if the person has lived completely isolated for years, without any kind of contact with the outside world.
• Low cultural degree : the offender’s cultural degree is so inferior to the average that the conscience of committing a crime is excluded. This circumstance occurs mainly in cases where the offender is a foreigner and has just joined society.
  
• Incongruity in the law : when there is a complete incongruity of the legislative text, so serious that it is possible to understand its scope. For example, when a law is so poorly written that it raises doubts about its meaning.
• Misguided jurisprudence : when the jurisprudential orientation induces to misinterpret the law and, as a consequence, to commit crimes.

However, they must take into account the special interpretive skills that certain people have because of their profession or other personal circumstances, which allow them to better understand the legislative text. For example, the foreigner’s ignorance of the law is excusable if he has recently lived in the territory and is unable to understand the language, asks for help from professionals in the legal sector and still commits the crime of being ill-advised.

We hope that you have understood the types of ignorance.