Definition: Willful blindness is a legal term, which means that if there is knowledge that you could have had or that you should have had, but choose not to have, you are still responsible. Willfully blind individuals seek to avoid liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting his or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable. For example, persons transporting packages containing illegal drugs have asserted that they never asked what the contents of the packages were and so lacked the requisite intent to break the law. Such defences have not succeeded and courts have argued that the defendant should have known what was in the package and exercised criminal recklessness by failing to find out.
Symptoms: Willful blindness can be recognized by the use of jargon. In order to ‘cover up’ a problem people will refrain from using ‘judgemental adjectives and speculation’. For example they will prefer using the word ‘issue’, rather than ‘problem’, and ‘discrepancy’ or ‘does not perform to design’ rather than ‘defect’. Concerning ‘animal welfare issues’ words like ‘animal suffering’, ‘rights’ or ‘exploitation’ will be avoided and the term ‘current/modern livestock farming’ will be used instead of ‘bio-industry’.
Other phenomena associated with willful blindness include inbreeding, obedience, reluctance to change, stress, fearfulness, suspicion and a tendency to cross one’s arms and point to others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else.
Pathogenesis: Willful blindness is caused by a perceived necessity. It may affect individuals and institutions, especially, when there are severe financial constraints. In the process of cost-cutting, ignorance becomes incredibly valuable, because once you start cutting to the bone you don’t want to know about the consequences of what you just did. Silence facilitates willful blindness. Even when many people in an organization may have a responsibility to fix a problem, nobody may take that responsibility, and hence act willfully blind. Predisposing factors for willful blindness include a deeply compassionate culture, a very steep hierarchy and size. In very large and complex organizations a true assessment of consequences is often almost impossible. Further predisposing factors include being exhausted or overstretched. If so, you can’t see, because you can’t think. Also, too many people from the same background will share the same values, beliefs and blind spots. In organizations where it isn’t felt to be safe to raise concerns or ask challenging questions, employees will focus on their task, obedient and conformist, and they suppose that because anyone can see the problem, someone else will do something. This is the main problem of willful blindness: that people are afraid to speak out, because they know they will be shot down, or imagine that they will.
Examples of willful blindness include the above-mentioned drug couriers, web providers denying they were responsible for illegal copy-right infringements on downloads of their users, the production of unsafe cars and aeroplanes, and medical errors like the practice of using x-ray technology to diagnose pregnant women (causing child cancer).
In an organization displaying willful blindness there will be a tendency to protect the system. If necessary the problem will be attributed to ‘a few bad apples’, which means that the system is immune. However, in willful blindness there is almost always a systemic failure.
It is also important to realize that the context can turn good people bad. Really good people can be transformed into bad guys by playing roles in a particular situation where that situation is validated by a system. This is what happened in Abu Ghraib, the American military run prison in Iraq where jailers, exhausted and abandoned by their superiors, humiliated prisoners and took pictures on their cell phones. One of the prison guards was an American patriot. Before Abu Ghraib he was active in Kuwait, trying to learn the language and working with children. He worked in the Abu Ghraib dungeon, starting his job starts at 4 pm for 12 hours, until 4 am in the morning. He slept in a prison cell in a different part of the prison, and he never left the prison for 3 months. This caused environmental overload. In addition, half of the prisoners had no clothes. They were naked all the time because they didn’t have enough prison uniforms. The prisoners didn’t speak English and there were only a few showers. This led to a gradual dehumanization. The prisoners seemed like, smelled like and looked like animals. If so, you begin to think of them as animals and treat them accordingly. At no point did the guards think that anything they were doing was wrong. Such is the power of the situation in causing willful blindness.
Therapy: To counteract willful blindness it is important to create a culture in which everyone can and wants to speak out. An example is what is called the ‘just culture’ in the Aviation industry. When it comes to safety performance competing companies openly collaborate. Required for establishing a just culture is for companies to make a public statement and to live up to the standards. It will take courage, skills and practice, e.g. it would involves hiring of more ethical personnel and the cultivation of conflict. People must be willing to take action in defence of people in need and foster a need heroic leadership. It helps if you can think of yourself as a hero in training.
Prognosis: It is doubtful if we will ever get rid of willful blindness. It’s main function is to protect the status-quo (until it is no longer tenable).
Animal welfare solutions: In the way we are presently treating animals all ingredients for willful blindness are present. Hence, there should be no doubt that willful blindness plays a major role in protecting the immoral and illegal interests of people, organizations and institutions responsible for major animal welfare infringements.
Sources: Margret Heffernan’s TED talk ‘Dare to disagree‘ (also available here). See also Willful blindness on Wikipedia.
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