In assessing degrees of judgmental blame, "powers of agency" must also be taken into account. In other words, a person must show evidence of "sufficient cognitive powers" as well as "sufficient powers of deliberation . . . [and] volition" or self-control (Jones, 28-9). Armed with these standards of individual capacity (notably situated along a continuum) and the aforementioned features of a blameworthy act, it becomes easier to discuss the differences between non-culpable and culpable ignorance. According to Jones and others, "People who do not realize the nature of what they are doing and are not to blame for their ignorance are not to blame for the wrong they do" (69). Logically, then, the application of culpability only becomes necessary when a person performs a wrong act out of an ignorance for which he/she is at fault for incurring. For example, one who performs a wrong act out of negligence, a moral defect in violation of role responsibility, is at fault because the lack of a moral virtue or presence of a vice, which triggered the negligence, is evidence of a defective character (Jones, 69).
The debate over culpability in regards to the Holocaust often centers on the claim by many Germans that they were ignorant of the systematic killing of Jews as part of the Final Solution. While it would be unfair to make sweeping generalizations, the majority of historical evidence points to the exact opposite conclusion. Rather, it is precisely the prevalence of evasive self-deception or "willful ignorance" that connotes blame on the vast majority of German people. In Chapter 4, Jones cites Michael W. Martin's definition of evasive self-deception as discussed in Martin's Self-Deception and Morality:.
Deceiving oneself is the evasion of full self-acknowledgment of some truth or of what one would view as truth if one were to confront an issue squarely. The truth or apparent truths may concern oneself, others, one's immediate situation, or the world at large.
