It is my position that any legal framework that seeks to criminalise transmission of HIV needs to be sensitive to the ways in which the act can be mitigated by moral or factual ignorance. It is a negative, of course, to transmit the virus but officials attempting to produce such legislation need to be wary of the ways in which individuals could be excused of the act by virtue of their ignorance of the moral and factual aspects of the illness.
Moral ignorance would be the situation where an individual has no reason to suspect they carry HIV and ultimately transmit it through this ignorance. If I were to make a peanut butter sandwich for a friend for example and they sustained an anaphylactic reaction from a non disclosed peanut allergy I doubt many would find me culpable.
Non-moral ignorance would be the situation in which an individual is aware that they have a degree of risk of having HIV but have not taken steps to confirm this and subsequently inoculate another person. A similar example would be a physician who doesn't know that a patient is penicillin allergic but is too lazy to ask and as a result the patient sustains an anaphylactic reaction. In this situation most would find against the doctor. When ignorance is wilful or stems from negligence, it does not count as an excuse.
The latter paragraph is the intuition that leads us to blame people for their negligence when they ‘should have known better’ but not in cases when knowing the potential for harm is impossible. Attributions of blame for sexual transmission of infections reflect this principle. A man with human papillomavirus (HPV) cannot be tested for the infection, so he cannot be blamed if he unknowingly transmits HPV to his partner. Yet unknowing transmission is not always excused. For example, people with reason to believe they have HIV may be culpable for negligence and therefore blameworthy for transmission if they chose to remain wilfully ignorant.
It is my opinion however that both moral and non-moral ignorance can sometimes excuse wrongdoing. What of yours?
