Can Ignorance of the Consequences Excuse Responsibility?

In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle examines voluntary and involuntary action. He distinguishes acting because of ignorance from merely acting while in an ignorant condition. If someone lacks knowledge of the particular circumstances, the action results from that ignorance, and the person later feels pain or regret, there is a stronger case for calling it involuntary. But a condition one has helped create, such as drunkenness, does not automatically excuse. The point is not whether someone can say ‘I didn’t know’, but how the ignorance arose and how it shaped the action.

Contemporary philosophy describes this as the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. Suppose a colleague wrongly labels a file as public and you forward it without encountering any warning, only to learn later that it contained private material. You remain part of the causal explanation of the disclosure, but you may not deserve the same moral blame. If the file was plainly marked confidential and you ignored the label because you were rushing, however, the ignorance may have resulted from avoidable negligence.

My view is that ignorance neither always excuses nor never does. We should ask separately: what could the person have known at the time, did they have a reasonable duty to check, and was ignoring the evidence itself a choice? This also separates causal responsibility, responsibility to repair, and blameworthiness. Even when someone does not deserve condemnation, they may still be best placed to explain what happened and help repair it. Responsibility is not an on-off switch; it is a discriminating judgement about knowledge, control and consequences.

https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility/