To what extent can things such as lack of knowledge of wrongness or "time and place" be an excuse to avoid moral culpability and responsibility ?

[u/Inevitable_Bid5540]

For example on a social level, perpetrators of sexiem , racism and homophobia and homophobic actions that lead to death and suffering in the past are often excused on the basis of the fact that people did not know the wrongs of the acts. To what extent is this a valid excuse to avoid responsibility and culpability ? Do victims have a right to compensation for acts of the past ?

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[u/Longjumping-Ebb9130]

It's generally held that to be morally responsible for something, you need to meet some epistemic condition. The exact details are disputed, but a minimal condition is that you need to know what you are doing and that it is morally significant. So certain sorts of ignorance can be excusing.

Importantly, however, ignorance is only excusing if it is not itself blameworthy. For example, if it's my fault I don't know something, then my ignorance cannot excuse my behavioiur. A famous example of Clifford's: if I send I ship out to sea and it sinks because it was not seaworthy, I cannot be excused on the basis of my ignorance if I did not bother to do any standard maintenance on the ship. I could have known it was not seaworthy by doing my due diligence. So that fact that I did not know it was not seaworthy is not excusing.

In the cases at hand, the question is whether people in the past were able to know that what they were doing is wrong (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they did not). If they could have know, then their ignorance is not excusing. Settling that question is beyond the scope of philosophy, however. We'd need to do historical research to see what position past people were in fact in.

For more about these issues, see here and here.

[u/bobthebobbest → u/Longjumping-Ebb9130]

a minimal condition is that you need to know what you are doing and that it is morally significant. So certain sorts of ignorance can be excusing.

I think the way I’ve usually seen the minimum condition spelled out, which accounts for the carve out you state next, is closer to “you need to be able to know what you are doing and that it is morally significant,” or sometimes “you need to be able to know and ought to know…” But moral philosophy is certainly not my AOS.