 Michele Moody-Adams defends a less lenient view about responsibility for oppression than Calhoun’s, dismissing in many cases the role of culture as a factor that justifies willful moral ignorance and that on these grounds exempts from responsibility those who act wrongly (Moody-Adams 1994). Her target is the view that being from a certain culture and adopting its practices absolves a person from responsibility for his actions. More specifically, she questions whether being unable to know, due to one’s upbringing in a culture, that certain actions are wrong, and being unable to question the morality of the society’s practices, absolves a person from responsibility for his actions. She defines “affected ignorance” as “choosing not to know what one can and should know” (296), as when we “ask no questions” when we suspect wrongdoing, or when we fail to acknowledge our human fallibility by hiding behind and blaming our culture for our own wrongdoing. Moody-Adams believes that moral ignorance is more a matter of our failings as human beings, and less a matter of “cultural limitations,” than some might believe. She argues against the moral ignorance position by noting that cultures are both created and transmitted by the people in them, that people modify or even radically revise them through their individual actions, and that people often act against cultural norms and sometimes act on desires that are in line with these norms but in ways not sanctioned by the culture (305). In short, cultures persist only because individuals capable of responsible action persist (292–293). Absolving from responsibility members of a culture for the wrongdoings that take place in the context of their culture misunderstands the tight connection between culture and agency, and denies the humanity of those who are rationally unimpaired and commit wrongdoing, even when they are influenced by cultural norms (306).