It's actually quite a good design idea because it is often the case that lower level code knows everything that can go wrong but has no idea what to do about it

It's actually quite a good design idea because it is often the case that lower level code knows everything that can go wrong but has no idea what to do about it. Higher level code has this knowledge. For an example, I remember reading a C library for handling some common encoding. It simply swallowed format errors because it didn't want to fail the whole function for them and didn't have a way to communicate anything was wrong. In a conditional system this could have been a condition and the default function could be set up to ignore it, for example.