Chapter 4 develops a challenge to two ideas that will be tempting to some: (i) harbouring and applying social attitudes that reflect social realities can only be good from an epistemic perspective, and (ii) harbouring and applying social attitudes that fail to reflect social realities can only be bad from an epistemic perspective. It is shown first that there can be epistemic costs associated with stereotyping, even where a stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. Then it is argued that there can be epistemic benefits associated with having social attitudes that fail to reflect these realities where the alternative would be to suffer the epistemic costs of stereotyping. It is argued that social attitudes that are egalitarian but fail to reflect social realities can be epistemically innocent and the lesser of two epistemic evils. Finally, the chapter outlines some implications of these points for existing theories of the ethics of stereotyping, accounts of epistemic injustice and moral encroachment views.
Belief, credence, and moral encroachment
