Epistemic Innocence and the Ethics of Stereotypes

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.

Beyond Bad Beliefs

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of bad beliefs, beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called moral encroachment, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s Groundwork, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness.

A Tale of Two Doctrines

In this chapter, Basu argues that morality might bear on belief in at least two conceptually distinct ways. The first is that morality might bear on belief by bearing on questions of justification. The claim that it does is the doctrine of moral encroachment. The second is that morality might bear on belief given the central role belief plays in mediating, and thereby constituting, our relationships with one another. The claim that it does is the doctrine of doxastic wronging. Though conceptually distinct, the two doctrines overlap in important ways. This chapter provides clarification on the relationship between the two, providing reasons throughout that we should accept both.

Moral Constraints on Belief?

The assumption that moral normativity and epistemic normativity run on separate tracks has recently come under pressure from developments such as “moral encroachment” and “doxastic morality.” Motivating these developments is the idea that in morally charged scenarios—for instance where we stand to impart unwarranted harms on others by forming certain beliefs about them—our epistemic requirements change: beliefs that would be justified by the evidence in a morally inert scenario may no longer be justified once the “moral stakes” are taken into account. In this sense, morality can act as a constraint on rational belief formation. This chapter argues that none of these approaches can carry out the task set for them. Specifically, both founder on the fact that moral and non-moral reasoning are often deeply entangled: even if we agreed about the moral principles, our assessment of who falls under the principles would depend on our further, non-moral beliefs.

Akrasia and Epistemic Impurism

This essay provides a novel argument for impurism, the view that certain non-truth-relevant factors can make a difference to a belief's epistemic standing. I argue that purists, unlike impurists, are forced to claim that certain ‘high-stakes’ cases rationally require agents to be akratic. Akrasia is one of the paradigmatic forms of irrationality. So purists, in virtue of calling akrasia rationally mandatory in a range of cases with no obvious precedent, take on a serious theoretical cost. By focusing on akrasia, and on the nature of the normative judgments involved therein, impurists gain a powerful new way to frame a core challenge for purism. They also gain insight about the way in which impurism is true: my argument motivates the claim that there is moral encroachment in epistemology.

Moral Encroachment, Wokeness, and the Epistemology of Holding

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding failures. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding.

Toward an Analytic Theology of Liberation

This chapter attempts to diagnose and critique the relative lack of interest in liberation theology as a research programme in analytic theology. After offering analyses of what constitutes ‘analytic theology’ and ‘liberation’ theology respectively and showing that the two are compatible, I argue that the epistemic good theology seeks—that of producing true explanatory theories—is subject to pragmatic and moral encroachment by other sorts of goods, including the good of serving the needs of the oppressed in society. Accordingly, I conclude that Christian theology ought to recognize liberatory interests as a norm of theological inquiry, and that instances of Christian analytic theology that are not also instances of liberation theology ought to be regarded as instances of bad theology.