Statistical Resentment: Or, What’s Wrong with Acting, Blaming, and Believing on the Basis of Statistics Alone

Abstract

If a reliable friend tells you that a colleague has been badmouthing you, it may be appropriate to resent that colleague. Without reliable evidence, such evidence would not be appropriate, even if in fact the colleague has been badmouthing you. There is room, then, for the evidence law of resentment (and of morality). In this paper, we address one part of this evidence law of morality: Statistical evidence – say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other – can never render resenting your colleague appropriate. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. In this paper we put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory (including the problem that statistical resentment poses for our own past treatment of this topic); the epistemological context – with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here.