Epistemic Duties Research Articles

Towards an Epistemology of ‘Speciesist Ignorance’

AbstractThe literature on the epistemology of ignorance already discusses how certain forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism, are perpetuated by the ignorance of individuals and groups. However, little attention has been given to how speciesism—a form of discrimination on the basis of species membership—is sustained through ignorance. Of the few animal ethicists who explicitly discuss ignorance, none have related this concept to speciesism as a form of discrimination. However, it is crucial to explore this connection, I argue, as ignorance is both an integral part of the injustice done to animals as well as an obstacle to improving their treatment. In order to adequately criticize sustained structural speciesism and injustices towards animals, I develop an epistemological account of ‘speciesist ignorance’. I begin by defining and distinguishing between individual and group-based accounts of speciesist ignorance. I argue that humans, taken as a group, enjoy a position of privilege, which allows them to comfortably remain ignorant of their participation in collective wrongdoings towards animals. Additionally, I point out that speciesist ignorance is structurally encouraged and thereby maintains the dominant view that the human-animal-relationship, as it stands, is just. In sum, this article lays the groundwork for a social epistemology of speciesist ignorance. In particular, it informs further debate about individual and institutional epistemic duties to inquire into speciesism and to inform the public, about the moral culpability of ignorant actions, and about effective animal advocacy and policy which actively rejects speciesist ignorance.

How (Not) To Wrong Others with Our Thoughts: A Liberal Challenge Against the Possibility of Doxastic Wronging

In recent years, a number of authors have claimed that we can wrong each other simply by having certain beliefs—in particular sexist, racist, ableist etc. beliefs—about each other. So far, those who argue for the possibility of so-called doxastic wronging have tried to defend this idea by focusing on issues of doxastic control and coordination. In this paper, I raise a distinctly moral challenge against the possibility of doxastic wronging. I show that the idea of doxastic wronging runs afoul of the liberal principle according to which all moral obligations have to be justifiable vis-à-vis those they presume to bind. In addition, I argue that there is a better way to account for the fundamental intuition driving the debate: instead of assuming the possibility of doxastic wronging and the morally grounded epistemic duty it implies, we should conceptualize what is morally problematic about bigoted beliefs in terms of the harm they constitute for their targets.

Evidentialism and Epistemic Duties to Inquire

Abstract Are there epistemic duties to inquire? The idea enjoys intuitive support. However, prominent evidentialists argue that our only epistemic duty is to believe well (i.e., to have doxastically justified beliefs), and doing so does not require inquiry. Against this, I argue that evidentialists are plausibly committed to the idea that if we have epistemic duties to believe well, then we have epistemic duties to inquire. This is because on plausible evidentialist views of evidence possession (i.e., views that result in plausible theories of evidentialist justification), inquiry is sometimes a necessary constitutive means of forming doxastically justified beliefs—beliefs that are proportioned to and based on one's evidence. So, either evidentialist views of evidence possession commit them to epistemic duties to inquire or they lead to independently implausible theories of evidentialist justification. My discussion also has important implications for the zetetic turn in epistemology, since I argue that evidentialists who are staunchly opposed to epistemic norms on inquiry have reason to reconsider.

Fake News and the Responsibilities of Citizens

This article argues that citizens are responsible for the way they participate in political communication and debate, including for the quality of the pieces of information they post or disseminate on social media. This view contrasts with approaches that prioritise institutional responsibility in combating misleading information. Instead, in the article’s perspective, public and private institutional interventions are justified only when they aim at sustaining citizens in upholding their epistemic duties and contribute to an environment that facilitates responsible communicative exchanges.

Plantinga’s Interpretation of Epistemological Deontologism

Alvin Plantinga challenges the rooted tradition of thinking about justification as the subject’s fulfillment of his or her epistemic duty. I try to show that, in several respects, Plantinga misinterprets the idea of epistemic duties and that, consequently, his argument against deontologism is not sound. I begin by summarizing Plantinga’s understanding of epistemological deontologism and then offer my own critique of this interpretation, which focuses on five issues: the problem of recognizability of epistemic duty, describing epistemic duty as subjective, Plantinga’s assumption of the principle of obviousness, the understanding of justification as absence of guilt, and the issue of doxastic voluntarism.

You ought to have known: positive epistemic norms in a knowledge-first framework

There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn’t, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program offers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what’s wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering account of positive epistemic norms that describe epistemic duties to believe.

Responsibility for Collective Epistemic Harms

AbstractDiscussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility that fills this gap. Building on Hindriks’s (2019) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the epistemic duty to join forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry.

Our Epistemic Duties in Scenarios of Vaccine Mistrust

ABSTRACT What, if anything, should we do when someone says they don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change? Or that they worry that a COVID-19 vaccine might be dangerous? We argue that in general, we face an epistemic duty to object to such assertions, qua instances of science denial and science sceptical discourse, respectively. Our argument builds on recent discussions in social epistemology, specifically surrounding the idea that we ought to speak up against (epistemically) problematic assertions so as to fulfil an important epistemic obligation – namely, preventing epistemic harms in others. We show that both science denial (SD) and vaccine hesitant (VH) discourses are harmful in a distinctively epistemic sense, and as such generate an especially strong duty to voice our disagreement. As we also argue, this obligation is nonetheless defeasible: depending on the situational features of those involved, voicing an objection to VH discourse may actually end up doing more harm than good. We conclude by tracing what seems like a promising path towards restoring well-placed public trust in scientific testifiers. Doing so is key in order to guarantee equitable access to warranted beliefs about important subject matters, such as the safety of vaccines, to all segments of society.

Global Variation in the Basic Reproduction Number of COVID-19

Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis” (Winsberg et al. 2020). In their paper, Winsberg et al. argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on Winsberg et al.’s contentions that knowledge about COVID-19 resultant projections were inadequate; that epidemiologists were biased in their estimates of relevant figures; that there was insufficient evidence supporting the efficacy of lockdowns; and that lockdowns cause more harm than good. We argue that none of these claims are sufficiently supported by evidence, thus impairing their case against lockdowns, and leaving open the question of whether lockdowns were justified.

Professional competence and business ethics

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine if the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to persecute Madoff is, in fact, an ethical failure. The authors turn to the extension of Aristotelian theory of moral values, virtue epistemology, to identify specific failures. The authors generalize this study’s conclusions to an overall responsibility of regulatory agencies to exercise epistemic virtues in their decision-making process. The authors explore how behavioral biases confound the execution of epistemic duty, and how awareness of behavioral biases can alleviate epistemic failures. The authors conclude this study with recommendations to prevent future frauds of Madoff proportions.Design/methodology/approachThe authors rely on recent advances in virtue epistemology and behavioral finance. The authors combine these two theoretical approaches to better understand the duty of competence inherent in being a finance professional, and even more so in being a regulator entrusted with overseeing financial industry, and psychological biases that may prevent finance professionals and regulators from performing this duty.FindingsThe paper concludes that the SEC employees failed to exercise epistemic virtues in their handling of the complaints implicating Madoff’s firm of fraud. This failure reveals a consistent pattern of behavioral biases in decision-making. The authors posit that knowledge of ethical theory, specifically virtue epistemology, as well as awareness of behavioral biases, which inhibit epistemically virtuous cognitive process, can improve the functioning of both finance industry and its overseers. The authors suggest that future finance professionals and regulators need to acquire this knowledge while pursuing their undergraduate education: it is the duty of business schools to facilitate this progress.Originality/valueThis paper combines the theory of virtue epistemology with the current knowledge of behavioral biases, which distort rational decision-making, to explain the failures of regulators to analyze fraud reports. The authors extend this finding to recommend the inclusion of the theory of virtue epistemology in business schools’ ethics curriculum.

Epistemic injustice in psychiatric practice: epistemic duties and the phenomenological approach

Epistemic injustice is a kind of injustice that arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic subject (eg, a knower, a reasoner) is wrongfully denied. In recent years it has been...

Editor's Note, December 2021.

Editor’s Note, December 2021 Quill Kukla This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal offers essays about risk, social values, and how to act in the face of risk, especially when our risk assessments are socially freighted. It is made up of two clusters of related papers. The first cluster consists of two papers that explore the ways in which our risk assessments are shaped by moral panic around HIV, and its accompanying legacy of fear, homophobia, and stigma. These papers take up ethical and social dimensions of PrEP (the drug that prophylactically prevents people from passing on HIV) and of blood donation in the face of social and medical policies based on risk distortions. The second cluster of papers is a back-and forth exchange in response to an essay we published last year in our special issue on the pandemic: “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis,” by Eric Winsberg, Jason Brennan, and Chris Suprenant (Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30:3, 215-242, also available at https://kiej.georgetown.edu/leaders-violated-epistemic-duties-special-issue/). This paper explored the ethics and epistemology behind governments’ decisions to impose lockdowns to contain the pandemic, and it argued for the value-laden and distorted role of risk in the models that governments relied upon and how they were used. The current issue contains a critical response to this paper, the authors’ reply, and a final reply from the critics. In “Contextualizing Risk in the Ethics of PrEP as HIV Prevention: The Lived Experiences of MSM,” Michael Montess argues that the biomedical conception of risks and benefits that has been used when assessing PrEP use is too narrow. We have focused on questions of efficacy and safety, to the exclusion of exploring the richer social, cultural, political, and interpersonal context in which PrEP use occurs. Homophobia and moral panic around HIV have framed our vision of sex on PrEP simply as ‘risky sex,’ without nuance about how PrEP use shapes relationships and impacts local culture within the MSM community. But PrEP is a complex social [End Page vii] intervention. For instance, its use may enable men to participate in group sex, poly sex, and anonymous sex, which are seen simply as ‘risky sex’ by the homophobic mainstream but which also have rich cultural meanings and roles in the gay community. But at the same time, its use may signal to a partner a plan to violate monogamy agreements, or it may help undermine a tradition of seeing sex with condoms as a way of signaling care and trustworthiness. This fascinating paper tells a whole multifaceted story about a changing and vulnerable sexual culture through the lens of a single drug. Kurt Blankschaen’s essay, “And If It Takes Lying: The Ethics of Blood Donor Non-Compliance,” asks: if unjustified policies based on risk distortion, racism, and homophobia block some people from giving blood, is it ethical to lie in order to donate, when you have good reason to believe your blood is actually safe? Donating blood is prima facie an ethical good, so can we lie to bring about that good, when what is causing the need to lie is an ill-informed and unjust policy? Blankschaen looks at donation restrictions on men who sleep with men (MSM), Haitians, and people with tattoos. He argues that in each case, the restrictions do not properly track risk, and are grounded in a moral panic around HIV, largely left over from an earlier era. His conclusion is that lying in these cases is morally permissible although not morally obligatory. The exchange concerning Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant’s paper is in three parts. In the original paper, written during the first few months of the pandemic in Spring 2020, Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant argue that governments violated their epistemic duties by imposing lockdowns without sufficient justification, given the quality of the data and models they had available to them. They look at the values that drove these decisions and risk assessments, which led to an underemphasis on the risks of lockdowns and an overinflation of the risks of COVID infection. They argue that governments...

Were lockdowns justified? A return to the facts and evidence.

Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, "How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis" (Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant 2020). In their paper, Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant's contentions that knowledge about COVID-19 resultant projections were inadequate; that epidemiologists were biased in their estimates of relevant figures; that there was insufficient evidence supporting the efficacy of lockdowns; and that lockdowns cause more harm than good. We argue that none of these claims are sufficiently supported by evidence, thus impairing their case against lockdowns, and leaving open the question of whether lockdowns were justified.

The Epistemic Duties of Philosophers: An Addendum

In "Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and Evidence", we argue that Eric Winsberg, Jason Brennan and Chris Surprenant fail to make their case that initial COVID-19 lockdowns were unjustified, due to the fact their argument rests on erroneous factual claims. As is made clear by a response in this volume, the authors mistakenly take us to have been defending the imposition of lockdowns. Here, we clarify the aims of our original paper, and emphasise the importance of getting the facts right when making philosophical arguments in such a contentious domain.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Epistemic responsibility of industrial enterprise engineer

The concept of epistemic responsibility of an industrial enterprise engineer is introduced. The concept of an engineer’s epistemic responsibility is inspired by a situation of epistemic distrust in which the engineer finds himself as an expert. The definition of ‘epistemic’ in relation to the word ‘responsibility’ allows asking a question, what are the characteristics of the knowledge with which the engineer substantiates decision-making. For the first time in the domestic philosophy of engineering, epistemic duties of an engineer of an industrial enterprise are formulated: the duty of due diligence and epistemic zeal. The general epistemological attitude of an engineer in an extreme situation is skepticism. The author claims that the role of anomalous evidence in establishing the truth is an epistemologically difficult problem in investigating an extreme situation. In an extreme situation, the engineer’s epistemic responsibility is embodied in the following: to prevent self-deception and potentially unintentional deception of others in relation to the engineering solution; do not mislead workers who do not have the proper epistemic experience and do not allow them to be mistaken; take into account abnormal or seemingly questionable information and consider it properly.

How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis

:In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, many world leaders imposed universal lockdowns. We argue that these restrictions have not been accompanied by the epistemic practices morally required for their adoption or continuation. While in theory lockdowns can be justified, governments did not meet and have not yet met their justificatory burdens. We will not argue that less stringent policies were optimal or better justified. Rather, we explain how government leaders failed and have continued to fail to meet their epistemic duties by relying upon data, models, and evidence of insufficiently good quality to justify their actions.

Эпистемическое обоснование: деонтологические аспекты

The article analyzes the problems related to the philosophical analysis of epistemic duties – ranging from doubts about their existence as duties of a special kind to discussing the boundaries of such obligations and the limits of responsibility of the epistemic subject. Special attention is paid to the consideration of epistemic behavior that goes beyond the "call of duty”, supererogatory actions. The paper describes the main characteristics and examples of such behavior and makes a conclusion about the need to block or substantially clarify the imperatives of epistemic rationality, which require actions, although commendable from the point of view of standard epistemic normativity but lying beyond the scope of what is epistemically due.

Breaking the epistemic pornography habit

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze some of the epistemically pernicious effects of the use of the internet and social media. In light of this analysis, it introduces the concept of epistemic pornography and argues that epistemic agents both can and should avoid consuming and sharing epistemic pornography.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on research on epistemic virtue, cognitive biases, social media use and its epistemic consequences, fake news, paternalistic nudging, pornography, moral philosophy, moral elevation and moral exemplar theory to analyze the epistemically pernicious effects of the internet and social media.FindingsThere is a growing consensus that the internet and social media activate and enable human cognitive biases leading to what are here called “failures of epistemic virtue.” Common formulations of this problem involve the concept of “fake news,” and strategies for responding to the problem often have much in common with paternalistic “nudging.” While fake news is a problem and the nudging approach holds out promise, the paper concludes that both place insufficient emphasis on the agency and responsibility of users on the internet and social media, and that nudging represents a necessary but not sufficient response.Originality/valueThe essay offers the concept of epistemic pornography as a concept distinct from but related to “fake news” – distinct precisely because it places greater emphasis on personal agency and responsibility, and following recent literature on moral elevation and moral exemplars, as a heuristic that agents might use to economize their efforts at resisting irrational cognitive biases and attempting to live up to their epistemic duties.

The Power of Stories: Responsibility for the Use of Autobiographical Stories in Mental Health Debates

Autobiographical stories do not merely offer insights into someone’s experience but can constitute evidence or even serve as self-standing arguments for a given viewpoint in the context of public debates. Such stories are likely to exercise considerable influence on debate participants’ views and behaviour due to their being more vivid, engaging, and accessible than other forms of evidence or argument. In this paper we are interested in whether there are epistemic and moral duties associated with the use of autobiographical stories in mental health debates. We argue that debate participants have a responsibility to assess a story as evidence or as an argument when the story is put forward to support a given viewpoint. We also make some preliminary suggestions about what can be done to ensure that the use of stories contributes to the variety of the resources available to debate participants without compromising the quality of the argumentation or increasing polarisation.