Little Girls Playing. Sweet
One beach-colored. One brown
One Loved
One Loved a Little Less
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Abstract
This paper is about an overlooked aspect—the cognitive or epistemic aspect—of the moral demand we place on one another to be treated well. We care not only how people act towards us and what they say of us, but also what they believe of us. That we can feel hurt by what others believe of us suggests both that beliefs can wrong and that there is something we epistemically owe to each other. This proposal, however, surprises many theorists who claim it lacks both intuitive and theoretical support. This paper argues that the proposal has intuitive support and is not at odds with much contemporary theorizing about what we owe to each other.
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Notes
As Obama notes, “there's no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.” See: http://people.com/celebrity/the-obamas-how-we-deal-with-our-own-racist-experiences/.
This case is borrowed from Basu and Schroeder (2019).
One might worry that the truth of these “should” claims requires an impossible (or at least false) thesis of doxastic voluntarism. If our belief-forming practices are involuntary, one might think it futile to make demands on belief. In response to this, I would argue that we are often responsible for beliefs we cannot even indirectly control. It is my view that we cannot believe at will for any reason whatsoever; though we can (and often do) voluntarily select what evidence we look for and how we choose to interpret it and weigh it. I take our beliefs and how we respond to evidence reflects (or expresses) certain evaluative stances that we take. We can, as Pamela Hieronymi (2006, 2008) suggests, exercise indirect long-term control over many of our beliefs by choosing how we engage in inquiry, what sources we look to, etc., and those whom we wrong through our beliefs can properly demand that we evaluate evidence in both epistemically and morally appropriate ways therein developing our epistemic/moral characters. I take it as a datum that an epistemic character is bad or undesirable if it would allow the person endowed with it to come to believe that someone is more likely to be a waiter on the basis of their race. We can demand that all people show more moral care than this with regard to their beliefs about others. Just as we are responsible and can be held accountable for the development of our moral character, I suggest that we are responsible and can be held accountable for the development of our epistemic character; though, as stated above, control is not necessary for moral responsibility on the view I favor. For more on this, see Basu and Schroeder (2019).
You might worry here that Mark’s response in this case—feeling wronged by Maria’s belief and insisting that she not believe that he has been drinking—is a tactic commonly used as a tool of emotional abuse within relationships. For example, imagine Mary and Hannah. Mary has been cheating on Hannah, and when questioned about who she's been texting, Mary feigns that she’s been wounded by Hannah’s request. Surely, Mary insists, if Hannah truly loved her she would trust her, Hannah wouldn’t insist on looking at Mary’s phone and snooping through her texts. This demand for partiality, this demand that Hannah grant Mary special leeway and discount the evidence before her illustrates how abusive practices are distortions of standard interpersonal expectations. Further, that these demands for partiality can be effectively used within a relationship both for good and for bad provides further evidence for thinking that the demand that one not take an agent-neutral stance towards the attitudes one forms of their partner is a practice we expect within relationships.
The Racist Hermit and The Security Guard have both appeared in previous work (Basu 2018b). In “The Wrongs of Racist Beliefs” I use these cases to argue that the wrong of the belief cannot be fully located in or explained by only the downstream features of the belief, i.e., the believer’s action. This is part of my argument that part of the wrong done in these cases must be located in the belief itself. This paper is a continuation of the previous project by showing how the racist hermit and other characters I've presented in my work demonstrate a moral failing which is an instantiation of a more general way in which we can wrong others through what we believe: by failing to give them what they are owed.
See also Patricia Williams’s (1992, pp. 44–46) retelling of her experience in a Benetton store.
One might worry that Sherlock Holmes’s tendency to form beliefs about others in the way that he does is something that is impossible for him to correct. If we assume that Holmes is neurodivergent in this respect, then I’m inclined to agree that his obligations to others are mitigated. Folks who are neurotypical may be able to relate to others in ways that are impossible for Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes cannot but relate to others as though they are objects or causal phenomena, and as a result, a moral theory that concludes that Holmes is constantly wronging others seems perverse, it compounds his plight. This objection is part of a larger problem in moral philosophy concerning neurodiversity, disability, and the demands of morality. For the time being, I must set this issue aside, but I want to thank Regina Rini for pressing me to think more about this issue.
See Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery.
One might object that anger is not the appropriate response because anger is not virtuous. It might be reasonable or excused to feel anger, after all, it can be morally exhausting to be magnanimous or forgiving or to laugh off the fifth time you’ve been pulled over by police or mistaken for a staff member. Nussbaum (2016) puts forward such an argument. But, as her critics note, anger plays an important role as a response to injustice in the world and provides important information and evidence about injustice (see Bell 2009; Srinivasan 2016, 2018; Bommarito 2017; Lorde 1984). For the purposes of this paper, I will just follow the latter’s assumptions about the role of emotions in guiding inquiry into injustice.
Although I am sympathetic to this general Kantian picture, there are many things to dislike about it. For example, it is not the case that all things in the world in virtue of not being people are thereby essentially replaceable, nor can they be essentially priced.
Much of my thinking on this topic has been influenced by Steve Bero, in particular Bero (MS).
Thanks to Gabbrielle Johnson for suggesting this case.
I should briefly note that this point is controversial and rejected by many pragmatists. See, for example, Zimmerman (2018).
For a similar account of moral encroachment on our evidential threshold for justification, see Basu (2018, chapter 3) and “Moral Encroachment and the Moral Stakes of Racist Beliefs” in preparation of Philosophical Issues, Bolinger (2018), and Moss (2018a, b). For a contrasting Strawsonian epistemology that is not cashed out in terms of evidential thresholds, see also Marušić and White (2018) in which they argue that what is required of within our relationships and our shared activities of reasoning is an epistemic permission or a default entitlement to believe others.
Marušić’s (2015) view is heavily influenced by Kant, Sartre, and Strawson. He uses Sartre’s philosophy to develop what he calls a Sartean response—approaching the question of what to do as a practical question, not as a theoretical question—as another way of developing the Kantian dictum that we act under the idea of freedom, as well as Strawson's claim that we take a participant point of view toward ourselves.
Beeghly (2018) raises important challenges to fully articulating what is morally wrong with not treating someone as an individual. I haven't tried to answer these challenges here, but have introduced an important starting point for recognizing that there is something that we epistemically owe to each other.
Thanks to Briana Toole for suggesting this case.
This is also amongst one of the many reasons that representation matters.
Thanks to Gabbrielle Johnson for pressing me to say more on this point.
Thanks to Wendy Salkin, Serene Khader, and Aarthy Vaidyanathan for all pressing me to say more on this point. Also, thanks to an anonymous referee for the Pat Parker poem.
Perhaps we already have reason to think there exists a moral-epistemic virtue of this kind: being woke.
I attempt to do this in my discussion of moral encroachment and how the moral stakes of our social situations can raise the evidential threshold for justification in Basu (2018a) (chapter 3) which is also in preparation of “Moral Encroachment and the Moral Stakes of Racist Beliefs” in Philosophical Issues.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussions, there are a lot of people I want to draw special attention to and I apologize to anyone I forget. In alphabetical order: Mike Ashfield, Renee Bolinger, Endre Begby, Stephen Bero, Kenny Easwaran, Stephen Finlay, Pamela Hieronymi, Gabbrielle Johnson, Robin Jeshion, Shieva Kleinschmidt, Dustin Locke, Maegan Fairchild, Kathryn Pogin, Mark Schroeder, Regina Rini, Briana Toole, Ralph Wedgwood, and Aaron Zimmerman. Additionally, I’d like to thank audiences at Claremont McKenna College, Princeton University, the 2018 Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and the Vancouver Summer Philosophy Conference.
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Basu, R. What we epistemically owe to each other. Philos Stud 176, 915–931 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1219-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1219-z