Abstract
It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief (Baker in Pac Philos Q 68:1–13, 1987; Keller in Philos Pap 33(3):329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116(3):498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality (in particular, it eschews both Pragmatic Encroachment and Epistemic Permissivism); it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality.
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Notes
This could be expanded to speak instead (or in addition) of credences, but as the literature to date has focused on belief, I will follow the literature.
Notice that Stroud’s own formulation here (and in what follows) is descriptive rather than normative—she is describing what we do, rather than what we “owe.” But it is clear from her presentation that she thinks that we do as we ought to do.
Here I disregard for the sake of simplicity the question whether moral values themselves can be in conflict with one another, giving rise to the need to distinguish prima facie moral duties with ultima facie moral duties. The picture could easily be modified to accommodate this point, but I won’t bother doing so here.
This assumes that S is moderately reflective.
In what follows I will be focusing on the case in which the information comes from one’s friend’s own mouth. In the case in which one gets information about one’s friend from a third party, the analysis will be slightly different. But even in those cases the friends know of each other that each has practical reasons to preserve the friendship and to avoid damaging it; and this might include behaving in certain ways and not in others.
See e.g. Holton (1994) and Hinchman (2005). While I do not endorse Hinchman’s account of the epistemology of testimony emerging from the idea of telling as “inviting to trust” (for which see Goldberg (2011, 2015), for present purposes I regard this as an apt description of an aspect of the interpersonal nature of the act of telling.
The idea that a speaker might have affective reasons for truth-telling is itself a point that has been made by many others, from many different points of view. See e.g. Baier (1986), Baker (1987), Jones (1996, 2004), and Hawley (2014b). Of these, Hawley is particularly clear about this: “it is often more reasonable to believe your friends will prove trustworthy to you than to believe this of strangers, since your friends are objectively more likely to fulfil your trust, however they behave to others” (2014b: 2037). I will discuss Hawley’s view at greater length below.
The case in which the information comes from a third party can be handled similarly. There, for A’s part, the danger to the friendship comes when either A disbelieves something good about S or believes something bad about S, when A gets this information from a third party, and when A’s (dis)belief in question does not match the facts.
It is to be noted that these practical reasons go beyond what an ordinary speaker has in making assertions. This is why A might think to herself, “Surely S wouldn’t lie to me.” Interestingly, if a third party, T, knew that S and A were good friends and that S just addressed her assertion that p to A, T herself could reason analogously: “Surely S wouldn’t lie to A.” (With thanks to [person’s name suppressed to preserve anonymity] for noting this third-person analogue, in discussion.) Of course, there is one possibility A is in a position to rule out that overhearer T is not: the possibility that S and A are conspiring to get someone to reason in the precise way described above, thereby getting any overhearer who knows of S’s and A’s friendship to believe that p with great confidence. (For a discussion of the normative pressure deriving simply from the nature of assertion, as opposed to friendship, see Goldberg (2015)).
If there are other practical reasons that S acts on, this must be because those reasons outweigh her value-reflecting practical reasons of friendship, in which case her valuing those other things is so great she is willing to risk serious damage to the friendship itself to preserve them—and S should anticipate that A would be able to work this out. It should also be clear that even as friends have value-reflecting practical reasons to preserve the friendship, they may at the same time have practical reasons in support of acting in ways that would antagonize the friendship. (By lying to a friend one might hope to cover up what would ultimately be more damaging to the friendship.) Clearly, as epistemic subjects aiming to fix beliefs regarding our friends, we must take into account all of the practical reasons they have. See the last two paragraphs of Sect. 4 for further discussion. (With thanks to an anonymous referee for indicating the need for this latter point.).
This is why, though it is “bruising” whenever one is not believed (Anscombe 1979), it is particularly bruising not to be believed by one’s friends, since in effect this makes clear that the friend is confident enough in the falsity of what one says that he is willing to risk damaging the friendship (where the damage would arise in the case in which one was, after all, trustworthy on this occasion).
The idea that there are potential costs associated with forming negative beliefs about friends is a fairly common one. The claim that these costs might be used as part of an argument against Epistemic Partiality, as I am trying to do here, has been explicitly made only by a select few. For a particularly clear statement of this, see e.g. Kawall (2013: 364–365) and McHugh (2013: 1124), and Hawley (2014b: 2037). See below for further discussion.
See e.g. Holton (1994) for a defense of the thesis that we can decide to trust.
Indeed, more work needs to be done by those who would defend EPF to show that such a view is consistent with a denial of the doctrine of doxastic voluntarism. Otherwise, there is a brief and compelling argument against EPF from the falsity of that doctrine.
An alternative analysis is possible: perhaps Juan should suspend until he collects new evidence. For an excellent discussion of the epistemological dimensions of suspension, see Friedman (2013).
Perhaps it will be said that this reflects badly on cases not involving friends, where we don’t have this extra motivation. So be it; the point is that we don’t owe it to strangers to double- and triple-check.
I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to consider this matter at length.
Including whatever additional evidence you have value-reflecting practical reason to acquire.
See e.g. Stroud (2006: 506).
I thank an anonymous referee for indicating the need to take this up more explicitly.
Above I pointed to two risks: that of failing to trust a friend who is worthy of one’s trust (as in cases in which it is the friend who tells one something); and that of acquiring false beliefs of something untoward about one’s friend (as in cases in which the information comes from a third party).
As noted in the introduction, she discusses only the special case in which EPFET is at issue.
Here is what Kawall says: “given the serious harms that could result from believing a negative claim about a friend, an agent would require significant justification in order for it to be rational for her to act as if the claim were true. In turn, this means that the level of epistemic justification that would be required for the agent to know that p would also be especially high in such a case. It is epistemically required that the good friend seek greater evidence, treat a wider range of possibilities as relevant, and so on in order to know. As such, there would be no conflict between epistemic norms and any belief-forming behaviour that is required (or merely permissible) by the standards of friendship.” (Kawall 2013: 366–367; italics added) For McHugh’s part, see (McHugh 2013: 1133, fn 24).
No way, that is, short of embracing the doctrine of value-reflecting reasons itself. See below.
I thank an anonymous referee for indicating the possibility of this response.
Compare Kawall (2013: 367).
Hawley (2014b) makes a very similar point.
I should add that insofar as our belief cannot be accounted for in either of these ways, it is not a justified belief. Suppose that a subject were nevertheless to persist in such a belief. Well, this sort of case couldn’t be used to support EPF without begging the question at issue. For to use such a case in this way would be to assume that the friend (morally) should form an unjustified belief; but this is precisely what is at issue. Since in effect I have been arguing that the demands of friendship do not require this, to use this sort of case to establish EPF would beg the question.
In that situation the case for EPF is not helped, since our unjustified belief would not be the result of the demands of morality, but rather of our going beyond those demands.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rigina Rini, Nomy Arpaly, Stephen Grimm, Carry Osbourne, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Henry Jackman, Annalisa Coliva, Lindsay Crawford, Dan Korman, Katherine Hawley, Jennifer Lackey, Paul Faulkner, Duncan Pritchard, Aaron James, Baron Reed, and Catarina Dutilh Novaes, for comments on earlier drafts; to audiences at UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, York University, the Ethics and Epistemology Group at Fordham University, Utrecht University, and the European Summer School in Social Epistemology that took place near Madrid (summer 2017), where I have delivered earlier versions of this paper; and to two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies, who gave me very helpful comments on several earlier drafts.
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Goldberg, S.C. Against epistemic partiality in friendship: value-reflecting reasons. Philos Stud 176, 2221–2242 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1123-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1123-6