Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs
Historical patterns of discrimination seem to present us with conflicts between what morality requires and what we epistemically ought to believe. I will argue that these cases lend support to the following nagging suspicion: that the epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2019
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| Online Access: | View Fulltext in Publisher |
| Summary: | Historical patterns of discrimination seem to present us with conflicts between what morality requires and what we epistemically ought to believe. I will argue that these cases lend support to the following nagging suspicion: that the epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. We can resolve these seeming conflicts by adopting a framework wherein standards of evidence for our beliefs to count as justified can shift according to the moral stakes. On this account, believing a paradigmatically racist belief reflects a failure to not only attend to the epistemic risk of being wrong, but also a failure to attend to the distinctively moral risk of wronging others given what we believe. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
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| ISBN: | 15336077 (ISSN) |
| DOI: | 10.1111/phis.12137 |