This paper focuses on several issues that arise in Miranda Fricker?s book Epistemic injustice surrounding her claims about our (moral) culpability for perpetrating acts of testimonial injustice. While she makes frequent claims about moral culpability with respect to specific examples, she never addresses the issue in its full generality, and we are left to extrapolate her general view about moral culpability for acts of testimonial injustice from these more restricted and particular claims. Although Fricker never describes (...) testimonial injustice in such terms, I argue that the fundamental wrong done in acts of testimonial injustice is a form of negligence. Once we understand testimonial injustice in this way, it is easier to see when and why we are culpable for perpetrating such injustices. Indeed, explicitly recognizing testimonial injustice as a form of negligence solves several problems for Fricker?s view, which are elucidated briefly along the way. However, construing testimonial injustice as a form of negligence has a cost as well. It highlights the fact that the normative core of Fricker?s view is deontological, rather than virtue-theoretic. Fricker claims to be offering a theory of the virtue of testimonial justice along the model of current virtue theories in epistemology, yet it seems that there is no compelling reason to think of what she has offered as a virtue theory, at least not on the model of virtue theories that one finds in epistemology. This is not to say that her view is any less plausible for not being a virtue theory. But calling it a virtue theory affects how one interprets its various claims, and tends to lead one away from, rather than toward, a proper understanding of the deep deontological nature of her account. (shrink)

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and (...) how it avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too. (shrink)

This paper has two main goals. The first is to defend a particular account of answerability according to which a person is (morally or criminally) answerable for their conduct if it is (morally or criminally) wrongful under the same description under which it is imputable to their agency. Negating defences in law aim to defeat criminal answerability by negating some element of the charged offence while their moral analogues aim to defeat moral answerability by defeating the aptness of the description (...) under which an action is imputed. In contrast, affirmative defences and their moral analogues aim to defeat the move from answerability to liability to sanction by offering an exculpatory explanation for the wrongful conduct. The second goal of this paper is to argue that there are important differences between the way that ignorance functions in negating defences and their moral analogues and affirmative defences and their moral analogues. Specifically, when ignorance functions to defeat answerability, it need only be sincere, but it is typically limited to matters of fact, whereas both moral and non-moral ignorance can excuse one from liability but only if non-culpable. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to the following argument which several authors have presented. If we are culpable for some action, we act either from akrasia or from culpable ignorance. However, akrasia is highly exceptional and it turns out that tracing culpable ignorance leads to a vicious regress. Hence, we are hardly ever culpable for our actions. I argue that the argument fails. Cases of akrasia may not be that rare when it comes to epistemic activities such as evidence (...) gathering and working on our intellectual virtues and vices. Moreover, particular cases of akrasia may be rare, but they are not exceptional when we consider chains of actions. Finally and most importantly, we can be culpable for our actions even if we do not act from akrasia or from culpable ignorance, namely in virtue of our unactivated dispositional beliefs. (shrink)

This paper explores types of organisational ignorance and ways in which organisational practices can affect the knowledge we have about the causes and effects of our actions. I will argue that because knowledge and information are not evenly distributed within an organisation, sometimes organisational design alone can create individual ignorance. I will also show that sometimes the act that creates conditions for culpable ignorance takes place at the collective level. This suggests that quality of will of an agent is not (...) necessary to explain culpable ignorance in an organisational setting. (shrink)

A point of contention in recent discussions of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility is whether culpable ignorance must trace to akratic belief mismanagement. Neil Levy has recently defended an akrasia requirement by arguing that only an akratic agent has the capacity rationally to comply with epistemic expectations the violation of which contributes to her ignorance. In this paper I show that Levy’s argument is unsound. It is possible to have the relevant rational capacity in the absence of (...) akrasia. I also argue that the internalist account of rationality that does much of the work in his argument is problematic. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that selective abortion for disability often involves inadequate counselling on the part of reproductive medicine professionals who advise prospective parents. I claim that prenatal disability clinicians often fail in intellectual duty—they are culpably ignorant about intellectual disability. First, I explain why a standard motivation for selective abortion is flawed. Second, I summarize recent research on parent experience with prenatal professionals. Third, I outline the notions of epistemic excellence and deficiency. Fourth, I defend culpable ignorance (...) as the best explanation of inadequate disability counselling. Fifth, I rebut alternative explanations. My focus is pregnancies diagnosed with mild or moderate intellectual disability. (shrink)

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand (...) our objections to epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

Ignorance is often a valid excuse for wrongdoing. But authors such as William FitzPatrick argued that ignorance is culpable if we could have reasonably expected the agent to take action that would have corrected or prevented it, given his capabilities and the opportunities provided by the context, but failed to do so due to vices such as laziness, indifference, disdain, etc. Guilty ignorance is still present in the debate and, in recent times, has become more pressing with the problem of (...) technological responsibility. In this paper, an internalist perspective of culpable ignorance is adopted to analyze a form of culpability distribution in the technological context based on dispositional beliefs. Thus, two types of responsibility are found. By examining the implications of culpable ignorance, we realize that we can respond to the unambiguous idea that an engineer is morally and epistemically responsible for certain facts. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold there are genuine cases of culpable ignorance. This paper argues that there are conditions that can render knowledge epistemically culpable too. First, we contrast culpable ignorance with morally culpable knowledge. Second, we examine the nature of epistemically culpable knowledge using a key example. We then highlight empirical support for the claim that there are real-world conditions that make epistemically culpable knowledge possible. Next, we survey three kinds of epistemic culpability fostered by culpable knowledge. Finally, we (...) address the benefits objection and argue that it fails. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent work on moral blame, which has drawn attention to the ambivalent nature of our blaming practices and to the need to ‘civilize’ these practices. It argues that the project of civilizing blame must engage with a further problematic feature of these practices, namely, that they can be implicated in structures of social oppression, and distorted by epistemic and discursive injustice. The paper also aims to show that engaging with this problem raises questions about the (...) Strawsonian equation of moral responsibility with liability to praise or blame. (shrink)

A minimally responsible threatener is someone who bears some responsibility for imposing an objectively wrongful threat, but whose responsibility does not rise to the level of culpability. Minimally responsible threateners include those who knowingly commit a wrongful harm under duress, those who are epistemically justified but mistaken in their belief that a morally risky activity will not cause a wrongful harm, and those who commit a harm while suffering from a cognitive impairment which makes it prohibitively difficult to recognize (...) and act on what is morally required of them. The chapter argues that minimally responsible threateners can indeed be morally liable for the harms they impose. Put differently, culpability is not a necessary basis for liability. (shrink)

Ignorance can excuse otherwise blameworthy action, but only if the ignorance itself is blameless. One way to avoid culpable ignorance is to pay attention when epistemic peers disagree. Expressed disagreements place an obligation on the agent to pay attention when an interlocutor disagrees, or risk culpable ignorance for which they might later be found blameworthy. Silence, on the other hand, is typically taken as assent. But in cases of suppressed disagreement, the silenced interlocutor has information that could save the (...) agent from ignorance in scenarios where that ignorance might lead to harmful action, and silence does not actually indicate assent. The problem is further complicated because the agent might not be aware of the fact that a silenced interlocutor has information that could prevent ignorance, and consequent harmful action. In this paper, I provide a new account of excuses from ignorance in situations of suppressed disagreement. I do this in the context of two cases; Kelly’s hypothetical case of the Tyrannical Dictator, and the real-world case of former South African President Thabo Mbeki and his AIDS denialist policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (shrink)

There is a widely accepted distinction between being directly responsible for a wrongdoing versus being somehow indirectly or vicariously responsible for the wrongdoing of another person or collective. Often this is couched in analyses of complicity, and complicity’s role in the relationship between individual and collective wrongdoing. Complicity is important because, inter alia, it allows us to make sense of individuals who may be blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree for their immediate conduct, but are nevertheless blameworthy to (...) a higher degree for their implication in some larger (or another person’s) wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of complicity. First, I motivate the distinction between direct and vicarious responsibility with three interlocking arguments, respectively appealing to: i) the structure of rational agency; ii) linguistic considerations; iii) the role of “principal vs. accomplice” in legal doctrine. I show how these arguments naturally extend to the epistemic domain, motivating an epistemic form of vicarious responsibility. I then examine complicity as a mechanism of vicarious epistemic responsibility. To fill this out, I engage with an epistemic analogue of the debate about the role of intention versus causal contribution in complicity. I propose a Casual Account of Epistemic Complicity, arguing that it accommodates a wide range of cases, and enables fine-grained explanations of degrees of culpability for epistemic complicity. With an adequate account of epistemic complicity on hand, we can explain what is objectionable about an important class of epistemic agent who, on an individual level, may be epistemically blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree, but whose relation to other individuals or collectives nevertheless makes them epistemically blameworthy to a higher degree. I explore some broader implications of this result. (shrink)

I articulate and defend a principle governing enforcement rights in response to a non‐culpable non‐just rights‐intrusion (e.g., wrongful bodily attack by someone who falsely, but with full epistemic justification, believes that he is acting permissibly). The account requires that the use of force reduce the harm from such intrusions and is sensitive to the extent to which the intruder is agent‐responsible for imposing intrusion‐harm.

In their article, Dylon McChesney & Mathieu Doucet argue that any viable account of the epistemic condition needs to account for the right scope of cases where an agent’s mental disorder results in exculpating ignorance. The authors then argue that this constraint on viability poses a serious problem for George Sher’s account of the epistemic condition, but not for quality of will views. In this discussion note, I do not challenge the viability constraint about mental disorder-based ignorance nor (...) do I challenge McChesney & Doucet’s argument that Sher’s account unjustly blames many cases of disorder-based ignorance. Instead, I argue against their position that quality of will views have the resources to accurately capture the scope of cases where mental disorders lead to exculpating ignorance. I argue that quality of will views fall short because they do not take into consideration the way that a non-culpably acquired difficulty, such as developing a mental disorder in childhood, can make an expectation that the agent avoid the disorder-based ignorance an unreasonably demanding expectation. This shortcoming results in quality of will views unjustly blaming agents for their disorder-based ignorance in some cases where the ignorance i) reflects a poor quality of will, but ii) it would be unreasonable to expect the agent to have avoided the ignorance. (shrink)

To lead an environmentally virtuous life requires information—about morality, environmental issues, the impacts of our actions and commitments, our options for alternatives, and so on. On the other hand, we are finite beings with limited time and resources. We cannot feasibly investigate all of our options, and all environmental issues (let alone moral issues, more broadly). In this paper I attempt to provide initial steps towards addressing the epistemic demands of environmental virtue. In the first half of the paper (...) I provide rules of thumb with respect to (1) how to prioritize our investigations into various issues, and (2) what kinds of information we should seek with respect to these issues, and the levels of epistemic justification we ought to attain. In the second half of the paper, I turn to a modified virtue ethics, appealing to the attitudes of virtuous ideal observers to provide characterizations of morally justified and morally non-culpable actions. I then apply these latter concepts in assessing agents, their actions and projects (with respect to environmental virtue), in light of their investigative efforts, and given their particular circumstances. (shrink)

Scientific research is supposed to acquire or generate knowledge, but such a purpose would be severely undermined by instances of research misconduct (RM) and questionable research practices (QRP). RM and QRP are often framed in terms of moral transgressions by individuals (bad apples) whose aberrant acts could be made conducive by shortcomings in regulatory measures of organizations or institutions (bad barrels). This notion presupposes, to an extent, that the erring parties know exactly what they are doing is wrong and morally (...) culpable, but had nonetheless proceeded to commit wrongful acts. However, a confession of intent to deceived is often not readily admitted by perpetrators of RM. I posit that beyond the simplistic notion of conscious moral transgression, deficits in epistemic virtues and/or the prevalence of epistemic vices have important roles to play in initiating and driving RM/QRP. For the individual perpetrator, deficits in epistemic virtues could lead to or amplify errors in one’s desperate attempt to be accomplished or to excel, and pushes one across the ethical line or down the slippery slope of misconduct. Likewise, a lack of epistemic virtue within perpetrators’ institution or organization could make it conducive for deceitful acts and suppress indications and warning signs for the former. Furthermore, epistemic vices exhibited by reviewers, editors and journals could also promote RM/QRP. In this view, epistemic failings, rather than widespread moral deficiencies of individuals within the research ecosystem, may underlie the prevalence of RM/QRP. (shrink)

We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what sorts of factors can one epistemic failing be worse than another? The paper develops a dual-factor view of degrees of (...) epistemic criticizability. According to the view, degrees of epistemic criticizability are (i) an inverse function of degrees of doxastic justification and (ii) a function of degrees of agent culpability. The paper develops an account of each factor, and explains how they should be weighted. The paper also addresses the importance of modelling degrees of epistemic criticizability in a broader context. I focus on the role that such a model can play in the ethics of epistemic criticism. (shrink)

This book considers whether we can be epistemically responsible for undesirable beliefs, such as racist and sexist ones. The problem with holding people responsible for their undesirable beliefs is: first, what constitutes an “undesirable belief” will differ among various epistemic communities; second, it is not clear what responsibility we have for beliefs simpliciter; and third, inherent in discussions of socially constructed ignorance (like white ignorance) is the idea that society is structured in such a way that white people are (...) made deliberately unaware of their ignorance, which suggests their racial beliefs are not epistemically blameworthy. This book explores each of these topics with the aim of establishing the nature of undesirable beliefs and our responsibility for these beliefs with the understanding that there may well be (rare) occasions when undesirable beliefs are not epistemically culpable. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit-based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open-mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed-minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open-mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the underpinning (...) of a virtue-theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power. (shrink)

We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for (...) belief by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a concern for the truth. (shrink)

One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Ignorance does not always excuse, however, for sometimes ignorance is culpable. One of the most natural ways to think of the difference between exculpating and culpable ignorance is in terms of justification; that is, one’s ignorance is exculpating only if it is justified and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it not justified. Rosen :591–610, 2008) explores this idea by first offering a brief account of justification, and then two cases that he (...) claims are counter examples to the justification thesis. The aim of this paper is to defend the justification thesis against Rosen’s two cases. The argument will proceed in the following way. First, I clarify a few things about the nature of culpable ignorance generally and why the justification thesis is so intuitive. I then present Rosen’s purported counterexamples. Once this is done, I argue that Rosen misses an important view of justification in the epistemology literature that I call the pragmatic view. I present a general picture of the pragmatic view, and explain how it fits naturally with our practices of criticizing people’s beliefs, including claims of culpable ignorance. Finally, I address Rosen’s cases arguing that, if the pragmatic view is right, then Rosen’s cases are not counterexamples to the justification thesis. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relationship between ignorance and responsibility. Ignorance is often treated as an excuse, but there are times when ignorance does not excuse. Ignorance that does not excuse is usually known as culpable ignorance. Since ignorance is largely an epistemological concept, the difference between culpable and exculpating ignorance suggests a connection between epistemology and theories of responsibility that has gone relatively unexplored. The following work explores this connection and argues that incorporating epistemological theories will help provide a robust (...) account of both the ignorance excuse and culpable ignorance. -/- The project begins by pointing out that some highly intuitive accounts of culpable ignorance seem remarkably like theories of epistemic justification. As such, epistemic justification seems like the best candidate for an epistemological concept that might share a connection with the culpable ignorance literature in moral philosophy. I argue that there is a theory of epistemic justification that captures our intuitions regarding culpable ignorance. Its close connection to our practices gives us good reason to think that, if this theory of justification is right, then the following is true: one’s ignorance exculpates only if it is justified, and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it is not justified. I call this the Justification Thesis. Once I establish the Justification Thesis, I defend it against various possible objections. First, the Justification Thesis is a derivative account of culpable ignorance, and it is often thought that derivative accounts are forced into responsibility skepticism. I argue that this is not true. Second, it is often thought derivative accounts like the Justification Thesis are open to a large class of counterexamples. I examine a few common alleged counterexamples and argue that they trade on ambiguities that, I suggest, are shared by every purported counterexample. When disambiguated it turns out they are not counterexamples after all. Third, some question whether ignorance with moral content exculpates. I argue that the Justification Thesis captures our intuitions regarding moral ignorance. Finally, I address a challenge to the initial assumption that culpable ignorance does not excuse and argue that this challenge is mistaken. (shrink)

Research shows that a high majority of parents receiving prenatal diagnosis of intellectual disability terminate pregnancy. They have reasons for rejecting a child with intellectual disabilities—these reasons are, most commonly, beliefs about quality of life for it or them. Without a negative evaluation of intellectual disability, their choice makes no sense. Disability-based abortion has been critiqued through virtue ethics for being inconsistent with admirable moral character. Parental selectivity conflicts with the virtue of acceptingness and exhibits the vice of wilfulness. In (...) this paper I claim that, beyond failures of moral virtue, disability abortion often involves failures of epistemic virtue on the part of parents. I argue two things: parents believe something false, or at least contested, about life with intellectual disability—and they do so because they are not epistemically conscientious. I first explain why a central motivation for disability abortion—that it prevents harm to the child—is mistaken. I next give a brief account of intellectual virtue and culpable ignorance. I then indicate why many parents fail to be intellectually virtuous when choosing to terminate pregnancy. I focus on elimination of intellectual disability and have little to say about physical and sensory impairments. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that blameworthiness is epistemically constrained. If one lacks sufficient epistemic access to the fact that some action harms another, then one cannot be blamed for harming. Acceptance of an epistemic condition for blameworthiness can give rise to a worry, however: could agents ever successfully evade blameworthiness by deliberately stunting their epistemic position? I discuss a particularly worrisome version of such epistemic shirking, in which agents pre-emptively seek to avoid access to potentially morally (...) relevant facts. As Roy Sorensen and Jan Willem Wieland have argued, we seem to be faced with a potentially troubling regress when trying to explain what goes wrong in such situations. I argue that the solution to this so-called Shirker Problem is not to be found in complicated and demanding anti-shirking-principles with universal scope and potentially self-reflexive content. Instead, careful consideration of the necessary motivational make-up of genuine shirkers reveals their ignorance to lack the necessary depth to be exculpatory. Since shirkers by definition react to the possibility of the revelation of morally relevant facts with acts of epistemic self-limitation, they necessarily prove guilty of a form of culpable moral recklessness. Epistemic shirking thus does not pose a worrisome problem for ethical theory. (shrink)

David Basinger has defended his position on the epistemology of religious diversity against a critique I wrote of it in this journal. Basinger endorses the principle that in the face of pervasive epistemic peer conflict a person has a prima facie duty to try to adjudicate the conflict. He defends this position against my claim that religious belief can be non-culpably “rock bottom” and thus escape “Basinger’s Rule.” Here I show why Basinger’s defense against my critique is not satisfactory, (...) and I argue against accepting Basinger’s Rule. (shrink)

Recent literature on the relationship between knowledge and justice has tended to focus exclusively on the social and ethical dimensions of this relationship (e.g. social injustices related to knowledge and power, etc.). For the purposes of this article, I am interested in examining the virtue of justice and its effects on the cognitive faculties of its possessor (and, correspondingly, the effects of the vice of injustice). Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of justice, I argue that in certain (...) cases justice can be a criterion of epistemic evaluation and that it deserves more attention than it has been given among virtue epistemologists. More precisely, the virtue of justice may become a criterion of epistemic evaluation in cases when a belief is formed on the basis of testimony. It would seem that there are cases when A’s assent to proposition p is something that is owed to B on the basis of B’s testimony; or there may be instances when A is culpable for declining to let B’s testimony have any effect on A’s belief. I briefly sketch four distinct scenarios in which this bears out. (shrink)

Integrity is often conceived as a moral virtue that pertains to the coherence between one’s moral convictions and actions, as well as consistency in convictions over time. By contrast, I argue that integrity is primarily an epistemic virtue. To act with integrity, an individual or organisation must engage in responsible inquiry; that is, the collection, processing, sharing, and storage of information in ways that promote truth. Organisational structures such as division of labour and hierarchy present challenges to responsible inquiry, (...) thereby making epistemic integrity in organisations inherently vulnerable and increasing the risk of unintentional unethical behaviour. This epistemic perspective on organisational integrity emphasises the importance of developing virtuous epistemic infrastructure and an ethical epistemic culture. By aligning their beliefs with facts, organisations can also improve moral behaviour and reduce the risk of culpable ignorance. (shrink)

In this paper, I restrict discussion to cases of psychopathy in which it is assumed that psychopaths who satisfy epistemic requirements of responsibility, including the requirement that one is culpable for an action only if one performs it in light of the belief that one is doing wrong, can and do perform actions they take to be immoral or illegal. I argue that in such cases, the well-documented emotional impairment of psychopaths fails to subvert moral culpability. In particular, (...) it does not undermine the sort of control required for moral blameworthiness and, hence, assuming all other conditions of responsibility have been met, the psychopaths of concern are indeed culpable for their behavior. Drawing, however, from certain lessons regarding the effects of coercion on responsibility, I propose that emotional impairment is a factor that should abate, perhaps even significantly, negative reaction to or treatment of such agents. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer. What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what justifies engaging in epistemic blame? I argue that a number of problems arise when we try to answer these questions by using existing conceptions of moral blame. I then consider and reject Brown’s [2020] belief-desire model of epistemic blame. Finally, I argue that (...) an agency-cultivation model of moral responsibility is not only able to help us to develop a plausible theory of epistemic blame; it is particularly well-placed to do so. (shrink)

This paper originally expands the orthodox conception of moral blameworthiness to account for blameworthiness for conduct and outcomes across normative domains, showcases the account’s power to explain epistemic blameworthiness for behavior and belief in particular, and highlights the account’s significance for theorizing about normativity and responsibility. Notably, the account challenges the prevailing polarization between deontic, axiological, and aretaic approaches to moral and epistemic normativity by suggesting that these so-called “competitors” serve as cooperators in explaining responsibility. The account also (...) highlights the way forgotten Socratic conceptions of epistemic normativity, which put forth epistemic duties to behave instead of more fashionable duties to believe, play a central role in explaining epistemic responsibility. By proposing this paradigm shift from belief-centered to behavior-centered theorizing about epistemic normativity and responsibility, the account reveals the doxastic freedom problem to be a pseudo-problem. The paper answers an objection to this approach to the problem raised by Neil Levy in this journal, an objection which has important implications for cases of culpable ignorance. The paper challenges the standard view of such cases that moral blameworthiness for ignorant conduct requires doxastic blameworthiness for ignorant belief. (shrink)

This chapter discusses whether patients should face penalties for unhealthy lifestyle choices. The idea that people should be held responsible for their bad health decisions is often associated with “luck egalitarianism”. This chapter explains the connection between responsibility-sensitive health care policies and luck egalitarianism and outlines some criticisms that have been made of luck egalitarianism in this context. It then highlights the implications of moral responsibility scepticism for luck egalitarians and other proponents of similarly responsibility-sensitive approaches to health care. Theorists (...) who have discussed the practical implications of moral responsibility scepticism have focused primarily on criminal punishment and, in that context, have often invoked an epistemic argument, maintaining that there are at least serious doubts about whether people are morally responsible (in the sense required for retributive punishment) and that, in view of this uncertainty, retributive punishment is unjust, given the serious harm it inflicts on offenders. This chapter argues that this type of reasoning also implies that we should not take patients’ responsibility for their poor health into account when deciding whether to give these patients treatments and that the health system should not impose significant penalties on individuals for harming their own health. Culpability-based desert seems to stand a better chance of helping luck egalitarians (and others with related views) to justify responsibility-sensitive health care policies compared with some alternative approaches. However, this chapter casts doubt on the idea that responsibility-sensitive health care policies based on this kind of desert are justifiable, focusing on doubts about whether people are morally responsible for harming their own health, whether harming one’s own health is morally wrong, and whether significant penalties for harming one’s health would be proportionate. (shrink)

This article critiques the ‘withdrawal approach’ to deparochializing global justice and argues for an approach that views ‘departure’ from mainstream theorization as integral to truly critical engagement. It introduces Aakash Singh Rathore’s approach to deparochialization – purportedly founded on Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice – as an example of ‘withdrawal approach’ which advocates repudiation of the West-centric and ‘profession-oriented’ academic debate on global justice, and promotion of context-sensitive theories. I argue that Rathore’s ‘withdrawal approach’ springs from an inaccurate reading (...) of Sen’s The Idea of Justice and hence overlooks the critical spirit of Sen’s engagement with the global heritage of ideas and 'critical departure’ from parochial theories. This article further explores three analytical forms of parochialism that dominant theories of global justice may suffer from: epistemic, conceptual and descriptive. Using the case of India’s superrich and their culpability in global poverty, I demonstrate the parochial construction of ‘duties’ in Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. I argue that deparochializing global justice, involving critical engagement with existing theorization along conceptual and descriptive lines, can illuminate a new way forward in global justice research. (shrink)

According to a common view, prejudice always involves some form of epistemic culpability, i.e., a failure to respond to evidence in the appropriate way. I argue that the common view wrongfully assumes that prejudices always involve universal generalizations. After motivating the more plausible thesis that prejudices typically involve a species of generic judgment, I show that standard examples provide no grounds for positing a strong connection between prejudice and epistemic culpability. More generally, the common view fails (...) to recognize the extent to which prejudices are epistemically insidious: once they are internalized as background beliefs, they quite reasonably come to control the assessment and interpretation of new evidence. This property of insidiousness helps explain why prejudices are so recalcitrant to empirical counterevidence and also why they are frequently invisible to introspective reflection. (shrink)

This paper responds to Bernecker’s attack on Michaelian’s simulationist account of confabulation, as well as his defence of the causalist account of confabulation :432–447, 2016a) against Michaelian’s attack on it. The paper first argues that the simulationist account survives Bernecker’s attack, which takes the form of arguments from the possibility of unjustified memory and justified confabulation, unscathed. It then concedes that Bernecker’s defence of the causalist account against Michaelian’s attack, which takes the form of arguments from the possibility of veridical (...) confabulation and falsidical relearning, is partly successful. This concession points the way, however, to a revised simulationist account that highlights the role played by failures of metacognitive monitoring in confabulation and that provides a means of distinguishing between “epistemically innocent” and “epistemically culpable” memory errors. Finally, the paper responds to discussions by Robins and Bernecker of the role played by the concept of reliability in Michaelian’s approach, offering further considerations in support of simulationism. (shrink)