Moral Encroachment and Positive Profiling

Erkenntnis 89 (5):1759-1779 (2024)
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Abstract

Some claim that moral factors affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. Call this _the moral encroachment thesis_. It’s been argued that the moral encroachment thesis can explain at least part of the wrongness of racial profiling. The thesis predicts that the high moral stakes in cases of racial profiling make it more difficult for these racist beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. This paper considers a class of racial generalizations that seem to do just the opposite of this. The high moral stakes of the beliefs we infer from these generalizations make it _easier_ rather than _harder_ for these beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. I argue that the existence of this class of cases—cases of “positive profiling”—give us reason to expand our account of moral encroachment in a way that brings it closer to the ideal of pragmatic encroachment that motivates it in the first place.

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Lisa Cassell
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Citations of this work

Epistemic Courage.Jonathan Ichikawa - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge in an uncertain world.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Matthew McGrath.
Elusive knowledge.David Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Varieties of Moral Encroachment.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2020 - Philosophical Perspectives 34 (1):5-26.

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