What, if anything, can be morally objectionable about the practice of epistemic partiality commonly associated with personal friendship? Recently, Jack Warman has argued that it may lead us to insult non-friends and perpetuate testimonial injustice against them by refusing their relevant testimony about our friends. In this article, we challenge Warman’s view on three grounds. First, we show that it underspecifies the conditions under which refusal of non-friends’ testimony counts as insulting. Second, we argue that epistemic partiality, as discussed in the literature, does not in fact require or lead individuals to refuse non-friends’ testimony in an insulting way. Third, we show that Warman’s two arguments concerning the moral wrongness of epistemic partiality assign such wrongness in two competing ways and thus turn out to be incompatible with each other. Finally, we go beyond Warman’s proposal to consider whether epistemic partiality may generate epistemic injustice in another way, by bestowing friends with credibility excesses.
Are beliefs subject to moral norms? Doxastic moralists argue that we can morally wrong others by what we believe about them – say, by holding racially prejudiced beliefs. Opponents argue that we cannot morally wrong others by holding beliefs: it only seems as if beliefs can wrong others because beliefs are connected to...
Two skeptical challenges have recently been raised against the existence of epistemic blame. One challenge argues that all seeming instances of epistemic blame are nothing more than moral blame in disguise. The second challenge asserts that epistemic blame is in fact nothing more than mere negative evaluation. I aim to...
Can predictable impairments of epistemic performance constitute injustice in the absence of harassment, manipulation, or prejudicial credibility deflation? I use this question to examine a case drawn from ordinary intellectual exchange: in mixed-sex settings, some male speakers may be distracted by the perceived attr...
Arata Hamawaki proposes that external world skepticism arises from dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary epistemic life. He offers a Davidson-style transcendental argument in response, urges that certain views of perceptual knowledge lead to skepticism, and suggests that we can’t properly claim to know the...
Adam Leite· International Journal for th...· 0 citations
Standards permissivism claims that multiple agents can be equally rational in holding different doxastic attitudes to the same proposition while having the same evidence because of differences in their epistemic standards. I argue that a successful account of standards permissivism should meet two explanatory goals. Fi...
Graham Curtiss-Rowlands· Synthese· 0 citations
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