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Epistemic Closure’s Clash with Technology in New Markets

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Abstract

Many people, such as Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Irving Fisher, and William Sharpe, assume that free markets full of rational people automatically lead to ethical actions and outcomes. After all, at its equilibrium point, a perfectly competitive free market maximizes utility, respects autonomy, and fulfills justice’s dictates. Unfortunately, in some technology markets, there are a significant number of people who have undergone epistemic closure. Epistemic closure entails that all reliable evidence that would challenge deeply held beliefs is dismissed as corrupted, whereas all supporting evidence, no matter how unreliable, is accepted as incontrovertible. Those who have the condition act irrationally within that domain. As a result, business decisions become much more difficult than they would be in a rational market. In this article, epistemic closure’s ethical issues are developed. First, although they are acting irrationally within the closure’s domain, those with epistemic closure can still be held accountable for their actions. Second, to deal ethically with epistemic closure and its consequences, then it is vital to know what it is and its root causes, as well as to have a practical principle that can assist in making pragmatic decisions. Because some new technologies face epistemic closure, then focusing on a particular representative case of it will help to illustrate the issue’s ethical dimensions.

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Notes

  1. See Genus (2006), Guston and Sarewitz 2002, Mohr (1999), and Porter (1995) for various versions of how technology assessment should be implemented. Common to each method is the requirement that everyone involved be able to acknowledge that the others in the process are rational beings with rational viewpoints, although there is need to agree with that viewpoint.

  2. I am not claiming that all technology is extrinsically good. Obviously, there are times when certain technology poses too great a risk or for some other moral reason to be permitted into a market. In this article, I will limit myself to technology that is not clearly defective.

  3. There are a number of well-known instances of this sort of irrational market Ludditism. One is the anti-vaccine push for children, which was based on a seriously flawed—both morally and scientifically—now discredited study that was supposed to prove causal link between vaccinations at an early age and the development of autism (Goodlee et al. 2011, p. c7452). A number of parents refused to immunize their children because the former feared that their children would be injured more severely by the vaccine than by catching any of the illnesses prevented by the vaccine. A consequence was the loss of herd immunity in certain areas of the developed world when too few children in the area received vaccinations (Ibid.). Another case is the denial of human contribution to global warming.

  4. However, the mere fact a person is irrational in one area of his or her overall beliefs and behavior does not entail that he or she is overall irrational. We will return to this point later on when moral responsibility for epistemic closure is discussed later in this section.

  5. Of course, if the person is irrational overall, then his or her actions are neither morally right nor wrong because they are not actions in the first place. Voluntariness is a necessary condition for an event to be an action.

  6. William Pentland describes a very similar case for an island in Maine. Many of the same charges and vitriolic actions can be seen in his article and the comments that follow it (see Pentland’s “Wind Power’s Worst Enemy: Noise,” 2011).

  7. There were many more letters and APOVs on the wind turbine issue, but I wanted to focus on one town.

  8. For the latter two sources, there are a number of comments left on the Web-pages on which The Daily News posts the letters and APOVs these comments were not assessed in full, because the posters were, in general, not identified. Because names are attached to the letters and APOV, I take it that they provide better evidence that the writer is committed fully to his or her position.

  9. The same might was done for the pro-wind turbine side. Of the 19, only two use ad hominem attacks and information taken out of context. None of the other criteria were found.

  10. For full disclosure, when I have interacted with CSOO members online, I have been accused of being on the wind turbine company’s payroll or having contracts with them. The fact is that neither is true nor do I have anything to gain from the technology other than what anyone would gain.

  11. The Daily News has a very liberal policy on publishing Letters-to-the-Editor and APOVs. As long as they meet word limits, and do not engage into extreme of language, then they are printed. Because The News is a small newspaper with a small staff, it cannot check the veracity of the claims made.

  12. Christopher Hanning and Amanda Harry state that their research supports that of Pierpont. The fact that the neutral panels did not find any of the three people’s work strong enough to change the panels’ view of health safety is a significant indication of the former’s research worth. Nor is their work listed in PubMed.

  13. Because this review just came out, I do not expect anti-wind turbine folks to have heard of it. It is included merely to show further support for the conclusions drawn by the other researchers and agencies.

  14. See Freeman’s Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (1984).

  15. Of course, if the mine owners or government has the ability to mitigate the injury, perhaps by moving the community to at least as good homes, then that might be morally required.

  16. I leave it an open question as to the threshold required for a market to become too risky for wise investment. Adequate parameters would have to evaluate whether trust can reasonably be maintained to such a degree that buyers and sellers would be willing to risk their resources.

  17. Of course, even an irrational belief can be tolerated at times, according to PMP. If it endangers only the person making such an epistemic mistake, or those who agree with him or her, then respect for their autonomy as persons making decisions in their lives would allow it to occur. The right to decide is not limited to the right to decide rightly. Even bad mistakes can be valuable to markets so that the people making them and others learn from what did not work. However, if the decision affects those who do not deserve the consequences caused by what we will state is a market defect, then it is unethical for epistemic closure to influence market actions.

  18. One significant reason that certain people oppose a particular technology is because it threatens something that they consider to be essential or central to whom they are as people.

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  1. Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, Dept. 2340, North Dakota State University, P.O. Box 6050, Fargo, ND, 58105, USA

    Dennis R. Cooley

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  1. Dennis R. Cooley
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Correspondence to Dennis R. Cooley.

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Cooley, D.R. Epistemic Closure’s Clash with Technology in New Markets. J Bus Ethics 108, 181–199 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1069-5

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