Abstract
In the flurry of recent exchanges between defenders of moral encroachment and their critics, some of the finer details of particular encroachment accounts have only begun to receive critical attention. This is especially true concerning accounts of the putative wrong-making features of the beliefs to which defenders of moral encroachment draw our attention. Here I attempt to help move this part of the discussion forward by critically engaging two leading accounts. These come from Mark Schroeder and Rima Basu, respectively. The problem of explaining how the beliefs at issue have a morally significant impact on the people they are about will turn out to be difficult. However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the beliefs have no such significance. In any case, as I hope to show, there are resources available to the evidentialist for acknowledging that the beliefs at issue affect those they are about in morally relevant ways—indeed, that they harm the person in a way that results in a demand on even the most impeccably rational believer. This is not the demand that she abandon her belief, however. It is instead a demand for a substantial form of regret in relation to the belief, a doxastic analogue to Bernard Williams’ “agent-regret” (Williams in Moral luck: philosophical papers 1973–1980, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981). An evidentialism with space for this notion of regret shows promise for withstanding the moral encroachment challenge.
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12 November 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01589-7
Notes
I use “black” here to pick out a comparatively wide range of individuals who suffer treatment like this.
To save words, I will omit repeated mention of this condition concerning independence from practical concerns. It should be assumed where I use “available evidence.” On a different meaning of “evidentialism” than mine, many moral encroachers too will count as evidentialists. An evidentialist of this stripe agrees with the traditionalist that evidence alone provides reasons for belief. However, practical considerations factor into what counts as (enough) evidence. See Worsnip’s (2020) discussion of “moderate pragmatism”.
Gardiner (2018) includes an excellent discussion of the many places “upstream” from a belief where that belief can go wrong on a traditional evidentialist picture.
See Gendler (2011) for a view that challenges this assumption. See Basu and Schroeder (2019) for an extended discussion of the “coordination problem,” which a view like Gendler’s will face. For the remainder of the paper, I bracket the possibility that one might have an independent moral reason not to believe something that one has reason to believe according to epistemic norms.
This way of characterizing encroachment is fitting for views that treat moral encroachment as a case of pragmatic encroachment. See Moss (2018) for the claim that morality encroaches on knowledge rather than justification. In discussing Rima Basu’s view below, I will consider the possibility that the beliefs at issue require evidence of a different kind.
See, for example, Gardiner (2018).
Fritz (2017) argues that a commitment to practical encroachment implies a commitment to moral encroachment.
Pragmatic encroachment can concern knowledge or justification; the description here is meant to be ambiguous between the two.
Suppose Sam and Alison never run into each other in public, so Sam never treats Alison with contempt. Schroeder will say that a belief like Sam’s might harm her just the same in virtue of creating a risk of his treating her this way.
Mark Schroeder helped me improve my discussion of his view in this section. Any problems remain despite his effort to set me straight.
I oversimplify, no doubt. One can keep her beliefs to herself in the sense that she never verbalizes them, say, while still having her activity affected by them—sometimes in ways of which she herself is not aware. Schroeder’s case is supposed to be one where the risk of any such effect is negligible.
Begby (2018) makes a similar observation. He articulates a view according to which the beliefs that concern us here are problematic, when they are problematic, in virtue of a causal connection with action.
As, alas, the 45th President of the United States of America is said to believe of any given Nigerian.
Schroeder writes that “insofar as we believe that interpersonal relations are just that—relations between persons—it will follow that failures to secure the best interpretation of someone will be failures of interpersonal relations” (2018, 125).
Schroeder provides a more complete treatment of the theory in (Schroeder, 2019).
Here, to be precise we’ll really need to distinguish between something like a “subjectively best interpretation” and an “objectively best interpretation.” As Schroeder helpfully emphasizes (in personal correspondence), we should distinguish between relating to someone as a person, on the one hand, and fully succeeding at identifying their actual features, on the other hand. It is possible to relate to someone as a person while being significantly mistaken about the truth of who they really are. This would occur when one makes a subjectively best interpretation without succeeding at making an objectively best interpretation.
We might think that to attribute responsibility to an individual is effectively to attribute to him or her a robust form of personhood. Consider Frederick Douglass' (1979) remark from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”: “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave.” The depersonalizing ways slaveholders nevertheless treated the persons they enslaved was indicative of the former’s bad faith and hypocrisy. An anonymous referee points out that one can regard an individual as a person in some ways while, at the same time, in other ways diminishing him or her as a person. This will mean that relating to an individual as a person won’t entirely turn on relating to the best interpretation of the individual. But it also leaves room for the possibility that relating to a best interpretation contributes to relating to an individual as a person. Whether it does so is a very interesting question I don’t hope to settle here. For now I will simply register my own sense that Schroeder’s observations of what is involved in relating to a best interpretation make for a very suggestive account of what is involved in caring about a particular person or being committed to him or her. And these orientations are not a requirement on relating to just anyone as a person.
An anonymous referee helped me see the need to clarify that I judge the other an appropriate target of resentment and related attitudes. It isn’t enough for me to be prone to resentment, in the absence of the appropriateness judgment, for me to count as treating the person as a responsible agent.
The issue Schroeder faces here is of a familiar form, which has been discussed under the heading of the “schmagency” objection to constitutivist accounts of practical rationality. See, to start, (Enoch 2006).
The problem of how belief could directly wrong, or in any way directly affect, another is not a problem for moral encroachment alone. It’s a problem for any view according to which having certain things believed of you itself affects you in a way that concerns morality. And just as it isn’t a problem that can arise for the moral encroachment view only, it isn’t a problem for all possible formulations of the view. A defender of moral encroachment might hold that the beliefs under discussion (including beliefs that risk no wrongful action) are problematic in virtue of something besides their effects on the people they are about; holding such a belief could amount to a non-directed wrong.
See, however, (Sher 2019), which argues that a mere private attitude can harm nothing but the character of the person who holds it.
Schroeder claims that a true diminishing belief could be said to be subjectively wrong on his view. The issue of whether the problem beliefs must be false to be wrongful is another fault line in the literature. Blum (2004), for instance, argues that stereotypes (racial and the like) are problematic only if false.
Perhaps, on a sort of hybrid view, there is a wrong no matter the belief’s truth value, but the wrong is deeper where the belief is false.
Gardiner (2018) makes a related point by means of the notion of an “understanding” in which a belief like Spencer’s is embedded.
Compare Gardiner: “Advocates of moral encroachment aim to describe a person whose beliefs are epistemically impeccable—well supported by the evidence and conscientiously considered—yet morally wrong because racist. My contention is that no such belief can exist. If a belief is morally wrong then there is some corresponding prior epistemic error. The belief is not well supported by the evidence and/or it is not interpreted through a morally appropriate understanding, and that understanding is not epistemically well supported. If a belief is epistemically well supported it cannot be racist since no true fact is genuinely racist” (2018, 23).
Also, I see no reason at this point to rule out the possibility that evidentialist norms and moral encroachment norms both figure in an explanation.
Arpaly and Schroeder (2014) includes an insightful discussion of this interesting, and perhaps more common, form of motivated reasoning.
See Watson (1996) on “responsibility-as-attributability”.
Gardiner (2018) makes these observations, although her concern is not with the illicit attribution of moral defects as such.
We might wonder, also, whether the concern applies equally well to partial belief. See Moss (2018) for a discussion of encroachment on partial belief. I am inclined to agree with her that the appeal to partial belief doesn’t immediately resolve the issues at play.
An anonymous referee asks whether it would really be so implausibly demanding were Basu to insist that no amount of statistical evidence is sufficient for the relevant beliefs. After all, the referee notes, this is a limited class of beliefs. In the overwhelming number of cases, statistical evidence will be permissible to rely on. I am skeptical of the compensatory picture behind the suggestion. I worry that a believer who is told her belief is irrationally held won’t be much assuaged by the suggestion that she will be rational in many other cases where she holds a belief like it.
I owe this point to Tim Schroeder.
I’m simplifying, as there are many different ways in which clinicians approach patients. I think it’s fair to say, however, that even the clinician fully committed to a “person-centered” approach will utilize generalizations to a degree.
Basu (2019a, 929–930) acknowledges some complexities here, but I wonder the extent to which we can fluidly move between, and blend, these perspectives is underestimated. An anonymous referee rightly points out that Basu needn’t argue that all occasions of taking the diagnostic stance depersonalize. The referee argues that Spencer’s belief does seem to depersonalize in this way, and that there must be a principled difference between his belief and beliefs that diagnose without depersonalizing.
To say that it would be apt of Spencer to apologize is not to say he should voice an apology to the patron. In some cases, publicly apologizing could do more harm than good—for starters, perhaps, by making the patron aware of the belief.
Arguably, an apologetic orientation or attitude is fitting only where one has done wrong. The argument should go through the same here if we think of the sort of regretful attitude I’ll discuss as “quasi-apologetic”.
We might want to say that Maria is permitted to believe only that it is likely that Mark has fallen off the wagon. But this belief seems problematic in a way that is similar to the belief that he has fallen off the wagon. As I’ve explained, I am bracketing issues related to partial belief, or credence, for the sake of simplicity. I have also bracketed the line of argument that would say Maria commits a distinctly moral wrong in holding the belief.
There is an important qualification to make. In certain cases, a belief will be regrettable in the way I’ve just discussed, while also indicating other commendable attitudes. Consider Gardiner here: “Black people are overrepresented in the US prison population, and acknowledging this fact matters for social justice. An important feature of this claim about demographic distribution is how it affects particular individuals. A person’s skin colour makes it more likely they—the individual—will be incarcerated. If we ought to acknowledge that a person is disproportionately likely to be imprisoned if they are black, we also ought to acknowledge that a randomly selected black person is more likely to be incarcerated than a randomly selected white person” (2018, 182).
An anonymous referee helped me see the urgency of addressing this worry.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for discussion with, or written comments from, Justin Coates, Jacob MacDavid, Paulina Mendoza Valdez, Tyler Porter, Mark Schroeder, Tim Schroeder, Martin Wallace, and Jonathan Weid.
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Rapstine, M. Regrettable beliefs. Philos Stud 178, 2169–2190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01535-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01535-7