Abstract
The debate around epistemic partiality in friendship presents us with several tough philosophical puzzles. One of these has been articulated in two objections to the view that friendship can require epistemic partiality on the grounds it is incompatible with the nature of friendship. The first, owed to Crawford, argues that you should not treat your friends with epistemic partiality because your beliefs about your friends should be responsive to the facts about them, and epistemic partiality is incompatible with this demand. The second, owed to Mason, draws on a Murdochian account of love to argue that loving relationships—such as friendship—are ‘epistemically rich states’, which means that they are constituted by a drive towards ever greater and more intimate knowledge of our loved ones. In this paper, I shall argue that epistemic partiality may indeed limit what we know about our friends, but not in ways that diminish the quality of our love for them, and certainly not in ways that block us from being friends with them.
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Notes
Stroud’s 2006 paper and Keller’s 2004 paper on the subject can undoubtedly be credited with drawing the attention of analytic philosophers to this phenomenon, particularly in relation to (the norms of) friendship. See Ichikawa 2022 and Atkins 2021. Atkins (2023) proposes a definition of ‘wokeness’ as a kind of group epistemic partiality, whereby woke people treat members of oppressed groups with epistemic partiality. The advantage of Atkins’ account is that, unlike certain alternatives, it is compatible with standard accounts of epistemic justification.
The claim that our beliefs can harm our friends is not a necessary part of epistemic partialism. It might not be our beliefs per se that harm our friends, but the ways in which we form, maintain, and update our beliefs. For instance, it is conceivable that the failure to withhold judgement about a nasty allegation about a friend until one has a chance to hear the friend’s side of the story that hurts them.
Some parts of this paper have been adapted from Warman 2019.
That said, even those who endorse epistemic partialism must recognise that there are limits to extent to which we can extend the benefit of the doubt to our friends, such as in cases where treating our friends with epistemic partiality could perpetuate certain kinds of epistemic injustice (Warman, forthcoming).
Kawall, for instance, has argued that that epistemic partialists have overstated the importance of belief and underestimated the role of other, putatively non-doxastic responses to our friends’ behaviour (2013). Arpaly and Brinkerhoff (2018) have argued that epistemic partiality in friendship is over-rated because those defending the position have over-estimated the value of irrational belief and underestimated the practical costs of epistemic irrationality. Whether these objections render epistemic partialism untenable is a separate issue from the one discussed in this paper.
There may be good reasons to doubt the monistic view of friendship that lends support to this position. Simon Keller (manuscript) has argued—persuasively, in my view—that monism about friendship is false.
We might consider Roger Scruton’s comment that while he could forgive someone’s laziness or selfishness, he would struggle to overlook someone’s ‘cowardice and viciousness […] as a murderer’ (1986: 240).
I grant that this is contentious. But it is less contentious, I would suggest, than endorsing a full-bore pragmatic encroachment view of epistemic rationality. Schroeder’s account of withholding belief, while ground-breaking, nevertheless observes epistemological orthodoxy insofar as it is consistent with the principle that only epistemic reasons are relevant when normatively evaluating a person’s doxastic attitudes.
There are also cases in which we consider belief not for object-given reasons eminently virtuous. Preston-Roedder (2013) has written instructively on the concept of faith in humanity. Someone who has faith in humanity ‘tends to believe in people, trust in them, make presumptions in their favor, or see them in a favorable light, morally speaking’ (Preston-Roedder 2013: 666).
In fairness, it is appropriate to mention that Piller thinks that this historical picture of the foundations of friendship does not support Stroud’s view of epistemic partialism.
This work was supported by a grant from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), Chile, FONDECYT Postdoctorado No. 3,200,770. I am very grateful for thoughtful comments and constructive feedback on various segments and versions of this paper from David Efird, Tom Stoneham, Christian Piller, and Katherine Hawley.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), Chile, FONDECYT Postdoctorado No. 3200770. I am very grateful for thoughtful comments and constructive feedback on various segments and versions of this paper from David Efird, Tom Stoneham, Christian Piller, and Katherine Hawley.
Funding
This work was supported by a grant from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), Chile, FONDECYT Postdoctorado No. 3200770 (PI: Jack Warman).
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Warman, J. Epistemic Partiality and the Nature of Friendship. Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-024-10440-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-024-10440-5