Varieties of Moral Encroachment

Bolinger, Renée Jorgensen

doi:10.1111/phpe.12124

Cited by 45 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…This objection was not borne out by our data. Consistent with prior work showing that people attribute to others a great deal of control over belief (Cusimano & Goodwin, 2019, 2020, participants attributed high control to both believers and, more importantly, slightly more control to the socially-close believer than they did to the socially-distant believer.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Stimuli. Prior work in psychology, moral philosophy, and epistemology has produced a catalog of mundane situations in which moral considerations plausibly override what one ought to believe on the basis of impartially evaluating the evidence (see e.g., Basu, 2019;Bolinger, 2018Bolinger, , 2020Cao et al, 2019;Stroud, 2006;Pace, 2011). We generated six vignettes which comprise a diverse and representative set of cases from this literature (see Table 2).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In principle, moral considerations could impact people's evaluations of others' beliefs at either of these points (Bolinger, 2020;Kim & McGrath, 2019, inter alia;Pace, 2011). That is, morality could influence a belief's quality by changing what counts as "sufficient evidence" for belief (e.g., as proposed by Bolinger, 2018;James, 1937;Pace, 2011) or by weighing moral considerations directly against evidentiary ones (e.g., Pascal, 1852;Stroud, 2006).…”

Section: Two Ways Morality Could License Motivated Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But others argue that what one believes ought to be affected by what is morally good or prudent to believe. For example, believing in God (James, 1937;Pascal, 1852), giving a friend the benefit of the doubt (Stroud, 2006), or forming beliefs about minorities that ignore salient race-or sexbased statistics (Basu, 2019;Bolinger, 2018), could be justified despite seeming to violate normal evidentiary standards (see Bolinger, 2020, andChignell, 2018, for reviews). On these views, Jane might be justified in her optimistic belief because moral or prudential considerations are on her side.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And if so, how do these moral considerations interact with judgments of the individual's evidence? The normative counterparts to these questions have been hotly debated within contemporary epistemology (Bolinger, 2020;Chignell, 2018), but relatively little is known about how people in fact tend to balance evidential and non-evidential considerations when judging what they or others ought to believe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief

Cusimano¹,

Lombrozo²

2020

Preprint

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When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one’s friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday situations, people treat moral considerations as legitimate grounds for believing propositions that are unsupported by objective, evidence-based reasoning. We further document two ways in which moral evaluations affect how people prescribe beliefs to others. First, the moral value of a belief affects the evidential threshold required to believe, such that morally good beliefs demand less evidence than morally bad beliefs. Second, people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief, and so sometimes prescribe evidentially poor beliefs to others. Together these results show that, in the folk ethics of belief, morality can justify and demand motivated reasoning.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Two Ways Morality Could License Motivated Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief

Cusimano¹,

Lombrozo²

2020

Preprint

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Moral Encroachment and Positive Profiling

Cassell

2022

Erkenn

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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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Blameless Moral Criticism – the Case of Moral Disappointment

Schönherr

2022

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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In discussing the ways in which we hold each other accountable for immoral conduct, philosophers have often focused on blame, aiming to specify adequate responses to wrongdoing. In contrast, theorizing about the ways we can appropriately respond to minor moral mistakes -i.e., criticizable conduct that is bad but not wrong -has largely been neglected. My first goal in this paper is, thus, to draw attention to this blind spot and argue that a separate account of blameless moral criticism is desirable. My second goal is to propose one way to explicate the contrast between blaming and blameless moral criticism in terms of the contrast between moral anger and moral disappointment: while moral anger, as many argue, is an appropriate response to moral wrongdoing, moral disappointment, but not moral anger, is an appropriate response to these minor moral mistakes.

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Varieties of Moral Encroachment

Cited by 45 publications

References 47 publications

Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief

Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief

Moral Encroachment and Positive Profiling

Blameless Moral Criticism – the Case of Moral Disappointment

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