Browsing by Author "Wasel, Esraa"
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Item Moral Encroachment and Competing Moral Norms(2023-05-10) Wasel, EsraaAlthough purism, the view that only truth-relevant factors can make a difference to the epistemic status of a belief, is commonly regarded as orthodoxy in epistemology, it has recently faced some serious pushback in the form of moral encroachment. Proponents of moral encroachment claim that moral factors can affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. They motivate this argument through examples that show someone forming a morally costly or risky belief if they only rely on their current evidence to form the belief. So given the high moral stakes of only relying on one's current evidence, more evidence is needed to justify the belief in question, and in the meantime, one ought to suspend judgement. In this paper, I'm primarily interested in examining cases that challenge an assumption underlying moral encroachment: that we know which moral norms we ought to be responsive to and which ought to bear on our belief forming practices. I do this by setting up a case where two sets of moral norms, whose value relative to each other we're uncertain of, encroach on the same belief. I argue that unlike traditional cases motivating moral encroachment where suspending judgment is almost always cast as the morally safe doxastic option, in cases of moral encroachment involving moral uncertainty, there's no clear morally safe doxastic option. This makes it difficult to know how we ought to proceed in forming an epistemically rational belief while remaining responsive to the various relevant moral norms that we care about in a context.Item Moral Encroachment and Moral Reasons For and Against Withheld Belief(2023-04-13) Wasel, EsraaRecent literature on moral encroachment begins with “high stakes” cases where someone draws an undermining inference about a person using statistical evidence. The cases are meant to show that although the evidence initially seems to adequately support the undermining belief, the belief is not justified. Forming an undermining belief about a person can have negative consequences if that belief turns out to be false, so more evidence is needed to justify the belief. Confronted with high stakes cases, a person ought to withhold belief and search for extra evidence to avoid the high risk possibility of forming a false belief. This approach views the effect of non-evidential or moral considerations as constituting reasons for withheld belief. However, I argue that if moral considerations can constitute reasons for withheld belief, they can also constitute reasons against withheld belief. In these cases, the moral risk of missing out on a true belief via withholding can affect the level of evidence necessary for epistemic justification. But accepting this claim can lead to a problem for moral encroachment: cases where forming a false belief is morally risky, so one ought to withhold belief, but where withholding is also morally risky, so one shouldn’t withhold. It’s not clear which risk we should weigh more heavily in the process of forming a belief, which brings into question the claim that moral considerations can affect the threshold of evidence necessary for a belief to be justified.