[00:00:02.510] - Wesley
You're listening to journal entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Georgi Gardner talks about her paper, evidentialism and moral encouragement published in the Springer volume, believing in accordance with the evidence edited by Kevin McCain. Georgi is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She studies epistemology and meta philosophy and particularly the role of statistical evidence and social judgements.

[00:00:37.590] - Wesley
Suppose your friend is accused of a crime, should you believe they did it? One way to answer this question is to look at whether your evidence justifies the belief that they are guilty. Another way to answer it is to consider what the morally right thing to do is in this situation. For example, maybe you think you should be loyal to your friend and stick with them no matter what. Traditionally, philosophers have thought that these two different domains are separate, but recently philosophers have debated whether something being morally wrong can impact whether evidence justifies a belief in the first place, otherwise known as moral encroachment, and the topic of this paper. 

[00:01:23.520] - Georgi
So this essay, it responds to the challenge from moral encroachment, so to back up a bit there, we have this kind of orthodox idea in epistemology that when we're in our beliefs and practices, we should sort of follow the evidence where it leads and we should align our beliefs with the evidence. So the amount of confidence that we have in a claim should be determined by things like by epistemic considerations of evidence and virtue and ability and the difficulty of the terrain and so on.

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And it shouldn't be affected by other things like how much is at stake morally, whether it would be like a practical useful belief that would make me feel better and so on.

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So that's the kind of orthodox picture and moral encroachment is this idea that whether a belief is justified depends on moral facts, moral stakes and moral considerations of the case. My essay responds to that challenge from moral encroachment, partly by arguing some of the ways in which it is a complicated claim that makes things complicated and has some costs and some problems, but mostly by undermining the motivation from our encroachment. So looking at what motivates moral encouragement and saying these cases and the arguments are not so conclusive, it's it's not such a strong case after the most, I'm undermining the argument for more encroachment.

[00:02:42.310] 
I got interested in the topic of moral encroachment really early by attending a theater in action in twenty sixteen, this big conference for people working in philosophy early career people. And Rima Basu presented her arguments from moral encroachment. And I think like a lot of people, I heard the arguments and thought, this can't be right. And so I wrote an essay in response mostly to her ideas, and it was really early in the development of them. So, in fact, some of what I was writing my essay, some of what I was responding to was drafts.

[00:03:16.540] 
None of it was published. But in fact, some of it was actually still just emails between her adviser, Mark Schroeder and her when they were coauthoring a paper. And I was responding to my own essay to their email exchange is that was kind of anticipating what would happen in their essay. So it's really, really early on and I was writing for an invited and invited chapter contribution for for McCain, Kevin McCain on Evidentialism. But in general, my orientation has been towards these applied topics, I think we can. I got really interested in these questions of ethics and the intersection between ethics and epistemology and our beliefs and practices and so on. I have this general orientation that we can get the right kind of results, the results that we want about these important social applied topics by following the evidence. So we don't have to bend our epistemic practices or our beliefs and practices around the kind of moral, social and political results we want. We can.

[00:04:20.160] 
We can sort of follow the evidence for leads and then we'll end up with the kind of anti racist anti sexist, sort of the right kind of responses,. And I think in doing that, we end up with a sort of stronger fitting in a certain way, because now we can sort of say of the racist views, they're the ones making the epistemic errors. We really having the subjective, hard nosed look at the evidence and we've got the antiracist results.

[00:04:46.240] 
My motivations are really that. I think the following evidence is itself ameliorative, like the the healing power of sunlight, like kind of just letting the evidence form a better understanding rather than sort of hiding from certain facts. And then you have not only a better understanding with regard to epistemic things, you'll also get the right kinds of results. And I, I just have this instinct. It's like instinct that if we. Don't want to inquire about certain things for moral reasons or something like that that could end up having a kind of toxic effect on epistemic practices.

[00:05:20.970] 
There are a whole bunch of really interesting interactions between epistemic activity. I think that they are deeply related domains, but I think that the way that they interact has to do with that broader epistemic agency. How do we inquire, what do we focus on? Where is our attention and epistemic virtues and sort of our general sort of where we put in an effort? What are we trying to learn about these kinds of questions? But these are all these broader questions of specific agency.

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In fact, they might even be moral factors affecting sort of what kind of broad understanding we should have or perhaps what concepts we should have. And I think this is a really interesting question. What kinds of moral demands on the could that be on not concepts that these questions are different from this other claim, the moral encroachment claim, which is that of a particular belief. Whether that's justified depends on moral facts, moral stakes and moral considerations of the case.

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So the case for moral encroachment or arguments are very often motivated with examples, these kind of vignettes and perhaps the most classic example is the Cosmos, the Cosmos Club case, which was introduced into these kinds of debates by Tamar Gendler. So and this is a real story. And it's described in John Franklin's autobiography, Mirror to America. So in ninety five, he was being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton. And the night before the awards ceremony, he was hosting a celebratory meal in his very fancy swanky D.C. social club called The Cosmos Club.

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So there he is hosting his friends, having a nice time. And this woman walks up to him and hands him her coat check, sort of saying, please bring me my coat. And the way that is described in the autobiography, she sounds a little bit haughty, a little bit rude. But of course, what's going on here is she's mistaking him for staff. He's not staff as a club member, and he's affronted by this, as you can probably already guess, a big part of what's happening is his race.

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He's black. And in this in the time in the club that he's in at almost every other perhaps every other club member is white.

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When he joined, he was the only black man, but I'm not sure about now but in ninety five and then of the staff that almost all black.

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So D.C. is of a racially segregated area. And so she's seeing somebody who's black and then assuming on that basis that he's staff and he's affronted. That's the that's the kind of case that motivates more encroachment. This is a case where somebody is being judged as it happens in this case, mostly based on their race. And the thought is. I believe this is the time, this is the way that the encroachment advocates are going to motivate their belief was justified when you just looking at the evidence, given the social stratification, given the racial stratification of members and staff in the club, her belief was justified.

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But it was morally wrong as moral problem to this seems to be this tension between moral demands not believing staff and epistemic demands or epistemic permissions, believing that he's staff.

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And that's kind of how time I get to introduce the case, advocates of moral encroachment and just as a tension, she sort of doesn't particuarly offer ways to resolve it. Just introduces the tension. Advocates of moral encroachment like Mark Schroeder, Rima Basu, Sarah Moss, Renee Bolinger will say, here's how you resolve the tension. There are these moral facts actually affecting whether the belief is epistemically justified. The belief is not justified because the moral facts. And so one way to unpack that is if you say, look, you have these two cases, if you could have two cases where the evidence is the same, the epistemic facts are the same in the two cases, case a, case b. But in one of them, there are these moral facts. And then in case, B, it's morally neutral, there aren't these moral facts. If then there's a difference between the epistemic justification of the two beliefs and that shows that the moral facts are affecting epistemic justification. So that's the kind of test case. That's the way to moral encroachment. And of course, the Cosmos Club Case is actually really. Because it's a real life case, there's a lot of nuance and complication, and so it's actually not a particularly clean case, but you can sort of clean up a little bit, make it sort of have a few of these kind of messy, difficult details.

[00:10:11.970] 
So, for example, one messy detail is that as he puts out an autobiography, all of the staff members in that club wear unifiroms. So in this case, she was ignoring the fact that he wasn't wearing a uniform and just sort of instead judging him based on race to see race and overestimating the significance of race too much being too focused on race, which is, of course, ordinary every day epistemic error that people make all the time.

[00:10:36.510] 
Right. But if you can have like two cases that are much cleaner, so much more simple, where it's just a matter of something like the base rates in one case and then the morally neutral case. So if you had it something like that, then it's harder to come up with two cases and you might think, but the only neutral case would just be something like, you know, in the next room is an Avery and you know, that say ninety five percent of the birds there are yellow and the other color.

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And then you know that a bird has just died.

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Then you now justified in believing that a yellow bird has died because probably a yellow that died like ninety five percent of them. Well, you can make it higher. Ninety nine percent.

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And then you contrasting that with the morally loaded case, you could say something like instead the base rates have something to do with race or staff or so on and so on and so on. And then the thought is meant to be if you can get a case that's epistemically the same.

[00:11:34.250] 
In every respect, except then they have these moral differences, if there's a difference in epistemic justification, then that must be caused by the moral difference.

[00:11:47.960] 
So that's the kind of way of unpacking what the moral encroachment? Well, the moral encroachment is a bit of an umbrella term, but this is the kind of the core moral encroachment idea is getting out. And I think that the Canary case makes this really crisp and really clear. Is it the belief that a yellow canary died is not justified by that evidence, the belief that is justified is that probably it's a yellow bird that died.

[00:12:12.330] 
But of course, it's a chance based on that evidence that it's some other bird.

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And so I think once we appreciate that about just a straightforward canary type case, then we can see, well, that's a big part of what's going on in these cases that putatively motivate encroachment, because actually the kind of evidence that's available is.

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It's actually a best it's just justifying a belief about what's probably the case that John Hope Franklin is probably staff, and I say that's that's the best it can motivate.

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And so then walking up to somebody and sort of handing your check over and saying you're going to bring me my coat based on there being probably stuff, well, that's kind of a moral problem, but it's also not something that purism is going to be saddled with endorsing.

[00:12:59.230] 
And in fact, it would reject a lot of issues with that kind of thing. So I think realizing the importance of how a lot of these this evidence is inconclusive and it's best it's supporting beliefs about what's probably the case is one really crucial way of responding to these kind of cases and so undermining the motivation for moral encouragement. 

[00:13:21.760] 
In terms of objections to moral encroachment, one of the things that I say is. Things get really complicated really quick if you let moral factors affect whether a belief is justified, especially if it's so independent from any action, and it's just the belief itself is is the locus of evaluation is the belief itself, even if the woman never acted on it, is causing this moral problem that that has the sense that things get really complicated really quick.

[00:13:50.170] 
And Basu will reply like, yeah, that's my view. That's that's an objection. You're just restating my view. But I think it does get really complicated, really quick. And this is seen in this explosion of different moral encroachment views that took off. And I think maybe part of the reason here is that this kind of complication is inevitable, partly because the structure of the two normative domains is different. And this isn't something that I say in the essay isn't unpacked in the essay, but in when we think about like moral, normative or moral issues, we have just for one example, all of these questions about what kind of world we aiming for these future directive's questions, what kind of person do we want to be?

[00:14:34.570] 
So do we want a world where in the Cosmos Club case, it's it's there's not much racial difference or no racial difference between who's staff and who's member? Or do we want a world where it doesn't make any difference to the social status? The people aren't seen as kind of lower on a hierarchy because this stuff rather than club members, or do we want to be in a place where there is no such thing as the Cosmos Club? So there is no such thing as wait staff, right?

[00:14:59.050] 
We have these future directed kinds of questions. But then if what we're doing is and these are all different moral, not morally normative questions, and if we want to bend epistemic negativity to meet moral norms, it raises questions. Well, which moral norms, how feature directed do we want to form beliefs as though the we aiming towards a society where we have no racial difference in the make up of kind of who's in the upper classes and who's in the lower classes?

[00:15:31.570] 
Or do we want it that they're aren't class, for example, there aren't fancy clubs and so on.

[00:15:36.100] 
So I think that the this is just one example of how the structure of the two normative domains different, not just they are responsive to different facts in the world, but they have different directions of fit, belief to world world to belief or something. But like they're very normative structure is different. And so just using that idea that moral norms can be directed in a way that epistemic norms at least once about whether a belief is justified aren't. And I think that example also points to another another discussion points to another feature of this kind of case, moral encroachment.

[00:16:11.960] 
This is an objection to moral encroachment as such, but rather an objection to the way that it's motivated is that it's somewhat reflective of the values of the professional class and maybe doesn't properly reflect the values of the working class.

[00:16:27.650] 
So a lot of these examples are using social status and professional pressure, and it's slightly discussed as if it's a kind of stigma attached to being, say, staff, as opposed to a club member.

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And I think this is this is common to a lot of academic work where it doesn't properly, I think reflects the kind of the concerns of financial justice, class justice, economic inequality and so on. And it's too concerned for social status, I think. So it's not clear to me that waitstaff would find the cases particularly motivating. And in fact, when I teach these kinds of examples to my students, University of Tennessee the students, they're really passionate about this. Right. And they think, well, there's nothing wrong with being mistaken for staff. They're staff.

[00:17:17.770] 
So they don't they don't. They're not sort of. Taken by the case in quite the same way, they don't think that this is something they think that there's something wrong with what the woman did, of course, but that the less motivated by the idea that the real problem is believing somebody stuff based on inconclusive evidence. And I think from my own experience as being wait stuff, I think wait staff feel a bit superior equipment because they think, well, gee, this is an eighty thousand dollar wedding.

[00:17:42.980] 
I could have done a much better party with eighty thousand dollars. I have much better values and judgment than these than these people with their canapes. 

[00:17:52.000] 
And just to be clear here, I mean, there are definitely problems, so it is a problem that people are systematically mistaken for staff based on race. I think there are problems there and there are including. That the consequences within you aren't getting as many kind of job opportunities because you're not paying, for example, to the other club members aren't approaching you with offers of contracts because they're assuming your staff or something like that.

[00:18:16.310] 
So there are definitely problems.

[00:18:18.770] 
But I think that there's a lot of these problems can just be explained as as. In ways that aren't going to be in tension with purism, the party, some people just in general paying too much attention to race and not focusing on other kinds of efforts, they're just too much judging people based on race. So I do want to I don't want to say what she did was totally rosy, even aside from her rudeness or apparent rudeness. But it's not totally of course, it's bad that people are mistaken for staff so much based on race.

[00:18:51.210] 
But even to this day, even Obama reported that he's still mistaken as staff if he stands outside a posh club in a dinner jacket, people hand him that car keys and so on. So but this is just illustrating the point that people are judging based on race, the failing to notice that's Obama standing there instead of seeing that's a black man standing there, he must be staff.

[00:19:13.400] 
And then even in the sort of John Hope Franklin case, the Cosmos Club case, which is the sort of one of the main examples used to motivate moral encroachment, the thought is meant to be like this belief was impeccable by the likes of orthodox epistemology. And that's actually an expression that is used by Mark Schroeder. The impeccable part, but if you look at that case, well, first of all, he wasn't wearing a uniform, he was sort of dressed smartly for an evening out and all the staff in uniform.

[00:19:38.240] 
But also he's 80 years old and he's kind of hoisting his friends at a party. So presumably his his behavior and conduct would have been very different from that of a staff member and so on. So she's ignoring all this other kind of evidence and instead just focusing on race, which is as ubiquitous and ordinary, normal epistemic error that people make all the time. And so these cases are really thin, just like a paragraph. They have to be sort of they have to that's how philosophy typically works.

[00:20:05.330] 
But as a result, they emit all these important details about like, well, we know like maybe in that kind of case, she's talked to him before and that kind of thing. It makes all these details. And so one thing that I think readers do is we. Read those examples, filling in the details as they most perhaps the most naturally normally filled in, but in that way we're filling in all these other kinds of moral areas.

[00:20:32.060] 
So, like, she just sounds really snooty. She sounds really snobby. We assume that she has these ideas of social hierarchy with somebody whose stuff is kind of underneath, somebody who's who's a club member and so on and so on. But then the case is then so we fill in all these details. But then somehow I supposed to take onboard that the beliefs are supported by the evidence? That the belief is kind of impeccable by the lights of orthodox epistemology, and that itself could be kind of methodologically suspect because we're assuming a whole bunch of sort of importing a whole bunch of ordinary moral understanding to condemn the person then stipulating that the belief is supported by the evidence.

[00:21:13.350] 
A really crucial part of resisting moral encroachment and retaining this purist orthodox view that we should be following, the evidence is highlighting, underscoring just how ubiquitous these epistemic errors are absolutely everywhere, especially about these kinds of morally loaded beliefs. And I think this plays a couple of different roles. So one is. Insofar as we're giving this sense, the following, the evidence where it leads leads to these kinds of beliefs as a racist or sexist, I think that massively overestimates the rationality of these racist beliefs, I think these beliefs aren't justified. They're not rational. And so Basu leads to these kinds of papers and thesis with this idea of this person who's looked at the evidence and has formed these beliefs, based that to African-Americans, tip less on average or something like that. And then we have this general sense that a lot of beliefs will be like that.

[00:22:07.540] 
You can really find out a lot of evidence and you'll still have these belief that are racist in these ways. But I think there's this ameliorative power of learning more. And if we learn more, we'll see that although there are a lot of beliefs that are racist, the epistemic error is ubiquitous. They're not supported by the evidence at all. They're just rampant the making of these rampant epistemic errors. And in fact, I think it's giving far too much credit to these racist views in a certain sense to even have these discussions or present this is as a problem, right, because a lot of these beliefs say about race with regard to crime statistics are not actually based on crime statistics, not actually based on base rates or data.

[00:22:50.540] 
And so we say, oh, these people have these beliefs based on data, they're not based on data at all. They're based on associations and stereotypes. What do people tend to think of. And we can see that with by looking at what the actual data is. So people think this is classic kinds of examples where people will cross the street. For example, if somebody approaches them at night who say black men or women will clutch their purses closer to them in an elevator.

[00:23:22.480] 
And these kind of conduct is really terrible. But then advocates of moral encroachment will think well about this kind of some kinds of cases. The evidence will will support that kind of. will sort of support the idea that there's an association between race and crime. But I think this is thoroughly mistaken, and so to even take these kinds of misbehavior this seriously is making too much credit to these racist beliefs. So if you take something like a stranger on the street walking towards you, first of all, almost certainly they're just walking home or they're just out for a walk or whatever. The overall participation rates in crime, at least that kind of violent crime to strangers is extremely low.

[00:24:07.670] 
And even if there's a racial difference, the racial difference is going to be tiny compared to the overall lowness of the numbers. So the magnitude is absolutely my nute. And then there might be a tiny race difference. There might not be. I'm not sure then if we're going to respond differently to black men and white men walking down the street. This is a massive epistemic error, because even if there's a difference in the race, race based differences in crime, participation, it's going to be tiny compared to the kind of overall magnitude and the overall magnitude are tiny.

[00:24:37.850] 
So this is the kind of area where we have these errors. But notice, these beliefs really are not based on data at all. They're just based on associations and stereotypes and these kind of racist connections that are forged in the mind. So that's the kind of error that I think is really ubiquitous and can can sort of make it seem like evidence points to racist to justify his racist beliefs when in fact, it doesn't. I think it's worth really highlighting just how ubiquitous these areas are.

[00:25:06.620] 
So you can see an error, like using the wrong based rates happens all the time. And so the kind of example I have in mind here is suppose it's true. And I don't suppose it's true that the majority of airplane related terrorist attacks committed by Muslims, and then when people see him, somebody who's Islamic on a flight, they tend to be Islamic on a flight. They then worry, though, they make this association. And what seems to be happening, that is some kind of what you could interpret that as thinking something like most Muslims engage in airplane terrorist, airplane based terrorism. Now, that's clearly an error. And obviously an error is using the wrong base rate switch base rates.

[00:25:51.670] 
That one, it should be completely clear that it's an error. But you see that error happened even in published essays advocating for more encouragement. That error happens all the time. And so this is just one example of how bad our statistical reasoning. Of course, it's not such a flagrant version of that error, but therea are versions of the error. And so we we have this idea that these statistics, these statistics can support these these kind of morally bad beliefs, but they really don't.

[00:26:18.420] 
And so I think, like a lot of these orthodox epistemic errors are rooted in this broader understanding, the kinds of explanatory picture of the world that we have. And so somebody might form a belief. But then there are these and it seems like perhaps is supported by the evidence, but they have a whole bunch of other background beliefs linking up to that belief. And it's. And those background beliefs are mistaken and they're not supported by the evidence. So insofar as we have this sense that there's moral errors and academic errors, it could be in the broader located in the broader background beliefs.

[00:26:54.130] 
And so if we take beliefs as so Jesse Munton has sone really nice work on this about the broader explanation of certain social facts. So if there's something like that, gay men tend to pass on sexually transmitted diseases at higher rates than straight men, for example. They might have that belief and that might be a justified belief, but then the broader explanation of that claim could be misunderstood. And so they'll think it's because say there's something inherently dangerous about about homosexual sex or there's something inherently irresponsible about the sort of social behavior of of gay men or something like that.

[00:27:41.090] 
And so it'll be kind of that belief that could be true is interpreted in this broader understanding. That's false. And so notice, if you have that kind of mistake in your broader understanding, one thing that could happen is the the social fact that you believe that is, in fact true and you believe it's good evidence you could then start using that poorly in your future inferences. So now you could start inferring things about gay men that you shouldn't be inferring or something like that or inappropriately using that to predict in the future.

[00:28:13.290] 
So she has this really nice example to illustrate this, suppose it's true that most Chinese Elm's in the US only grows two feet tall, so ninety five percent of them or something like this.

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And that's a true fact. But it's true because 90, 95 percent of them are grown as bonzi trees. So they're growing in little pots and that means that they're not growing tall.

[00:28:39.770] 
And I suppose that the little ones I treat excuse me, a little Chinese starts growing in the garden outside and somebody says, don't worry. And then the homeowner of worries, it's going to grow very large and sort of destroy the foundations of the house or it's going to sort of dominate the garden or block the light from reaching into the living room or something like this. And then the friend says, oh, don't worry about that. It's Chinese Elm and almost all Chinese elms they only grow to less than two feet tall in America. They say that's not going to block your light. It's not going to dominate your garden. It's Chinese elm. Only five percent of them in America only grow to less than two feet tall. So here we can really clearly see the kind of error that the friend is making. They have this true fact about the base rates of Chinese elms with regard to their height. But the understanding, the broader understanding, the explanation of that fact is lacking.

[00:29:30.770] 
And so he's now misapplying it to this point, this tree out in the garden, which isn't in a pot. And so it could well grow to its ordinary height of presumably pretty tall, its tree. I don't know how tall they grow. So that's the kind of but again, that's like a silly kind of example. But it's to illustrate this idea that we can have these true facts. But if they're embedded in an understanding or an explanation, explanation, that's mistaken.

[00:29:54.200] 
We're going to stop making errors. When we then apply them to novel cases, we're going to have errors of induction. So that's the kind of example. And she describes how maybe some of the feeling of epistemic error that we feel when somebody says something about, say, the the sexually transmitted infection rate among gay men, we feel that there's some error. We feel that this is a mistake. And she says, look. Maybe the kind of error is actually located in that broader under the feeling of error, it is making it to the broader understanding.

[00:30:28.010] 
And so now we can diagnose why we feel something wrong with those kinds of beliefs and we can sort of explain away the sense of the problem with having those kinds of beliefs when the truth is supported by evidence and then in a very different way that's the kind of the same kind of idea that I'm arguing in the last section of my paper where I really draw attention to the epistemic role of understanding. And I say, look, there could be these social factors that seem. They seem kind of that we shouldn't have something wrong with believing them, but as I use as an example, suppose that it's true that on average men and boys are less better at maths. And suppose that's true. Well, if it's true, then there's nothing wrong with believing it. We just need to imbed in understanding which doesn't denigrate girls based on the basis of maths capacity or something like that. We should just embedded in a non-sexist understanding.

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And the problem with that kind of belief, if it were true, would be that it would be for many people embedded in a sexist understanding when we that just shows that women are less intelligent or something like that. 

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I described right at the outset, look, I have this orientation that following the evidence where it leads, having these kind of objective perspectives is going to lead to the right kinds of beliefs and the right kinds of perspective on the world.

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So I think sometimes, though, these ameliorative beneficial effects to using base rate evidence and social statistics kinds of evidence. So if one is what we want to put resources where they be most beneficial in the schools where people that have a more of a school to prison pipeline, we want to put resources. This is partly using kinds of profiling. We're using the social base rates to say of particular students that we want to now target them for particular help particular kinds of assistance.

[00:32:26.420] 
I think also these the fact that there are these racial disparities about who's to stop and frisk, who's arrested, who's a who's found guilty and so on. That's not just some kind of abstract facts about society that has real bearing on real individuals living in society.

[00:32:41.540] 
And so when we see somebody who's say African-American , of them, then at least in some cases, they have these higher increased chances of things like ending up incarcerated because of their race. And it's not just affecting a social statistic, it's affecting their chances. And so if people who say first generation college students, they're going to be more likely to drop out or they're not going to be less likely to go to college. And so we meet somebody who's saying, for example, a first generation college college student who then becomes a professor.

[00:33:13.550] 
The base rates the unlikelihood of that the small number of first generation students among the professoriate itself can help frame their accomplishments and so kind of highlight the sort of extra difficulties that they probably encountered. But all of this is the kind of profiling it's using these base rates and social statistics to judge specific individuals and the probabilities concerning specific individuals. I think it can also help to sort of help interpret people's behavior so we can see if somebody acts in a way that may be part of what's happening.

[00:33:48.710] 
So perhaps, for example, somebody. Writes an email to a professor in a slightly informal way or something like this. I'm actually very informally with my students. I don't mind that stuff, but but it could be that you felt it was a problem with that. Well, the fact that they're a first generation student could help you interpret why they did that and to better understand why they did that. 

[00:34:14.900] 
So this one really nice place for the future of this research is I've said, look, in any case where there seems to be a moral problem, we found some epistemic problems, like she's ignoring the evidence, he's he's wearing a dinner jacket and all the staff wear a uniform or something like this. So what I'm wondering and this is kind of a binary claim, it's saying like there's yes, there's a moral mistake, moral problem. But notice there's also an epistemic mistake, it's just not a threat to purism, to evidentialism.

[00:34:44.850] 
But I wonder whether this is too cross-grained and that there might be a place in the discussion in the literature to go to where it talks about proportionality. So maybe like a big moral problem, but only of a small epistemic problem, for example. And there could be could there be a way of motivating more encroachment using that kind of disparity or that difference in degree of of problem, of magnitude of problems? I think they'll be a nice place for advocates of more encouragement to stop pressing.

[00:35:10.890] 
If they can find a case where there seems to be these terrible wrongs and tiny epistemic wrongs, then maybe we have the kind of disconnect between epistemic and moral norms that could motivate moral encroachment. But my own personal interest is I've become a lot more interested in broader features of epistemic agency. And so in particular, things like moral demands on attention and epistemic effects of attention. And so the epistemology of attention and really trying to think of epistemic virtues with regard to attention.

[00:35:41.460] 
So I work a lot on the epistemology of rape accusations. For example, I've noticed whenever I teach that whenever I do research on that, people really quickly bring up. What about false accusations what about false accusations and the specter of false accusations and then the costs of false accusations to the accused, for example. I think this is important. Some say it's not important, but it seems to be disproportionate attention. It can really dominate an entire Q&A period, entire classroom.

[00:36:05.540] 
So there seems to be something that people aren't thinking about, the costs of not believing, accusations of the truth or something like that.

[00:36:13.780] 
And so we have this kind of where is our attention going? And this is a question that has to do with the intersection of epistemic norms and moral norms. That isn't moral encouragement. It's not just about whether belief is justified at a time, given the evidence is more about our epistemic conduct or epistemic character trajectories and. behavior and so on. So that's what I'm working onat the moment and then also the the moral and epistemic contours of how to interpret our own behavior. Our own experiences, how to interpret other people and also what concepts we should even have.

[00:36:53.160] 
So I think we have these kind of I think that we could have this kind of orthodox purist kind of evidentialist orientation toward how we should interpret our behavior. I mean, purism is narrow claim about whether a belief is justified by the evidence, but in terms of orientation like following the evidence where it leads and aligning beliefs with the evidence and so on, but about interpretation and broader understanding. And then in particular, what what kind of concepts should we have?

[00:37:20.670] 
How should we the concepts of sort of how we how we think about the world, like the tools that we use to think about the world. Are there any moral and epistemic constraints on those? And how can we adjudicate which concepts are better and worse using these kind of epistemic and moral ideas of a better understanding of concepts, we want our concepts to help us better understand the world that better, is that better? Is that like a moral bet on having, like, a morally better understanding? I'm really interested that in the shaping of concepts. But again, this is all parts of these broader areas of epistemic agency and cognitive agency.

[00:38:02.970] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our Web site at journal entries, dot fireside dot fm for more information about Georgi Gardiner, her work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode.