Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many denials of (...) established science. But there are complex philosophical issues here, concerning, among other things, (i) what an expert is; (ii) what kind of deference is called for; (iii) and when deference is called for. This entry gives an overview of these three issues and recent work on them. It then examines some potential collective and pragmatic disadvantages of deference, before concluding with reflections on what we can say to those who distrust experts. (shrink)

Is there a problem with believing based on moral testimony? The intuition that there is a problem is a starting point for much research on moral testimony. To arbitrate between various attempts to account for intuitions about moral testimony, we need to know the exact nature of those intuitions. The current study investigates this empirically. The study confirms an asymmetry in the way we think about testimony about moral and descriptive matters and explores the extent to which this asymmetry is (...) explained by different metaphysical beliefs about the relevant domains, or beliefs about the relative background levels of deception or disagreement. (shrink)

In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...) the moral agency of oppressed people, and obscuring real issues of oppression. In light of these many harms, we conclude that there are pro tanto reasons not to employ this strategy, and instead offer a series of suggestions for those considering adopting such a rhetorical move. (shrink)

One of standpoint theory’s main claims is the thesis of epistemic advantage, which holds that marginalized agents have epistemic advantages due to their social disadvantage as marginalized. The epistemic advantage thesis has been argued to be true with respect to knowledge about particular dominant ideologies like classism and sexism, as well as knowledge within fields as diverse as sociology and economics. However, it has yet to be analyzed with respect to ethics. This paper sets out to complete this task. Here, (...) I argue that we have good reason to believe that the marginalized are epistemically advantaged with respect to moral knowledge overall, including moral facts other than those about the morally problematic features of systems of domination. To do so, I first articulate the connection between marginalization and the moral domain, drawing on the rich history of feminist and non-ideal ethics. Then, I argue that marginalized agents are more likely to have several particular epistemic skills that are necessary to come to have moral knowledge. Utilizing real-world cases where moral knowledge is at stake, I show how marginalized agents have better access to evidence (broadly), as well as advantages distinguishing between considerations that are morally relevant and those that aren’t (sorting), determining the weight a certain piece of evidence has with respect to determining a moral matter (significance), and using concepts which bear on moral questions (conceptual competency). I close by considering the upshots my analysis here has for other areas of moral epistemology like moral testimony and moral expertise. (shrink)