Alexandra Lloyd

I argue for robust, as opposed to cautious, moral encroachment. Cautious moral encroachment holds that non-evidential moral considerations interact with the threshold for an attitude’s positive epistemic status asymmetrically: raising, but not lowering, the threshold. Robust moral encroachment, on the other hand, holds that the effect of moral considerations is symmetric: moral stakes can both raise and lower the threshold for an attitude’s positive epistemic status. In other words: when the moral benefits of being right about p are greater than the moral costs of being wrong about p, the moral stakes can exert downward pressure on the evidential threshold for justified belief. To make this case, I argue that given the moral roles played by outright belief, we have reason to go in for robust, as opposed to cautious, moral encroachment. To illuminate the importance of accepting robust moral encroachment, I consider some cases in which there are high moral stakes of failing to take an attitude towards a true proposition. I argue that to determine the relative moral stakes, we ought to take into account both the magnitude and distribution of harm that stands to accrue.

Deception, like coercion, can invalidate the moral force of consent. In the sexual domain, when someone is deceived about some feature of their partner, knowledge of which would be dispositive of their decision to have sex – a dealbreaker – the moral validity of their consent is undermined. I argue that in order to determine whether someone has discharged their duties of disclosure in the sexual domain, we should ask whether, upon receiving a token of consent to sex, they have a justified belief that their partner would consent to the sexual encounter given all the features that it has. I argue that whether an agent has a justified belief in this proposition is a function of the agent’s body of evidence and which alternatives uneliminated.

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community.