Jordan Myers

Two skeptical challenges have recently been raised against the existence of epistemic blame. One challenge argues that all seeming instances of epistemic blame are nothing more than moral blame in disguise. The second challenge asserts that epistemic blame is in fact nothing more than mere negative evaluation. I aim to simultaneously defend the existence of epistemic blame against both forms of skepticism. But rather than directly defending epistemic blame, I build an indirect case for the phenomenon’s existence. To do so, I return to the moral domain and examine three of what I call blame’s neighboring phenomena: excuses, exemptions, and the objective attitude. I develop domain-generalizable connections between each of these phenomena and blame. Next, I return to the epistemic domain, providing examples of excuses, exemptions, and objective attitudes being offered or adopted in response to poor epistemic performances. Given our derived evidentiary connections, I argue that the presence of these phenomena in the epistemic domain is compelling evidence for the existence of epistemic blame.

I have often blamed others for their repugnant, unethical, or irrational beliefs. However, considering how irrelevant influences affect beliefs makes it seem as though no one controls which beliefs they hold. In the burgeoning literature on epistemic blame, epistemologists have widely assumed that beliefs can be an appropriate target-class of epistemic blame: that we are right to blame others for their beliefs. In response to this consensus, I raise a concern about resultant luck from the moral responsibility literature and consider the ‘rationalist’ response to this problem: that any appropriate target of blame must be immune to resultant luck. I import both the concept of resultant luck and the rationalist reply into the epistemic domain, arguing that all beliefs are inappropriate targets of epistemic blame because they are subject to epistemic resultant luck. But I do not directly advocate for an eliminativist conclusion; instead, I suggest that we may still aptly target blame at the quality of one’s inquiry: the viciousness demonstrated in an investigation, regardless of how one’s beliefs (un)luckily turn out. Thus, one can be aptly blamed for a true belief if arrived at in a vicious manner and praised for a false belief if arrived at virtuously.