Katie Peters

How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires neither. Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort—people with ‘effects-virtues’—would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart.

One problem highlighted by intersectional and Black feminist theory is that not all oppressed agents are oppressed in the same ways and to the same degree. One of the implications of this for responsibility practices is that social practices of exculpation will not apply equally across all agents. This article explores two false social narratives about far-right women and evaluates them according to the standard view of moral responsibility. The first narrative of misogyny as exculpation holds that far-right women are themselves victims of oppression (of the misogyny of their own movements) and thus not blameworthy for their actions, as misogyny undermines their control and knowledge on the standard view of moral responsibility. The second narrative of infantilization as exculpation also proposes that women lack both knowledge and control on the standard view. The narrative tells us that (White) women, unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (White) men. If we assume the standard view of moral responsibility, both of these narratives impede our ability to hold far-right women responsible. By instead proposing the adoption of the rational relations view of Angela Smith, this article seeks to demonstrate how a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to far-right women’s extremism with larger implications for our responsibility practices as a whole.