Nomy Arpaly

I advocate scepticism about epistemic blame; the view that we have good reason to think there is no distinctively epistemic form of blame. Epistemologists often find it useful to draw a distinction between blameless and blameworthy norm violation. In recent years, this has led several writers to develop theories of ‘epistemic blame.’ I present two challenges against the very idea of epistemic blame. First, everything that is supposedly done by epistemic blame is done by epistemic evaluation, at least according to a prominent view about the social role of epistemic evaluation. Parsimony considerations count against introducing an idle mechanism that does the same work as an existing one. Second, no current theory of epistemic blame includes a plausible account of the force of epistemic blame or the practices that could express it. I conclude that we should give up the notion of epistemic blame.

Many philosophers believe that it counts against one morally if one is close and good friends with a bad person. Some argue that one acts badly by counting a bad person as a good friend, because such friendships carry significant moral risks. Others locate the moral badness in one’s moral psychology, suggesting that one becomes objectionably complacent by being good friends with a bad person. In this paper, I argue that none of these accounts are plausible. In fact, I propose that the starting intuition, that there is something pro tanto morally bad in being close and good friends with a bad person, does not track ethical reality. A person’s friend list isn’t at all in-principle informative of a person’s moral character. I also diagnose why we nonetheless have this mistaken intuition. I propose that friendships are fragmented in two crucial aspects. Once we observe these fragmentations, our initially mistaken intuition completely goes away.