Ripley Stroud

I argue that all extant philosophical accounts of gaslighting over-generate or under-generate cases, either because they fail to include the internal felt experience of the gaslit or because they include this internal experience in the wrong way. I contend that some act A counts as gaslighting iff: (1) the gaslighter’s act A expresses disagreement with the gaslit without adequately expressing respect for the gaslit, and this makes it the case that (2) the gaslit in fact comes to believe that there is no hope for their fundamental rational competence, either universally or within some specific domain.

So far, the peer disagreement literature has focused on determining the rational response to the discovery that a peer disagrees with you. I think we should also focus on determining the moral response to peer disagreement. I provide two fully distinct arguments for the conclusion that we have moral reason to conciliate with our peer. First, I demonstrate that we have a moral duty, on pain of disrespect, to factor in the higher-order evidence of our peer’s reliability and the fact of peer disagreement. Factoring this in will often result in at least some conciliation. Second, I argue that practicing the moral virtue of open-mindedness rationally requires lowering confidence. And while there is no moral duty to be open-minded, it is on balance morally preferable to be open-minded, particularly in cases (like peer disagreement) where you have no epistemic reason to suspect that being open-minded will lead you astray. I close by explaining the ramifications of my claim for the relationship between moral and epistemic norms.

I propose that listeners have a moral duty to believe anyone’s testimony, on pain of disrespect, unless they have independent reasons to think that the testifier is not credible. What typically entitles a person to standard-issue respect is having the capacity for practical reasoning: practical agency and moral norm-responsiveness. I show that the capacity for theoretical reasoning also involves agency and norm-responsiveness, making it structurally isomorphic to the capacity for practical reasoning. This therefore plausibly grounds an entitlement to a specifically epistemic type of respect: an entitlement to be treated as an epistemic agent. Because we express our epistemic agency through providing testimony, and testimony generally justifies belief, treating someone as an epistemic agent requires accepting their testimony in the absence of countervailing evidence. So, because epistemic agents are morally entitled to be treated as epistemic agents, testifiers are morally entitled to have their testimony believed by default. To not treat someone in this way is to express that you take (without good reason) either their capacity for agency or norm-responsiveness to be compromised.