Regrettable beliefs
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Regrettable beliefs Mica Rapstine1
Accepted: 1 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In the flurry of recent exchanges between defenders of moral encroachment and their critics, some of the finer details of particular encroachment accounts have only begun to receive critical attention. This is especially true concerning accounts of the putative wrong-making features of the beliefs to which defenders of moral encroachment draw our attention. Here I attempt to help move this part of the discussion forward by critically engaging two leading accounts. These come from Mark Schroeder and Rima Basu, respectively. The problem of explaining how the beliefs at issue have a morally significant impact on the people they are about will turn out to be difficult. However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the beliefs have no such significance. In any case, as I hope to show, there are resources available to the evidentialist for acknowledging that the beliefs at issue affect those they are about in morally relevant ways—indeed, that they harm the person in a way that results in a demand on even the most impeccably rational believer. This is not the demand that she abandon her belief, however. It is instead a demand for a substantial form of regret in relation to the belief, a doxastic analogue to Bernard Williams’ ‘‘agent-regret’’ (Williams in Moral luck: philosophical papers 1973–1980, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981). An evidentialism with space for this notion of regret shows promise for withstanding the moral encroachment challenge. Keywords Moral encroachment Evidentialism Racism Prejudice Wrong Regret
& Mica Rapstine [email protected] 1
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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M. Rapstine
1 Introduction Imagine that your friend arrives to join you at a bar. The bartender requires him to provide his driver’s license, along with his credit card, in order to start a tab. A credit card alone sufficed for your tab. The discrepancy seems strange to you, but you shrug it off with the thought that there was probably just an oversight in your case. As your friend steps out to take a call, you find yourself listening in on some employee banter you weren’t meant to hear. You hear a resentful remark about your friend from the bartender, and learn he was required to provide his license because he is black.1 Yours wasn’t taken because you are white. In recent weeks, you further gather, a couple black customers provided credit cards that didn’t belong to them, ordered several drinks, and then walked from their tabs. Stunned and angry, you motion to your friend that the two of you should leave. Insofar as the bartender has acted discriminatorily, he has wronged your friend. But there seems more gone bad with the case than the way the bartender acts. It seems that the bartender errs in believing as he does. He inappropriately believes that your friend represents a special theft risk. We want to say, of course, that a belief like the bartender’s is racist. But what, more exactly
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