A Graduate Workshop

Rachel Keith, "Doxastic Wrongs, Expanded"

A person doxastically wrongs someone in virtue of what they believe. Philosophers so far have explored doxastic wronging in the context of beliefs whose content are about the injured party. In this paper, I argue that we can doxastically wrong one another without explicitly believing anything about the person we wrong. In other words, a person can be doxastically wronged by a belief that is not directly about them. I argue that beliefs about social groups, beliefs about oneself, and beliefs about the world more broadly all have the potential to doxastically wrong. I do so by arguing that people do not exist in a vacuum, and we do not mentally represent them as such. We recognize that people exist in relation to other people in a shared world. Therefore, our beliefs about other people and the world in which we all live impact the way we mentally represent, and therefore relate to, particular people.

Cody Dout, "Superagency"

Superagency is an encompassing phenomenon, or complex set of phenomena, that can be described in various ways. In the simplest sense, Superagency can be described as a twofold at-whim capacity of some people, namely white people, to (i) release themselves and others from the requirements of institutional rules and norms in situ and, at the same time, (ii) to marshal those same rules against a non-superagential target of their choosing in situ. By “at-whim,” I refer to their abilityto manifest their own rules governing social reality on the fly. By “release” from institutional rules and norms, I mean their ability to decide to whom the official rules and norms apply. Finally, they can marshal those same rules against targets in the sense that whites generally have the ability to enforce the rules themselves or to summon an institution or agency to enforce them even when the rules would otherwise go unenforced. In short, as I stated above, white people do not simply benefit from the structure, they call into being what the structure is or should be.

The paper is divided into two main parts. In the first, I develop the positive account. It begins by characterizing superagency generally and then turns to the elements of superagency that I identify, providing a discussion of each before I consider some historic and contemporary examples. As I see it, the elements of superagency are what I call 1) the Ethos of White Solidarity, 2) Vigilantism By Proxy, 3) Implicit Sanction, and 4) Righteous Moral Corruption, each of which is to be defined in due course. The second part of the paper defends the account of superagency by situating it within existing philosophical literature on racism, suggesting that the key contribution of my view is that it provides an account of precise mechanisms that explain racist outcomes. I argue that existing work either misunderstands how racist outcomes occur, does not engage with this question at all, or misses important dimensions of racism (in general) that superagency reveals. More specifically, I claim that such views miss the simultaneously agential-structural power revealed by superagency, and/or falsely ascribe an independent social existence to institutions which are binding over Black lives - thereby minimizing white responsibility to the damage done by anti-Black racism in American life. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how we are to understand superagency in relation to “white privilege.”

Elis Miller Larsen, "What is Rational Responsibility for Ignorance?"

There is an intuitive difference between not knowing the capitol of Idaho and failing to see that the Latinx person dressed in a white shirt is not your server. Both are instances of ignorance, yet only the second case seems to call for a certain kind of rational responsibility. Making a normative epistemic distinction between the two cases is difficult given our current analyses where ignorance is either the absence of knowledge, the absence of true belief, or the absence of awareness. Following these analyses, ignorance can be no more epistemically evaluable than mere absences. Absence ignorance generates a problem for rational responsibility. How do we rationally evaluate epistemic absences? I argue that (in some cases) people are ignorant because they omit certain obvious and relevant possibilities that are central to their inquiry. Such ‘omissive ignorance’ can be produced by an ignoring attitude—a mode of cognition that activates a set of possibilities. Unlike absence ignorance, omissive ignorance is subject to rational responsibility since it inferentially bears on how a person settles a question. The view is not an analysis of ignorance with the purpose of providing a replacement theory for past analyses. When someone is omissive ignorant they can also lack knowledge although the epistemic absence is not definitive of their ignorance. The argument for rational responsibility is also not a replacement theory for existing theories of moral responsibility—in many cases we will still want to hold people morally responsible in addition to holding them epistemically responsible. Focusing on distinctive epistemic requirements allows us to account for a breadth of examples that have the structure of omissive ignorance yet lack a moral or social charge. The upshot of this paper is threefold: (1) it can explain the difference between non-normative and normative epistemic evaluations of ignorance; (2) it can provide an evaluation where ignorance can be epistemically better or worse; (3) it introduces a distinctive epistemic requirement for rational responsibility that can account for the problematic aspect of ignorance separable from its moral permissibility. 

Rima Basu, Keynote, "Bullshit Inquiry"

Academic journals serve dual roles: they exist to advance knowledge and the publications within are used as arbiters for career advancement. This duality can lead researchers to employ publication optimization strategies in an attempt to game the system through a variety of means including fraud, plagiarism, deception, poor citation practices, and more generally, so-called “scholarshit”. This paper introduces a previously overlooked strategy, "bullshit inquiry". Bullshit inquiry poses a unique moral and epistemic challenge in philosophy. A key methodological principle of philosophy is the principle of charity which asks us to interpret others in the most persuasive and truth-supporting manner we can. Bullshit inquiry, characterized by a reckless disregard for truth or falsity, demonstrates not only a lack of respect but it also manipulates interlocutors into either abandoning charity or entertaining insincere beliefs, thereby undermining the foundational principles of philosophical discourse.