The Obligation to Diversify One's Sources: Against Epistemic Partisanship in the Consumption of News Media

In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically “partisan” in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own – to “diversify our sources”. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, substantively correct

Epistemic Worth

Actions can have, or lack, moral worth. When a person’s action is morally worthy, she not only acts rightly, but does so in a way that reflects well on her and in such a way that she is creditable for doing what is right. In this paper, I develop and defend an analogue of the notion of moral worth that applies to belief, which I call epistemic worth. When a person’s belief is epistemically worthy, she not only believes rightly, but does so in a way that reflects well on her and in such a way that she is creditable for believing what is right. The notion of epistemic worth, I suggest, is of interest to both epistemologists and ethicists

Rights, Wrongs, and Recourse in the Law of Torts

Cardozo\u27s opinion in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.\u27 hinges on a stark assertion about rights and wrongs: A plaintiff has no right of action unless she can show \u27a wrong\u27 to herself; i.e., a violation of her own right. Cardozo himself made this principle the core of his analysis, yet scholars typically regard it as impenetrable, circular, vacuous, or, as Posner put it, eloquent bluff. Small wonder, then, that readers typically turn to reasonable foreseeability as the essence of the case. Leading scholars treat Palsgraf as a proximate cause case, despite Cardozo\u27s pronouncement that W[the law of causation, remote or proximate, is thus foreign to the case before us., Though Palsgraf is widely regarded as the most famous case in American tort law, Cardozo\u27s own reasoning in Palsgraf is typically ignored or derided, but not explained. The facts of Palsgraf may be peculiar, but its core principle is pervasive: For all torts, courts reject a plaintiffs claim when the defendant\u27s conduct, even if a wrong to a third party, was not a wrong to the plaintiff herself. For example, an injured plaintiff can win in fraud only if she was defrauded, in defamation only if she was defamed, in trespass only if her land rights were violated, and so on. Courts reach these results even where the defendant acted tortiously, the plaintiff suffered a real injury, and the plaintiffs injury was reasonably foreseeable. The legal rule upon which these cases rely is that which our scholarly tradition treats so ambivalently in Palsgraf: A plaintiff cannot win unless the defendant\u27s conduct was a wrong relative to her, i.e., unless her right was violated. I shall call this principle the substantive standing rule and shall show that it is a fundamental feature of tort law

The Motives for Moral Credit

To deserve credit for doing what is morally right, we must act from the right kinds of motives. Acting from the right kinds of motives involves responding both to the morally relevant reasons, by acting on these considerations, and to the morally relevant individuals, by being guided by appropriate attitudes of regard for them. Recent theories of the right kinds of motives have tended to prioritize responding to moral reasons. I develop a theory that instead prioritizes responding to individuals (through appropriate attitudes of regard for them) and argue that it better accounts for the basic features of the right kinds of motives – what we most fundamentally care about in judging whether persons deserve moral credit

Higher-Order Defeat and Doxastic Resilience

It seems obvious that when higher-order evidence makes it rational for one to doubt that one’s own belief on some matter is rational, this can undermine the rationality of that belief. This is known as higher-order defeat. However, despite its intuitive plausibility, it has proved puzzling how higher-order defeat works, exactly. To highlight two prominent sources of puzzlement, higher-order defeat seems to defy being understood in terms of conditionalization; and higher-order defeat can sometimes place agents in what seem like epistemic dilemmas. This chapter draws attention to an overlooked aspect of higher-order defeat, namely that it can undermine the resilience of one’s beliefs. The notion of resilience was originally devised to understand how one should reflect the ‘weight’ of one’s evidence. But it can also be applied to understand how one should reflect one’s higher-order evidence. The idea is particularly useful for understanding cases where one’s higher-order evidence indicates that one has failed in correctly assessing the evidence, without indicating whether one has over- or underestimated the degree of evidential support for a proposition. But it is exactly in such cases that the puzzles of higher-order defeat seem most compelling