抄録
The practice of epistemic evaluation, which evaluates the attributability of epistemic status (knowledge, justified, rational, etc.) to beliefs held by the subject, is one of the essential activities of epistemology. The standard theory of epistemic evaluation is “purism,” which holds that the attributability of epistemic status to a belief is judged solely based on truth-relevant factors. Here, truth-relevant factors refer to factors that indicate the degree of probability that a belief is true, such as evidence supporting the truth/falsehood of the content of the belief.
However, there is a counterargument to this standard position that supports the following “moral encroachment” thesis (hereafter ME): the attributability of epistemic status to a belief p held by a subject depends on moral factors that are not truth-relevant with respect to p. If purism is correct, for example, if the evidence that subjects S1 and S2 have for a proposition p is identical - there is no difference in truth-relevant factors - then when S1 and S2 believe p, the epistemic status attributed to their beliefs will always be the same. In contrast, if ME is correct, then even with identical evidence, the possibility of attributing epistemic status to p can vary depending on whether a particular moral factor is present or not. In other words, even if there is no difference in truth-relevant factors, if there is a difference in moral factors, the epistemic evaluation result will change.
In this paper, after a close examination of this ME argument, we will show that the existing ME positions proposed so far cannot be accepted as valid. However, since purism also has unresolved problems, I propose a new ME variant called “rule ME” that can avoid the problems of both positions. Through the above discussion, the relationship between the activity of epistemic evaluation and moral factors will be organized appropriately.
