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Vice epistemology studies how character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles systematically get in the way of knowledge, while doxastic responsibility is concerned with what kinds of responses are appropriate towards agents who believe badly. This paper identifies a new connection between these two fields, arguing that our propensity to take responsibility for our doxastic failures is directly relevant for vice epistemology, and in particular, understanding the social obstacles to knowledge that epistemic vices can create. This is because responses to norm violations are an important mechanism by which norms are upheld, and maintaining epistemic norms is crucial for our collective epistemic successes. This paper then identifies a new kind of vice, one which is bad precisely because of the way it undermines the epistemic norms that our blaming practices help maintain, and thus the benefits that said norms create. I call this vice epistemic evasiveness, and it concerns the attitude that one takes towards their own performance as an epistemic agent. Evasiveness is bad because it creates uncertainty about which agents are reliable, it prevents holders of this attitude from learning from their mistakes, and it signals to third parties that the norm is not being upheld, making them less likely to follow the norm.

This paper introduces the concept of epistemic hypocrisy, arguing that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral standing and epistemic standing. I also consider some potential asymmetries between the standing to engage in moral blame and the standing to engage in epistemic blame, arguing such asymmetries are either only apparent or can be explained away by extraneous factors.

This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is the robustness with which an entity is resistant to performing certain kinds of epistemic activity, such as questioning certain ideas, believing certain sources, or making certain inferences. Epistemic inoculation occurs when social, political or cultural processes cause an entity to become immune to engaging in certain epistemic activities. After outlining each of these concepts, we close by considering some of the risks associated with attempts to improve others’ epistemic health.

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people’s behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects’ responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions.

A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy.

This paper proposes a new theory of blame’s nature, arguing that it has the function of upholding norm compliance. Norm compliance is achieved by making agents competent with norms and motivated to exercise said competence, and blame achieves these through three effects. First, blame signals an agent’s commitment to a norm, which gives assurance to others that the norm will be complied with. Second, blame sanctions norm violations, thus deterring them. Third, blame sensitises agents, in a direct and indirect manner. Directly, it draws its target’s attention to their conduct, and induces emotional recognition of how the victim saw the conduct via empathy. Indirectly, it gives the target feedback on their conduct, which teaches them the nature of the norm, when it applies, and the weight that ought to be accorded to it compared to other norms. Additionally, by providing incentives to conform to the norm which the agent repeatedly tries to comply with, the agent gradually internalises the norm, after which they begin to experience the norm as intrinsically motivating. The paper closes by considering some implications of this theory for theorising about blame and blameworthiness.

This paper argues that a signalling and sanctioning account of blame can provide a taxonomy and unified theory of the many ways that blame can go wrong. Blaming not only signals a blamer’s commitment to a norm (understood as internalisation of the norm and willingness to enforce said norm), it also sanctions wrongdoers, deterring norm violations. The important role these two functions play in upholding norm compliance allow us to understand why many kinds of blame are objectionable—what I call pathologies of blame. These include harsh blame, trigger-happy blame, moralising blame, feeble blame, inconsistent blame, meddlesome blame, hypocritical blame (which itself has a number of forms), and virtue signalling blame. Allowing any of these pathologies to become standard practice threatens the very valuable norms we care about, and which appropriate blame plays a crucial role upholding.

Doris, in his 2002 book Lack of Character and 2005 paper ‘Replies: evidence and sensibility’, famously argues that we lack the kinds of global character traits posited by theories of virtue, because the situationist experiments demonstrate that people do not display trait-relevant behaviour in trait-relevant situations above chance. This paper argues that some notable situationist experiments are not trait-relevant situations. By analysing which factors improve or reduce participants’ chances of success (e.g. stress, lack of familiarity, ambiguity), and observing that these factors decrease agents’ capacity to recognize and respond to a variety of reasons in a variety of settings, the best explanation of many subjects’ failure to do the right thing is that they are affected by factors that are capacity-compromising. This matters, because settings in which agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing are typically not apt tests of an agent’s character traits.

Smilansky (2006) notes that wrongdoers seem to lack any entitlement to complain about being treated in the ways that they have treated others. However, it also seems impermissible to treat agents in certain ways, and this impermissibility would give wrongdoers who are themselves wronged grounds for complaint. This article solves this apparent paradox by arguing that what is at issue is not the right simply to make complaints, but the right to have one's demands respected. Agents must accept the authority of others to make second-personal demands on them before they can expect others to treat their own demands (or complaints) as legitimate. Wrongdoers’ previous wrongdoing shows they do not treat others’ demands as authoritative. However, as they are still beings with dignity, which acts as a source of moral reasons for others, wronging them remains impermissible.

This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer. What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what...

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to have revisionary consequences, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame.

In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these perpetrators knowingly chose to develop their prejudices. Attempts to ground culpability under some Attributionist accounts of moral responsibility will also fail. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (Philos Top 24(2):227–248, 1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused.

Philosophers have argued that subjects who act wrongly in the situationist psychology experiments are morally responsible for their actions. This paper argues that though the obedient subjects in M...