Unifying Moral and Epistemic Praiseworthiness

Abstract

On a popular philosophical view, moral and epistemic normativity are two species of the same genus: we can give unified accounts of normative properties pertaining to both domains. The case of praiseworthiness poses a challenge. Under a compelling theory, what makes us morally praiseworthy is that our action manifests morally good will. However, I argue that an explanation of epistemic praiseworthiness in terms of the manifestation of epistemically good will fails. Nonetheless, as I then go on to show, the correct explanation of what makes us praiseworthy is unified on a more structural level: the manifestation of morally good will is the manifestation of moral sensitivity. And there is a structurally analogous notion of epistemic sensitivity, which I make the core of a view about epistemic praiseworthiness. In both domains, then, what makes an agent praiseworthy for her response is that it manifests a sufficient degree of sensitivity—moral sensitivity in the moral domain and epistemic sensitivity in the epistemic one. This novel view of the still underexplored property of epistemic praiseworthiness elucidates important aspects of our beliefs’ evaluation: how difficulty bears on the degree of praise we merit for our knowledge and under which conditions we merit praise for knowledge acquired via testimony.