Defending Moral Encroachment On Both Belief And Credence

Normative conflict states that merely based on the statistical evidence about the frequency of possessing a disvalued trait within a group,one’s belief that a person in the group possesses that trait cannot be epistemically rational and morally permitted at the same time.Moral encroachers on belief argue that the conflict can be avoided because the rationality of an agent’s belief can depend on the moral considerations of the belief itself.There are two common challenges for moral encroachment: first,the normative conflict is all about epistemic rationality so that moral considerations play no role in solving the conflict;second,an agent cannot be responsible for belief,since she has no voluntary control over belief.However,the first challenge cannot explain away the moral intuition in the normative conflict case and it leads to further troubling questions.The second challenge can be well responded to by research for responsible belief.The most serious challenge comes from Fritz and Jackson.They argue that moral encroachment on belief entails moral encroachment on credence.Since moral encroachment on credence is impossible,as most scholars suggest,moral encroachment on belief is impossible.My paper will reject Fritz and Jackson’s argument.There are two tasks in my paper:first,I will examine the objections to moral encroachment on credence;second,I will respond to the objections with King and Babic’s model of epistemic risk function,and then defend the model.My argument goes as follows: to begin with,I will argue the two reasons against moral encroachment on credence are inconclusive.First,it cannot be concluded that there is no mechanism for moral encroachment on credence at all,though the mechanisms proposed by Fritz and Jackson are not viable.Second,Dutch Book argument assumes that moral consideration is incompatible with Conditionalization but this assumption is false.Then,since epistemic risk function which is determined by attitudes towards epistemic errors can pick appropriate prior credence which,together with evidence can determine updated credence,I argue that moral considerations can encroach on credence by encroaching on prior.This is the mechanism of moral encroachment on credence which is friendly to Conditionalization.Next,I defend the notion of risk minimization used in the model and clarify the rational constraints on credence posed by the model.To conclude,I argue for moral encroachment on credence by responding to two major objections.As a result,moral encroachment on credence is not a burden for defending moral encroachment on belief.Instead,together with the latter,it is a promising solution to normative conflict.