Ari Deller (St Peter's College):'Higher-Order Evidence Harms the Self'
There has been much attention in the recently burgeoning literatures on ‘the ethics of belief’ concerning how we may harm (and perhaps wrong) others by what we believe. However, the question of the self-directed ethical import of beliefs is under-explored. In this talk, I outline three ways in which beliefs have ethical import with regards to the self; beliefs play an important role in self-constitution, self-expression and self-understanding. I then build on this framework to argue that to subject oneself to some forms of higher-order evidence is to threaten oneself with a distinctive kind of self-alienation. As such, there are not only epistemic considerations, but also ethical ones, which are relevant to what kind of evidence we ought to gather. I argue that this has relevant explanatory upshots for important epistemic literatures, including the literatures on disagreement, deference and self-trust.
