Research Projects

Synthese (2025)

I have often blamed others for their repugnant, unethical, or irrational beliefs. However, considering how irrelevant influences affect beliefs makes it seem as though no one controls which beliefs they hold. In the burgeoning literature on epistemic blame, epistemologists have widely assumed that beliefs can be an appropriate target-class of epistemic blame: that we are right to blame others for their beliefs. In response to this consensus, I raise a concern about resultant luck from the moral responsibility literature and consider the ‘rationalist’ response to this problem: that any appropriate target of blame must be immune to resultant luck. I import both the concept of resultant luck and the rationalist reply into the epistemic domain, arguing that all beliefs are inappropriate targets of epistemic blame because they are subject to epistemic resultant luck. But I do not directly advocate for an eliminativist conclusion; instead, I suggest that we may still aptly target blame at the quality of one’s inquiry: the viciousness demonstrated in an investigation, regardless of how one’s beliefs (un)luckily turn out. Thus, one can be aptly blamed for a true belief if arrived at in a vicious manner and praised for a false belief if arrived at virtuously.