Abstract

Epistemic judgment seems to be less emotionally engaging than moral judgment. We are more prone to judge epistemic failures in an emotionally “cool” way than we are moral failures. In order to accommodate this observation, Boult (2020) has argued for a relationship-based account of epistemic blame that parallels Scanlon’s account of moral blame. The suggestion is that if one can give a non-emotion-based account of epistemic blame, then the coolness of epistemic judgment would not be a problem for the prospect of epistemic blameworthiness. In this talk I push back on the suggestion that the role of blaming emotions in judgments of epistemic failure can be so easily dismissed. Drawing on Bourget’s (2017) account of phenomenal grasping, I want to suggest that moral blaming emotions allow us to phenomenally grasp moral blameworthiness. This in turn allows us to appreciate the normative significance of moral blameworthiness in a way that we would otherwise be unable to do. I argue that if we do not have epistemic blaming emotions, then even if we are epistemically blameworthy and even if we engage in epistemic blame, we are not capable of phenomenally grasping that fact. This would, at the least, be a bizarre result for the defender of epistemic blameworthiness.

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