The Normative Turn in Conspiracy Theory Theory?

ABSTRACT

The papers contained in this special issue are evidence that the philosophy of conspiracy theory is undergoing a ‘normative turn’, with earlier concerns about the epistemological soundness of conspiracy theories now being supplemented by a shift to concerns about discursive and epistemic justice. This is a welcome development. Nonetheless, these normative concerns need to be seen within the context of an ongoing and largely undeclared disagreement between generalists and particularists over just how conspired the world really is.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theory
• particularism
• generalism
• epistemic justice

It is exciting to see the range of approaches to the philosophy of conspiracy theory contained in this special issue, and it is much to the indefatigable M R. X. Dentith’s credit that such an excellent array of diverse papers has been assembled here. It would be impossible to give each paper its due in a response such as this, nor am I equipped to do so. What I do hope to do, however, is situate these papers within the wider generalist-vs-particularist discussion, in order to suggest that we are witnessing a significant turning point in the discussion.

The philosophy of conspiracy theory is no longer in its infancy. We now have more than two decades of excellent, if under-recognized, epistemological work on the question of what conspiracy theories are, and whether, taken as an epistemological class, conspiracy theories deserve the sort of opprobrium typically heaped upon them. The discussion has been somewhat heated at times, but in retrospect at least, the field enjoyed a rather harmonious childhood. In earlier work (Stokes 2018) I noted that it was ‘astonishing’ that philosophers had reached a consensus that there is nothing inherently disqualifying about conspiracy theories qua theories. As Dentith notes in their introduction to this special issue, ‘there are two senses of “astonishing” here worth noting: the first is that because philosophers are typically fractious, this kind of general agreement is in itself astonishing. The other sense, of course, is that the consensus in philosophy is astonishing because it is at odds with the consensus elsewhere’ (Dentith forthcoming). Just for the record, I meant ‘astonishing’ purely in the first sense. But it is certainly true that ‘first generation’ voices in conspiracy theory theory converged on a position that is appreciably different to the ways in which conspiracy theories seem to be discussed in the wider culture. It was perhaps inevitable then that, as it matured, the philosophy of conspiracy theory would start to encounter pushback both from within philosophy (e.g. Cassam 2019) and without (e.g. Dieguez et al. 2016).

On the surface, much of this pushback presents itself as a disagreement over exactly what we are talking about when we talk about conspiracy theories. Particularists appeal to a minimalist definition, noting that while doing so captures some events or narratives that we would not typically think of as conspiracy theories (Watergate, the assassination of Julius Caesar, etc.), adding other features to our definition of conspiracy theory – contradicting an official narrative, very powerful actors, nefarious intent, etc.—will cause the definition to misapply in other ways. With a minimalist, and thus capacious, definition in hand, every historically literate person turns out to be a conspiracy theorist, as Pigden (2016) infamously puts it. Generalists respond that this wide definition goes well beyond what we are actually talking about when we use the terms ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’. The particularists have lost sight of a real and worrying category of explanation, say the generalists; the particularists reply that the generalists are working with a definition of conspiracy theory so vague as to fail to track any respectable object of scientific inquiry (see e.g. Pigden’s contribution to this special issue (forthcoming)).

If this were just a disagreement about definitions, however, the debate would be nowhere near as testy as it is. Other philosophical commitments permitting, we could all simply advert to a Wittgensteinian family-resemblances approach, agree that we know a conspiracy theory when we see one, gravely cite Aristotle’s well-known warning not to expect more precision than the subject matter allows for and move on. But in true conspiratorial style, I’m going to suggest there’s something else going on here. Generalists don’t just dislike the particularist definition because it strays from what they take popular usage to be, but because it threatens legitimate interpretations of the social world, leading to views that they take to be absurd and repugnant. Particularists don’t just dislike the generalist definition because it is vague, but because it excludes interpretations of social reality they think should be at least open to consideration. Deep down, I’d suggest, the generalist-particularist debate tracks not one disagreement, but two. The first thing it tracks is a declared disagreement between a revisionary philosophical definition of conspiracy theory and a vague but widespread popular use of the term. The second thing it tracks is a largely undeclared conflict over the essentially undecidable question of how conspired the world really is.

Conspiracy Theory and Epistemic Justice

Up to this point, the debate has largely proceeded as an epistemological one. The papers in this special issue of Social Epistemology arguably mark a ‘normative turn’ in the philosophy of conspiracy theory (the humanities and social sciences, you understand, never merely progress, but always make ‘turns’). There has, of course, always been a normative dimension to the philosophy of conspiracy theory from the outset. Philosophers like Charles Pigden, David Coady, and Lee Basham have argued from the start that the reflexive dismissal of conspiracy theories is not merely epistemically unwarranted, but also politically harmful and indeed quite dangerous. By treating conspiracy theories as inherently dismissible, the argument goes, we shield political actors and institutions from legitimate scrutiny and thereby make ourselves vulnerable to various forms of harm. This worry is never far from the surface in a great many of the papers on the topic to date. Yet these normative issues have been largely subordinated to the epistemology of conspiracy theory, with the implicit (and not unreasonable) assumption that we must get the latter right first in order to address the former.

What is striking about the new phase in the particularism-generalism debate evident in this issue of Social Epistemology is that attention has shifted from the attempt to define conspiracy theory (and then re-assess the epistemic respectability of such theories), to a normative assessment of the speech-act of calling something a ‘conspiracy theory’ or calling someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’. In response to the accusation that ‘conspiracy theory’ as philosophers have construed the term differs from the everyday use of the phrase, particularists have begun to look more closely and critically, using a wider range of theoretical tools, at just how the term is used. The question that then arises is what we should do with the expression ‘conspiracy theory’: keep using it on the grounds that it usefully picks out a real class of explanation, ‘engineer’ the concept to make popular usage track some underlying reality more closely, retain the term but aim to remove the stigma, ditch the term altogether, or continue using ‘conspiracy theory’ in the epistemologists’ sense as a term of art?

Melina Tsapos, for instance, argues that a simple account of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ yields the conclusion that everyone is a conspiracy theorist, making the term theoretically unfruitful (forthcoming). She shows that no other construal, however, fares better at giving us a definition of ‘conspiracy theorist’ that is both fruitful and explains why nobody ever wants to self-identify as a conspiracy theorist. (There probably are a few people out there who embrace the label, but one does hear the phrase ‘No, I’m a conspiracy realist’ with remarkable regularity.) Niki Pfeifer argues, helpfully I think, for a probabilistic interpretation of generalism that has the effect of taking some of the heat out of the generalism-particularism debate: in effect, every generalist claim about the falsity of conspiracy theories comes with an unspoken asterisk, an implicit caveat that there may be the odd exception (forthcoming). Rico Hauswald points to the function of calling something a conspiracy theory in conversational contexts (forthcoming). Specifically, utterances like ‘that’s a conspiracy theory!’ operate as dismissive conversational exercitives. The ‘dismissive’ aspect is where the danger lies: such exercitives function to take possibilities out of consideration and thereby lay us open to premature knowledge claims and premature causal claims. But citing Blake-Turner (2020), Hauswald notes that dismissive conversational exercitives can also play a positive role, by ensuring that irrelevant alternatives are not wrongly taken to impinge on otherwise uncompromised knowledge claims.

These analyses of what pejorative uses of the phrase ‘conspiracy theory/theorists’ are doing on a discursive level are partly focused on the epistemic risks associated with dismissing conspiracy theories and those who proffer them. Hauswald, for instance, notes that we may ‘prematurely’ accept a generic statement like ‘Pharmaceutical companies are trustworthy’ if instances where such companies have behaved in untrustworthy ways are excluded from consideration by labelling them as conspiracy theories. But there is also a pervasive concern here for the forms of epistemic and discursive injustice that speaking pejoratively of conspiracy theorists can involve. As Matthew Shields puts it, citing Husting and Orr (2007, 27), by calling you a conspiracy theorist I can ‘symbolically exclude you from the imagined community of reasonable interlocutors’ (forthcoming). That, as Will Mittendorf notes, is to deny one’s interlocutor a form of rational respect owed to others in democracies (forthcoming). One does not need to be a particularist, let alone a conspiracy theorist, to be troubled by this implication.

But if particularists are right that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is used to unjustly marginalize a certain group of interlocutors, that does not mean that what those interlocutors themselves do is unproblematic. Shields takes it as an upshot of particularism that there is ‘no reason either to retain or add the negatively evaluative concept conspiracy theory_e to our epistemic and political vocabularies, which have the linguistic and conceptual resources we require for criticizing false and unjustified beliefs, including those that are egregiously so’ (forthcoming). But suppose we abandon the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’; suppose the phrase itself become taboo, a recognized slur. That may well lead to certain gains in epistemic justice, and that may be reason enough to seek to retire the phrase. We’d still be left, though, with a recognizable class of accusatory explanations that are morally uncharitable and ontologically expansive, and that run up against what for many of us are fundamental background conditions for interpreting observed events and public actions. If we accept particularism, then we have to approach these explanations with the same receptivity as we would any other explanation. In other words, particularism is not mollified simply by dropping a piece of terminology that has come to serve repressive discursive ends, but by dropping any prima facie objection to investigation of the explanations that terminology is meant to describe.

Haunted by Witches

J. C. M. Duetz makes the interesting and valuable move of shifting our focus from the word ‘conspiracy’ to the word ‘theory’ in considering the bad rap conspiracy theories get in popular discourse (forthcoming). On Duetz’s telling, part of the opprobrium is due to conspiracy theories being ‘theories’ in the loose popular sense (‘But that’s just a theory!’) while being opposed to ‘mainstream’ or ‘official’ narratives that are theories in the scientific sense of massively well-supported and accepted explanations. Hence the conspiracy theory theorist’s fallback of insisting that the ‘official’ narrative of 9/11 and the ‘inside job’ narrative are both conspiracy theories – because both posit a conspiracy as the causal factor in what happened, even if they posit quite different conspiracies – isn’t quite true. One is a theory in the strict sense, and the other is a theory in the loose sense. ‘It is the “theory”-aspect that is doing most of the work in derogatory “conspiracy theory”-talk’, Duetz claims, and ‘[N]ot, as was previously the focus of most Conspiracy Theory Theorists, the “conspiracy” aspect’ (forthcoming). This, incidentally, provides a neat explanation for the late-lamented Mort Sahl’s refusal to discuss conspiracy theory, as cited in Keeley’s contribution to this issue, on the grounds that it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s the truth!

It’s worth dwelling here for a moment though on why Duetz thinks such an explanation is necessary. Duetz asks ‘[W]hy is it, then, that we find explanations advancing conspiracies as salient causes of events so suspicious […] if we know that conspiracies are part and parcel of our social lives’? (forthcoming). This is a not unreasonable concern: faced with an interlocutor who accepts that conspiracies happen but also refuses to entertain conspiracy-based explanations of events (rather that investigating them and dismissing them) then the charitable thing to do is to look for some non-conspiracy-related reason why they dismiss conspiracy theories. But this takes as essentially uncontested the two things that, I’d suggest, are precisely what is at issue in a great deal of pushback against conspiracy theory: that conspiracies really are ‘part and parcel of our social lives’, and moreover that conspiracies of the sort advanced by the people popularly identified as conspiracy theorists are part and parcel of our social lives.

Some of this does indeed come down to definitions of conspiracy, and Duetz makes the important point that generalists are probably not cleaving to popular usage any more than particularists do, but run a definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ that is every bit as stipulative as that offered by the particularists with their minimalist, pejorative-free definition. But even allowing for that, it’s just not clear that, because generalists accept that Watergate happened, there has to be some other reason why those same people use the term ‘conspiracy theory’ pejoratively. We can explain the generalist’s stance without assuming the problem lies in the ‘theory’ part of ‘conspiracy theory’ by saying that the generalist accepts conspiracies have happened while also asserting that conspiracy, far from being ‘part and parcel’ of human social life, is so abnormal a state of affairs as to be worth excluding from immediate consideration. There is a (somewhat parochial) saying that when you hear the sound of hooves, you don’t immediately think ‘zebras’. Much of the generalist vs. particularist debate looks like it is, in fact, an unacknowledged disagreement about the local prevalence of zebras. In other words, the underlying disagreement here is really about how conspired society is: whether conspiracies, at least in some restricted sense or over some vague threshold of size, secrecy, or efficacy, are things that happen often enough to worry about or things that happen rarely if ever. That is ultimately, I’d suggest, not a question of our judgments of the available evidence but of an ontological commitment to the world being a certain way, a commitment which in turn will largely determine what we take the evidence to be and how we interpret it.

Brian L. Keeley offers an interesting analogue to the pejorative use of ‘conspiracy theory’ in the term ‘witch hunt’ (forthcoming). There is an irresistible similarity here in that Trumpian declarations such as ‘this investigation is the biggest witch hunt in American history!’ certainly operate as dismissive conversational exercitives. The effect of such an utterance is to declare that the ‘hunt’ in question is at once illegitimate, conducted in bad faith, and likely to lead to deeply unjust results. It is not hard to see how ‘that’s just a conspiracy theory’ can operate in the same way. However, Keeley notes, there is one rather important difference:

One important reason for the negative evaluation attached to witch hunting is that witches do not exist! At least, supernatural-power-wielding, evil witches—in the sense the term implies, such as in the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17^th century—do not exist. In this way, a witch hunt is akin to a snipe hunt in that it is foolhardy and ultimately fruitless to hunt for something that does not exist. To the contrary, conspiracies do happen, and they happen all the time. In addition to Watergate, consider that the social world—both currently and historically—is replete with conspiracies. In many social domains […] the most reasonable explanation of events is conspiratorial in nature. [emphasis added] (forthcoming)

Although witches in the relevant sense don’t exist, Wiccans do, and are sometimes (self-) described as witches; but that does not justify removing the pejorative connotations of the term ‘witch hunt’, because witch hunts (at least ostensibly) hunt supernatural witches, not Wiccans. Hence you can’t rehabilitate the term ‘witch hunt’ by pointing to the existence of Wiccans, because ‘witch’ is applied to two different objects: supernatural malevolent beings, and followers of Wicca. And in the same sense, the generalist can simply insist true conspiracies and conspiracy theories are two different things, as Keeley himself notes in his discussion of how Napolitano and Reuter (2021) make precisely this move. So: conspiracies are witches, Watergates are Wiccans. Any questions?

The particularist can object, not without good cause, that this is just special pleading. If conspiracies form any sort of kind at all, then conspiracy theories and explanations-in-terms-of-conspiracy are clearly of the same kind given their only real difference is ‘official’ acceptance (and even that is something they do not have intrinsically given that a theory can be officially accepted at one time and not at another). If the simpler and wider use of ‘conspiracy theory’ favored by particularists is not perfectly co-extensive with the folk-concept of conspiracy theory, then so be it: ‘Conspiracy theory theorists are not the “folk” with respect to the concept of CTs. Even more so than philosophers, in general, conspiracy theory theorists take as their goal a fuller understanding of this phenomenon, making use of many interdisciplinary lenses, from political science to social psychology to history to sociology, to name only a few sub-disciplines involved in the area of study’ (Keeley forthcoming). Just as other experts in other domains can use language appropriate to the Sellarsian scientific image rather than the manifest image of the folk, ‘conspiracy theory theorists can use their concepts similarly unbeholden to how the folk use the term’ (Keeley forthcoming).

The problem, I’d suggest, is that we live in the manifest image. The clash between folk-language and scientific language can generate negative consequences, as when Creationists trade on the ambiguity between scientific and everyday senses of the word ‘theory’. I don’t think conspiracy theory theorists are somehow debarred from coming up with their own revisionary definitions of popular terms, but the more revisionary those definitions are, the less theoretically fruitful (as Tsapos puts it) and socially illuminating they are going to be. Learning that everyone is a conspiracy theorist because we all believe a cabal of Romans conspired to murder Julius Caesar isn’t going to help us understand why a large body of people take seriously the idea that Trump is secretly fighting to destroy a vast Democrat child exploitation network or that schoolchildren killed in mass-shootings either never existed or were murdered by the government. If generalists have, as Keeley notes, a tendency to focus ‘solely on example CTs whose epistemic faults are taken as given’ (forthcoming) or to focus on outlandish conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones or David Icke (Dentith 2021), particularists have a tendency to not engage with the troubling character of contemporary conspiracy theories at all.

Charles Pigden argues that the problem with the pejorative use of ‘conspiracy theory’ is that the term itself is so fuzzy as to fail to form a studyable target: terms like this ‘do not have determinate (uncontested) extensions. Hence “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” do not constitute a set of phenomena suitable for psychological or social scientific investigation’ (forthcoming). Worse, the term licenses invalid inferences, which Pigden illustrates using A. N. Prior’s ‘Tonkish’ logical connectives. Much of Pigden’s argument, though, depends upon the claim that ‘It simply is not true that theories which posit conspiracies are almost always false, crazy or unbelievable’; if that were true, constructing an argument for why conspiracy theories generally aren’t worth taking seriously would be trivial. But, Pigden has repeatedly argued, it isn’t true. We all believe conspiracies can, have, and do happen.

My worry is that there is an element of motte-and-bailey argument going on here, in a way that mirrors what generalists are accused of doing. If generalists admit that Watergate and Iran-Contra happened but insist that’s irrelevant or marginal to what they are talking about, particularists have a corresponding habit of breezily admitting many conspiracy theories are wrong, silly, ludicrous and often hateful, but insisting that is irrelevant or marginal to what they are defending. Generalists defend a motte (‘some claimed conspiracies are true but most aren’t’) while trying to claim the bailey (‘conspiracy theories as a class can generally be dismissed’) while particularists defend a motte (‘some conspiracies are true’) while claiming a bailey that amounts to ‘we can’t automatically dismiss conspiracy theories’ – which sounds benign enough until you open up a web browser and look at what you’re therefore committed to not automatically dismissing. Pigden and co. want to be able to assert that ‘conspiracies happen’ is true in a thin sense while surreptitiously leaving the door open for the idea that we can’t simply gainsay theories of the type that people actually refer to – however imprecisely and inchoately – as conspiracies.

Again, much of this seems to come down to background assumptions about how the world works, and related notions of what counts as a trustworthy source of knowledge. Consider Pigden’s Tonkish Rules 3:

‘Conspiracy theory’ Introduction*

From ‘This is a theory which posits a conspiracy to which I (or the epistemic authorities I respect) do not subscribe’ infer (that is, it is okay to infer) ‘This is a conspiracy theory’

‘Conspiracy theory’ Elimination

From ‘This is a conspiracy theory’ infer (that is, it is okay to infer) ‘This theory is false, crazy or unbelievable’

Pigden tells us that these rules ‘license moves from truths to falsehoods since many theories which posit a conspiracy and are disbelieved by some speaker or the epistemic authorities that she respects are nonetheless true, plausible or rationally believable’. We’re not told what theories these are, however, and much in this part of the argument hangs on Pigden’s indexicalisation of the phrase ‘epistemic authorities’. If we take it that, say, Maddow fans and Trump fans accept different epistemic authorities, then those of Pigden’s Tonkish Rules that invoke epistemic authorities will indeed license inference to false claims. But if we simply speak of epistemic authorities simpliciter, that problem largely goes away. There aren’t my authorities and your authorities; there’s just the authorities, whatever you or I happen to believe.

This leads us to Duetz’s aim of fostering depolarization between conspiracy theorists and those who reject conspiracy theories. It is hard not to look at the tenor of current political debate and wish for a (no doubt imaginary) past in which there were still shared epistemic authorities and a corresponding body of agreed facts we could check in order to settle disagreements. Let’s leave aside the question of whether such a simpler time ever really existed, or whether we should want to go back there even if it did; a less polarized world does sound desirable in any case. To achieve depolarization, as Duetz notes, it won’t be enough simply to present people with ‘factual arguments to undermine the other group’s epistemic evaluation of a theory’ (forthcoming). We need to take a further step: ‘taking the other group’s perspective and being attentive to their ways of determining the conditions for epistemic evaluations’ (forthcoming).

There are arguably many other reasons for doing this. Being attentive to an interlocutor’s ‘ways of determining the conditions for epistemic evaluations’ can be a way of treating someone with full dignity as both a rational agent and a moral patient. More cynically, it can also be a useful debating tactic: ‘even if I grant what you’re saying about the epistemic status of the competing theories, here’s why your preferred theory turns out to be wrong’. Anyone who worries about the decline in trust in shared epistemic authorities would do well to understand the ways in which people have become alienated from society’s knowledge-generating mechanisms, and the forms of asymmetrical political and economic power relations and institutional failures that have led to our much-decried ‘post-truth’ condition.

But is depolarization for its own sake the right thing to aim for? It’s not clear what finding middle ground would look like between people who think Jews secretly rule the world and those who don’t, or between those who think Sandy Hook was staged and those who don’t, and it’s not clear that’s ground we should want to occupy. The solution to conspiracy-theory-induced polarization might well turn out to be for people who believe in conspiracy theories to stop doing so – which is obviously not to say that they should somehow be made to stop, were such a thing even possible.

Mittendorf’s paper is largely focused on what, if anything, would legitimate state intervention against conspiracy theories, which is a much narrower question than the question of whether we should take conspiracy theories seriously or dismiss them out of hand. Mittendorf argues that:

Morally unreasonable conspiracy theories, if offered sincerely, still require the social equality of other citizens, including and especially those who the theorizer is theorizing about. For example, to hold a belief that a minority group engages in some conspiratorial impropriety requires evidence and the opportunity for an examination of those claims by the minority group members and others in a process of reason exchange. If the conspiracy theory somehow damages that group’s ability to participate in debate freely and equally, then the original conspiracy theory accusation cannot be properly vetted, which undermines its initial claim to truth. (forthcoming)

But the moral unreasonability here does not simply consist in failing to give a minority group the ‘ability to participate in debate freely and equally’ whether by undermining their epistemic standing via the conspiracy itself (‘Well of course they’ll deny it – they’re all conspirators! You can’t believe a word they say!’) or other means of exclusion from public debate. Rather, the problem is putting minority groups in positions where they are required to defend themselves in the first place. It is unsustainable to say that prejudiced accusations against marginalized or vulnerable groups are morally reasonable so long as those groups are given full opportunity to disprove those accusations. That is true even if such theories are offered ‘sincerely’, and is also true even if we accept Mittendorf’s claim that his proposed approach ‘creates more inclusivity and legitimacy and offers robust protections for the social and political equality of all through internal epistemic commitments’.

Ethics of Accusation

I said above that the debate over conspiracy theories seems to have shifted from defining and assessing conspiracy theories as a class of explanation to defining and assessing the function of the speech act of defining something/one as a conspiracy theory/ist. As presented in this special issue, however, that assessment largely only flows one way; the contributors here are largely concerned with the political and moral dimensions of accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist. I want to conclude by suggesting how things might look if we make the corresponding move in the other direction: considering the moral and political implications of positing a conspiracy – and thereby of accusing someone of being a conspirator.

Hauswald describes compellingly how the introduction of a new alternative into a conversation changes the scope and character of that conversation, by essentially changing the universe of possibilities within which the conversation takes place. He uses McGowan’s (2019) example of the adulterous Maureen to explain how ‘Sometimes the mere mention of an alternative is sufficient to make it salient to the participants in the conversation[.]’ In this case, Maureen is torn between various options as to what to do about her husband’s suspicions. When her interlocutor replies ‘Why don’t you just come clean and tell the truth for once!’, a new alternative is put into contention. The field of possible responses is now opened up, and the onus is on Maureen to address or dismiss this new option.

But consider the other side of the story: how the husband’s suspicions arose in the first place. Let’s suppose that a few days beforehand, Maureen’s husband – we’ll call him Maurice – is talking to his friend, fretting about what could possibly be causing Maureen’s recent unusual behavior. His friend, noticing clues that point to an affair, delicately suggests ‘Morrie, you don’t suppose there could be someone else, do you?’ As in Maureen’s case, the friend introduces a new, salient possibility into the mix of relevant options. But the friend in Maurice’s case has done something else, too. Exactly what he has done needs to be teased out somewhat: at worst he has just accused of Maureen of infidelity, at best he has asserted that it is at least thinkable that Maureen has been unfaithful. (We’re assuming here a range of generic background conditions about Maureen and Maurice’s marriage i.e. they mutually expect fidelity, and that Maureen is not lying out of a legitimate sense that her infidelity is justified or out of fear of an abusive reaction from Maurice). In other words, the friend’s intervention does not simply change the composition of the set of relevant alternatives. It also changes the world in morally relevant ways too: it is now a world in which Maureen has been impugned.

Prima facie, we have moral reasons to be reluctant to impugn people. This flows, I take it, from the very character of moral regard for the other, which among many other things, requires us to interpret people as charitably as possible. The resulting reluctance is of a very particular type. It is not just that we want to avoid the needlessly hurt feelings caused by a false accusation (though hopefully we do!), but that we do not want to call the default goodness of the other into question unless doing so is unavoidable. If Maurice’s friend instead says ‘Morrie, do you think perhaps she’s behaving strangely because she’s gravely ill?’ that too introduces a possibility Maurice will be understandably reluctant to entertain. But it does not change the moral world in the same way as the accusation of infidelity. (It might open up a secondary moral question of whether Maureen should have told Maurice about the illness, but that would be derivative of the non-moral fact of getting sick; the corresponding wrong in the infidelity case is hiding the infidelity, which is derivative of an act which is itself wrong.) Simply raising the possibility of cheating is irreversible in the moral case in a way that, ceteris paribus, isn’t in the sickness case. There are some things you just can’t take back.

To this we may well respond: but Maureen really is cheating on him! And conspiracies really do happen, just as adultery does. But remember that the disagreement between generalists and particularists concerns whether we should entertain conspiracy explanations at least long enough to investigate them, not the broader question of whether we should believe them. The answer to that question will look different based on very different, and ultimately untestable, assumptions about how societies work, just as whether it’s reasonable to wonder whether one’s spouse is cheating will ultimately depend not on statistics about the prevalence of adultery, but about our relationship to the other person. Again, what is at issue in all these cases are, fundamentally, ontological commitments to the world being a certain way: how trustworthy other people are, how open one’s society is, how prevalent undetected conspiracy is, how random or deliberate events are. Beneath and beyond their definitional and epistemological disagreements, generalists and particularists may ultimately just live in different universes.

That does not, however, negate the issues of epistemic justice raised in these fine papers, nor the importance of the epistemic and critical turn they represent. It may, in effect, be wrong to be a conspiracy theorist even if there really are conspiracies, and wrong to call someone a conspiracy theorist even if they really are a conspiracy theorist. That is not a happy place to end up. But nobody ever said we’d only end up in happy places.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to M R. X. Dentith for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Stokes

Patrick Stokes is associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He works on issues of personal identity, death, moral psychology, and the work of Søren Kierkegaard.