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ABSTRACT
In developing her ethics of care, Eva Kittay discusses the vulnerability and voluntarism models of obligation. Kittay uses the vulnerability model to demonstrate that we have some obligations to care, even for those to whom we’ve made no promise or with whom we have no agreement. Kittay’s primary interest is in our moral obligations. I use this distinction to propose a new way to understand our epistemic obligations to one another. After explaining Kittay’s models and their epistemic analogs, I use epistemic vulnerability to explain two cases.
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Notes
1. Exceptions include (Goldberg Citation2018; Fricker Citation2007; Dotson Citation2011) who address this more or less directly.
2. In her discussion of what she calls ‘traditional liberal theories’, Annette Baier points to Rawls, Locke, Mill and others as theorists who have ignored or failed to pay due attention to what we’ll call the vulnerability model. (Baier Citation1987).
3. This is plausible in an extreme case.
4. There are a number of purported explanations for why this is. Much has been written, in epistemology, about why we do or ought to attempt to meet our epistemic goals. Some argue that the epistemic goals we ought to pursue are intrinsically valuable. Others argue that epistemic goals are good for us to pursue because of the kinds of creatures we are (Lear, 1988). Still others claim that to get along at all well in the world – to know what to eat, how to take care of our bodies, what schools to attend, or which salons to avoid – we need to attempt to meet these basic epistemic goals. In other words, we do and ought to pursue epistemic goods – to have these as our goals – because doing so helps us meet our desires. These so-called instrumental accounts, as defended by, for example, Hilary Kornblith (Citation1993), Catherine Elgin (Citation2004), and others, are to me, the most persuasive. While these accounts differ on what sorts of goods are properly considered our epistemic goals, they agree that we epistemically ought to pursue evidence, or revise our beliefs, or behave otherwise epistemically well because doing so allows us to pursue our non-epistemic goals. When an expert tells me that The Alehouse has the best beer selection in town, I ought to update my relevant beliefs because doing so helps me achieve my beer-related goals. I should note that I suspect that any account of epistemic goods and our motivation to pursue them could, modulo some changes, be used to offer an account of basic and legitimate needs. Doing so will involve a comparative ranking of epistemic goals and the projects these goals help us to pursue. I don’t mean this as a ranking of extrinsic importance, but rather a ranking in terms of how basic these goals and projects are.
5. See information about the Tuskegee experiment.
6. See Nazi anatomy experiments.
7. See Factory farming.
8. There are interesting connections and implications, here, for our understanding of epistemic injustice, discursive injustice, and other related phenomena. I’m thinking here, of Miranda Fricker’s work on testimonial and pre-emptive testimonial injustice (Fricker Citation2007), Rebecca Kukla’s work on discursive injustice (Citation2014), and Kristie Dotson’s work on testimonial smothering (Dotson Citation2011), among others. I won’t delve into these connections here, for space and focus reasons.
9. For further discussion of this, see (Rushton and Juola-Rushton Citation2008; Hursh Citation2007; McCarthey Citation2008; Volante Citation2004).
10. Some school districts and states attempt to improve student performance on standardized tests by outsourcing curricular and planning decisions to various agencies and educational counsels and consortia. See, for example, the Principles and Standards literature from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, or Pennsylvania’s Core Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics documentation.
11. In the real case from which this is adapted, the teacher in question knew he was failing to meet the students’ needs. He had been physically attacked by other students several years before and was entirely emotionally withdrawn from his teaching. He continued to teach because his pension was within reach, and because he did not have to work summers. He was willfully inattentive to his students’ needs, but this need not be the case in all such instances of epistemic failing.
12. For further discussion of this point see (Elgin Citation2018).