We have an epistemic duty to speak up, even when it makes us uncomfortable, even when it seems rude, weird, or exhausting.
DR MARIANNE FURTADO DE NAZARETH
Fake news is a phenomenon that pervades our waking hours, now with social media being the norm as the go to, for so-called ‘breaking news’. Salacious stuff about anyone from Prince Harry and Megan Markle or even if there’s another epidemic wave of Covid flying across the seas from China to us. We have turned into a panic driven society where all kinds of rumours are turned into ‘cold facts’. These may seem like small mistakes – so small that speaking up could seem more trouble than it’s worth.
However, you may reach a different conclusion if someone expresses a false belief concerning a matter of great importance. It may
be a social media discussion on which Covid vaccine is efficacious. It may be a neighbour worrying that a vaccine approved by international health agencies apparently changes our DNA, or a Twitter bot calling into question whether the Holocaust really happened. It may be your boss ‘joking’ that there’s no need to educate women so they don’t contradict you in the newsroom.
These are not small mistakes. In fact, you may think the subject matter is too important and the other person’s belief too distant from the truth to remain silent. Even so, deciding whether to object can be complicated. You might worry about offending someone, or lack the time to articulate your disagreement. You may even find yourself in a conversational con- text so polarised that introducing an objection will likely backfire.
But sometimes there are better and stronger reasons for voicing our disagreements with others. Sometimes we have an outright obligation to do so. You probably should correct your friend, even if speaking up strains your relationship, when they claim that cutting down hundreds of trees in Bangalore is needed for the infrastructure. And you probably should risk alienating your next door neighbour when she recounts advising her family members against vaccination because she thinks that a vaccine developed almost ‘overnight’ is dangerous. But how do we decide, in any given situation, whether to pipe up or instead let a false, unwarranted, misleading assertion pass? False, unwarranted beliefs are precursors to harmful consequences... we should, when feasible, prevent others from being harmed
Of course, it isn’t always appropriate to correct someone’s false beliefs: ‘Testifying to all our disagreements would be weird, rude, and exhausting,’ as the philosopher Casey Rebecca Johnson aptly says. Interrupting a private conversation between two colleagues only to pedantically set them straight about shopping for veggies from the grocer or from Big Basket, would likely violate other obligations we simultaneously hold, for instance to be polite, or to respect others’ privacy. Conversely, politeness may become a secondary concern if those same colleagues are organic farmers where being aware of even minor price changes is of great practical importance.
When it comes to objecting to or correcting a false or unwarranted assertion, context matters. And context can mean: who we are, who the speaker is, what the assertion is about, the situation in which it is uttered, and how others witnessing the assertion respond. These are all considerations that should be factored in and weighed against one another as we deliberate whether or not to voice our disagreement.
With so much complexity involved, we may wonder: is the duty to object worth taking seriously?
It is. There are two reasons why. The first is that false, unwarranted beliefs are precursors to harmful consequences. The second is that we should, when feasible, prevent others from being harmed. In fact, we can be even more specific: if someone faces harms of a practical nature, we have a moral duty to speak up; if these harms are of an epistemic nature, we have an epistemic duty to speak up.
If I relay my neighbour’s poorly justified vaccine-sceptical advice to a student who believes what I tell him, I am doing something wrong. There is more to our epistemic duties than mere self-interest. If my student entertains a false belief after our exchange, and entertaining false beliefs is harmful, my testimony has put him in epistemic harm’s way.
In fact, my poorly justified advice might produce a second and subtler harmful con- sequence. Since my testimony is in flagrant contradiction of the advice given by public health experts, there is a real possibility that the latter’s credibility will be diminished in my student’s eyes. My advice could weaken his trust in genuinely competent testifiers such as public health authorities, and so limit or dam- age his access to an indispensable source of justification for his beliefs about public health.
Typically, we want to avoid entertaining false beliefs. We want as many of our beliefs
as possible to be as close to the truth and as well supported as possible. Why else would
we incentivise learning, celebrate intellectual advances and accomplishments, reward correct answers, or prize knowledge over ignorance? Crucially, we do all these things not out of uncritical habit but because we recognise that knowledge and understanding are key ingredients of our intellectual wellbeing, and their
pursuit a virtuous endeavour. And so anything that stands in the way of our beliefs being true and justified puts us in epistemic harm’s way.
This means that entertaining beliefs that are true and justified isn’t just a noble aim, it’s a goal we ought to actively pursue: an epistemic duty. Some of our epistemic duties are to ourselves. If I unquestioningly believe my neighbour’s claim that drinking two litres of orange juice every day guarantees immunity to Covid-19, even though I know she has no medical training and that she relies on her non-expert social media peers for information, then I’m doing something wrong. I’m being negligent and doing a poor job of ensuring that my beliefs are justified.
But things become more complicated when it comes to matters that lie outside our sphere of expertise. If neither my student nor I are public health experts, then we both crucially depend on those who are, if we want to form warranted true beliefs about public health matters. This is sometimes referred to as the novice-expert gap. When non-experts ‘don’t know whom to trust’, this gap becomes very difficult or impossible to fill.
So if my student regards me as an epistemic authority, and I abuse that authority by contradicting – and therefore discrediting – the testimony of public health experts, then I risk compromising his access to vital trustworthy testimony. Doing so would violate my obligation not to epistemically harm others.
In an age of rising misinformation, as navigating expert testimonies becomes ever more difficult, we must be epistemically vigilant. We must be careful when it comes to our own beliefs. We shouldn’t treat gossip and speculation as fact. We should be wary of far-fetched explanations.
Sometimes, we have an epistemic duty
to speak up. Even when it makes us uncomfortable. Even when it seems rude, weird or exhausting. And even when it’s about some- thing as seemingly unimportant as the price of tomatoes.
∎
