Abstract

This paper examines the moral and epistemic statuses of beliefs formed on the basis of naked statistical evidence concerning socially salient categories such as race and gender. According to Mark Schroeder, such beliefs wrong people because their contents falsely diminish them. And he argues that these morally unjustified beliefs, although well supported by statistical evidence, are also epistemically unjustified. Now, I believe that Schroeder’s account of these matters is the best on offer, as it is the only extant account that adequately addresses both the problem of whether we can regulate our beliefs by responding to moral reasons (“the problem of control”) and the problem of whether there are non-coordinating epistemic and moral standards governing belief (“the problem of coordination”). But it does so only by denying that true beliefs can be wrong, which I take to be a substantial cost. So, I propose an alternative account, which I call the suspend-or-rule-out (SORO) account. On this account, the central wrong lies not in having a belief with objectionable content, but in failing to suspend judgment before ruling out certain relevant alternative possibilities concerning how the given person may have exercised their rational agency. I show that this account explains how true beliefs can be wrong while still solving the problems of control and coordination.