Extraordinary Tuesday "Should an epistemic authority be also a moral authority?"

By Tamar Tskhadadze, associate professor from the School of Arts and Sciences of Ilia State University, Tbilissi in Georgia

Authority (alongside testimony) as a source of knowledge in widely discussed in social epistemology. Discussions are mainly focused on the epistemic norm – i.e. what epistemic norm follows from acknowledging someone as an epistemic authority. My question is different: what are conditions or requirements for someone (or some institution) to be acknowledged as an epistemic authority. Usually these conditions are explicated as the agent’s higher order evidence that the person (or institution) in question is better positioned to arrive at a true belief on the question at issue – has superior epistemic capacities, better access to relevant evidence, etc. I argue that this prima facie plausible conception may have difficulties.

Consider, for example, Tuskegee experiment – does it only compromise the researchers involved (or the institution of science in general) in moral sense, being irrelevant to their status as epistemic authorities? The positive answer is quite plausible prima facie. And this intuition accords perfectly with the conception of epistemic authority just outlined. However, if we isolate the concept of epistemic authority from moral considerations in this manner, even a more radical conclusion may follow: that cases like Tuskegee experiment, in which scientists compromise their moral integrity for the sake of their epistemic goals, should be considered as not undermining but, instead, bolstering their status as epistemic authorities. Now, this conclusion may be upsetting, however, is not, in and by itself, paradoxical. So shall we accept it?

I will try to argue that a conception of epistemic authority that does not lead to this conclusion can be developed and it would be a more adequate conception on several counts. I will draw on some insights from virtue ethics for doing this.