The Epistemic Insignificance of Moral Encroachment

While moral encroachment—the view that the moral features of an agent's belief can impact its epistemic status—has received a significant amount of attention, core problems with the view remain unaddressed. In this paper, I aim to accomplish three tasks: first, I argue that if moral encroachment simply applies to cases in which agents engage in statistical reasoning, then the thesis is epistemically redundant. Second, I critically examine the possibility of moral encroachment applying to cases in which agents do not engage in statistical reasoning. Lastly, I demonstrate that even if the thesis of moral encroachment is stripped of its epistemic implications, it still can teach us important moral lessons about when our beliefs wrong others.