Doxastic Wronging without Pragmatic Encroachment

The doxastic wronging thesis holds that beliefs can, in themselves, constitute directed moral wrongs. To posit the existence of doxastic wrongs, then, is to say that beliefs are subject to moral in addition to epistemic evaluation. If you’re in the business of claiming that beliefs are answerable to both moral and epistemic norms, you must provide a story as to how these spheres of normativity interact in cases of doxastic wronging. In particular, there is a question of whether they can come into conflict. Most philosophers who defend doxastic wronging say that moral and epistemic norms cannot conflict, securing this result by appeal to a form of pragmatic encroachment. In this paper, I argue for an alternative explanation as to how and why conflicts do not arise: the justification-first account. Here, conflicts do not arise because beliefs wrong only if and partly because they are independently epistemically unjustified.