The Vice of Nepotism: The Moral and the Epistemic

Nepotism forms a core part of our everyday moral and socio-political vocabulary, yet we lack a coherent account of it. The aim of this paper is to provide that account. I argue that nepotism (i.e., nepotism proper) is a moral vice, which has a hitherto unnoticed epistemic counterpart, namely, epistemic nepotism. Further, I argue that nepotism proper is a disposition to give undue weight to one’s primordial private realm or the interests of its members in the distribution of social goods within the civil public realm, rooted in excessive love for them, which systematically results in morally harmful effects. Epistemic nepotism is a special case of this, where the relevant goods are epistemic in nature. I then apply the results of the analyses to address a recent challenge posed to vice epistemologists by Quassim Cassam: how vice attribution or explanation can be cogently applied to cases where individuals’ epistemic conduct proceeds from value or ideology.