Nepotism: The Political, the moral, and the epistemic
In both the Global North and South, nepotism forms a core part of our everyday moral and socio-political vocabulary, and yet we lack a coherent account of it. The aim of this paper is to supply 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 claim that both forms of nepotism are rooted in a vicious motive, morbid love of one’s 'primordial private realm,' which makes individuals to assign an undue weight to the side of the distributive equation they belong to, thus, systematically leading to injustice in the distribution of social and epistemic goods. The result of the account is then used to address a recent challenge to vice epistemology by Quassim Cassam, namely, that vice epistemology is incapable of demonstrating its cogency in cases of individuals whose epistemic conducts proceed from value or ideology.
Keywords: Echo chamber, Epistemology of the Global South, vice epistemology, institutional epistemology.