"Vicious Perspectives"
This talk introduces and defends the concept of vicious perspectives as a distinct category of epistemic vice. Perspectives are complex dispositions—webs of beliefs, desires, experiences, and mental states that coalesce around particular domains and dispose us to respond to evidence and argument in characteristic ways. Unlike isolated beliefs or even character traits, perspectives constitute total ways of seeing and making sense of the world. They can be acquired implicitly through habituation or reflectively endorsed through sustained intellectual effort.
I argue that existing accounts of epistemic vice—motivationalism (which focuses on improper motivations) and obstructivism (which focuses on states that obstruct epistemic goods)—fail to fully capture what makes perspectives like racism epistemically vicious. Instead, I propose a generative account: perspectives are vicious when they systematically generate resources and reasons that enable their own self-reinforcement and make their holders resistant to conversion toward truth.
Vicious perspectives exhibit several distinctive features: they are opaque to their possessors, who take themselves to be genuinely pursuing truth; they produce what I call the "hydra effect," generating new defenses when challenged; they enable a kind of vicious integrity that makes abandoning the perspective feel like abandoning rationality itself; and they block interventions while hindering the development of genuine intellectual and moral virtues.
Given this account of vicious perspectives, I consider two questions: how do we ensure that our own perspectives are not vicious, and whether there is any hope for those with vicious perspectives?
Regarding the first question, I consider whether a commitment to truth, paired with a commitment to love—exemplified by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.—can serve as a check on the development of vicious perspectives. I say yes. Regarding the second question: I suggest this is possible yet unlikely, given that some perspectives include hinges (drawing on Wittgenstein), which help us grasp both why conversions are so difficult and what conditions might make them possible