If beliefs can wrong, when do they do so?

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sadness_and_despair.jpg.

A person doxastically wrongs someone in virtue of what they believe. Here is a paradigmatic example: Isaac is an employee at Big Box Store. He sees Nicholas, a patron of the store, walking towards the exit. Isaac thinks Nicholas looks suspicious and believes that Nicholas is shoplifting. Isaac isn’t paid enough to care, though, so he does not intercept Nicholas on his way out. In fact, Nicholas was not shoplifting.

If Isaac wrongs Nicholas, it is the belief Isaac holds that explains the wrong (after all, Isaac never acted on his belief). The wrong of doxastic wronging is relational: it involves a failure to relate to someone in the appropriate way. The relationships we have with one another are not constituted solely by the actions we take towards and with one another, but also rely on things like attitudes, emotions, and beliefs. Therefore, we have a legitimate interest in the mental life of those with whom we interact. You might, for example, feel hurt if your significant other suspects you of cheating for no good reason even if they never act on their suspicions.

At the heart of the argument supporting doxastic wronging is the idea that we have moral obligations to relate to others appropriately, and that part of relating to someone appropriately involves mentally representing them in a particular way. Our mental representation of someone is obviously shaped by what we think about them in particular, but that is not all that shapes our mental representations of others. We do not view people as displaced and isolated beings; we recognize that people exist in the world and in relation to other people. The beliefs we have about the world and other people, therefore, shape how we mentally represent certain people.

The literature on doxastic wronging has so far focused on beliefs that are directly about the person who is wronged. Rima Basu and Mark Schroeder (2019) make this most apparent: “A doxastic wronging happens if one person wrongs another in virtue of what she believes about him.”[1] But I think we need to consider the ways in which the argument for doxastic wronging expands to a much broader set of beliefs. In other words, a person can be doxastically wronged by a belief that is not directly about them. Even beliefs that are intuitively the safest—beliefs about one’s own identity—have the potential to wrong others.

The most obvious place to look is towards beliefs about social groups, even if the believer does not believe anything directly about any particular member. Someone who believes “All Muslims are terrorists” is not off the hook because they do not know any Muslims to form directed beliefs about. On the contrary, I argue that this person doxastic wrongs every member of that social group in virtue of their belief about the social group in general.

Beliefs about oneself also influence the way one relates to other people. Here is an example: Valerie holds the belief “I am a good mother.” Valerie is not, in fact, a good mother—she has been abusive to her children all her life. Valerie’s belief that she is a good mother prevents her from relating to her children appropriately. In order to maintain the belief that she is a good mother, she is unable to conceive of them as victims of abuse. Worse, she may wrongly attribute responsibility for conflict to them, or refuse to acknowledge there is any conflict at all.

The so far unspoken premise here is that beliefs about oneself are not truly just about oneself. Because we do not exist in a vacuum, beliefs about ourselves influence the way we see ourselves relating to other people and the world around us. This is easy to see in obviously comparative beliefs, such as “I am the only competent philosopher alive.” I contend that even beliefs that are not obviously comparative—such as “I am a woman”—are minimally interpersonal. They at least carry the implicit consequence that anyone who is relevantly similar should have the same belief. Because they are (even minimally) interpersonal, they have the potential to doxastically wrong.

Lastly, beliefs about the world (that do not explicitly include people in their content) can doxastically wrong. Someone who believes “Cancer is not real” believes nothing about people (at face value). The belief has plenty of consequences about people, though: that those who claim to have cancer are mistaken or lying, that no one has died from cancer, etc. Just like beliefs about social groups, beliefs about diseases (for example) prevent the believer from relating to a large set of people (and each individual member of the set) in the appropriate way.

People do not exist as isolated, displaced figures, and we do not think of them as such. When we mentally represent people, we represent them in relation to other people and the world they live in. Therefore, we must take care not only in forming beliefs about particular people, but also in forming beliefs about those they are related to and the world in which they exist.