Epistemic Respect

I propose that listeners have a moral duty to believe anyone’s testimony, on pain of disrespect, unless they have independent reasons to think that the testifier is not credible. What typically entitles a person to standard-issue respect is having the capacity for practical reasoning: practical agency and moral norm-responsiveness. I show that the capacity for theoretical reasoning also involves agency and norm-responsiveness, making it structurally isomorphic to the capacity for practical reasoning. This therefore plausibly grounds an entitlement to a specifically epistemic type of respect: an entitlement to be treated as an epistemic agent. Because we express our epistemic agency through providing testimony, and testimony generally justifies belief, treating someone as an epistemic agent requires accepting their testimony in the absence of countervailing evidence. So, because epistemic agents are morally entitled to be treated as epistemic agents, testifiers are morally entitled to have their testimony believed by default. To not treat someone in this way is to express that you take (without good reason) either their capacity for agency or norm-responsiveness to be compromised.