According to radical moral encroachment, certain moral considerations encroach on epistemic norms to avoid making conflicting demands on agents. In this paper, we provide a genealogical argument for this view by focusing on the kinds of doxastic wrongs that involve forming beliefs based on problematic generalisations. Our genealogical argument reveals that possession of knowledge requires sensitivity to agency-based moral considerations that are flouted in situations of doxastic wronging.

Here is the basic thought: given that we participate in interdependent practices of knowledge acquisition, our epistemic norms will be sensitive to ways of believing that threaten the cooperative nature of those practices. More specifically, our genealogy will reveal that to possess knowledge, good inquirers need the virtue of epistemic respect: the capacity to adopt the right sort of epistemic engagement to the target of one’s inquiry. Forming beliefs based on problematic generalisations involves a lack of epistemic respect and so those beliefs will fail to amount to knowledge