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Epistemic Responsibility in Business: An Integrative Framework for an Epistemic Ethics

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Abstract

How can we make businesspeople more concerned about the truth of the information they spread or allow to circulate? In this age of ‘fake news’, ‘business bullshit’ and ‘post-truth,’ the issue is of the utmost importance, especially for business trustworthiness in the internet economy. The issue is related to a kind of epistemic responsibility, that consists in accounting for one’s own epistemic wrongdoings, such as making a third party believe something false. Despite growing interest in epistemic misbehavior in the literature of business ethics, the question of epistemic responsibility has been neglected. The aim of this paper is therefore to address this gap, by proposing a notion of epistemic responsibility for business, that may help regulate undesirable epistemic behavior, such as the spreading of false information. To define this notion of epistemic responsibility, I have introduced the concept of epistemic fault. Being epistemically responsible consists in being disposed to account for alleged epistemic faults. This notion of epistemic fault relies on a theoretical framework which combines a typology of eight ‘epistemic values’, a normative stance regarding these values, and a dispositional approach to epistemic virtues and vices. I use this theoretical framework to integrate the various accounts of epistemic virtues and vices found in the literature into a single explanatory scheme. Combined with the notion of epistemic responsibility itself, such an integrative framework should facilitate the practical application of an operational epistemic ethics in business, i.e., the development of virtuous epistemic practices.

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Notes

  1. These two expressions are often used interchangeably in the literature. I have chosen to use the term epistemic, for reasons which will become clear later.

  2. This model is inspired by Koppl (2006), who outlines a mathematical theory of epistemic systems. According to Koppl (2006), epistemic systems are “social processes viewed from the perspective of their tendency to help or frustrate the production of true judgements” (Koppl, 2006, p. 91). Mathematically, Koppl (2006) models an epistemic system as a set of senders, S, a set of receivers, R, and a set of messages.

  3. Epistemologists make the distinction between "trait virtues" and "faculty virtues". Faculty virtues are truth-conducive cognitive faculties. Here, however, I consider only trait virtues.

  4. It is also a contribution to the debate on the unity of epistemic virtues (Goldman, 2001).

  5. Technically, this means that the locution “epistemic vice” must be ‘predicative’ (Ridge, 2013, p. 188), since “is epistemic vice” entails both ‘is epistemic’ and ‘is a vice’.

  6. Like Battaly (2017), I do not think that this last kind of epistemic justice, called “hermeneutical epistemic injustice” by Fricker (2007), is a vice, since the deviation is not clearly avoidable, and therefore does not clearly constitute a fault. However, I will not elaborate on this point in this paper.

  7. This is why I have chosen the term epistemic ethics, not intellectual ethics.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Boudewijn de Bruin (section editor) and the four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments, which greatly improved this paper. I would also like to thank Pascal Engel for his insightful remarks on an earlier version. This paper also benefited from the feedbacks received at the 2020 workshop on epistemic responsibility, organized by Christian Walter's and Emmanuel Picavet's Ethics and Finance Chair at the fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), in Paris. I am also thankful for the insightful discussions with Isabelle Beyneix, Jean-Philippe Bouilloud, Véronique Coq, Leonardo Augusto de Vasconcelos Gomes, Hervé Laroche, Sara Mandray, Emmanuel Picavet, Roger Pouivet, Louis Vuarin and Christian Walter. And last but not least, I am particularly grateful to Linda El-Dash for her help in clarifying the text, and making my English more understandable.

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    Erwan Lamy

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Lamy, E. Epistemic Responsibility in Business: An Integrative Framework for an Epistemic Ethics. J Bus Ethics 183, 1–14 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05078-1

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