The Collective Underpinnings of Bad Beliefs

Even with events like the Capitol attack, it is misguided to focus too much on the possible epistemic failures of individuals. Instead, the focus should be on the collective underpinnings of bad beliefs (such as false beliefs about a stolen election), and especially on the collective agents who peddle in misinformation. We can divide the collective agents that pollute our epistemic neighborhoods roughly into those that do so for ideological or other such reasons (misbelievers), and those that do so for instrumental reasons (disinformers), although in practice these categories can overlap. These two motivations impact the responsibility of the collective agents that help to create bad epistemic neighborhoods. While misbelieving is more culpable in a purely epistemic sense, being a disinformer is more culpable in a moral sense. Epistemic institutions present a special case for the responsibility of collective agents. Although collective agents can present us with clear cases of culpability in epistemic matters, when dealing with consumers of fake news and misinformation, we should proceed with a certain level of epistemic humility.