Lippert-Rasmussen, K. Are Stereotypers Wronged When Stereotyped? On Defeated Doxastic Rights and Structural, Doxastic Injustice. Acta Anal (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-025-00670-2 (online first)

Abstract: Several philosophers have recently defended the view that, in virtue of holding a certain belief, we might be doing something that is morally objectionable even if our evidence supports the belief in some sense. Such philosophers generally take the moral objectionableness in question to be a personal, doxastic wrong. In the case of personal, non-doxastic wrongs, sometimes an act that would otherwise have constituted such a wrong does not do so; that is, the rights in question are defeated in these cases. Such defeat can arise either because of how the benefits of the act to the rights holder clearly outweigh the harms in such a manner that consent to the act in question can be presumed or because of what the victim of that act does; that is, they waive or forfeit the right against others that they do not subject them to the relevant treatment. If doxastic rights exist, then something similar can occur when it comes to personal, doxastic wrongs. But even if such situations might not involve any personal, doxastic wrongs, they might still involve structural, doxastic injustice. We need the notion of structural, doxastic injustice to explain the sense that some such situations are morally objectionable despite the absence of any personal doxastic wrongs. These two ideas — that doxastic rights are sometimes defeated and the notion of structural, doxastic injustice — are the two contributions made by this article to the ethics of belief.