“The Distribution of Doubt” – Eleanor Gordon-Smith (University of Southern California)
April 24 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Friday, April 24, 2026
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Dodd Hall 321
RSVP HERE
Join us on Friday, April 24, 2026 for a lecture by Eleanor Gordon-Smith (University of Southern California). This event is hosted by Women in Philosophy. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM in Dodd 321 with a small reception to follow.
The Distribution of Doubt
In this talk I connect two seemingly disparate questions. First, how suspicious should each of us be of our fellow members of public life? On the one hand, it is important for us to find out about malfeasance where it exists; this seems to recommend a lot of scrutiny. On the other hand, many of our most important political and social projects fare better when we do not subject each other to strong suspicion; collective projects often fare better under trust or hope or faith than under suspicion. Second question: what justifies the special privileges journalists seem to hold, e.g., to violate duties of confidentiality in the service of their discoveries?
The question of how suspicious we should be of one another in public life has frequently been understood as a question of which attitude we all should take. The effort to justify journalistic privileges has frequently been treated as an extension of rights to free speech. Against both tendencies, I argue for a division of skepticism, in which just some of us take on an attitude I call ‘paranoid investigating’ towards others in public life. Second, I argue that seeing journalists in the role of dedicated paranoid investigators supplies new and fruitful justification for their privileges. The ethics of interpersonal attitudes and the ethics of the press can both be advanced by this model, on which questions of attitudes in public life are not just individual epistemology or moral psychology at scale.
RSVP HERE
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