Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 26, No.

3, 2009
DOI number: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00452.x

Philosophy and Public Policy: A Role for Social

Allen
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Philosophy
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Moral Epistemology

ALLEN BUCHANAN

abstract Part 1 of this essay argues that one of the most important contributions of
philosophers to sound public policy may be to combat the influence of bad Philosophy (which
includes, but is not limited to, bad Philosophy produced by accredited academic philosophers).
Part 2 argues that the conventional conception of Practical Ethics (CPE) that philosophers
bring to issues of public policy is defective because it fails to take seriously the phenomenon of
the subversion of morality, the role of false factual beliefs in this subversion, and the vulnerability
to the exploitation of our moral powers that our social-epistemic dependency entails. Given the
serious risks of the subversion of morality through the propagation of false factual beliefs, CPE’s
near exclusive emphasis on identifying sound moral principles greatly constrains its potential
contribution to the Negative Task of Practical Ethics, the endeavour to reduce the incidence
of the most grievously wrong behaviour. Practical ethicists should focus more on the ethics of
believing, and develop a more sophisticated conception of the moral and epistemic virtues of
individuals and of institutions, one that includes protective meta-virtues, whose function it is
to guard us against the more frequent and predictable subversions of morality, including those
subversions that are facilitated by the processes of belief-formation that our social institutions
and practices foster.

1. The National Commission Paradigm and its Limitations

Philosophers — at least those who work in Practical Ethics — tend to take a positive
view of the role they see Philosophy playing in contemporary public policy. With under-
standable pride they point to the proliferation of national Bioethics commissions in
a number of countries and the prominent presence of academic philosophers in them.
There have always been some who question either the value of such public deliberative
bodies or the contribution that philosophers make to them, or both. But recently, new
doubts have been raised by the patently ideological composition of President Bush’s
Council on Bioethics, as well as by the not unrelated fact that the Council’s Reports
fall far short of accepted minimal standards for philosophical moral reasoning.1
Perhaps this is an especially propitious time for a serious examination of the role of
Philosophy in public policy.
Perhaps; but it would be a mistake to begin such an inquiry with the assumption
that Philosophy has generally played a positive role in public policy and that the issue
before us now is how to prevent grossly biased and philosophically weak national
commissions from changing that. For one thing, there is no particular reason to think
that the most important role for Philosophy is in national commissions or other
government-sponsored public deliberative bodies. There are a number of less direct

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2009, Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Philosophy and Public Policy 277

ways in which philosophical thinking can make its way into the public policy process.
Rather than serving as members of public deliberative bodies, philosophers can publish
work that is read by staff who brief policy makers or help shape public opinion.
Alternatively, depending upon how accessible their ideas are, they can help shape
the cultural-intellectual background from which policy issues emerge, influencing the
thinking of policy makers who may never even have heard of their work. Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation (1975), on the moral status and proper treatment of nonhuman
animals,2 and Jonathan Glover’s What Sort of People Should There Be? (1984), which
opened the door to serious public discussion of the ethics of reproductive technologies,
are paradigm cases.3
There is a more basic reason not to assume that the issue now is how to prevent the
input of Philosophy into the public policy process from being corrupted by politics: to
do so is to suggest that the influence of Philosophy on policy is generally benign and
that whatever harm is now being done is an aberration. As Karl Popper pointed out
fifty years ago, there is much evidence against this rosy assessment. Indeed, one might
go so far as to say that some of the most disastrous public policy has been inspired at
least in part by those in power taking some philosophers too seriously.
Some contemporary philosophers would no doubt respond indignantly that the risk
that philosophical influence on public policy will contribute to moral catastrophes is
much reduced due to the character of contemporary Philosophy or at least of that type
of contemporary Philosophy that tends to engage the public policy process. They
would say that contemporary philosophers who critically analyze public policy options
are not likely to inspire disastrous large-scale social experiments, to contribute to the
mobilization of mass violence, to rationalize aggressive war, or to encourage public
policy that is seriously destructive in other ways.
Such protestations are unconvincing. It may well be that the US President’s Council
on Bioethics has contributed to public acceptance of pro-abstinence responses to the
HIV-AIDS epidemic that have resulted in millions of deaths that would not have
occurred if more resources has been directed toward encouraging the use of condoms.
The President’s Council has also supported restrictive policies on stem cell research
that may have delayed important medical advances that would save many lives and
avoid much human suffering.
Furthermore, some contemporary academic political philosophers and philosophers
of international law have produced nationalistic, anticosmopolitan theories that provide
handy intellectual resources for defending policies that sharply constrain cooperation
in coping with global climate change, that deny the authority of the International
Criminal Court, and that exempt the world’s one superpower from the full force of
international human rights law.4 It is difficult to gauge the influence of such academics;
but there is no doubt that in some instances they not only help implement policy but
also play a role in formulating it. Consider, for example, the work of the foreign policy
law and constitutional law expert John Yoo in the US State Department: he was the
author of a memo asserting the President’s authority to employ torture. There can be
little doubt that Yoo was chosen for his position as legal counsel to the Executive
precisely because of the character of his views on the Constitution, and the latter are
accurately described as embedded in a conservative-authoritarian Political Philosophy.
If one takes a less self-serving, broader view of who counts as a philosopher, the
assumption that the influence of Philosophy on public policy is generally benign

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looks even more dubious. If one includes religious and nationalist thinkers who
offer systematic visions of how society ought to be and outline programmes for how
to bring about what they consider to be progress, then it becomes clear that Popper’s
worries are far from anachronistic. Consider the Islamicist theoretician, Sayyid
Qutb, who has apparently significantly influenced the leadership of Al-Qaeda and
other terrorist groups. Or contemplate leading US neoconservatives such as William
Kristol, who combine a kind of a kind of unarticulated virtue ethics, arbitrarily selected
elements of Political Realism, grand generalizations about human nature and
society, and a Manichean division of the world into the forces of freedom and those
of evil, to produce a sweeping view of humanity’s past and future in which the United
States is believed to play an exceptional if not transcendent role. On some accounts,
neo-con Philosophy played a significant role in the Bush Administration’s decision
to invade Iraq in 2003 and its willingness to violate international prohibitions on
torture.
Ignazio Silone, the anti-fascist novelist, went so far as to assert that modern tyranny
requires the collaboration of intellectuals.5 He might have added: especially the collaboration
of philosophers, in the broad sense of the term, because modern tyrannies can only be
sustained by beliefs of a rather theoretical — indeed philosophical — kind.
No doubt some would say that whatever negative effects such thinkers have does not
detract from the claim that Philosophy now has a generally positive influence on policy
because they aren’t really philosophers — their thinking doesn’t qualify as Philosophy.
If one employs a sanitizing, stipulative definition of ‘philosopher’, treating that term
as an honorific title for those who meet standards of excellence that are currently
endorsed by mainstream academic philosophers in developed countries, one will
conclude that the influence of Philosophy on public policy is much more benign than
if one operates with a broader definition.
Rather than indulging in the comforting evasion that only bad Philosophy is dangerous
and that bad Philosophy isn’t really Philosophy, it would be better to begin with what
might be called the colloquial conception of a philosopher: one who purports to offer
a systematic view of reality or at least of social reality, a view that includes prescriptions
for how we ought to live or at least how we should orient ourselves toward existing
political authority, conventional morality, and major contemporary political issues.
Philosophers thus conceived exist in academia outside Philosophy departments
(for example in religious studies and modern languages departments) and outside
academia altogether.
In the past, philosophers in this broader sense, including some who held prominent
academic posts, have provided the intellectual and normative scaffolding for religious,
nationalist, and ethnonational violence. Sometimes they have done so intentionally;
in other cases, their thoughts have been borrowed and adapted by entrepreneurs of
violence in ways that might horrify them. There is no reason to assume that this will
not continue. Ironically, the greatest impact of Philosophy on public policy may not
be in the area in which it has been most direct, conspicuous, and widely discussed —
that is, in the participation of academic philosophers in the deliberations of public
Bioethics commissions or other similar bodies.
One lesson to draw from these reflections is that contemporary professional
philosophers may be construing their role in public policy far too narrowly. Their
greatest service might be to combat the influence of bad Philosophy and of pernicious

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interpretations of good Philosophy, wherever these occur, whether in academia or in

more popular venues, but perhaps especially in the latter. That enterprise might turn
out to be more efficacious than the sum total of philosophical contributions to any
number of national commissions.
Unfortunately, there are powerful institution-based incentives, as well as academic
cultural norms, that inhibit those best equipped to perform this service from under-
taking it. A John Rawls will be extremely reluctant to set aside his passionate engagement
with the best thinking in the history of Moral and Political Philosophy to produce
endless stream of op-eds or popular books criticizing Margaret Thatcher’s vision of
the good society or neo-conservative American Crusader Philosophy. Nevertheless,
some contemporary academic philosophers have recognized that the most important
philosophical battles may not be occurring in academia and that an appreciation of
this fact should alter the philosopher’s conception of her special responsibilities.
For example, for several decades Ronald Dworkin has vigorously criticized the legal
philosophy espoused by American conservatives and he has done so in publications
that reach beyond academia. And there are signs that the institutional incentives
are beginning to shift in favour of philosophers whose work is of fairly direct relevance
to public policy. Philosophers such as Onora O’Neill, Jonathan Glover, Francis Kamm,
Jeff McMahan, and Thomas Pogge, whose work undermines the distinction between
Normative Ethics and Practical Ethics, have gained well-deserved institutional
recognition.
So far I have argued that a serious examination of the role of philosophers in public
policy should depart from what might be called the Commission Paradigm in three
respects: it should (1) encompass a broader conception of what counts as Philosophy
(and who counts as a philosopher, by not denying that label to nonacademics or to
thinkers whose work doesn’t meet current minimal professional philosophical standards
of rigor and clarity or minimal moral standards as to content); (2) recognize a variety
of channels through which Philosophy can influence policy, some of which are quite
indirect, and (3) not presume that the influence of Philosophy on public policy
will generally be benign and should recognize that in some cases the must valuable
contribution philosophers can make may be to try to counteract the influence of bad
Philosophy.
The last point requires clarification: I have not argued that on balance the influence of
philosophers on public policy has been negative. Nor do I wish to sound unappreciative
of the good that some contemporary philosophers have done. My point is simply that
philosophers, like intellectuals generally, tend to downplay the harm that they can do
and that combating this harm should be a high priority.6
For the remainder of this paper I want to make the case for another, more
fundamental departure from the way in which the relationship between Philosophy
and public policy is usually conceived. I will argue that the conception of Practical
Ethics that philosophers typically bring to public policy issues is itself too narrow.
To preview my main thesis: I want to show that Practical Ethics has paid too little
attention to the individual psychological and social processes by which individuals
come to have and to sustain false beliefs that systematically subvert morality. I will
also argue that even when Practical Ethics includes a healthy measure of Virtue
Ethics it is still inadequate, because conventional Virtue Ethics fails to take seriously
the fact that the virtues are vulnerable to being subverted by false beliefs and largely

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overlooks the fact that the risk of subversion can vary systematically, depending
upon the social environment in which the individual finds herself. More specifically,
I will argue that Virtue Ethics has largely overlooked the importance of institutional
epistemic virtues because it has underestimated the epistemic dependency of
individuals and thereby overestimated what might be called the autonomy of the
individual’s virtues, both epistemic and moral. My ultimate conclusion will be two-fold:
first, that Practical Ethics should attend more to the subversion of morality through
the social propagation of false beliefs and second that this re-orientation of Practical
Ethics is of vital importance for philosophers who desire to make their work relevant
to public policy.

2. The Subversion of Morality

A Criterion of Adequacy for Conceptions of Practical Ethics

Practical Ethics, as I understand it, is the attempt to use reasoning to determine what
we ought to do, as individuals and collectively.7 If this is the task of Practical Ethics,
then one criterion of adequacy of a conception of Practical Ethics is how much it
contributes to tackling what might be called the Negative Moral Task: the endeavour
to avoid the very worst behaviour. In our world, the worst behaviour is dreadful indeed;
it includes wrongful mass violence — unjustified war, genocide, ethnic cleansing,
terrorism (by states and non-state actors) and other large-scale human rights violations.
Of course, Practical Ethics should not be restricted to the Negative Moral Task; but
any conception of Practical Ethics that fails to facilitate the Negative Moral Task will
be seriously defective.8 I will argue that conventional Practical Ethics (CPE for brevity)
is defective in precisely this way: it offers too little help in the prosecution of the
Negative Task, because it assumes a radically incomplete picture of the sources of
wrongful mass violence.

Who Commits Wrongful Mass Violence?

I begin with what I take to be a fairly uncontroversial claim about the perpetrators of
wrongful mass violence: They are people like you and me. Most of the people who
commit wrongful mass violence are what might be called ‘moral normals’. They are
not sociopaths (the incidence of sociopathy being far too low to account for such
widespread participation in wrongful mass violence). They have a moral sense and they
have traversed the path of normal moral development.
There are two quite different explanations of the fact that wrongful mass violence is
perpetrated largely by moral normals. The first is that such violence occurs in extraordinary
conditions in which the moral powers are switched off or overridden by fear, anger, or
perceived self-interest. Call this the Moral Impotence Model. According to the Moral
Impotence Model, the explanation of wrongful mass violence does not require reference
to the exercise of our moral powers. In contrast, according to the second model, wrongful
mass violence generally occurs, not because the moral powers have been switched off
or overridden, but because they have been subverted. Call this the Subverted Morality
Model. According to the Subverted Morality Model, moral principles, virtues, and

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justifications play a significant explanatory role in wrongful mass violence. Large-scale

wrong occurs, not because morality is in abeyance, but because its resources are being
deployed in the service of immorality.
My aim is not to deny that the Moral Impotence Model sometimes applies or even
to try to show that the Moral Subversion Model plays a significantly larger role in the
aetiology of wrongful mass violence. I simply want to suggest that the Subverted
Morality Model has considerable power and to then draw some conclusions about
Practical Ethics.

Two Forms of the Subversion of Morality

Subversion can occur in either of two ways. What I shall call Active Subversion occurs
when moral motivation is distorted so as to produce immoral behaviour: moral motivation
itself helps to cause immoral behaviour. As an example of Active Subversion, consider
the efforts of the SS leadership to instil in SS recruits the idea that ‘my honour is
loyalty’. There was no effort to extricate the recruit from the moral mode. Instead, a
moral virtue, honour, was recharacterized in an extremely limited fashion, so as to be
equated with loyalty to military superiors and ultimately to the Führer. Far from being
subjected to efforts to switch off their moral powers, SS recruits were encouraged to
think of being an SS man as an exceptionally morally demanding calling.9 Further,
loyalty itself was characterized in SS moral instruction in an extremely simple way, as
something approaching unreflective obedience. To the extent that this kind of moral
disfigurement played a role in SS atrocities, reference to the operations of the moral
powers plays an explanatory role. On this view, morality — albeit morality subverted
— is a cause of wrongful mass violence. To the extent that this sort of subversion of
morality is the result of the deliberate efforts of those who seek to mobilize others for
wrongful mass violence, it can be described as the exploitation of the moral powers for
immoral purposes.
Similarly, individuals can come to have beliefs that distort their understanding
of what being courageous or having fortitude requires — believing, for example,
that in certain circumstances being courageous requires suppressing compassion
and killing unarmed civilians. It is reported that Himmler gave what might be
called moral motivational talks to German soldiers who engaged in mass shootings
of civilians, urging them to focus on the fact that they were admirably bearing a
considerable burden so that future generations could live in safety and prosperity,
spared of the threat of racial degeneration.10 In such cases, moral virtues are recon-
figured in such a way as to motivate immoral acts. This phenomenon is not
peculiar to the Nazis or the SS; in war it is commonplace for the moral virtues of
soldiers to be manipulated in ways that increase the likelihood that they will act
wrongly. Similarly, religious indoctrination can sometimes convince individuals
that true piety requires acts of ‘martyrdom’ that involve the destruction of innocent
individuals, as with some suicide bombers. In this case, religious motivation is
channelled toward wrongful mass violence, in part through the cultivation of beliefs
about history, for example, that ‘The West’ has sought and continues to seek the
destruction of Islam.
Passive Subversion occurs when individuals come to have beliefs that lead them to
exclude the members of some groups from the scope of moral principles or from being

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the object of moral sentiments, in particular, feelings of sympathy and compassion. If

a slave-holder believes that Africans are not persons but instead are subhuman brutes,
then when he hears the proposition that all men are born equal, with certain unalienable
rights, he will not think that this applies to slaves. In this case, beliefs about supposed
natural differences between Whites and Blacks result in, or at least help support, a false
moral status judgment, and when a certain group of people is denied moral status, one
obstacle to treating them brutally is removed. Here the subversion of morality consists
in removing some individuals from the protections provided by moral constraints, in
this case those associated with moral status. As with Active Moral Subversion, and in
contrast to the Moral Impotence Model, there is no shift from a moral to a nonmoral
mode of operation on the part of the individual. Passive Subversion is passive because
the ensuing immoral behaviour may not be morally motivated at all, but it works
through an appeal to the moral powers nonetheless. That is why it can be characterized
as the subversion of morality and not a case of moral impotence in the face of over-
whelming nonmoral motivations.
When Active Subversion occurs, moral motivation becomes distorted in such a way
as to help produce immoral acts; in Passive Subversion the scope of moral principles
or of moral virtues becomes limited and certain individuals are thereby excluded from
moral concern altogether or at least from being the proper objects of certain moral
sentiments. In both cases, subversion occurs because of the character of the web of
beliefs within which the moral powers operate, rather than because the moral powers
have been switched off or overridden, due to overwhelming emotion or perceived
self-interest. Active and passive subversion can occur together. For example, it may
make it easier for one to kill innocent people if one believes that they are subhumans
and that it is honourable and dutiful to destroy them.
In the remainder of this section, I will sketch some additional illustrative
examples of the subversion of morality, make clearer their dependence upon false
factual beliefs, and emphasize that the beliefs in question are propagated through
social mechanisms. These examples will include, but not be limited to, cases of
mass wrongful violence. The subversion of morality is not confined to such extreme
cases.

How False Factual Beliefs can Distort Moral Status Judgments

In her illuminating book, The Nazi Conscience, historian Claudia Koontz makes the case
that the wrongful mass violence perpetrated in the Third Reich was motivated in part
by a quite demanding and distinctive Nazi moral sensibility. She also provides evidence
that Nazi ethics was not created de novo, but largely consisted of a systematic
subversion of ordinary morality. One example she provides is especially vivid: German
public school teachers were instructed to inculcate in their students the importance
of following the Golden Rule — but with the proviso that it applies only to ‘racial
comrades’.11 The identification of some people as racial comrades and others as not
depended upon a web of false factual beliefs about natural differences between
so-called Aryans and non-Aryans, about the history of ‘the German people,’ and about
the role that non-Aryans, and especially Jews, supposedly played in the social, political,
and economic calamities that befell Germany after World War I. The systematically
distorted, morally relevant factual beliefs conveyed by teachers in the Third Reich

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were disseminated by other authority-figures as well, including state officials, medical

doctors, clergymen, and parents.
What is striking about the Nazi Golden Rule case is how clearly it shows how the
propagation of false factual beliefs, through socially structured patterns of epistemic
deference, can facilitate grossly immoral behaviour, not by causing the abandonment
of ordinary moral principles, but by subverting their application. The dark genius of
Nazi ethics was that it encouraged morally motivated people — moral normals — to act
immorally without requiring a wholesale abandonment of their quite unexceptionable
moral principles.
In the Nazi Golden Rule case, a web of false factual beliefs is deployed to remove
some individuals from the scope, and hence from the protective constraints, of a moral
principle. In the case of Himmler’s moral motivational talks cited earlier, moral
concepts are explicitly invoked: there is an appeal to moral duty and to the virtues of
fortitude and self-sacrifice in order to convince soldiers that they must kill noncom-
batants for the higher good and in order to remove the victims from the scope of the
moral sentiment of compassion.
The process by which individuals’ morally relevant beliefs are distorted so as to
result in such an exclusion from the scope of moral sentiments need not be purely
discursive, however. Our experience of the other can be manipulated in such a way that
we are unable to perceive them as worthy of respect. For example, prisoners of war or
victims of ethnic cleansing are sometimes stripped of the outward signs of individuality,
made to live in filth, and pitted against one another in daily struggle for survival — all
of which makes it easier for camp guards to regard them as subhuman, as brutes to
whom respect is not owed and who are not even worthy of compassion.

The Killing of Noncombatants in War

It could be argued recent philosophical work on the morality of war is one of the most
impressive examples of CPE (conventional Practical Ethics).12 Among the most central
concerns of this literature is the proper understanding of traditional Just War Theory’s
Principle of Discrimination, according to which ‘noncombatants’ (or, in an earlier
formulation, ‘innocents’) are not to be the deliberate targets of military action. For the
most part, recent work has concentrated on (1) determining what sorts of activities
contribute sufficiently (or in the right ways) to the war effort for those who engage in
them to be classified as combatants and hence not afforded protection by the Principle
of Discrimination; or on (2) developing an alternative conception of being morally
liable to be killed that can replace the notion of being a noncombatant to yield a
more adequate Principle of Discrimination. In pursuing the first task, philosophers
have focused on certain problematic cases, such as that of the NATO bombing of a
Serbian television station in 1999, and attempted to formulate a conception of being
a noncombatant that would tell us whether that action was a violation of the Principle
of Discrimination or not. In pursuing the second, they have tried to articulate a general
account of the moral liability to be killed that would match and help explain our most
confident and stable intuitions about justified and unjustified killing and that would
illuminate not only the jus in bello issue of to whom the Principle of Discrimination
applies, but also fundamental jus ad bellum issues, including the question of whether
preventive war is ever justified. These are both worthy enterprises for Practical

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Ethics, but they do not address what may be the most common form of violence
which the Principle of Discrimination is intended to constrain: cases in which soldiers
kill soldiers who have surrendered or people who are obviously civilians and offer a
moral justification doing so that rests on patently unjustified factual beliefs about
the behaviour of ‘the enemy’. One particularly well-documented instance of this
phenomenon is the case of the deliberate killing by German soldiers of large numbers
of Belgian civilians in World War I. The justification offered for this behaviour, in
some cases, was that Belgian nuns had castrated and then killed wounded German
soldiers.13 This is only an extreme version of a common justification for the killing
of civilians. Germans also justified the shooting of civilians on the grounds that they
were francs-tireurs — fighters not wearing uniforms, who stealthily shot unsuspecting
German soldiers. Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence whatsoever of Sisterly gelding;
but neither is there credible evidence of widespread Belgian francs-tireurs. It is likely
that flimsy rumours or outright fabrications of atrocities committed by ‘the other side’
have been used to justify violations of jus in bello principles in most wars, or at least
in most wars during periods of history where it was even thought necessary to justify
the killing of unarmed people.
My point is not that CPE, with its tendency to focus on moral principles and
arguments to the exclusion of attention to the factual beliefs that can subvert
their application, has nothing to say about such cases. The conventional practical
ethicist could point out that when made fully explicit such attempts to justify the
killings of civilians or captured soldiers often include an implausible principle of
collective responsibility, according to which violations of the rules of war by some
members of a group (civilians) are thought to justify the killing of other members
of the group. Interestingly enough, contemporary philosophers writing on the morality
of war have not, to my knowledge, even engaged in this sort of principled critique of
blatant violations of the Principle of Discrimination. The key point, however, is
that they have not had much to say about the role of unjustified — and sometimes
quite incredible — factual beliefs in uncontroversial violations of the Principle of
Discrimination.

Conventional Practical Ethics’ Neglect of the Ethics of Believing

It may be that practitioners of CPE have largely ignored such flagrant violations of
the Principle of Discrimination as the German’s deliberate killing of Belgian civilians
because they are — from the standpoint of moral principle — easy cases, and hence
not worth of their attention. In my view, this is a mistake and one that reveals
the limitations of CPE.14 If CPE is really practical, that is, if its goal is to improve
behaviour or at least to reduce the incidence of very bad behaviour, then it should
not avert its eyes from such cases. Nor, if it does consider them, should it focus only
on identifying unsound moral principles — in this case an indefensible principle
of collective responsibility. It ought also to take seriously the role of false factual
beliefs in the aetiology of wrongful behaviour. In brief, Practical Ethics ought to
take seriously the idea that the ethics of believing is an important element of Practical
Ethics.
What is perhaps most disturbing about the familiar scenario of killings of civilians
or prisoners being justified by unsubstantiated claims about atrocities committed by

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the other side is how remarkably uncritical the killers are about factual beliefs which,
if they are to be taken at their word, play an important role in their motivation for
killing. The willingness of ordinary Germans to believe a distorted view of history and
the role of the Jews in it is equally disturbing.
A wit once remarked that many a young man has made a proposal of marriage in
lighting conditions under which he would not venture to purchase an inexpensive
necktie. It is even more remarkable, and of much graver moral consequence, that many
people are so gullible in accepting factual claims of the sort that can be so easily
marshalled to rationalize — or, rather, moralize — extremely immoral behaviour. When
having certain factual beliefs predisposes one toward cooperation with massive wrongful
violence, being gullible is a moral vice. But it is a moral vice that has largely been
ignored by CPE.
Of course, animal liberationist philosophers and feminist philosophers have proceeded
on the assumption that beliefs matter. The former have sought to make explicit and
criticize our beliefs about the differences between humans and nonhuman animals
and the moral implications of these alleged differences. The latter have argued that a
person’s location within the structure of sexist social institutions and practices affects
her beliefs and even her capacity for knowledge.15 Yet, in spite of these valuable con-
tributions, CPE has not focused systematically on the role of false factual beliefs in the
subversion of morality.

Social Epistemic Dependency and its Relevance to the Ethics of Believing

The examples of the subversion of morality that I have sketched in this paper as well
as others that I have characterized in much more detail elsewhere, have two common
features: in each case the subversion of morality involves false factual beliefs and in
each case one cannot understand how individuals came to have the beliefs in question
without appreciating the fact that we are all much more dependent on others for our
beliefs than we typically recognize or are willing to acknowledge. In instances of the
exploitation of morality — when subversion is deliberately fostered by those who mobilize
others for wrongful mass violence — the factor of social epistemic dependency is
most obvious. For example, school children or military recruits are taught ‘facts’ about
history or biology that serve to justify excluding certain groups from the scope of
moral principles or the reach of compassion. The transmission of false beliefs follows
channels of epistemic deference that are integral to the institutional structure of the
society in question.16 For instance, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, it is impossible
to understand ‘what went wrong’ in the eugenics movements of the late 19th and early
to mid-20th centuries unless one comprehends the role that deference to putative
scientific expertise played in the complex web of beliefs that allowed eugenicists to
mobilize massive violations of individual rights without having to achieve a fundamental
overhaul of common moral principles. Here, as in many other cases, the subversion of
morality occurred because individuals’ moral powers were directed toward immoral acts,
due to vulnerabilities that were rooted in their inevitable social epistemic dependency.
Given the fact of social epistemic dependency, an adequate conception of Practical
Ethics must attend to the ways in which institutional epistemic virtues and vices — the
features of institutions that help determine their efficacy in fostering factual beliefs —
can affect the ability of individuals to avoid morally subversive false beliefs.

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Why Virtue Ethics is Not Enough

Thus far I have argued for four conclusions. (1) CPE is defective because it fails to
meet a reasonable criterion of adequacy for Practical Ethics: it does too little to
facilitate the Negative Task of Practical Ethics, which is to provide guidance as to how
to reduce the incidence of the worst behaviour, including wrongful mass violence. CPE
falls short in this regard, I have argued, because it pays insufficient attention to the
subversion of morality. (2) False factual beliefs play a crucial role in the subversion of
morality. (3) Because false factual beliefs play a crucial role in the subversion of
morality and because the subversion of morality in turn plays a crucial role in some of the
worst behaviour, Practical Ethics should focus more on the ethics of believing. (4) An
adequate ethics of believing must take seriously our social-epistemic dependency.
It might be objected at this point that my indictment of the limitations of CPE is
hyperbolic because my understanding of CPE does not reflect its richness. I have
proceeded, it might be argued, as if CPE is concerned exclusively with getting the right
moral principles; but this is not the case. In the past two decades or so there has been
a resurgence of Virtue Ethics, and this development has enriched Practical Ethics. On
this view, CPE, to the extent that it incorporates the insights of Virtue Ethics, can
illuminate the phenomenon of the subversion of morality in two ways. First, a Virtue
Ethics-infused Practical Ethics can offer an account of the virtues that illuminates the
difference between genuine virtues and the disfigured virtues that play a significant
role in grossly immoral behaviour. Second, it can illuminate the ethics of believing by
providing an account of the epistemic virtues of individuals and their role in avoiding
the subversion of morality. For example, individuals who possess the epistemic virtues
will not simply swallow wild rumours about knife-wielding Belgian nuns.
I believe this objection overestimates the penetration of Virtue Ethics into contemporary
Practical Ethics. But whether I am right about that or not, there is a deeper problem
with the objection: contemporary Virtue Ethics has thus far not paid sufficient attention
to the subversion of moral virtues and has failed to appreciate either how much the
well-functioning of the moral virtues depends upon one’s factual beliefs or how dependent
we are for our factual beliefs on others; in other words, Virtue Ethics’ contribution to
the ethics of believing has underestimated our social-epistemic dependency.
Once we understand the potential for the exploitation of the moral powers for
immoral ends, we need a richer account of the virtues, one that includes what might
be called protective meta-virtues — ingrained dispositions that can help individuals avoid
the subversion of morality, including the disfigurement of the virtues. Perhaps foremost
among these protective meta-virtues would be epistemic virtues that take into account
the extreme vulnerability that our inevitable social-epistemic dependency entails.
The key point is that individuals ought to cultivate habits of belief formation — and
correction — that are specifically geared to avoiding the most common patterns of
belief formation that contribute to the subversion of the moral powers. In the language
of Virtue Ethics, being morally virtuous requires having epistemic virtues that enable
us to respond appropriately to our predicament of extreme social-epistemic dependency.
In particular, being morally virtuous requires being more critical of socially transmitted
factual beliefs of the sorts that typically play an important role in the various ways in
which morality can be subverted. Among other things, this would mean being disposed
to exercise special scrutiny of the processes by which one comes to have beliefs that

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are relevant to moral status judgments, beliefs about the history of one’s own country
and its treatment by other countries of the sort that are often invoked to justify armed
conflict, and all beliefs that tend to limit the sentiments of compassion and respect.17
Even a much richer account of the virtues of individuals than contemporary Virtue
Ethics provides would still not be enough, however. Any attempt to enrich Practical
Ethics by foregrounding the ethics of believing will be grossly inadequate unless it
incorporates what I have elsewhere called social moral epistemology.18 As I understand
the term, ‘social moral epistemology’ is the systematic comparative evaluation of
alternative institutional arrangements and social practices as to their efficacy and
efficiency in promoting beliefs that are especially important for the proper functioning
of the moral powers. Given our extreme epistemic dependency and given that this
dependency is socially structured, we need to expand our conception of epistemic
virtues in two ways. First, as I have already indicated, a full characterization of the
epistemic virtues of a morally responsible individual must include stable dispositions
to be critical about the institutional epistemic environment in which one lives. A
characterization of individual epistemic virtues that omits reference to the institutional
epistemic environment is flawed. Second, we need an account of the epistemic virtues
of social institutions. More precisely, we need criteria for the comparative evaluation
of alternative institutional epistemic environments as to their effects on our ability to
form and sustain the beliefs upon which the proper functioning of our moral powers
depends.
Because conventional Virtue Ethics underestimates the social-epistemic dependency
of the individual, it proceeds as if the virtues of individuals are much more autonomous
or self-sufficient than they are, neglecting the ways in which an individual’s capacity to
cultivate and sustain the virtues — and to avoid their disfigurement — depends upon
the patterns of epistemic deference that prevail in the society in which the individual
finds herself. So unless Virtue Ethics comes to incorporate social moral epistemology,
its further penetration into Practical Ethics will not remove the limitations I have
described.
In recommending that Practical Ethics should take the ethics of believing more
seriously and in arguing that an adequate account of the ethics of believing will attend
to the complex relationship between individual and institutional epistemic virtues, I
am not suggesting that Philosophy should be replaced by Social Science. Social moral
epistemology, as I understand it, is an essentially normative enterprise: it evaluates the
epistemic functions of alternative institutional arrangements and social practices and it
may prescribe epistemic-institutional reform for moral reasons. The enriched Practical
Ethics that I am advocating will still be recognizable as Ethics: it will utilize the results
of social moral epistemological enquiry to develop a more nuanced account of what it
is to be a virtuous individual and what a better society would be like.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Relationship Between Philosophy and Public

Policy

In the first part of this essay I argued that philosophers should take a broader and a
more critical view of the relationship between Philosophy and public policy, recognizing
that one of their most important contributions to sound public policy may be to

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combat the influence of bad Philosophy (which includes, but is not limited to, bad
Philosophy produced by accredited academic philosophers). In the second part, I
argued that the conventional conception of Practical Ethics that philosophers bring to
issues of public policy is defective because it fails to take seriously the phenomenon of
the subversion of morality, the role of false factual beliefs in it, and the vulnerability to
the exploitation of our moral powers that our social-epistemic dependency entails. I
also argued that contemporary Virtue Ethics cannot cure these defects of the conventional
conception of Practical Ethics because it implicitly assumes that the virtues of individuals,
including their epistemic virtues, are more self-sufficient than they are likely to be.
Even when conventional Virtue Ethics acknowledges the importance of epistemic
virtues or the epistemic dimension of the moral virtues, it does not take into account
the fact that the well-functioning of the virtues can either be impaired or facilitated
by the epistemic virtues or vices of the institutions and social practices that help shape
the individual’s beliefs.
If my analysis is cogent so far, then it should be clear why the dominant methodology
of conventional Practical Ethics is deficient and it should be equally clear why this
deficiency impoverishes the contribution that Practical Ethics can make to sound
public policy. Practitioners of CPE typically try to identify sound moral principles
by pumping intuitions about hypothetical cases that have been suitably simplified to
isolate a particular moral variable; then they recommend policies that would be in
accordance with the moral principles thus developed. More sophisticated practitioners
acknowledge that the direct implementation of moral principles developed in this way
may not be advisable or feasible, appealing to the importance of distinguishing between
ideal and nonideal theory. One obvious problem with this methodology, even in its
more sophisticated form, is that it takes no heed of the fact that having the right moral
principles is sometimes not enough. As several of the cases of the subversion of morality
sketched above indicate, people whose moral principles are unexceptionable can do
horrific things in the name of those very principles.
Given the adeptness of some people in exploiting the moral powers of others through
manipulating their factual beliefs, CPE’s near exclusive emphasis on identifying sound
moral principles greatly constrains its potential contribution to the Negative Task of
Practical Ethics, the endeavour to reduce the incidence of the most grievously wrong
behaviour. Identifying the correct moral principles is, of course, of vital importance,
but given the capacity for subversion of the moral powers, much more is needed.
Practical ethicists should focus more on the ethics of believing, and develop a more
sophisticated conception of the moral and epistemic virtues of individuals and of
institutions, one that includes what I have referred to as protective meta-virtues, whose
function it is to guard us against the more frequent and predictable subversions
of morality, including those subversions that are facilitated by the processes of belief-
formation that our social institutions and practices foster.
Another, equally fundamental change in the way in which practical ethicists conceive
of their contribution to public policy deliberations is needed. In evaluating policy
options, we need to consider the unintended epistemic effects of institutional change,
not just the likelihood that they will achieve their stated goals. We should also entertain the
possibility of policy initiatives that are calculated to improve the epistemic performance
of our institutions. This would mean, among other things, challenging the liberal slogan
that it is not the business of government to foster virtue. Unless social policy helps to

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foster the protective meta-virtues of individuals and the epistemic virtues of social
institutions, the practical ethicist’s well-argued recommendations for public policy
grounded in sound moral principles will be of limited value.

Allen Buchanan, Department of Philosophy 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham,
NC 27708, USA. allenb@duke.edu

NOTES

1 For a discussion of the ideological character of the President’s Council, see Alta Charo, ‘The endarkenment’
in L. Eckenweiler & F. G. Cohn (eds.) The Ethics of Bioethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007). For criticisms of some of the President’s Council’s reasoning in its reports, see Allen Buchanan,
‘Enhancement and the Ethics of Development’, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 18 (2008): 1–34 and
‘Human Nature and Enhancement’, Bioethics 23 (2009): 141–150.
2 In his response to the version of this paper presented at the British Academy workshop, Alan Carter rightly
pointed out that I failed to emphasize the important contributions of philosophers such as Singer to the
reform of public policy concerning the treatment of nonhuman animals.
3 It is an interesting question as to whether feminist academic philosophers, as opposed to feminist
philosophers in the broader sense of the term ‘philosopher’ explained below, have had as large an impact
on public policy as academic philosophers like Singer and Glover.
4 For examples, see Jeremy A. Rabkin, Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires
Sovereign States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); John C. Yoo, ‘Globalization and the
Constitution: Treaties, non-self-execution, and the original understanding’, Fordham law Review 66
(1997): 319–369.
5 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 561.
6 Here, again, I am indebted to Alan Carter, whose response to the presentation on which this paper is
based convinced me that I had conveyed too negative a view of the role of philosophers in public policy.
7 The term ‘Practical Ethics’ is typically used to characterize ethical inquiries other than those typical of
meta-ethics and as including normative ethical inquiries that have fairly direct implications for individual
action or public policy.
8 This criterion for the adequacy of Ethics is implicit in Jonathan Glover’s approach in his fine book,
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).
9 For the importance of the appeal to moral duty and moral self-sacrifice of the individual in Nazi ideology,
see Claudia Koontz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). See also the
interview with former SS Major, Karl Wolf, Himmler’s Adjutant, in the episode entitled ‘Genocide’, in
the classic World War II documentary series, The World at War.
10 Ibid., Karl Wolf interview.
11 Koontz op. cit., p. 119.
12 For three decades Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), was the
dominant contemporary philosophical work on the morality of war. In the last five years a more nuanced
and rigorous literature on the topic has emerged. This new work not only effectively criticizes some of the
most fundamental assumptions of Walzer’s approach, but also develops its own more comprehensive and
systematic accounts. For a valuable new collection of essays that reflect this resurgence of thinking about
the morality of war, see H. Shue & D. Rodin (eds.) Preemption: Military Action and Moral Justification
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
13 See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 20.
14 In his response to the earlier version of this paper presented at the British Academy workshop, Neil
Manson noted that the term ‘Applied Ethics’ is sometimes reserved for normative inquiry into hard cases.
It may be that there is a tendency in what I have called CPE to focus exclusively on hard cases. My point is
that doing so comes at considerable cost, if one agrees that the Negative Task is central to Practical Ethics.
15 I am indebted to Alan Carter for calling this point to my attention in his valuable comments on an earlier
draft of this paper.

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16 In his insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper, Neil Manson correctly notes that the term
‘transmission’, when applied to beliefs, may betray or encourage a failure to appreciate the holistic nature
of believing and that this mistake may in turn lead to an underestimation of the difficulty of changing
beliefs in such a way as to reduce the incidence of wrongful mass violence.
17 This proposal is neutral on the question of whether some version of Evidentialism is true. There is no
assumption that every belief requires sufficient evidence (either as a matter of epistemic or moral
responsibility); instead, the idea is that we now have sufficient empirical evidence about the role of certain
classes of factual beliefs in the causation of wrongful mass violence that being morally responsible requires
subjecting those beliefs to special scrutiny.
18 For a development of the idea of Social Moral Epistemology, see the following papers. ‘Social moral
epistemology’, Social Philosophy & Policy 19 (2002): 126–52; ‘Political liberalism and social epistemology’,
Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2003): 95–130; ‘Social moral epistemology and the role of bioethicists’, in
L. Eckenweiler & F. G. Cohn (eds.) The Ethics of Bioethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007, pp. 288–96; ‘Social moral epistemology and the task of ethics’, in J. McMahan, N. A. Davis & R.
Keshen (eds.) Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2009