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15 Crim. L. & Phil. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/crimlpy15 and id is 1 raw text is: Criminal Law and Philosophy (2021) 15:1-23 https://doi.org/10.1007/si1572-019-09521-9 ORIGINAL PAPER Are Dissenters Epistemically Arrogant? Tine Hindkjaer Madsen' Published online: 2 January 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract One who elects to serve mankind by taking the law into his own hands thereby demonstrates his conviction that his own ability to determine policy is superior to democratic decision making. [Defendants'] professed unselfish motivation, rather than a justification, actually identifies a form of arrogance which organized society cannot tolerate. Those were the words of Justice Harris L. Hartz at the sentencing hearing of three nuns convicted of trespassing and vandalizing government property to demonstrate against U.S. foreign policy. Citizens engaging in civil disobedience are indeed at times accused of being arrogant because they apparently think their own political judgment is superior to that of the democratic majority. This paper examines and evaluates the claim that dissenters are epistemically arrogant. Con- trary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, I argue that epistemic arrogance involves inflating the epistemic worth of one's view. Indeed, the most plausible charge against civil dissenters consists of two claims: (A) civil dissenters have a higher degree of rational certainty in P than is warranted, and (B) civil dissenters use a method of expression that requires a higher level of rational certainty than is warranted in the propositions that their political view is right and the injustice they fight is substantial. I argue that civil disobedience does not necessarily involve epis- temic arrogance. Whether an act of civil disobedience evinces epistemic arrogance has to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the extent to which each dissenter lives up to (A) and (B). Keywords Civil disobedience - Dissent - Epistemic arrogance - Civic virtues Political judgment - Majority rule - Democratic theory E Tine Hindkjaer Madsen thm@hum.ku.dk; tine.hindkjaer@gmail.com Section of Philosophy, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Vej 3, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark I_) Springer