David Enoch (Hebrew U) – “Statistical Resentment, Or: What’s Wrong with Acting, Blaming, and Believing on the Basis of Statistics Alone” (Virtual Hart Seminar, Surrey)

The Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy is holding an online Hart Seminar by David Enoch (Hebrew U), on Wednesday, 17 June 2020, 16:10–18:10 BST:

Abstract: Statistical evidence – say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other – can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why.

We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context – with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence.

Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here.

For details, see their event page.