Moral encroachment and group-to-individual inferences

The paper is concerned with a special class of inferences, in which we draw conclusions about individual people based on evidence about the groups to which they belong. One thing that is notable about these inferences is that they are often subject to a kind of moral criticism. By judging people in this way, it is claimed, we demean or diminish them, and fail to properly respect them as individuals. And yet, if these inferences are epistemically sound - as they sometimes appear to be - then we face the possibility of a clash between moral and epistemic norms. One way to avoid this clash is through the thesis of moral encroachment - the idea that standards of epistemic justification are themselves sensitive to moral considerations and, in particular, can become more stringent when a belief has the potential to morally wrong others. In this paper I offer some reasons for doubting this thesis, and argue that group-to-individual inferences are, in the end, better understood through a more traditional framework on which epistemic justification is determined purely by the nature of one's evidence.