"How could you be so oblivious?": Positive epistemic duties and oppressive ignorance

Abstract You’re on the train home after a long day. You exit at your station, still thinking about work. A few minutes later, you stop; something is off. It takes you a moment to realize that you missed a turn and obliviously walked several blocks in the wrong direction. This paper does three things. First, I identify and provide an account of a familiar phenomenon that I term obliviousness. On this account, obliviousness occurs when an agent non-deliberately fails to take a rational route to some belief p that is immediately available to them at t that they ought to have taken. I propose that an agent ought to take such a rational route to belief when this is directly relevant to pursuing an aim that S is or should be actively pursuing at t . Second, I argue that, despite the reference to aims in the account, obliviousness centrally involves an epistemic failure, thereby indicating that we have positive epistemic duties. As part of making this case, I sketch a non-ideal picture of epistemic normativity on which, in light of our human limitations, practical (including moral) factors help determine the scope of our epistemic duties—without thereby instrumentalizing epistemic rationality. Third, I show that obliviousness can function as oppressive ignorance. I highlight how social conditions shape key cognitive dispositions such as to cultivate patterns of ignorance in ways that often escape our deliberate control and awareness. This suggests that we have epistemic as well as moral reasons to ameliorate unjust social conditions.