Topic: The Parent Trap: How Doxastic Wronging Starts at Home

Speaker : Rima Basu, Claremont McKenna College

Abstract: When Mulan reflects on how she'll never be the perfect bride or the perfect daughter, we recognize her pain. Our parents exert a kind of doxastic influence over our lives and it can hurt when we fail to live up to their expectations. In previous work I've focused on racist beliefs to illuminate the ways beliefs can wrong, however, the paradigmatic example of doxastic wronging likely lies somewhere closer to home. Although at some level we can all relate to Mulan, it is puzzling how the expectations our parents place upon us wrong us and it is unclear whether we are justified in these feelings of hurt and resentment. This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by providing a taxonomy of the ways our parents can wrong us in order to better understand how our relationships shape our attitudinal and doxastic obligations more generally.