De Jure Hinges and Doxastic Wronging: The Harm of Rational Beliefs

In the study of how we know what we know, philosophers have long been interested in the invisible rules that hold our thinking together. Imagine a door that swings on a hinge; the door can move, but the hinge must stay fixed for the movement to make sense. In our minds, we have similar fixed points—basic assumptions we accept without question, like trusting that other people are telling the truth or that the world exists outside our heads. These are called "hinges." They are the foundation that allows us to investigate specific facts. For a long time, it was thought that if a belief was irrational or false, it was harmful because it broke these rules of thinking. However, a new line of inquiry suggests that the story is more complicated. It turns out that a belief can be perfectly logical, supported by facts, and still cause deep harm simply because of how it treats another person. This idea challenges the way we understand prejudice, suggesting that the damage done by a biased belief does not always come from the belief being wrong, but from the moral weight of holding it.

Mary Gregg, a researcher at Yonsei University, takes this idea and applies it to the work of philosopher Annalisa Coliva. Coliva has argued that identity prejudices—such as assuming a woman is less trustworthy than a man, or that a person of a certain race is less capable—are not true "hinges." She believes they are merely "hinge-like" because they are irrational. In her view, these prejudices are harmful specifically because they are unreasonable and block us from seeing the truth. If we can prove a belief is irrational, Coliva argues, we can prove it is harmful and therefore not a genuine part of our mental framework. Gregg, however, finds a gap in this logic. She argues that Coliva misses a crucial possibility: a belief can be rational and still be harmful. By looking at a concept called "doxastic wronging"—a fancy term for the idea that the act of believing something about a person can be a moral wrong in itself—Gregg shows that the source of harm is not always irrationality.

To understand Gregg's point, consider a scenario involving a wealthy woman at a party. She looks around and sees that almost all the staff are Black men in tuxedos, while almost all the guests are white. She sees a well-dressed Black man and, based on the statistics of the room, logically concludes he is a waiter. She hands him her coat. Statistically, her guess is likely correct; the numbers say she is right. In the world of pure logic, she has made a rational inference. Yet, intuitively, something has gone terribly wrong. The man she mistook is actually a distinguished guest. The harm here is not that she was statistically wrong; the harm is that she reduced a person to a stereotype, treating him as a function rather than an individual. This is what philosophers call "doxastic wronging." The belief itself, even if it fits the data, carries a moral injury because of how it frames the person being believed about.

Gregg uses this example to challenge Coliva's framework. If Coliva is right, then the woman at the party should be safe from criticism because her belief was rational and supported by evidence. But if we agree that she did something wrong, then rationality cannot be the shield that protects a belief from being harmful. Gregg argues that Coliva's reliance on rationality to define what counts as a harmful prejudice is flawed. Coliva claims that because identity prejudices are irrational, they are the ones causing the damage. But if a rational belief can also cause the same kind of damage, then the irrationality of the belief is not the only thing that matters. The harm comes from the attitude and the way the belief is held, not just from whether the math adds up.

This distinction changes how we view the nature of prejudice. Coliva suggests that we can identify harmful prejudices by pointing out that they are irrational and therefore not part of our core, fixed beliefs. Gregg counters that this approach is too narrow. Even if a prejudice is rational, or even if it is based on a "hinge" that everyone agrees is rational, it can still commit a form of injustice. The problem is not that the belief is broken logic; the problem is that the belief is a moral failure. By focusing only on whether a belief is rational or irrational, we might miss the real source of the harm, which lies in the way we treat people through our beliefs.

The paper does not claim that all prejudices are rational or that we should accept them. Instead, it suggests that the tool we use to judge them—rationality—is not sharp enough to catch every instance of harm. If we only look for irrationality, we might let harmful, rational beliefs slide by. Gregg's work implies that we need a new way to understand these fixed points in our thinking. We must recognize that a belief can be a "hinge" that holds our world together, and still be a place where we do great harm to others, simply because of the moral color of the belief itself. The conclusion is not that we should stop trying to be rational, but that we must realize that being rational does not automatically mean we are being kind or just. The harm of identity prejudice runs deeper than a simple mistake in logic; it is a failure of how we see each other, a failure that can happen even when the numbers are right.