Actually, I think my concerns aren't the utilitarian ones, even if I want to acknowledge the validity of those concerns. I'm more interested in the deontic mor

Actually, I think my concerns aren't the utilitarian ones, even if I want to acknowledge the validity of those concerns. I'm more interested in the deontic more something along the lines of the deontic idea that we should understand folks in the way that they understand themselves. I'm with you on the idea that we shouldn't assume folks are evil and that we should always try and understand them in te way they understand themselves. But I'm often finding myself working with and communicating with narcissistic people wholly lack that ability to see other people as having thoughts and motivations which are different from their own. In these cases, I suppose evil is just too strong a word... there are levels of understanding people that I try to filter out, specifically the dialectic between how they understand themselves and what I should take away from that understanding. So, at some point, I feel like we have to go beyond simply being agnostic about how people see themselves... of course we all see ourselves as driving as best we can. And we need to develop the empathy you're describing and understand the real differences between how we see things. But beyond that, I'm having a hard time with the idea that we're all just morally neutral actors who all see ourselves as doing the best we can, and I feel like if I can better understand why we might have a real ethical obligation to respect others' epistemic situations I'll have a better understanding of my own ethics... and I guess that was what I was hoping for: what's the underlying argument that we should attempt this ethical stance of respecting others beyond the pragmatic, utilitarian reasons that seem far more obvious.