ABSTRACT
Ever since the Enlightenment, authority of all kinds has been suspect. We cannot live without political authority, so early modern philosophers attempted to find a way to ground the authority of the state in something it is undeniably rational for each subject to accept. But authority in other realms, including the moral and epistemic domains, was allowed to disappear. Authority in the realm of belief is still treated with suspicion. Authority in the realm of moral belief is treated with even greater suspicion. I want to argue that we can reasonably treat epistemic exemplars as epistemic authorities even when the domain of their epistemic exemplarity is the domain of the moral. It is reasonable to take beliefs from them preemptively under conditions I will propose, and doing so does not require a sacrifice of autonomy. When the epistemic authority is also an exemplar of moral virtue—a wise person, we can learn virtue through the process of imitating her. The justification for imitating an exemplar of wisdom is parallel to the justification of believing on epistemic authority.
