ABSTRACT
A vice attribution is the judgement that another person has a specific epistemic vice. Such attributions are often intended as explanatory, but vice explanations of recent political events are problematic in a number of ways. They tend to underestimate the significance of other factors and are at odds with the principle that a democratic culture is one in which citizens assume that their fellow citizens have good reasons, or at any rate reasons, for acting as they do. Vice explanations can themselves be epistemically vicious to the extent that they make it harder to understand people whose lives, values and political preferences are very different from our own. Vice explanations imply that the epistemically vicious suffer from a form of false consciousness, but there is also a type of false consciousness to which some vice epistemologists as susceptible.
