Ripley Stroud is a philosopher primarily interested in questions in, and at the intersection of, ethics and epistemology. Her dissertation, “Epistemic Respect and the Right to be Believed”, develops a new framework for understanding how moral considerations bear on our epistemic practices. She argues that certain epistemic statuses (e.g., being a testifier, or being an expert on something) ground a moral entitlement to a kind of respect. This respect, in turn, provides others with a moral reason to accept (to varying degrees of strength) the things we say.
At Princeton, Stroud is pursuing three distinct projects. First, she is interrogating the boundaries of this theoretical framework by examining how it holds up against bad-faith interlocutors who nevertheless present as sincere – i.e., is there moral reason to give trolls the benefit of the doubt? Second, she is developing a related project on normative conflict, arguing that moral and epistemic norms will often pull in different directions and that theorists would do well to not collapse the two into one another. Finally, she is working on a project about love, where she argues that to love someone well at present, we must love at least some of the people they were in the past – including who they were before we met them.
Stroud earned her B.A. in Liberal Arts & Sciences from St. John’s College, her M.A. in philosophy from Brandeis University, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to Princeton, she served as a Research Fellow at the Philosophy & Society Initiative at the Aspen Institute. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Synthese, and Hypatia.
