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Philosophers have mistakenly used the phrase “motivation by rightness de re” to refer to motivations whose objects are right-making features. If the “de re” qualifier were used correctly, this phrase would instead refer to a motivation whose object is that the agent acts rightly, but that represents moral rightness under another description. Moreover, many instances of ordinary moral deliberation cannot be fully explained by the hypothesis that deliberators just care about the particular right-making features that they see at stake in their circumstances. They can only be explained by taking deliberators to have a further, overarching concern: a concern to strike the right balance between everything important at stake. And these overarching concerns are often instances of motivation by rightness de re, correctly construed, given the conceptual role of ordinary deliberators’ judgments that a certain action strikes the right balance. These observations challenge various criticisms of motivation by rightness de dicto.

This chapter concerns pernicious predictive inferences: taking someone to be likely to possess a socially disvalued trait based on statistical information about the prevalence of that trait within a social group to which she belongs. Some scholars have argued that pernicious predictive inferences are morally prohibited, but are sometimes epistemically required, leaving us with a tragic conflict between the requirements of epistemic rationality and those of morality. Others have responded by arguing that pernicious predictive inferences are sometimes epistemically prohibited. The present chapter takes a different approach, considering the sort of reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences that seems morally praiseworthy and vindicating its epistemic status. We argue that, even on a simple, orthodox Bayesian picture of the requirements of epistemic rationality, agents must consider the costs of error—including the associated moral and political costs—when forming and revising their credences. Our attitudes toward the costs of error determine how “risky” different credences are for us, and our epistemic states are justified in part by our attitudes toward epistemic risk. Thus, reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences need not be epistemically irrational, and the apparent conflict between morality and epistemic rationality is typically illusory.