Cuneo on what makes ethics and epistemology similar

Cuneo spends some time drawing out the similarities between ethics and epistemology. Here are the similarities that he points to:

1) Moral and epistemic reasons are categorical
2) Moral and epistemic facts are structurally isomorphic
3) Moral and epistemic facts normatively appraise objects of the same type
4) It's often the case that it's difficult to disentangle the moral and epistemic parts.

1) means that both epistemic and ethical facts "are, imply, or indicate reasons for agents to behave in certain ways regardless of whether these agents care about conducting their behavior in a rational/moral way, whether they belong to a social group of a certain kind, of whether they have entered into social agreements with others." (59) I take it that this is an explication of what it means to say that epistemology is a normative domain.

2) means that facts of both kinds come in the same kinds. Some ethical statements are evaluative ("Xing is good"), while others are deontic ("You ought to perform X"). Likewise epistemic statements are either evaluative ("Believing X is rational") or deontic ("You ought to believe X"). Further, ethical facts are either particular ("That deed is evil") or general ("Murder is wrong"), and the same can be said for epistemic facts which are either particular or general.

3) expresses the idea that "institutions, persons, intentions, actions, propositional attitudes (beliefs, acceptances, inquiries and hopes), character traits, emotions, policies, ways of viewing things, ways of finding things out, and so forth, are all plausibly thought to be subject to moral and epistemic norms."

4) means that "in some cases there is no obvious way to disentangle (ontologically at least) their moral and epistemic dimensions; some failing...appear to be both moral and epistemic failings." For example, "failing to treat the testimony of another with sufficient care and attention."

Are these similarities impressive? Certainly I find the first impressive, but I consider it just an explication of what it means to say that ethics and epistemology are both normative discourses. The second doesn't seem so exciting to me, though I'm having trouble picking out exactly why. I think because it seems to me (WARNING: not an argument) very difficult to imagine a normative domain that could be either deontic but not evaluative, or the other way around. The fourth way I find very impressive, though I'm not sure what to make of it if moral and epistemic domains are quite distinct. After all, it's often difficult to separate the normative and descriptive dimensions of a term. For example, take the word "murder." It doesn't seem to be murder if you kill during war, or kill an evil perpetrator, etc. So part of what it means to murder someone is to do something wrong. So there is significant entanglement between the normative and descriptive domains in these terms. Nevertheless, it's unclear to me what this goes to show.

Let's look at the third similarity. Cuneo writes "it would be incorrect to say that moral and epistemic facts are interestingly disanalogous because epistemic facts concern only 'theoretical' reasons, while moral ones concern only 'practical' reasons." He argues, and I'm convinced, that some moral reasons are theoretical and some epistemic reasons are practical.

I might be missing something, but can there be epistemic evaluations of states of affairs beyond actors? Because there can be moral evaluations not just of actors, but of situations and states of affairs. Is it obvious that the same can be done in epistemology? What is an epistemically good outcome that doesn't have to do with the actor? We can morally evaluate, for example, the goodness of evil of a war. A tax can be bad. Can epistemology evaluate anything outside of an actor? Cuneo says that institutions and policies can be epistemically and morally evaluated. But these are tangled up with actors--institutions, such as countries, companies, boards or clubs, can work together and reach decisions and act as a corporate. And policies can be morally evaluated epistemically because they are the decisions of actors. But what about plain-old boring states of affairs. I think they can be morally evaluated but not epistemically evaluated (what would that even mean?).

Is this important at all? I'll see if I can make the case for this doing some work in the next post, unless I change my mind about the previous few paragraphs.