Protect yourself!! People with alexithymia are more vulnerable to social manipulation. (Beware hidden agendas & pyramid scammers posing as “experts” – they come to your door now and they’re moving into dog training.)

Alexithymia & manipulation

Three Duties of Epistemic diligence

 The first is to avoid allowing oneself to be deceived or to deceive others; and the second is to check others are not misled. In circumstances where false claims are nonetheless accepted as a basis for deciding on action, the third duty is to seek to correct them. “

Three duties of epistemic diligence. / Hayward, Tim.
In: Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2019, p. 536-561.

Epistemic Diligence and Honesty

All else being equal, it is morally good for agents to be honest. That is, agents shouldn’t, without good reason, engage in non-honest behaviours such as lying, cheating or stealing.

One variety of person who misrepresents her knowledge is a liar. Liars intentionally mislead people. Another variety of dishonest person who misrepresents her knowledge is the bullshitter. Bullshitters display an indifference to the truth or falsity of what they say. 

Honesty derives its value (whether that be on the basis of respect or autonomy or similar) from the value we place on holding true beliefs.

It is disrespectful for people to lie to us – and it undermines our autonomy – because it thwarts our attempts to have an accurate picture of the world.

And so honesty that doesn’t generally serve the function of helping agents to have an accurate picture of the world does not seem particularly useful.

This is heightened when we think about expert agents, including group agents, who provide advice. It is no good for such experts to share ill-informed beliefs that don’t meet the professional standards that we expect of them. Lazy experts who do not exercise their expertise in order to form accurate beliefs, but nonetheless share those beliefs freely are not, it seems to me, acting with a virtuous form of honesty.

Such experts might get themselves off the hook by being explicit about their laziness, and thus encouraging people not to view their assertions as the assertions of an ‘expert’. But in failing to apply the epistemic standards associated with their expertise, they effectively surrender their status as an expert. To be both honest and an expert, they must exercise epistemic diligence. “

Oxford University Miller, Christian B. Honesty: The philosophy and psychology of a neglected virtue. Oxford University Press, 2021.