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The primary method for defending biocentric individualism - a prominent theory of the moral value of organisms - is to appeal to the fact that there are certain things that are good for and bad for living creatures, even if they are not sentient. This defence is typically and frequently met with the objection that we can determine what is good for some living creature without thereby having any moral reason or obligation to promote or avoid undermining it. In this paper I show how a theory of the morality of defensive violence pre-empts this objection.

We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle-one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with the closure principle. When we used research materials that overcome what we think are difficulties with Turri's original materials, we found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when we presented Turri's original materials to nonphilosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning (viz., professional mathematicians), they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs.Our results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle-one that applies to all beliefs, regardless of their source-provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative closure principle.* This paper has benefited greatly from helpful comments and suggestions from John Turri, Wesley Buckwalter, two anonymous reviewers from Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, an anonymous reviewer for