It’s easy enough to see that epistemic insouciance is an epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are reprehensible character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. On the one hand, not caring about the facts is an attitude for which a person can be criticised. On the other hand, it is hard to see how not caring about the facts or the evidence can be anything other than an obstacle to gaining knowledge. Not only did Trump not know whether what he said to Trudeau was true, he didn’t care to know. His attitude prevented him from knowing by making him indifferent to the truth. For Trump, the truth or falsity of what he said to Trudeau just didn’t matter.

An attitude that is in the roughly same ballpark as epistemic insouciance is contempt. Indeed, one might think that contempt is the essence of epistemic insouciance. There is contempt for the facts, contempt for evidence and, in the case of some politicians, contempt for the public. It is debatable, though, whether contempt is necessary for epistemic insouciance. Other sources of this attitude might include arrogance and laziness. For example, one might argue that the real problem with some epistemically insouciant politicians is not, or not just, that they are contemptuous but that they are what Heather Battaly in her book on virtue calls ‘slackers’. They don’t care enough about the facts to be contemptuous of them.

The Brexit debate in the UK provides some support for this view. Both Boris Johnson and David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, are often blamed for a lack of seriousness about the complexity and pitfalls of the U.K’s attempts to disentangle itself from the EU. Both have been accused of idleness, of playing fast and loose with the facts, and of treating everything as a joke. Both are presumably capable of asking and answering difficult questions but neither can be bothered. If they are slackers that is already enough to explain their epistemic insouciance, without the supposition that they are motivated by the kind of contempt that is evident in other cases. Yet, even if they aren’t motivated by contempt, their conduct might be said to display contempt for the facts.