Epistemic paternalism involves interfering with the inquiry of others, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. Recently, such paternalism has been discussed as a method of getting the public to have more accurate views on important policy matters. Here, I discuss a novel problem for such paternalism—epistemic spillovers. The problem arises because what matters for rational belief is one’s total evidence, and further, individual pieces of evidence can have complex interactions. Because of this, justified epistemic paternalism requires the would-be paternalist to be in an unusually strong epistemic position, one that most would-be paternalists are unlikely to meet.
