The value of privileged access

It is commonly held that we stand in a special epistemic relationship with respect to certain facts about our minds, a relationship that is known as privileged access. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we either lack privileged access entirely, or that the scope of such access is severely limited. While there have been a number of attempts in the literature to respond to these skeptics, one question that has not been addressed is what, if anything, of value we fail to possess if these skeptics are right. In this paper, I argue that insofar as we lack privileged access, something of significant value would be absent from our cognitive lives. I defend this claim by developing a novel position that privileged access is necessary for possessing a type of epistemic control that is extrinsically valuable to those who possess it. I also provide reasons for thinking that privileged access is valuable in and of itself.