Abstract
Epistemic deontology maintains that our beliefs and degrees of belief are open to deontic evaluations—evaluations of what we ought to believe or may not believe. Some philosophers endorse strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology on which agents can always access what determines the deontic status of their beliefs and degrees of belief. This paper articulates a new challenge for strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology. Any version of epistemic deontology must face William Alston’s argument. Alston combined a broadly voluntarist conception of responsibility, on which ought implies can, with doxastic involuntarism, the position that our beliefs are not under our control. Together, those views imply that epistemic deontology is false. A promising response to Alston’s argument is to embrace a compatibilist account of control—specifically a reason-responsive version of compatibilism—and use it to criticism his doxastic involuntarism. I argue that while reason-responsive compatibilism about control does undermine Alston’s argument, it comes at a cost. Specifically, it is inconsistent with strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology. The surprising upshot is that so long as we retain a voluntarist conception of responsibility, we have reason for rejecting strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology.
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Notes
I assume both beliefs and degrees of belief exist. For purposes here, I am agnostic as to whether one category reduces to the other. I will focus mostly on beliefs, but all the issues here could be formulated mutantis mundandi in terms of degrees of belief.
These are not the only possible evaluations of beliefs. We can evaluate beliefs in terms of their value or goodness, epistemic virtuous or viciousness, coherence, origins in a reliable source, whether they have reasons or evidence that support them, etc. (And, of course, there might be various relations between these evaluations—a subject I will not discuss here.).
There is a category of ‘ought to be,’ e.g. “it ought to be that hardworking students get jobs.” Some might propose securing deontic evaluations for agents’ doxastic attitudes by appeal to this category (see, e.g., Chrisman 2008). However, either that category reduces to what agents are required to do or not. If the former, then it is thereby included in my discussion. If the latter, then it is beyond the scope of my discussion. Either way, I won’t spent time here on specific proposals of that kind.
An alternative construal of the deontological conception of justification would be that a belief is justified if and only if it is not the case that it is in violation of a doxastic duty or obligation. However, it is conceptually possible that a belief is not in violation of a doxastic duty or obligation because none apply to it. (Compare: it’s not the case that I’m in violation of a company policy if I do not work for the company!) My understanding of the deontological conception follows Alston in requiring that a belief is justified only if there are some set of doxastic duties or obligations that do apply to it.
Some philosophers simply deny this principle in response to Alston’s argument (see, e.g., Feldman 2000; Schmitt 1992). Others might deny it by offering up an alternative conception of responsibility that might be dubbed a “rationalist” conception instead of a “voluntarist.” For that kind of approach to responsibility, see (e.g.) Adams (1985), Smith (2005) and Hieronymi (2008). Such positions strike me as implausible. But I won’t argue against them here as my concern is with a different response to Alston’s argument.
Compare Steup (2011: p. 547). This is an approximate gloss on what Fischer and Ravizza refer to as “moderate reason-responsiveness.” Roughly, this is a moderate requirement because it is stronger than the weak requirement that there only be one such world where the agent is reason-responsive but it is weaker than the strong requirement that in every such world the agent is reason-responsive. See Fischer and Ravizza (1998: p. 41ff.) and Fischer (2006) for details and elaborations on “reason-responsiveness” and the differences between strong, moderate, and weak reason-responsiveness.
Steup (2008) canvasses a range of non-reason responsive compatibilist positions and many of them give desires and wants an important role.
Of course, more could be said about the relation of ‘consideration in favor of.’ Some, like Scanlon, understand it in terms of the concept ‘being a reason,’ generating a tight circle of primitive concepts; but there are other understandings as well. But the foregoing does show that Schmitt is incorrect when she claims that “describing a reason as ‘normative’ seems nothing much more than describing it as ‘non-explanatory” (2015: p. 33).
For more on access and internalism, see Schmitt (1992), BonJour (2002) and Bergmann (2006). For an alternative proposal of internalism in terms of supervenience and mental states, see Conee and Feldman (2001). For criticism of that proposal, see Bergmann (2006). Some authors (e.g., Bergmann (2006)) formulate “internalism” about justification as a version of what I’ve called “weak internalism”, while others (e.g., BonJour 2002) formulate it as a version of what I’ve called “strong internalism.” What an agent can access might include more than just her mental states. It may also include general epistemic principles (cf. Chisholm 1966) or logical/probabilistic principles (cf. BonJour 2002). The inclusion of “accessible” general principles does not matter for my argument. Finally, keep in mind that internalists will want to avoid as “accessible” information that is gained through further research, e.g., consulting an expert or online encyclopedia. This is to stay true to the idea that things outside the perspective of an agent are irrelevant. I assume we have a workable notion of “access” on which that is true.
Not all of these authors use the term ‘permitted’ and some endorse a weaker position than the one formulated here. For reasons I cannot get into here, I think authors who prefer a weaker formulation should opt for this stronger formulation. In any case, I’m concerned with the principle as formulated, not necessarily the detailed exegesis of all of these authors. For additional discussions of epistemic conservatism, see Kvanvig (1989), Christensen (1994) and Vahid (2004).
For more on evidence possession and evidentialism, see my (under review).
For instance, both Conee and Feldman (2008) and McCain (2014) suggest accounts of evidential fit on which, crudely, evidential fit of a proposition to body of evidence is a matter of explanatory relations between them available to subjects. But an explanation being available to a subject is defined in a way that implies it is accessible to a subject.
Feldman is also a mentalist about justification: he thinks that any two subjects that are alike “mentally” are alike in terms of justification. But I’m not here focused on his theory of justification but this principle he articulates.
One might object that, depending on the account of basing, adding the further claim that Julius’ belief is based on her seemings and is not reason-responsive actually produces an incoherent scenario. This could only happen if there were an account of the basing relation on which, when a doxastic attitude is based on an agent’s reasons, it was impossible for the attitude to not be reason-responsive. I’m not sure there is a plausible account of the basing relation that would entail that. But even if there were, it could not be used by internalists to respond to this problem. Since being reason-responsive is not determined by the actual facts that agents can always access, and this account of basing relation implies being reason-responsive, it follows that agents could not always access how their doxastic attitudes are based. Thus, amended principles that used this account of the basing relation will not be internalist ones.
It does not matter if the further details amount to either changing the reason-responsiveness of the mechanism that give rise to the agent’s attitudes in the actual world or actually changing the mechanism in the actual world from a reason-responsive one to a non-reason responsive one. Either way will result in a scenario that is consistent with these strong internalist principles and Strong Epistemic Internalism.
To be sure, as I discuss in (2014), we frequently know the crude origins of our beliefs (e.g., that I have this belief because of what I saw or because so-and-so told me). However, we do not retain the origins of all of our justified beliefs. Further, knowledge of crude origins can be insufficient for knowledge of reason-responsiveness because the particular mechanisms underwriting belief are not necessarily transparently accessible to us. For a helpful overview of some of the ways that biases and unreliable heuristics can influence simple reasoning in a way that is not transparent, see Kahneman (2011).
Given the deontological conception of justification, we can distinguish between Strong Epistemic Internalism and the Hybrid Position using the terminology of “justifiers.” Call a “global justifier” anything that is relevant to whether an agents’ belief is justified. Call a “conferring justifier” anything that confers or robs justification to a belief. Clearly conferring justifiers are a subset of global justifiers, but not conversely. Strong Epistemic Internalism maintains that all global justifiers are accessible to an agent. Hybrid Position maintains that all conferring justifiers are accessible to an agent, but not all global justifiers may be.
It might be suggested that subject treat these various internalist principles as general rules of thumb, with the agent treating it as a background assumption that his attitudes are open to deontic appraisal. I’m not sure this suggestion helps with the problem for two reasons. First, even if an agent did do this, it is still possible that such “general rules of thumb” would lead them astray, because the background assumption is false and the agent cannot introspectively tell that it is false. Second, this response would make it even harder to motivate the Hybrid Position because it would undermine its ability to criticize rival views. For instance, consider a view that endorsed a reliabilist constraint, on which an agent ought to believe something only if it originated in a reliable source. A defender of the Hybrid Position might try to object to such a constraint on the basis of the role inaccessible facts play in determinating deontic appraisals. But proponents of that constraint could offer a response that mirrors this response to my criticism: the principle is a general rule of thumb, with agents treating it as a background assumption that their attitudes originate in reliable sources. If the above response succeeds in defending the Hybrid Position, I don’t see why it wouldn’t also succeed in defending this reliabilist constraint.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful conservation and feedback, I thank Dan Buckley, Jordi Cat, Dave Fisher, Hao Hong, Mark Kaplan, Suzanne Kawamleh, Tufan Kiymaz, Tim Leisz, Adam Leite, Dan Linsenbardt, Sharon Mason, Nick Montgomery, Timothy O’Connor, Luis Oliveira, Harrison Waldo, Phillip Woodward, and three anonymous reviewers.
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Perrine, T. Strong internalism, doxastic involuntarism, and the costs of compatibilism. Synthese 197, 3171–3191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1879-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1879-4