Foundations of an Ethics of Belief 3110327449, 9783110327441

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The initial intuition
Main objective
Preliminary clarificatory remarks
Two central problems
The problem of control and responsibility
The normative problem
Abstracts of the chapters
Chapter 1: What the philosophy of action teaches us
Chapter 2: The impossibility of acquiring beliefs directly for reasons
Chapter 3: Pascalian and theoretical control
Chapter 4: Doxastic responsibility as responsibility for consequences
Chapter 5: Epistemic praiseworthiness and epistemic blameworthiness
Chapter 6: Beyond epistemic justifiedness
Chapter 7: Epistemic justifiedness and non-epistemic justifiedness
Chapter 1: What the philosophy of action teaches us
Actions and happenings
Non-reductionist conception of action
Reductionist conception of action
Actions, happenings and activities
Acting for reasons
Three distinctions about reasons
Motivating reasons vs. normative reasons
Internalism vs. externalism about reasons
Humean vs. anti-Humean conception of motivation
Back to the doxastic realm
Epistemic reasons, non-epistemic reasons and evidence
Delineating the interesting issue
Chapter 2: The Impossibility of directly acquiring beliefs for reasons
Direct and indirect belief acquisitions
Direct/indirect acquisitions of belief and epistemic/non–epistemic reasons
Williams’ argument
“To believe that p is to believe that p is true”
Believing vs. imagining
Transparency
The teleological account
Conclusions
Chapter 3: Theoretical and Pascalian control
Two forms of indirect doxastic control
Theoretical control
Pascalian control
Indirect doxastic influence on belief acquisitions
Unlimited doxastic control considered
Ryan’s unlimited doxastic control
Pieces of evidence vs. motivating reasons
Steup’s unlimited doxastic control
Chapter 4: Doxastic Responsibility as Responsibility for Consequences
Responsibility for consequences
Responsibility for basic actions
Responsibility for the consequences of actions
Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions, theoretical and Pascalian control
Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions and indirect doxastic influence
Responsibility for believing
Chapter 5: Epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness
Epistemic and non-epistemic desirability
The fundamental epistemic end
Other epistemically desirable states
The fundamental epistemic end: some specifications
Epistemic and non-epistemic ends: summary
Varieties of epistemic goodness*
Final and instrumental epistemic goodness
Epistemic rationality and epistemic commendability
Varieties of epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness
Final and instrumental epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness
Epistemic praiseworthiness/blameworthiness for rational belief acquisitions
Epistemic praiseworthiness for epistemically commendable belief acquisitions and epistemic blameworthiness for epistemically non-commendable belief acquisitions
Chapter 6: Beyond epistemic justifiedness
Accessibilism, mentalism, and externalism
Accessibilism and perceptual disjunctivism
Normative properties
Valuable, rational, commendable belief acquisitions and the threefold classification of justifiedness
Externalism: the goodness* of instrumental goodness
Mentalism: the goodness* of rationality
Accessibilism: the goodness* of commendability
The reliabilist and the accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness
The reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness
The credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness
Accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness
Chapter 7: Epistemic and non-epistemic justifiedness
The divergence thesis
The “pragmatic” refutation of the divergence thesis: Clifford and James
Clifford’s ethics of belief
James’ ethics of belief
The point of agreement
The divergence of rationality
The objection against the divergence of rationality
Conclusion
Bibliography

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Anne Meylan Foundations of an Ethics of Belief

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY Herausgegeben von / Edited by Herlinde Pauer-Studer • Neil Roughley Peter Schaber • Ralf Stoecker Band 15 / Volume 15 The aim of the series is to publish high-quality work that deals with questions in practical philosophy from a broadly analytic perspective. These include questions in meta-ethics, normative ethics and "applied" ethics, as well as in political philosophy, philosophy of law and the philosophy of action. Through the publication of work in both German and English the series aims to facilitate discussion between English- and Germanspeaking practical philosophers.

Anne Meylan

Foundations of an Ethics of Belief

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

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To the members and the friends of Episteme. This research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................1 The initial intuition ............................................................................................................................. 1 Main objective ....................................................................................................................................... 3 Preliminary clarificatory remarks .......................................................................................................... 3 Two central problems ........................................................................................................................ 4 The problem of control and responsibility ......................................................................................... 5 The normative problem .............................................................................................................................. 6 Abstracts of the chapters................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1: What the philosophy of action teaches us ..................................................................... 6 Chapter 2: The impossibility of acquiring beliefs directly for reasons .................................... 9 Chapter 3: Pascalian and theoretical control ..................................................................................... 9 Chapter 4: Doxastic responsibility as responsibility for consequences ................................11 Chapter 5: Epistemic praiseworthiness and epistemic blameworthiness ...........................12 Chapter 6: Beyond epistemic justifiedness .......................................................................................13 Chapter 7: Epistemic justifiedness and non-epistemic justifiedness .....................................14

Chapter 1: What the philosophy of action teaches us .................................................. 17

Actions and happenings...................................................................................................................17 Non-reductionist conception of action ...............................................................................................18 Reductionist conception of action ........................................................................................................22 Actions, happenings and activities ..............................................................................................27 Acting for reasons ........................................................................................................................................28 Three distinctions about reasons ................................................................................................32 Motivating reasons vs. normative reasons........................................................................................32 Internalism vs. externalism about reasons .......................................................................................33 Humean vs. anti-Humean conception of motivation .....................................................................34 Back to the doxastic realm..............................................................................................................35 Epistemic reasons, non-epistemic reasons and evidence ...........................................................35 Delineating the interesting issue ...........................................................................................................38

Chapter 2: The Impossibility of directly acquiring beliefs for reasons ................. 41

Direct and indirect belief acquisitions .......................................................................................41 Direct/indirect acquisitions of belief and epistemic/non–epistemic reasons ...................42 Williams’ argument ...........................................................................................................................45 “To believe that p is to believe that p is true” ..........................................................................52 Believing vs. imagining ..............................................................................................................................53 Transparency.................................................................................................................................................55 The teleological account ...........................................................................................................................57 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................................................60

Chapter 3: Theoretical and Pascalian control ................................................................ 64

Two forms of indirect doxastic control ......................................................................................68 Theoretical control ......................................................................................................................................69 Pascalian control ..........................................................................................................................................79 Indirect doxastic influence on belief acquisitions .......................................................................... 82 Unlimited doxastic control considered ......................................................................................87 Ryan’s unlimited doxastic control ........................................................................................................87 Pieces of evidence vs. motivating reasons.........................................................................................89 Steup’s unlimited doxastic control .......................................................................................................92

Chapter 4: Doxastic Responsibility as Responsibility for Consequences ............. 97

Responsibility for consequences ..................................................................................................97 Responsibility for basic actions .............................................................................................................99 Responsibility for the consequences of actions ........................................................................... 103 Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions, theoretical and Pascalian control ...... 119 Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions and indirect doxastic influence ........... 124 Responsibility for believing .................................................................................................................. 125

Chapter 5: Epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness ............................ 129

Epistemic and non-epistemic desirability ............................................................................. 129 The fundamental epistemic end ................................................................................................ 130 Other epistemically desirable states ................................................................................................. 131 The fundamental epistemic end: some specifications ............................................................... 134 Epistemic and non-epistemic ends: summary .............................................................................. 135 Varieties of epistemic goodness* .............................................................................................. 136 Final and instrumental epistemic goodness .................................................................................. 136 Epistemic rationality and epistemic commendability ............................................................... 137 Varieties of epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness ................................... 141 Final and instrumental epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness .................... 141 Epistemic praiseworthiness/blameworthiness for rational belief acquisitions ............ 144 Epistemic praiseworthiness for epistemically commendable belief acquisitions and epistemic blameworthiness for epistemically non-commendable belief acquisitions 146

Chapter 6: Beyond epistemic justifiedness .................................................................. 151

Accessibilism, mentalism, and externalism .......................................................................... 154 Accessibilism and perceptual disjunctivism .................................................................................. 157 Normative properties.............................................................................................................................. 160 Valuable, rational, commendable belief acquisitions and the threefold classification of justifiedness ................................................................................................................................. 163 Externalism: the goodness* of instrumental goodness............................................................. 164 Mentalism: the goodness* of rationality ......................................................................................... 164 Accessibilism: the goodness* of commendability ....................................................................... 167 The reliabilist and the accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness 172 The reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness ................................................. 173 The credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness ........................................................ 175 Accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness .................................................... 179

Chapter 7: Epistemic and non-epistemic justifiedness ............................................ 185 The divergence thesis .................................................................................................................... 185 The “pragmatic” refutation of the divergence thesis: Clifford and James .................. 191 Clifford’s ethics of belief ......................................................................................................................... 192 James’ ethics of belief .............................................................................................................................. 196 The point of agreement .......................................................................................................................... 202 The divergence of rationality ..................................................................................................... 203 The objection against the divergence of rationality ................................................................... 204

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 207 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 211

1

INTRODUCTION Our daily intellectual life involves lots of evaluations of actions. We consider that driving above the speed limit is dangerous, that giving one’s bus seat to older people is polite, that stirring eggs with a wooden spoon does not make any difference for cooking tasty scrambled eggs, that caring for the environment is smart. On the ground of these evaluations, we get blamed or praised by others for our actions. The present study has been sparked by the intuition that something analogous is correct regarding acquisitions of belief. Acquisitions of belief seem to be proper objects of negative or positive evaluations, and it is at least occasionally appropriate to blame or praise people for the beliefs they have acquired. THE INITIAL INTUITION Suppose that Henry is an experienced mountain guide, organizing ski excursions around Mont Blanc. This morning Henry is supposed to guide a group of four Italian tourists. While getting ready to leave, Henry is deliberating about the itinerary he wants to take. He has to make a choice between two routes. Henry would prefer to take the first route because it offers fantastic scenery. By contrast, the second route is really less impressive and will be much more boring for the Italian tourists. The only concern which holds him back from opting for the first route, is that it contains two difficult sections that only good skiers can manage. While he is trying to find out whether it is not too risky to take the first itinerary with the group of the four Italians, he remembers that the Italian tourists he met previously were, most of the time, really good skiers. On the ground of memory and without checking further, Henry acquires the belief that the four Italian are sufficiently good skiers and makes the decision to take the first route. When the group reaches the first difficult section of the circuit, a very steep slope, one of the tourists gets panicky. When Henry realizes the danger of the situation, he immediately makes his best efforts to reassure and help him but to no avail. While trying to go down the slope, the Italian tourist falls, tumbles all the way down, and finally breaks his left arm and two of his teeth. Most of us are, I suppose, inclined to blame Henry in these circumstances. We are tempted to say: “Henry is guilty for believing that they are sufficiently experienced, without having checked whether they really are as good at skiing as the other Italian tourists he has met”,

2 “He should not have believed that they are without verification”. What we reproach Henry for is neither his evaluation of the first route nor his choice to take the first route. As such and given what he sincerely believes, opting for the first, most interesting circuit seems to be an irreproachable decision. Our feeling is that Henry is blameworthy for having acquired the false belief that the four Italians are sufficiently good skiers. The sort of assessment at work in Henry’s case is very frequent. When someone’s action unintentionally brings undesirable and objectionable consequences, the pressing question, in order to establish his guilt, bears upon his right to ignore the possibility that such an action is undesirable or that such an action will have such displeasing consequences.1 Ignorance is very often offered as an excuse for a misdeed and, every time this is the case, the next question will concern the entitlement to ignore. To say it differently, the next question will bear upon the blameworthiness or innocence of the subject’s ignorance. It happens also that we evaluate someone’s acquisition of a belief negatively, without bearing in mind the potential or actual consequences of this belief acquisition. If my neighbour Ralph is convinced that eating raspberries on Tuesdays is unhealthy, I will probably consider his belief stupid or ridiculous. The negative assessment of his belief acquisition is not inevitably grounded on its potential or actual consequences. Even if my neighbour (unbeknownst to him) is allergic to raspberries and will never enjoy the pleasure of eating raspberries anyway, I will keep evaluating his belief acquisition negatively. Note that there are also cases in which we praise people for their belief acquisitions. We attribute prizes and rewards to scientists for their discoveries, we congratulate children for what they truly believe about snails’ reproduction, etc. These examples manifest our tendency to evaluate belief acquisitions and our inclination to assess people for what they believe, just as we

1

As explained in Schulthess (1991), the determination of the blameworthiness of an agent requires that we consider various forms of ignorance. We need to determine whether the agent is entitled to ignore the rules that he violates by performing his action, but also whether he is entitled to ignore the circumstances in which he acts just as the nature of the action he performs. For the sake of simplicity, I gather the last two notions under the label “ignorance of the consequences of the action” in this work.

3 undeniably evaluate actions and people for their performances of these actions. MAIN OBJECTIVE The goal of this work is not to offer a theory determining the conditions under which a subject deserves to be praised rather than blamed for the belief he acquires.2 It is not to establish which specific virtues, norms or values should guide belief acquisitions. Answering this sort of question amounts, I believe, to elaborating an ethics of belief. 3 The objective of this work is rather to provide the theoretical framework in which it is possible to assess people for what they believe. It is to cast light on and, hopefully, answer the problems which need to be solved before that we can begin to elaborate an ethics of belief. As Henry’s example is supposed to show, we frequently feel the need to assess a subject’s right to ignore what he ignores or to believe what he believes. Preliminary clarificatory remarks Before presenting the two main problems that philosophers need to solve if they want to be able to assess people for their belief acquisitions, a few preliminary remarks are useful. First, it is important to note that the attitude of believing a proposition is a doxastic attitude and that there are other sorts of doxastic attitude: the attitude of disbelieving a proposition and the attitude of suspending one’s judgement regarding a proposition. The hypotheses, theses, conclusions, etc. of this work are mainly formulated in terms of the acquisition of beliefs without mentioning the other two kinds of doxastic attitude. This choice is dictated by the interests of brevity and simplicity. It does not reflect any priority given to beliefs, by contrast to one or the other kind of doxastic attitude. Everything which is asserted about belief acquisitions, is, mutatis mutandis, correct regarding the other kinds of doxastic attitude. 2

For the sake of simplicity, I do not always mention the third option, the possibility of being neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy for a belief acquisition. 3 The ethics of belief is very often considered a deontological theory, briefly said, as a theory presupposing the existence of norms of believing and implying the ascription of duties to believe. But an ethics of belief can also be grounded on a system of values or on a system of virtues and vices. The notions which help to differentiate various kinds of moral philosophy can be transferred to the doxastic realm.

4 There is a second point to make regarding the scope of this inquiry. As I have just said, believing a proposition is a doxastic attitude. Now attitudes are mental states that we can, among other things, acquire, maintain and revise. In this work, I assume that the acquisition, the maintenance and the revision of a belief are temporally related in the following way: 1. The acquisition of the belief that p, by a subject S, occurs at an instant t. This is the instant at which S precisely begins to be in the state of believing that p; 2. From then on, S might maintain himself in the state of believing that p. This is something S would do during a period of time that begins at t; 3. From then on, S might revise his doxastic attitude toward proposition p. He might stop believing p. This is something S would do at some instant t+n which is the time at which S would either acquire the disbelief that p or would start suspending his judgment toward p. In brief, the acquisition of the belief that p is an event constituting the boundary from which we are in the state of believing that p. Once we are in the state of believing that p, it is possible to maintain ourselves in this doxastic state or to revise our doxastic situation. I content myself with speaking of acquisitions of belief, but most of what I will say is, mutatis mutandis, valid for maintenances and revisions of belief as well. Finally, I consider that the acquisition of the belief that p, like the maintenance or the revision of the belief that p, are states of affairs. More accurately, they are exemplifications, by a subject S, of the property of acquiring/maintaining/revising the belief that p at some instant/during a certain period of time. Such states of affairs are what the present study takes as its object. TWO CENTRAL PROBLEMS The ascription of blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for belief acquisitions, i.e. the ascription of doxastic blameworthiness or praiseworthiness, raises two main problems, the problem of control and responsibility and the normative problem, with which I deal separately

5 in the two main parts of this work.4 The first part consists of chapters 1 to 4 while the second part includes chapters 5 to 7. The problem of control and responsibility The first problem bears upon the possibility of our being responsible for our belief acquisitions. It begins with the observation that it is incorrect to blame a person for what is not under his control because this is not something for which he is possibly responsible. I cannot be blamed for my cousin getting a cavity, for my aunt falling in love with her dentist, for the plane being late. At least, this is true as long as I do not exercise any control over these states of affairs; as long as they are not state of affairs for which I am possibly responsible. Now, it does not seem that we control our belief acquisitions as we control the performances of our actions. I cannot acquire the belief that I am 10 years younger just because I want to, as I can raise my arm if I want to ask a question at a lecture. When I acquire the belief that the weather is rainy today as a result of my drawing the curtains, the acquisition of this belief is something which merely happens to me. It does not seem to be something over which I exercise a form of control. Hence, we could be tempted to conclude that any attempt to elaborate an ethics of belief is flawed from the beginning in virtue of the impossibility of being responsible for our belief acquisitions. The reasoning would be the following: 1. The ethics of belief is essentially a theory specifying when we are praiseworthy rather than blameworthy for our belief acquisitions or conversely; 2. It is incorrect to praise or to blame a subject for the occurrence of a state of affairs if he is not responsible for the occurrence of this state of affairs; 3. Our being responsible for the occurrence of a state of affairs requires that we control the occurrence of this state of affairs; 4. We do not control the occurrence of the states of affairs consisting in our belief acquisitions; Then 5. The elaboration of an ethics of belief is impossible. Obviously we shall have to discuss step 4. in full details to avoid the conclusion 5. above. 4

Engel already emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between these two problems in Engel (2001a).

6 The normative problem Besides the possibility of our belief acquisitions’ being under our control, the second main problem to tackle, in order to account for the possibility of blaming or praising people for their belief acquisitions, is the normative problem. The normative problem bears upon the identification of the properties which turn beliefs into, roughly speaking, “good” or “bad” things to acquire.5 If there is no property such that a belief possessing this property is either good or bad, there is no ground for evaluating belief acquisitions and, in turn, there will, obviously, be no possibility of blaming or praising someone for his belief acquisition. Fortunately, among the properties characterizing beliefs some of them clearly seem to influence their general value or desirability. The most obvious candidate is the property of being true. Acquiring true beliefs seems better than acquiring false beliefs. The acquisition of rational beliefs and the acquisition of well grounded beliefs also seem desirable. The main purpose of the second part of this work is to put some order in this diversity. As we will see, the end of acquiring true beliefs plays a central role when it is a matter of epistemic evaluation. But belief acquisitions can be assessed along non-epistemic lines as well. The acquisition of a belief might be good in virtue of its intrinsic pleasantness, its happy consequences, its being the result of a very elegant method, etc. In these cases, the desirability of the belief acquisition has not necessarily something to do with the desirability of acquiring true beliefs rather than false ones. The last chapter of this work is devoted to clarify the connection between the epistemic and the nonepistemic realm of evaluation. ABSTRACTS OF THE CHAPTERS Chapter 1: What the philosophy of action teaches us The first chapter of this work constitutes an attempt to clarify the notion of “control” by appealing to the philosophy of action. The starting point is that the form of control of belief that epistemologists are tracking in 5

In this work, I presume that such things as normative properties of beliefs exist independently of our minds, that the goodness or the badness of a belief does not exclusively consist in its being the object of a positive or a negative attitude. I discuss the notion of “normative property” in more detail in the chapter 5 of this work.

7 the doxastic area is the one exercised when we perform movements for reasons, i.e. when we perform full-blooded actions, by contrast to mere activities. To control one’s belief acquisition in the relevant way is to acquire this belief for a reason. Therefore, the first chapter is mainly devoted to improving our understanding of the necessary conditions under which one of my movements qualifies as a movement performed for a reason, with the underlying idea that the same conditions apply to belief acquisitions. As I have just said, the exercise of a form of control of belief acquisitions is a necessary condition for the attribution of responsibility, which is itself required by the ascription of doxastic praise or doxastic blame. Hence, doxastic praiseworthiness and doxastic blameworthiness necessitates our being able to acquire beliefs for reasons. To say it differently, the specification of the notion of control in terms of reasons drives me to the following formulation of the classical problem of doxastic voluntarism: 1. It is incorrect to praise or to blame a subject for one of his belief acquisitions if he cannot be responsible for his belief acquisitions; 2. Our being responsible for our belief acquisitions requires that we control our belief acquisitions; 3. What we control is our actions, i.e. the movements we perform for reasons, by contrast to what happens to us and by contrast to our mere activities; 4. Beliefs cannot be acquired for reasons; Then

8 5. It is incorrect to praise or to blame anyone for one of his belief acquisitions.6 From there, what is at stake in the next chapters of this work is the correctness of the fourth premise. Is it really impossible to acquire beliefs for reasons while it is possible to perform movements for reasons? Two important distinctions are made at the end of the first chapter. First, I note that our motivation to acquire beliefs is twofold. We frequently desire to acquire true beliefs about a topic but we also sometimes desire to acquire pleasant, reassuring, or morally good beliefs. That is, unlike our reasons to perform movements, our reasons to acquire beliefs can be epistemic and/or non-epistemic. Consequently, we should reformulate the question under scrutiny in the two following chapters: Is it really impossible to acquire beliefs for epistemic or nonepistemic reasons, as it is possible to perform movements for reasons? Second, I distinguish between the evidence supporting the truth of a proposition and a motivating epistemic reason to acquire a true belief 6

Compare to the following more traditional formulation of the problem of doxastic voluntarism: 1. If we have any epistemic obligations, then doxastic attitudes must sometimes be under our voluntary control; 2. Doxastic attitudes are never under our voluntary control; 3. We do not have any epistemic obligations. See Feldman (2000), Sharon (2003), Weatherson (2008). First, traditional formulations of the problem of doxastic voluntarism generally include deontological concepts. My formulation is more general. It raises the question of our being possibly assessed for our belief acquisitions. It does not specify whether we deserve to be praised/blamed because we satisfy/violate a duty, because we acquired a valuable/disvaluable belief or because we have been virtuous/vicious. Second, traditional formulations of the problem of doxastic voluntarism include more explicit reference to the “ought implies can” principle. In the traditional formulation just mentioned, the “ought implies can” is underlying premise 1. Facing such a traditional formulation, epistemologists who want to find a solution to the problem of doxastic voluntarism have the choice to argue against the “ought implies can” principle (see Feldman 2000, Ryan 2003) and/or to argue against the impossibility of controlling belief acquisitions (Ryan 2003, Steup 2000, etc.) This alternative does not arise with my own formulation since it does not clearly rely on the “ought implies can” principle.

9 about a topic. To have evidence is not to have a motivating reason. Indeed, to have evidence is to be in a state characterized by the world to mind direction of fit and being in such a state is not sufficient to motivate to act. Chapter 2: The impossibility of acquiring beliefs directly for reasons The main goal of the second chapter is to defend the idea that beliefs cannot be acquired directly for reasons. As we will see, a helpful way of formulating the same idea is to say that belief acquisitions cannot be assimilated to basic actions, i.e. bodily movements performed for reasons. First, I try to show that Williams’ argument against the possibility of believing at will misses its target but, also, that his argument can be amended in a way such that it finally succeeds in proving that we cannot acquire beliefs directly for non-epistemic reasons. The second objective of this chapter is to stress the importance of the following premise of Williams’ argument: it is impossible for a subject S to consider both that the mental state that he acquired is a belief and that he acquired it for a non-epistemic reason. Not only does this premise capture what is distinctive of beliefs compared to other sorts of mental states but it also provides an appropriate account of the feature of doxastic deliberation called “transparency”. Chapter 3: Pascalian and theoretical control One of the conclusions of the second chapter of this work is that belief acquisitions cannot be categorised with basic actions for the reason that we cannot acquire beliefs directly for reasons while basic actions, i.e. bodily movements can be performed directly for reasons. But this clearly leaves the door open to the possibility that belief acquisitions are non-basic actions, that is to say, the possibility that we can acquire beliefs indirectly, i.e. by performing a more basic action. The suggestion that we are able to exercise such an indirect form of control over our belief acquisitions is never really questioned. It is indeed very plausible that we possess such an ability. My goal in the chapter 3 is to develop this proposal. As I said, our motivations for belief acquisitions might be epistemic and/or non-epistemic. Accordingly, I believe that our indirect control over belief acquisitions can take two forms:

10 1. We exercise theoretical control over the acquisition of a belief if and only if we acquire this belief by performing one or several more basic action(s) consisting in a truth-oriented modification of our current set of evidence and our performance of this (these) more basic action(s) is motivated by an epistemic reason, i.e. a desire to acquire a true belief about a topic; 2. We exercise Pascalian control over the acquisition of a belief if and only if we acquire this belief by performing one or several more basic action(s) consisting in a manipulative modification of our current set of evidence and our performance of this (these) more basic action(s) is motivated by a non-epistemic reason, i.e. a desire to acquire a pleasant, useful, reassuring belief, etc. The rest of this chapter is principally devoted to answering Alston’s argument7 against the relevance of these two kinds of control for the ascription of doxastic responsibility. This mainly leads me to elucidate the nature of theoretical control. When I exercise theoretical control — for instance, when I exercise theoretical control over the acquisition of the belief that there is no milk left in the fridge, by opening the door of the fridge— I exercise control over the acquisition of a determinable belief, the content of which regards my stock of milk. But I do not exercise control over the acquisition of the determinate belief that there is no milk left. By appealing to an example in which a subject is responsible for his action even if he only controls a determinable form if it, I conclude that theoretical control is a fully agentive sort of control. It is perfectly able to ground the ascription of responsibility for scientific discoveries or for the sort of doxastic negligence displayed by Henry in the example above. Finally, I try to reply to both Ryan’s and Steup’s suggestions to the effect that doxastic control is not restricted to the indirect form I favour. The common difficulty of their two arguments, I claim, is that they rely on a confusion surrounding the notion of “a subject’s reason to believe”; more accurately, on the confusion between a subject’s evidence

7

See Alston (1988), Alston (2006).

11 supporting the truth of proposition p and his motivating reason to acquire a true belief about a topic. Chapter 4: Doxastic responsibility as responsibility for consequences The lesson of chapters 2 and 3 is that we control our belief acquisitions only indirectly. We control our belief acquisitions as we control our nonbasic actions of cooking a boeuf bourguignon, or losing weight, that is to say, actions that we perform by performing one or several more basic actions. The main result of the last two chapters is that we should conceive doxastic responsibility on the model of responsibility for nonbasic actions. Now to be responsible for a non-basic action is to be responsible for the consequence of one or several basic actions. For instance, to be responsible for the non-basic action of killing my neighbour’s cat by driving over it is to be responsible for the occurrence of the state of affairs consisting in the death of my neighbour’s cat, which is the consequence of several of my basic actions. Analogously, to be responsible for, let me say, the acquisition of the belief that I am a reliable friend is to be responsible for the resultant acquisition8 of the belief that I am a reliable friend, which is the consequence of my performing one or several basic actions consisting in the modification of my current set of evidence. The goal of chapter 4 is to provide a compatibilist account of the conditions under which a subject S is responsible for his resultant belief acquisition by trying to apply a reasons-responsiveness model of responsibility for consequences to resultant belief acquisitions.

8

The expression “the acquisition of the belief that p” might refer to the complex state of affairs which consists in my actions of manipulating my current set of evidence causing the instantaneous acquisition of the belief that p. But it might also precisely refer to the instantaneous acquisition of the belief that p, which is entailed in this complex state of affairs and which delineates its occurrence. From chapter 4 on, I distinguish, when necessary, between the two meanings of the expression “the acquisition of the belief that p” by speaking of “the resultant acquisition of the belief that p” to refer to the simple state of affairs. From chapter 4 on, the expression “the acquisition of the belief that p” refers to the more complex and causal state of affairs.

12 Chapter 5: Epistemic praiseworthiness and epistemic blameworthiness If I am right to think that we are sometimes responsible for our belief acquisitions, then it is certainly possible to be either praiseworthy or blameworthy for our belief acquisitions. In chapter 5, I consider different sorts of epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. They correspond to the various ways in which belief acquisitions can be epistemically good things, that it to say, good things in regard to the achievement of the final epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. In more detail, I distinguish between four sorts of epistemic goodness characterizing belief acquisitions: 1. Final goodness: the goodness characterizing the acquisition of a true belief; 2. Instrumental goodness: the goodness characterizing the acquisition of a belief which causes the acquisition of a true belief; 3. Goodness of rationality: the goodness characterizing the acquisition of a belief which is finally good and/or instrumentally good according to what the subject who acquires this belief thinks at the time he acquires it; 4. Goodness of commendability: the goodness characterizing the acquisition of a belief which results from the believer trying hard enough to acquire a belief which is finally good and/or instrumentally good. The first conclusion of this chapter is that it is impossible to be responsible for our belief acquisitions being either rational or irrational. Hence, it is inappropriate either to praise or to blame someone for his rational or irrational belief acquisition. The second conclusion is that, I cannot, let me say, be praised for my finally or instrumentally valuable acquisition of a belief without deserving to be praised for my commendable acquisition of this belief. But the contrary is not true. If I am praised for having acquired a belief by trying hard enough, I am not necessarily to be praised for having acquired a finally or instrumentally valuable belief.

13 Chapter 6: Beyond epistemic justifiedness Chapter 6 relates the previous considerations with three epistemological accounts of the justification of belief: the externalist account of justification, the mentalist account of justification and the accessibilist account of justification. These are traditionally considered as antagonist and incompatible views. The first goal of this chapter is to provide some further support for the claim, defended mainly by Alston9, according to which epistemologists who disagree about the notion of justifiedness of beliefs do not have a common pre-theoretical conception of what they are debating. My project is to bring support to this view by showing that the various conceptions of justifiedness are actually reflecting the distinct sorts of goodness presented in chapter 5. The starting point of this project is that externalists, mentalists and accessibilists do, at least, agree on the fact that a justified belief acquisition is a belief acquisition which is good in a way. From there, an important part of chapter 6 is devoted to showing that externalists pre-theoretically conceive justifiedness as instrumental goodness, that mentalists pre-theoretically conceive justified belief acquisitions as “good because rational” belief acquisitions and that accessibilists pre-theoretically conceive justifiedness as the goodness of commendability. In the last part of chapter 6, I discuss what I call the problem of the explanation of the goodness of justifiedness and consider two influential explanations: the reliabilist explanation and the so-called credit explanation. This leads me to suggest an accessibilist explanation of the goodness of justifiedness, i.e. an explanation grounded on what I previously described as the accessibilist conception of the goodness of justifiedness. Finally I try to show that an accessibilist explanation of the goodness of justifiedness does not encounter the objection which is traditionally addressed against the credit explanation. The accessibilist explanation is able to account for our being sometimes justified when we believe the testimony of others.

9

See Alston (1985), (1993) and (2006).

14 Chapter 7: Epistemic justifiedness and non-epistemic justifiedness In chapters 5 and 6, my attention is focussed on the various kinds of epistemic goodness which can characterize belief acquisitions, on the various ways in which belief acquisitions can be epistemically justified or unjustified, while leaving aside the non-epistemic form of justifiedness or unjustifiedness that belief acquisitions seem to display as well. The last chapter of this work is devoted to the consideration of the divergence thesis, i.e. the claim according to which it is possible for a belief acquisition to be simultaneously epistemically justified and nonepistemically unjustified and possible for a (another) belief acquisition to be simultaneously epistemically unjustified and non-epistemically justified. The most immediate way of refuting the divergence thesis is to claim that the acquisition of true beliefs is not finally desirable, that it is only instrumentally and non-epistemically desirable, i.e. desirable in virtue of the non-epistemic goal it helps to achieve. I do not hope to settle the question of the final desirability of the goal of acquiring true beliefs. I simply try to emphasize that, beyond their discrepancies, Clifford’s and James’ ethics of belief both consider the goal of acquiring true beliefs as being merely instrumentally and non-epistemically desirable. I conclude this chapter by emphasizing that the divergence thesis is, at least, clearly wrong if we suppose that a justified belief acquisition is nothing other than a rational belief acquisition.

THE PROBLEM OF CONTROL AND RESPONSIBILITY

17

CHAPTER 1: WHAT THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION TEACHES US We saw in the introduction that the project of elaborating an ethics of belief is tied to the possibility of ascribing responsibility for the acquisition of belief, which I call doxastic responsibility. The ascription of responsibility I have in mind does not merely consist in a straightforward ascription of causality.10 When I say that a tempest is responsible for the tree’s being uprooted, I merely say that some causal relationship holds between the occurrences of two states of affairs. Causality is ascribable to various kinds of metaphysical entities: processes like tempests, objects, etc. The responsibility that I am tracking in the epistemic domain is only ascribable to persons. It is the sort of responsibility that we, sometimes, have for our actions; the sort of responsibility that presupposes the ascription of causal agency. Hence, the fundamental condition that the acquisition of belief has to satisfy, in order to be something for which we can be held responsible, is being something that we do. To be clear, what is required is not that every single acquisition of belief could be considered as an action but that, at least, some of them could. ACTIONS AND HAPPENINGS There is a fundamental and much-debated difference between my actions and my movements when things happen to my body, e.g. between my action of getting up in the morning and opening a door, and a mere bodily happening like my stumbling over a root while walking in the forest. This difference has direct influence on the attribution of responsibility. I am never responsible for my movements when it is something that happens to my body and not something that I do. I am not responsible for being dazzled when I go out of the cinema, for getting stuck in the lift, etc. Analogously, acquisitions of belief won’t be something for which we are sometimes responsible if they always are things that happen to us and not things that we do. Addressing the question of the conditions under which someone is responsible for the acquisition of a belief requires first showing that 10

I take up here Feinberg’s distinction between “straightforward ascriptions of causality” and “ascriptions of causal agency”. See Feinberg (1970), pp. 130-133.

18 belief acquisitions are able to fulfil the condition which differentiates actions from mere happenings. Before focussing on this issue, my main goal in this chapter is to offer an overview of some theories of action with the purpose of finally drawing out a joint opinion regarding the features that a movement needs to display in order to qualify as an action.11 Many philosophers of action agree about, at least, some necessary conditions. These are the common assumptions on which I would like to rely in order to investigate responsibility for belief acquisition. Understanding the very nature of action is a notoriously difficult task, which requires much more than the formulation of a couple of necessary conditions. I would obviously have to take account of many refinements if my ambition were to take this issue forward. However, this would be beyond the scope of this chapter, the aim of which is merely to clear the ground for the understanding of responsibility for belief. I also think that such refinements would have no crucial influence on my overall results. Non-reductionist conception of action As I said, the division between the two categories of actions and bodily happenings has been much discussed and has given birth to several different conceptions. In the following pages, I would like to present the outlines of the two most influential conceptions. The first kind is the non-reductionist conception of action.12 Its main objective is to defend the idea that actions do not constitute a specific sort of bodily happenings but constitute a sui generis category of entities. The difficulty of the task appears once we notice that the truth-makers of the propositions referring to happenings and the propositions referring to actions both involve the occurrence of a state of affairs, which is a happening. Not only the truth of the proposition: “a gun’s being fired takes place” but also the truth of the proposition: “I fire the gun” require 11

To my knowledge, few epistemologists questioning the possible existence of doxastic responsibility really pay attention to the important amount of philosophical work devoted to the distinction between happenings and actions. I believe the writings of philosophers of action can help delineate accurately the ins and the outs of this question. 12 The following paragraphs are largely inspired by the very enlightening account of the non-reductionist conception of action offered by Moya. See Moya (1990), pp. 18-29.

19 the occurrence of the state of affairs consisting in the gun’s being fired. It is not true that I fire the gun if the gun’s being fired does not take place. Consequently, if something radically distinguishes the category of actions from the category of happenings, it must lie in the way the gun’s being fired is brought about. The action of firing the gun occurs when the gun’s being fired is brought about in an agentive way while the happening of the gun’s being fired takes place when the gun’s being fired is not brought about in this specific way. Hence, the genuine challenge for the supporters of the non-reductionist conception is to provide a non-reducible account of the agentive way of bringing about the gun’s being fired. It is not possible simply to claim that the bringing about of the gun’s being fired is an action when the gun’s being fired is brought about by an agent. Indeed, the gun’s being fired can be brought about by an agent without being an action. If, for instance, I cause the gun’s being fired by stumbling on a root, I did not perform the action of firing the gun. Alternatively, we could be tempted to say that the bringing about of the gun’s being fired amounts to the action of firing a gun only if I bring about the gun’s firing by performing an action, for instance, the action of pulling the trigger. The problem is that the action of pulling the trigger can be further analysed as the bringing about of a happening as well, e.g. as the bringing about of the trigger’s being pulled. What is distinctively agentive in my action of pulling the trigger has to be found in the way I bring about the trigger’s being pulled. Therefore, it is not sufficient to appeal to the action of pulling the trigger in the analysis of “I bring about the gun’s being fired” in order to account for what is specifically agentive in the bringing about of the gun’s being fired. Obviously the same difficulty will recur if we try to analyse “I bring about the trigger’s being pulled” by appealing to another more basic action. “I bring about the trigger’s being pulled” can probably be analysed in terms of “I bring about the trigger’s being pulled by moving my finger”. But, once again, an action of moving my finger can be identified to a bringing about of the movement of my finger in a specific way. Then, the appeal to the action of moving my finger is not sufficient to point to what is distinctively agentive in the bringing about of the trigger’s being pulled.

20 This is where basic actions enter into the picture. Here is the following general definition by Danto: Basic actions are actions which are not caused to happen by the man who performs them.13 As this definition makes clear, basic actions are the most fundamental actions by which I perform other less basic actions, like bodily movements. They are not themselves induced by my performance of something else. Basic actions are conations, that is, volitions, willings or tryings (the defenders of the non-reductionist conception of action do not agree on the exact nature of these conations14). Trying or willing to move my finger is a basic action, for the most fundamental action that I perform, when I move my finger, consists in trying or in willing to move my finger. The appeal to basic actions is supposed, then, to bring to an end the regress just presented. Even if it is true that my action of trying to move my finger also implies the occurrence of a happening —a trying to move my finger—, such a happening cannot be treated in the same way as the gun’s being fired, the trigger’s being pulled, the movement of my finger. The difference is the following: when the movement of my finger is brought about, I am not necessarily performing the action of moving my finger. In contrast, when a trying to move my finger is brought about, I am inevitably also trying to move my finger. A trying to move my finger is not something that can be brought about in a non-agentive way.15 Finally, supporters of the non-reductionist conception of action claim that what distinguishes the bringing about of the gun’s being fired when it is an action from the bringing about of the gun’s being fired when it is a happening lies in the fact that I perform the former but not the latter by performing a basic action. “Basic actions are, so to speak, the source of agency; they transmit agency to other things we do.”16 13

See Danto (1965), pp. 141-142. See Moya (1990), pp. 19-29. 15 Moya addresses the following objection to the non-reductionist solution: basic actions, tryings, willings etc., are either mental or physical states of affairs of our minds. If they are mental states of affairs, we face the problem of interactionism: how can purely mental acts cause physical happenings? If they are physical events, then, it is not true that they cannot by reductively analysed in terms of the bringing about of a mere happening. If they are physical states of affairs, the appeal to basic actions does not help stop the regress. See Moya (1990). 16 Moya (1990), p. 14. 14

21 Moya’s non-reductionism Carlos Moya’s account of the distinction between actions and mere happenings is a non-reductionist one. However, Moya’s criterion of agency does not resort to basic actions but to meaningful actions. Examples of meaningful actions are signalling for a turn, making an offer, holding a lecture. The crucial thing to note about meaningful actions is that they cannot be reductively analysed as non-agentive bringing about of happenings. For the proposition “I make an offer” to be true, an offer’s being made has to take place. But the bringing about of an offer’s being made is essentially agentive in the sense that, inevitably, when an offer’s being made takes place, someone makes an offer. Similarly, it is not possible for the state of affairs consisting in a turn’s being signalled to occur without someone performing the action of signalling for a turn. According to Moya, meaningful actions “seem to be pure actions”17 and, therefore, constitute “good starting points to analyse agency. The conditions that allow the performance of such actions will provide a good insight into the nature of agency”18. Here is the condition Moya has in mind: “Pure actions are such in virtue of there not being the possibility that they be unintentional, or, in other words, in virtue of being necessarily intentional. There is no such thing as greeting, signalling for a turn unintentionally. To do it intentionally is a necessary condition of greeting, signalling for a turn or marrying but not of shooting a gun, killing someone or scoring a goal.”19 When he claims that pure actions are necessarily intentional, what Moya means, more accurately, following the Davidsonian tradition, is the following: when an action is described as a pure action, it is necessarily 17

Moya (1990), p. 39. Moya (1990), p. 40. Despite the crucial discrepancy between Davidson and Moya’s approach, Davidson has a similar idea in mind when he claims: “Perhaps, then, being intentional is the relevant distinguishing mark. If it were, it would explain why some verbs imply agency, for some verbs describe actions that cannot be anything but intentional; asserting, cheating, taking a square root, and lying are examples”, Davidson (1980), p. 44-5. 19 Ibid. p. 52. 18

22 intentional under this description. That is, the action of firing a gun is not a pure action since “I fired the gun” can describe a piece of behaviour which is intentional or non-intentional. This finally leads Moya to formulate the following criterion of agency: “A certain behaviour is an action, if and only if it is intentional (or intentionally performed) under some description”.20 Reductionist conception of action Moya’s criterion is clearly very similar to Davidson’s: “A person is the agent of an event if and only if there is a description of what he did that makes true a sentence that says he did it intentionally”.21 The crucial difference between Moya and Davidson’s criteria lies in their respective conception of intentionality. Davidson’s view of

20

Moya (1990), p. 53. Many of what we consider to be actions cannot be described as intentional in Moya’s sense. While listening to a philosophical talk, I scratch my head or play with a pen. These are clearly actions but they are not the result of a commitment to perform them. In normal circumstances, when I play with my pen, I did not previously intend to play with my pen. Therefore, Moya distinguishes between two kinds of intentionality. When I spontaneously scratch my head while listening to a talk, my action only reflects an immediate intention in the sense that my scratching my head does not serve future goals. By contrast, a full-blooded intentional action —the action of signalling for a turn, the intentional action of going to the marketplace— serves future goals: so my intention to go back home, my intention to have fresh fruits for dinner, etc. To summarize, Moya distinguishes between two kinds of actions: what he calls “purposive behaviour” that only reflects an immediate intention and the fullblooded action that results from a more complex intention that also serves future goals. See Moya (1990), pp. 57-60. 21 Davidson (1980), p. 46.

23 intentionality supports a reductionist conception of action while Moya’s conception of intentionality is an attempt to defend non-reductionism.22 According to a reductionist conception23, an action is just a happening with a specific sort of cause. Now there are clearly various ways of spelling out this thesis depending which sort of cause you identify as the relevant one. According to the Davidsonian account of action, for instance, “we can properly say that they [beliefs and desires, my comment] are causes of intentional actions, and when we say this we draw upon the concept of ordinary event causality.”24. That is to say, the bringing about of the gun’s being fired is an action of firing a gun only if the cause of this happening is the agent’s desire and belief. Let me have a brief look at two famous difficulties encountered by the Davidsonian conception of action. First, consider the following case: George is about to give a talk about the possible extinction of platypuses. George desires to win the sympathy of his audience and believes that crying will suffice to satisfy his desire. Unfortunately for him, he is unable to cry at will. Out of frustration, he bursts into tears. 22

Moya’s views regarding intentionality are not crystal-clear. I will try to offer a brief account below. Moya’s main claim is that intentions are commitments. Intentions are commitments to do things in the same way that signalling for a turn is a commitment to turn. Intentions are not similar to plans, desires or aims, because the latter do not involve a commitment. Planning to go to the market place is not like intending to go to the marketplace in this respect. Intending to go to the marketplace commits myself to performing this action, as signalling for a turn commits myself to turning. As a result of being conceived as a commitment, intention is also a normative notion. Its normativity appears once you note that there is something wrong if someone who commits himself to turning by signalling for a turn does not turn. By contrast, I can plan to perform an action and finally perform another without there being anything wrong. Finally, the identification of intentions with commitments protects them from being reductively conceived in terms of mere happenings. Moya claims that a reductive conception in terms of mere happenings cannot possibly account for the normative feature of intentionality. 23 Traditional reductionist conceptions of action are mainly Armstrong’s and Davidson’s. See Armstrong (1973) and Davidson (1980). 24 Davison (1980), p. 49, n. 7.

24 His bursting into tears does not seem to count as something he does. Nevertheless, it has been caused by the combination of his belief and desire.25 A conceivable reply consists in claiming that, in such a case, the agent’s desire and belief do not manifest their characteristic causal powers in the sense that his belief only accidentally produces what satisfies his desire. Indeed, it is matter of coincidence that the mechanism of frustration produces a reaction that is able to satisfy the agent’s desire according to the agent’s belief. To say it differently, a possible way out consists in narrowing the scope of the Davidsonian model to pieces of behaviour that are not accidentally caused by beliefs and desires.26 Even if this —quite ad hoc— solution is accepted as such,27 it is insufficient to save the Davidsonian conception of action. Indeed, the Davidsonian model faces a second difficulty, which is of greater interest for some of my future considerations. There are cases —cases of Freudian slips mostly— in which a piece of behaviour is non-accidentally caused by a belief and a desire but does not seem to qualify as a full-blooded action.28 Consider the following example: While he is about to sleep, James believes that he has a professional interview the morning after. He also believes that he needs to get up at 8 am at the latest to arrive on time. Therefore, he thinks that he had better switch on his alarm clock. As a result of his suspicion that this kind of job won’t suit him and his unconscious reluctance to get the job, he unconsciously set his alarm clock one hour too late. It sounds quite counterintuitive to claim that James setting his alarm clock one hour too late is a full-blooded action. After all James did not 25

This is, slightly modified, Velleman’s example. See Velleman (2000a), pp. 7-8. See Velleman (2000a), p. 8. Note that Davidson does not believe in this solution: “beliefs and desires that would rationalize an action if they caused it in the right way —through a course of practical reasoning as we might try saying— may cause it in other ways. If so the action was not performed with the intention that we could have read off from the attitudes that caused it. What I despair of spelling out is the way in which attitudes must cause actions if they are to rationalize the action”. Davidson (1980), p. 79. 27 For a more sophisticated solution to the problem of causal deviant chains, see, for instance, Bishop (1990). I thank Pascal Engel for this reference. 28 Velleman (2000a), pp. 8-9. 26

25 want to get up too late. Nevertheless, his piece of behaviour is the result of his reluctance to get the job combined with his belief that if he is late, he won’t obtain it. Moreover, his piece of behaviour does not accidentally match his belief and desire. The second difficulty of the Davidsonian conception of action points to a distinction between mere activities and full-blooded actions. One of its main flaws lies in its inability to account for this distinction. The Davidsonian conception of action is “a model of activity but not of action”.29 I will say more about the distinction between activities and actions —which, I believe, plays an important role in an accurate understanding of doxastic responsibility— just below. Before this, I would like to take a step back and try to cash out the two lessons jointly taught by non-reductionism and reductionism. The first one is quite obvious. An action, as opposed to a mere happening, necessarily results from a conation: either a basic action, according to the non-reductionist view, or a conative state, i.e. a specific sort of mental state, according to the reductionist view. As I use it, the concept of conation or conative states is the broadest possible. It refers to a class of states of affairs (actions or events) —like the willing to perform action A, the desire to perform action A, an urge to perform action A— which are internal to the mind of the agent, have the world-to-mind direction of fit, and causally lead to the performance by this agent of the relevant bodily movement in normal circumstances. That is, conations or conative states are states which causally explain the performance by an agent of his bodily movement. The notion of conation/conative state needs to be distinguished from the notion of a reason to act. As we saw with the case of James, people can be caused to act by a desire to act in a certain way, without having a reason to act in this way. That is, a bodily movement, which causally results from a desire to perform this movement, is not necessarily performed for a reason.30 I leave aside the notion of reason for the moment and come back to the first lesson commonly taught by distinct theories of action: 29

Velleman (2000a), p. 10. I do not want to deny that having a reason to perform action A involves having a desire, a motivation to perform action A. My only claim here is that there is, at least, a conceptual difference between my reason to perform an action and what causes me to perform this action.

30

26 For my movement to qualify as an action, as opposed to a mere happening, it has to be the causal result of one of my conative states, for instance a desire.31 Clearly, this is a very general lesson. And, as I said, generality is actually what I am pursuing. Indeed, I wish to ground the upcoming discussion of doxastic responsibility on some shared conception of action to avoid ending up with results which would depend on a specific theory of action. The second lesson regards the distinction between basic and non-basic actions. As we saw, the existence of basic actions, which are conations, plays a crucial role for many non-reductionist conceptions of action. Basic actions are called “basic” because they are actions that we cannot perform by performing a more basic action. The non-reductionist appeal to basic actions has its origin in the iterative way in which some actions seem to be connected. Performing action A consists in making a state of affairs E happen by performing action A’ which itself consists in making a state of affairs E’ happens by performing action A’’, etc. Most philosophers of action —supporters of the reductionist conceptions of action included— agree with this model and with the general idea that there are actions which are more basic than others. In the example above, A’’ is more basic than A’ which itself is more basic than A’. To make myself clear, I do not mean that every philosopher of action accepts the idea that there are basic actions. Obviously reductionists do not think so. I suggest rather, then, that philosophers of action: 1. jointly accept that a relation of “being more/less basic than” connects actions forming a chain and also that 2. they share the same metaphysical conception of action: a (non-basic) action consisting in the bringing about of a state of affairs.

31

In what follow I often use the term “desire” in its technical, philosophical sense, as synonymous to “conative state”, “pro-attitude”. According to this technical sense, every action is the causal result of a desire.

27 ACTIONS, HAPPENINGS AND ACTIVITIES Until now, I have contented myself with differentiating between actions and happenings. Examples of Freudian slips, like the one in which James is involved, seem to call for a refinement of the distinction. As I said, James’ unconsciously setting his alarm clock one hour too late does not qualify as a full-blooded action but it is not a mere bodily happening either. James’ movement seems to possess an intermediate status. Roughly, the reason why we are tempted to categorize James’ movement in such an intermediate way is that his setting his alarm clock one hour too late was only caused by his more or less conscious reluctance to get this job. It is not also something that James performs for a reason. Then, as a first approximation of the distinction between activities and actions, let me say that: An activity is a bodily movement of an agent S, which is caused by one of his conative states without S’s performing this movement for a reason. By contrast: A full-blooded action is a bodily movement of S that is caused by one of his conative states but which is also a bodily movement that S performs for a reason.32 The formulation of the conditions under which an action is performed for a reason is a highly delicate task. I will discuss it in more detail below. Two remarks have to be made beforehand. First, note that Freudian slips are not the only kind of case which seem to display the intermediate status of activities. When I distractedly play with my pen while listening to a philosophical talk, when I scratch my head while playing chess, when I cross my legs as soon as I sit down, these are all really movements I do, most of the time, without having a reason to perform them. They do not seem to qualify as full-blooded actions, in the way that my movement of raising my finger when I have a question, my movement of turning down the volume of the radio, etc., do. The category of activities not only includes Freudian slips, but also 32

This is Velleman’s terminology. See Velleman (2000a), p. 10. Velleman explicitly takes up Frankfurt’s distinction between two ways of being active: “To drum one’s finger on a table, altogether idly and inattentively, is surely not a case of passivity: the movements in question do not occur without one’s making them. Neither is it an instance of action, however, but only of being active.” Frankfurt (1988), p. 58.

28 movements performed out of habit, and bodily tics, as long as they are not performed for a reason. My second remark is terminological. Henceforth, I will call the category of entities including actions and activities the category of purposive behaviour. What I regarded as the distinction between mere happenings and “actions” will now be considered as the distinction between happenings and pieces of purposive behaviour. Acting for reasons Trying to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the conditions under which an action is performed for a reason would clearly take me too far from my main objective in this study. Hence, I content myself with presenting a few generally accepted elements of the issue, which are directly relevant for my purpose. Beyond many potential disagreements, some general and common ideas seem to guide the conception of philosophers interested in the topic of our reasons for acting. My goal now is to formulate these rather uncontroversial ideas and to show, finally, that they are sufficient for the purpose of distinguishing between actions and activities. First, it is commonly accepted that performing an action for a reason involves being motivated to perform that action. I do not want to discuss—at least not for the moment— the nature of such motivation. “Is the reason constituted by the combination of desire and cognitive consideration? Do desires inevitably play a role when I perform an action for a reason?” These are questions that I consider at the end of this chapter. Another shared view is that an action performed for a reason can be explained by referring to this reason. The reason, which motivates me to perform this action, also explains why I perform this action.33 More importantly for the rest of this work, another commonly accepted idea is that the reason, which explains why I perform a bodily 33

See of course Davidson (1980), Audi (1986), Velleman (2000a), Crisp (2006). The problem faced by philosophers who claim my reason to perform action A causally explains my performance of A is the one at which I hinted with the presentation of George’s example above. If my reason to perform A causally explained my performance of A, then, my performance of A needs to be causally related to my desire and my cognitive consideration in an appropriate way. An appropriate way is a way which avoids the difficulty raised by cases in which my desire is accidentally satisfied by the bodily movement it causes.

29 movement, is also something that I am able to mention as an explanation of why I am performing this bodily movement while I am performing it. A shorter way of formulating this idea is to say that I perform an action for reason r only if the reason, which motivates me to perform this action, is avowable.34 This is the case because, when I am moving my body for a reason, I am not only a well-placed observer of my behaviour being caused by one of my motives, I am acting in the light of the reason, so to say.35 “Avowability” is the feature which grounds the distinction between activities and full-blooded actions. In the case of an activity like a Freudian slip, the agent cannot provide, at least not immediately, a meaningful explanation by appealing to what motivates him to behave in this way. What I mean by “not immediately” is that, even if the agent eventually ends up with an explanation, he will have to seek further or to introspect to explain why he is performing such a bodily movement. To be clear, the condition of avowability has the following four features: a. it does not require that I have the ability to believe that I am performing this bodily movement for a reason. Children perform bodily movements for reasons even if they do not have the concept of reason. b. it does not require either that I am presently conscious of the reason why I am performing an action while I am performing it. I may raise my arm for a reason while being buried in thought.36 This could be considered a bodily movement that I perform for a reason even if I am not simultaneously conscious that I am raising my arm because I want to be polite to my neighbours. When I perform an action for a reason, like my action of greeting my neighbour, I am disposed to become immediately conscious of my motives. The condition of 34

See Crisp (2006), p. 38. For a similar idea, see also Hieronymi (2008). According to Hieronymi, an action performed intentionally —an action performed for a reason— is an action for which I am answerable, that is to say, is an action for which I can be asked for reasons. As Hieronymi notifies, this is originally Anscombe’s idea. According to Anscombe, whenever a subject performs action A intentionally, that is for a reason, one can rightly ask him: “Why did you perform action A?”, where this question does not look for an explanation of what causes this subject to perform action A but for what was his reason for performing action A. See Anscombe (1957). 35 See Audi (1986), pp.517-518. 36 See Audi (1986), p. 520.

30 avowability only necessitates a disposition to provide an explanation of my action. c. it does not rule out that I can forget the reason why I performed this bodily movement after having performed it. The condition of avowability only necessitates me being able to explain why I am performing this bodily movement while I am performing it. d. it does not apply to actions which are not as basic as our bodily movements. As I will explain in more detail in chapter 3, it seems that a non-basic action, like the action of baking bread, can be performed for a reason even if the agent forgets the initial reason why he performs this action while he is performing it. Here is what is, at least, necessarily37 the case when an agent S performs a bodily movement for a reason r: 1. The condition of motivation: S’s performance of this bodily movement is motivated by r; 2. The condition of explanation: the reason r explains why S performs this bodily movement; 3. The condition of avowability: more importantly, S is disposed to provide an immediate explanation of why he performs this bodily movement by mentioning the reason r which motivates him to perform it. Now let us see how this can account for the intuitive distinction between activities and full-blooded actions. I mentioned two kinds of cases in which it seems that my behaviour qualifies as something less than a full-blooded action: Freudian slips and 37

These conditions are probably not sufficient. But they are, at least, sufficient for the purpose of distinguishing between action and mere activities. For instance, Audi considers that it is also necessary that I could have another motivation than the one I actually have. If nothing, not even the desire to avoid the destruction of humanity, is able to defeat the motivation I actually have, then it is doubtful that I act for a reason when I act as a result of this actual motivation. As Audi noticed, this has to be distinguished from the ability to behave differently when I have a certain motivation. It could be that my motivation to smoke is invincible in the sense that I cannot bring myself to act contrary to it. It is another question whether the possession of this motivation itself is unavoidable. See Audi (1986), pp. 533-34.

31 pieces of behaviour like my drumming with my finger on a table, my playing with a pen, etc., that are not mere reflexes but do not seem to be full-blooded actions either. I believe that, in these two kinds of cases, at least, one of the conditions above is not satisfied. While getting up the day after, James will certainly be astonished to see that he is one hour late and his surprise is certainly the manifestation of his inability to explain immediately why he set his alarm clock one hour too late. Regarding pieces of behaviour like my drumming with my fingers, it is not clear that these pieces of behaviour are unconsciously motivated like Freudian slips. If they are not motivated in such a way, they differ from a bodily movement performed for a reason in virtue of the fact that they do not satisfy condition 1. Even if they are motivated in such a way, it seems that I won’t be able to provide an explanation of my drumming with my finger by appealing to a reason. Suppose that someone interrupts you while you are drumming with your fingers and asks you why you are behaving like this. You could answer that this is something you enjoy, because you want to be able to explain your action. But the pleasure you draw from drumming with your finger is not the reason why you perform the action of drumming with your fingers, as the pleasure I draw from jogging is the reason why I go jogging regularly. The pleasure you draw from drumming with your fingers is not the consideration in the light of which you drum your fingers. It seems rather to go with the action of drumming with your fingers. It possibly causes the action of drumming with your fingers, but it does not explain why you perform this action. Let me summarise the last considerations. The third lesson that the philosophy of action teaches us is that we should prefer a threefold categorisation between actions, activities and mere happenings in order to account for the intuitive difference between two levels of “agency”. My action of instinctively scratching my head when I think about a problem does not seem to be as “agentive” as my action of going to the marketplace in order to buy some fresh fruit. Now the philosophy of action also provides us with a very simple way to account for the distinction between activities and full-blooded actions. Full-blooded actions are pieces of purposeful behaviour performed for reasons while mere activities are not. That is, for the performance of a

32 bodily movement to qualify as a full-blooded action, it needs, at least, to satisfy the three conditions mentioned above. Once again, this way of accounting for the distinction has the advantage of being sufficiently general to be compatible with many theories of action.38 THREE DISTINCTIONS ABOUT REASONS Motivating reasons vs. normative reasons A crucial distinction has to be made as soon as one tackles the notion of reasons to act.39 It is crucial to differentiate between: 1. The motivating reason to perform action A; 2. The normative reason to perform action A.40 There are two ways of using the notion of reason which address two different questions. Suppose that I am suddenly interrupted by my friend Emma running up into my office while I am working. I can ask myself two distinct questions regarding Emma’s behaviour. First I can wonder why Emma performs this action, what are the considerations in the light of which she performs this action. In this case, I try to determine what is her motivation for performing this action and I expect an answer referring to her motivating reason. For instance, Emma runs up into my office because she thinks the building is on fire and she wants to warn me. The second question I can ask myself is the following: does Emma have any reason to run into my office? This time my question is normative. What I am trying is settle is whether there is something which speaks in favour of Emma’s action. I expect an answer mentioning something which makes the action of running up into my office the appropriate, the 38

This is obviously compatible with the reductionist conception but also with the non-reductionist conception of action. It is clearly possible to defend the idea that conations, like tryings, are basic actions that cannot be reduced to mere happenings while saying that a subject’s action of shooting someone by trying to shoot him is a full-blooded action only if he performs the basic action of trying to shoot this person for a reason. That is to say, only if his trying to shoot is motivated by a desire to achieve an end, his trying is explained by this desire and his desire is also something that he is immediately disposed to mention as an explanation of why he tries to shoot this person. 39 I am very grateful to Pascal Engel for having pressed me to clarify this point. 40 This is Dancy’s terminology in Dancy (2002). For a similar distinction, see Crisp (2006), Mulligan (2009a) (2009b), Parfit (1997).

33 right action to perform. For instance, Emma is right to run up into my office because the building is in fire. Because there are different interrogations, the answers to these questions might be completely divergent. If Emma runs up into my office for the same motivating reason but I perfectly know that there is no fire, I can explain why she runs up into my office but I cannot find much to say in favour of what she does, I cannot defend her behaviour. Until now, I used the term “reasons” to refer to motivating reasons exclusively. For instance, when I put forward the conditions, which need to be satisfied when a piece of purposeful behaviour is performed for a reason, what I was obviously trying to mention were the conditions under which a piece of purposeful behaviour counts as an action performed for a motivating reason. In the rest of this work, I will adopt the habit of explicitly distinguishing between normative and motivating reason every time I am speaking of normative reasons. Internalism vs. externalism about reasons My goal here is obviously not to settle this highly complicated debate. Simply, I would like to give the broad outlines of the discussion in order to avoid any confusion between the internalism vs. externalism and the aforementioned conceptual distinction between motivating and normative reasons. Internalism holds that an agent A only has a good reason to Ω if, were A to know all the relevant facts, and deliberate rationally, A would be motivated to Ω. According to internalism, the set of normative reasons in Emma’s situation is limited by what Emma would be motivated to do. For instance, suppose Emma would not have been motivated to warn me if she had rather believed that there was a bomb in the building. Hence, according to internalism, there being a bomb in the building does not constitute a normative reason to warn me in Emma’s situation. Roughly, externalism about normative reasons is the view according to which the presence of a bomb in the building might be a normative reason for Emma to run up into my office and warn me even if she would not have been motivated to perform this action if she had if she had believed that there was a bomb in the building. According to externalists, what gives us normative reasons for acting are not “facts about our own motivation, but facts about our own or other

34 people's well-being, or facts about other things that are worth achieving”.41 Humean vs. anti-Humean conception of motivation As I briefly said above, another much debated issue concerns the exact nature of our motivating reasons. According to what is traditionally called the Humean theory, when I perform an action for a motivating reason, my motivating reason is constituted by a suitable combination of a cognitive consideration and an independent desire. When an agent performs action A for a reason, he is motivated by an independent desire D to achieve an end E together with a cognitive consideration B that his performing action A will contribute to the achievement of E.42 According to the Humean conception of motivation, no belief can motivate an agent to act on its own. It needs to be combined with an independent desire, that is to say, a desire which is not itself produced by this belief.43 Briefly, the anti-Humean reaction can take two forms. First, it might be claimed that an independent desire is not always necessary to motivate us to perform an action. Some beliefs are able to motivate us to perform an action by causing us to have some new desire.44 For instance, “the belief that the action would be unjust could cause in me a desire to have nothing to do with it, and the belief–desire combination thus formed would be what motivates me to abstain”.45 The second form of antiHumeanism is the view that belief alone is capable of motivating action. This is the view called “pure cognitivism” by Dancy who is also one of its most famous contemporary supporters.46 Like the Humean, Dancy claims that motivation requires a combination of two elements but unlike him he holds held that both could be beliefs. 41

Parfit (1997), p. 102. The agent might believe either that the performance A constitutes a means to achieve E or that to perform A is to achieve E. 43 The most famous contemporary supporter of the Humean theory of motivation is certainly Donald Davidson. 44 Dancy and Parfit both attribute the first anti-Humean position to Thomas Nagel in Nagel (1970). For a discussion of the Humean vs. anti-Humean conception of motivation, see also Engel (1991). 45 Dancy (2002), pp. 12-13. On a variant of this anti-Humean view, the desire to abstain is not induced by the belief that the action is unjust. The desire to abstain is not a distinct mental state, it consists in my being moved by the belief that the action is unjust. 46 See Dancy (1993) and (2002). 42

35 “On my view, a desire is never a necessary part of what motivates. So we have two beliefs which together motivate. One of these is about how things are, and the other is about how they would be if the action were successfully performed”.47 Now, it is important to note that Dancy considers it would be unwise to contend that desire plays absolutely no role in motivation. This is because every time I am motivated to perform an action, I am, by definition, in a state whose success conditions consist in things coming to be in a certain way. That is to say, when I am motivated, I am inevitably in a state which has the mind to world direction of fit. And such a state is a desire not a belief. Hence, Dancy claims: “Desire never motivates, on my account. (If one is thirsty, one is motivated by the prospect of drinking.) But there can be no motivation without desire”.48 One again, I do not want to take a stance in the debate regarding the nature of our motivation when we act for a reason. I will often express myself in a quite Humean way without mentioning explicitly that there are other plausible conceptions of motivating reasons. This does not manifest a clear preference for the Humean model and has rather to be interpreted as a brevity measure. This very brief presentation of the Humean and anti-Humean positions aims at showing that even such a drastic anti-Humean conception as Dancy’s does not deny that to be motivated to perform an action is to have a desire towards the performance of this action. To say it differently, whenever I act for a reason, I can truly be said to have wanted or desired to act as I did. I am going to make use of this important lesson more than once. BACK TO THE DOXASTIC REALM Epistemic reasons, non-epistemic reasons and evidence An important part of this work is grounded on the idea that our motivating reasons for acquiring a belief can take two main forms. Epistemic reasons to acquire beliefs

47 48

Dancy (2002), p. 13. Dancy (2002), p. 14.

36 My reason for acquiring a belief is epistemic if and only if what I am motivated to achieve is the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs.49 The simplest way of delineating the other set of reasons people can have for acquiring beliefs is to say that they are all conceivable reasons for acquiring beliefs that are non-epistemic. Non-epistemic reasons to acquire beliefs My reason for acquiring a belief is non-epistemic if and only if what I am motivated to achieve is not the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs but rather the end of acquiring pleasant, useful, reassuring, etc. beliefs. The crucial thing to note here is the very specific use I make of the notion of epistemic reason. In this work, “epistemic reason” refers to a motivating reason. “Epistemic reason” is not synonymous with “evidence” as is commonly the case in the philosophical literature. “Evidence” is another very complex notion, which would deserve a full study for itself. In this work, I will make a quite unsophisticated and unproblematic use of the notion.50 I take it that pieces of evidence are indications —“evidence” and “truth indications” are synonymous in this work— of the truth of a proposition. To have evidence51 supporting proposition p is to have indications that p is true. For a subject to have evidence supporting proposition p is for the subject to be in a mental state which indicates that p is true. When I will say that my acquisition of the belief that p at t is grounded on — or supported by— the evidence I have at t, this is just a shorter way to say that I have evidence supporting the truth of p and that this is what causes me to acquire a belief with such a propositional content. But, strictly speaking, pieces of evidence do not support or ground the acquisition of belief, they support or indicate that a certain proposition is true. Even if it is not inappropriate to call my evidence supporting the truth of p my reason to believe that p, pieces of evidence are not motivating reasons. 49

I will say more about the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs in chapter 5. 50 This is, I believe, the use privileged by the evidentialist conception of justification. See Feldman (2004a). 51 I say more about what it is for a subject to have evidence in chapter 6 below.

37 Let me first explain why I think it is appropriate to call “my evidence supporting the truth of p”, “my reason to believe”. Then I will try to show why pieces of evidence cannot be considered to be motivating reasons. According to its most general meaning, the term “reason” means simply “salient explanatory cause”. When I say, for instance: “the reason why Henry was late is that the road was congested”, I explain Henry’s being late by referring to what saliently caused it, but I clearly do not presume anything regarding his motivation to be late. It is appropriate to speak of the “reason” why a person did such or such a thing without simultaneously saying anything about what motivated him to do this thing. Something analogous happens when I mention my evidence in an explanation of why I believe such or such a thing. When I say: “the reason why I acquired the belief that p is that I remembered that p is true”, I explain why I acquired the belief that p by mentioning the salient explanatory cause of the acquisition of this belief. I do not say anything regarding my potential motivation to acquire a belief regarding the truth of p. Now, even according to the strictest anti-Humeanism, embodied by Dancy’s theory, if pieces of evidence are motivating reasons, my having pieces of evidence which indicate that p is true will involve my being in a state which has the mind to world direction of fit. But my having evidence supporting the truth of p does not seem to involve my desiring anything or my being in any sort of conative state. My having evidence supporting the truth of p involves my being in a state which has the world to mind direction of fit exclusively. On its own, my having evidence supporting the truth of p can only cause me to acquire the belief that p like my having evidence of a mouthwatering smell is able to cause me to be hungry. It is not something which motivates me to acquire the belief that p any more than the evidence of a mouth-watering smell constitutes a motivation to be hungry. I do not deny, of course, that my having evidence supporting the truth of a proposition p can motivate me if it involves a desire. But, on its own, my having evidence supporting the truth of p merely consists in my being in a state which indicates that p is true. As such, it is not something, which can motivate me to do one thing or another. For being

38 in a state characterized by the world to mind direction of fit is not sufficient to motivate me to act. In the rest of this work, I will take care to distinguish between: 1. My having an epistemic reason for acquiring a belief which is my being epistemically motivated to acquire a belief. When I have an epistemic reason to acquire a belief, I am in a state which involves a desire, more accurately, a desire to acquire true rather than false beliefs. 2. My evidence supporting the truth of a certain proposition p which is not a motivating reason.52 To be clear, I agree with philosophers53 when they distinguish between non-epistemic reasons for acquiring non-epistemically desirable beliefs, and evidence. I simply add to this model. Epistemic reasons are the exact analogue of the non-epistemic reasons in the epistemic realm. They are epistemic reasons to acquire epistemically desirable beliefs, i.e. true beliefs. Delineating the interesting issue Recall that the general goal of the first part of this work is to consider whether it is appropriate —at least sometimes—to hold people responsible for their belief acquisitions. As I said already, there is one obvious condition that the occurrence of a state of affairs needs to satisfy in order to be something for which someone is possibly responsible. People are not responsible for mere happenings that take place in the world independently of what they do. I am not responsible for earthquakes, or for your cat being crushed by a car. The things for which we can be held responsible are our purposeful behaviours: activities or actions.54 Then, I have a very simple test at hand to start checking whether people can possibly be held responsible for having acquired a belief: I need to 52

My having evidence indicating that p is true can be considered to be a normative reason since my having evidence indicating that p is true seems “to speak in favour” of my acquiring the belief that p. This is the normative view presupposed by the evidentialist conception of the justification of belief acquisition. 53 See Engel (1999), p. 8. 54 And the predictable consequences of our purposeful behaviour. I consider the issue of the conditions under which someone is responsible for the consequences of his behaviour in detail below.

39 investigate whether the acquisition of the belief that p can satisfy the condition under which a performance counts as an activity or an action. The reason why I previously stressed the distinction between activities and actions appears more clearly now. I was getting ready to delimit accurately the philosophical issue that I would like to address in the following two chapters. It needs to be made explicit that the interesting philosophical question does not concern the possibility of belief acquisitions qualifying as activities. It is hardly deniable that belief acquisitions are not always the faithful results of what we perceive as being true about our environment. There are definitely circumstances in which people unconsciously acquire beliefs as a result of their fears, their desires, etc. “There is the familiar experience of wishful thinking, of belief arrived at through the influence of desire and wishes, or the formation of beliefs in self-deception and other abnormal or pathological cases. Literature, philosophy and psychiatry are full of such episodes”.55 The fascinating philosophical question rather regards the possibility of people acquiring beliefs for reasons, as it is possible for them to perform actions for reasons. Consequently, the doxastic responsibility that I try to understand in the following chapters is the analogue of the responsibility that an agent possibly has for his purposeful behaviour when it is a fullblooded action that he performs for a reason. Certainly, agents are also sometimes responsible for their activities. But this is not the kind of responsibility that I am going to track in the following chapters. The possibility of acquiring a belief for a reason is very controversial. Even if I am really highly motivated to get rid of the thought that I am a very bad tennis player and also consider that a good way of achieving this end would be to acquire the belief that I won my last match against my brother, it does not seem that I could acquire this belief, directly, for this reason.56 It seems that I cannot acquire a belief directly for a reason, as I can raise my finger directly for the reason that I desire to ask a question. But why is it so? This is the question tackled in the following chapter of this work.

55

Engel (1999), p. 5. For the sake of brevity, I will mention the cognitive component of a motivating reason only occasionally when understanding requires it. 56

41

CHAPTER 2: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DIRECTLY ACQUIRING BELIEFS FOR REASONS

We have the strong intuition that we cannot directly acquire the belief that the Swiss football team won the European Championship for the reason that I desire to believe something pleasant. This chapter is an attempt to spell out the specific feature of beliefs which grounds the intuition that beliefs cannot be acquired directly for non-epistemic reasons in the way that I can perform bodily movements for reasons. DIRECT AND INDIRECT BELIEF ACQUISITIONS Before getting to the heart of the matter, I would like to make clearer what I mean by directly when I claim that it is intuitively impossible to acquire a belief, directly, for a non-epistemic reason while it is possible to perform a bodily movement directly for a reason. Without further specifications, the use of the “direct”, “indirect” terminology is a bit obscure. Note, for instance, that the desire, which constitutes part of my reason to act, is not stricto sensu directly related to the movement of my body since many other physical events have to take place for my desire to cause my bodily movement. When philosophers state that I cannot directly acquire a belief for a reason and contrast this statement with the claim that I can directly move my body for a reason, they implicitly appeal to the aforementioned idea that some actions are more basic than others.57 More accurately, I think that: “it is directly possible for me to move my body for a reason” actually means: “the action of moving my body is something that I can perform for a reason without having to perform a more basic action”.58 Usually, indeed, when I want to move my body in a certain way, for instance, when I want to raise my finger, I do not need to perform a more basic action in order to perform the action of raising my finger. Hence, when philosophers claim that people cannot directly acquire beliefs for reasons, what they mean is that a belief acquisition cannot be as basic an action as a bodily movement. This is obviously compatible 57

See chapter 1. Things would be slightly different for the supporter of a non-reductionist conception of action. “It is directly possible for me to move my body for a reason” would rather mean: “the action of moving my body is something that I can perform for a reason by having only to perform the basic action of willing, trying to move my body”. For sake of simplicity, I will omit this precision below. 58

42 with the possibility of belief acquisitions being actions of a less basic degree in the chains of more or less basic actions discussed in the previous chapter. Direct/indirect acquisitions of belief and epistemic/non–epistemic reasons Now that the notion of direct and indirect belief acquisitions is clarified, I would like to make things a bit more concrete by providing an example of each of the various ways in which a belief can be acquired for a reason. This consists in crossing the distinction between direct and indirect belief acquisition with the distinction that I made in the previous chapter between epistemic and non–epistemic motivating reasons for acquiring a belief. 1. Direct acquisition of a belief for an epistemic reason A direct acquisition of a belief for an epistemic reason would concern a belief that I acquired as a result of my desire to acquire true beliefs without having to perform any more basic action. This sounds like a self-contradictory case. Indeed acquiring a belief, just like that, without any consideration for the environment is acquiring a belief without any consideration for its truth. Then, a desire to acquire a true belief cannot rationalise the acquisition of a belief as a desire to perform an action can “directly” rationalise the movement of my body. It can only rationalize the performance of a (more basic) action consisting, for instance, in my observing my environment, a performance by which I suppose I will acquire a true belief. From a first-person perspective, the way to satisfy a desire to acquire true beliefs implies necessarily an intermediate truthoriented modification of one current set of evidence since acquiring true beliefs consists precisely in forming mental states that are faithful representations of our environment. 2. Direct acquisition of a belief for a non-epistemic reason A direct acquisition of a belief for a non-epistemic reason would concern a belief that I acquired as a result of my desire to acquire a pleasant belief without having to perform any more basic action. This is a way of acquiring a belief for a reason59 that I characterized already as being highly counterintuitive. It does not seem that I can acquire a belief for a 59

This kind of case refers to something very similar to what Engel called direct volitionism. See Engel (1999).

43 non-epistemic reason as I can move my body for a non-epistemic reason, no matter the strength of the desire which constitutes my non-epistemic reason. To reword an example from William Alston: “Can you, at this moment, start to believe that Geneva is a colony of the Duchy of Savoy, just by deciding to do so? If you find it too incredible that you should be sufficiently motivated to try to believe it, suppose that someone offers you 5 millions Swiss francs to believe it, and you are much more interested in the money than in believing the truth. Could you do what it takes to get that reward? …It seems clear to me that I have no such power”.60 As I said, my goal in this chapter is not to say anything against this very strong intuition but, rather, to explain why it is right. To avoid any possible confusion, it is probably useful to make clear that a belief, acquired 1. directly 2. for a non-epistemic reason: 1. would be, by definition, as basic as a bodily movement; 2. would be, by definition, acquired independently of any truth indications, i.e. independently of any indications supporting the truth of its propositional content. That is to say, if I have some non-epistemic reason to believe that it is not going to rain tomorrow and, accidentally, acquired this belief by reading the newspaper, this belief does not count as being acquired directly for a non-epistemic reason, first, because I acquired it by performing a more basic action, second, because I acquired it on the ground of truth indications. 3. Indirect acquisition of a belief for an epistemic reason Indirect acquisitions of belief for epistemic reasons are represented by cases in which I acquire a belief as a result of my desire to acquire true beliefs, by performing another (more basic) action. Cases of this sort are very common. They take place every time when I perform an action with the hope that the performance of this action will lead me to acquire a true belief. It can be a single bodily movement like turning my head with the goal that this will lead me to the acquisition of a true belief regarding the noise behind me. Of course, in this case, the effort made is little. 60

See Alston (1988), p. 263.

44 This is why we could be tempted to conflate the acquisition of a belief about the noise by turning my head with a bodily movement. But the acquisition of a belief about what makes this noise behind me is not as basic as a bodily movement. I cannot acquire a belief about the noise behind me as a result of my desire to know what is happening behind me as I can raise my finger as a result of my desire to ask a question. When I desire to acquire a true belief about a noise behind me and acquire a belief as a result of this desire, I necessarily acquire this belief by performing a bodily movement: turning my head, looking into the drawer, searching my pockets, etc. As we will see later in more detail, all these bodily movements can be suitably designated by a single description. They all consist in a —relevant for the question at issue— modification of the evidence I previously had. More accurately, they all consist in the collection of new pieces of evidence regarding the world around me. Note that cases in which I acquire a belief by performing a single bodily movement like turning my head, differ only quantitatively from cases in which the acquisition of a belief is unquestionably not as basic as a bodily movement; for instance, cases in which the acquisition of a belief occurs after an extensive inquiry. 4. Indirect acquisition of a belief for a non-epistemic reason Indirect acquisitions of belief for non-epistemic reasons are represented by cases in which I acquire a belief as a result of my desire to have a pleasant life, by performing another (more basic) action. For instance, consider the case of a mother who has some serious doubts that her child stole some money in her purse. She is also convinced that it is much better for her child’s education and for her future relationship with him that she does not tell him anything and does not behave suspiciously toward him. Since she is also conscious that the doubt that her child pilfered a couple of notes from a purse will inevitably modify her behaviour, she thinks that it would be better for her to erase this doubt. She starts then to focus on the numerous respectable actions of her child, his good marks at school, etc. By concentrating her attention on the evidence supporting the proposition that her child is a good little boy, she finally acquires the belief that he certainly did not steal her money and that she probably spent it.61 61

For other examples of this kind, see Meiland (1980), pp. 15-16.

45 Note that the actions by which the mother acquires the belief that pleases her can be described as a manipulation of her evidence. That is to say, even when I acquire a belief for a non-epistemic reason, the action by which I acquire this belief consists in a modification of my evidence.62 WILLIAMS’ ARGUMENT In the following pages, I would like to suggest a reformulation of Williams’ much-debated argument the conclusion is that people are unable to acquire beliefs at will.63 Williams’ explicit ambition is to show that: “it is not a contingent fact that I cannot bring it about, just like that, that I believe something, as it is a contingent fact that I cannot bring it about, just like that, that I am blushing”.64 His main argument to defend this claim is the following: “If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a ‘belief’ irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality. At the very least, there must be a restriction on what is the case after the event; since I could not then, in full consciousness, regard this as a belief of mine, i.e. something I take to be true, and also know that I acquired it at will”.65 The first part of the argument is devoted to making clear what he means by believing “at will”. Believing something “at will” is not just being unconsciously driven to acquire a belief. It consists in believing something for a reason. Moreover, it consists in acquiring a belief “whether it was true or not”, that is to say, in believing something for a 62

This sort of case manifests something very similar to Engel’s indirect volitionism. They are also comparable to Engel’s weak volitionism in so far as acquiring a belief that p indirectly for a non-epistemic reason consists in acquiring this belief by providing yourself with evidence supporting the truth of p. See Engel (1999). The indirect acquisition of belief for a non-epistemic reason is the topic of the next chapter. 63 For other reformulations of Williams’ argument, see Winters (1979), ScottKakure (1994), Engel (1999), Noordhof (2001), Frankish (2007). 64 Williams (1973), p. 148. 65 Ibid.

46 non-epistemic reason. Finally, even if Williams does not specify it, it is clearly the direct acquisition of belief for non-epistemic reasons that he has in mind. Hence, even if it is not always formulated explicitly in the following paragraphs, the next issue under my scrutiny concerns the possibility of directly acquiring beliefs for non-epistemic reasons. Now, taking into account what I previously said about what counts as an action performed for a reason, here is what I take to be the target of Williams’ argument. If a subject S were able to acquire the belief that p directly for a nonepistemic reason, the following conditions would be satisfied: a. The condition of motivation: S’s acquisition of the belief that p is motivated by this non-epistemic reason, i.e. the combination of a desire to achieve a non-epistemic end and a cognitive consideration that acquiring the belief that p will help achieve this end; b. The condition of explanation: the relevant combination of desire and cognitive consideration explains why S acquires the belief that p; c. The condition of avowability: S is disposed to provide an immediate explanation of why he acquires the belief that p by appealing to the non-epistemic desire and cognitive consideration, which motivates him to acquire it. d. S acquires this belief for this reason, as he is able to move his body for a non-epistemic reason, without having to perform a more basic action. Some brief comments are useful here. First, condition (d) rules out cases in which the belief that p is acquired by modifying the evidence, by manipulating it in some way. For instance, by visiting a hypnotist or by focusing my attention on some evidence. The second remark concerns self-fulfilling beliefs, that is, beliefs the acquisition of which simultaneously provides you with considerations supporting their truth. For instance, the acquisition of the belief that I am courageous, if it simultaneously causes me to perform more audacious actions, will also provide me with evidence that I am courageous.66 66

I am also not sure that the acquisition of a self-fulfilling belief can possibly count as a direct acquisition of belief.

47 By definition, the acquisition of the self-fulfilling belief that p provides the believer with evidence supporting the truth of p. Therefore, when someone acquires the self-fulfilling belief that p, he will not explain his acquisition of the belief that p by appealing to the non-epistemic desire which initially motivates him but rather by mentioning the reasons why he thinks p is true. Hence, the acquisition of a self-fulfilling belief does not count as the acquisition of a belief for a non-epistemic reason.67 The core of Williams’ argument comes in the second part of the quotation above. I suggest reformulating it in the following way: 1. Before supposedly acquiring a mental state for a nonepistemic reason, when I consider my project, I am actually considering the project of acquiring a mental state for a nonepistemic reason; 2. I cannot consider both that the mental state that I plan to acquire is a belief and that I am going to acquire this mental state for a non-epistemic reason; 3. Then, before supposedly acquiring a belief for a nonepistemic reason, I cannot consider the mental state that I plan to acquire to be a belief. Something analogous is true after the supposed acquisition of a belief a non-epistemic reason: 1* After having hypothetically acquired a belief for a nonepistemic reason, when thinking about what I have just achieved, I will actually be thinking that I acquired a mental state for a non-epistemic reason; 2* I cannot consider both that the mental state that I acquired is a belief and that I acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason; 3* Then after having hypothetically acquired a belief for a nonepistemic reason, when thinking about what I have just achieved, I will not be able to consider the mental state that I acquired to be a belief.

67

For an objection to Williams’ argument appealing to self-fulfilling beliefs, see Scott-Kakure (1994), p. 83. For a similar reply, see Engel (1999).

48 Thus far, Williams’ argument only establishes the following subjective conclusion: (W) Before having supposedly acquired a belief for a nonepistemic reason/after having hypothetically acquired the belief that p for a non-epistemic reason, it is impossible that I consider both that the mental state that I plan to acquire/acquired is a belief and that I am going to acquire or acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason. To say it more briefly68: (W) When a believer hypothetically acquires a belief for a nonepistemic reason, it is impossible for him to consider both that the mental state he acquired is a belief and that he acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason. Before distinguishing W from two other claims with which it can easily be confused, I would like to make two brief remarks. First, it is important to mention that W admits of an exception. It might happen that a subject considers the mental state he is in to be a belief and simultaneously consider that he acquired this mental state for a nonepistemic reason. This is the case when the subject remembers, at time t+n, that he acquired the belief that p for a non-epistemic reason at t, but believes that p on the ground of truth indications at t+n. This is the case when the believer obtains evidence supporting the truth of p between the acquisition of the mental state, at t, and the time, t+n, at which he considers the reason why he acquired this mental state. This remarks led epistemologists to amend W in order to capture this exception.69 To avoid making my formulation of Williams’ conclusion uselessly complex for the present purpose, I will simply claim that W is correct except for the cases in which the believer obtains evidence supporting 68

For the sake of brevity, I will omit to mention Williams’ “before the event” claim in the following discussion of his argument. This restriction is of no consequence for my conclusions in this chapter. 69 Winters suggests substituting “sustain” for “acquire” in Williams’ argument. Hence, she thinks that the strongest claim relevant to believing at will that we have reason to accept is the following: “It is impossible for me to believe of a particular belief b that b is a present belief of mine and is sustained at will”. See Winters (1979). Frankish’s reformulation to capture this exception is slightly more sophisticated: “For any proposition p, it is impossible in full consciousness both that one consciously believes that p and that one’s belief that p is both unsupported and deviant”. See Frankish (2007).

49 the truth of p between his acquisition of the mental state bearing upon p and his consideration of the reason why he acquired this mental state. Second, note that W is correct mutatis mutandis for the maintenance and the revision of a belief. For instance, when a believer maintains himself in a mental state for a non-epistemic reason, it is impossible for him to consider both that the mental state he maintains himself in is a belief and that he maintains himself in this mental state for a non-epistemic reason.70 The conclusion W above has to be distinguished from two other claims: First, from a claim concerning the impossibility of a desire inducing an acquisition of belief directly and unconsciously: (U) It is impossible for a desire to induce directly and unconsciously the acquisition of a belief while it is possible for a desire to induce directly and unconsciously the performance of a bodily movement. (U) bears upon the possibility of a belief acquisition qualifying as a direct activity. Think about a case in which my desire to believe that my sister is happy in the city in which she lives makes me believe that this city enjoys the mildest climate in South America. By contrast, when a desire to believe that p unconsciously induces the possession of evidence supporting the truth of p which in turns makes me believe that p, the acquisition of the belief that p counts as an indirect activity. Perhaps acquisitions of belief cannot be directly induced by desires. At least, cases in which desires unconsciously and indirectly induce belief acquisitions seem more common than cases in which they unconsciously and directly induce belief acquisitions. But, as I said, I am not interested in this work in the possibility of desires unconsciously inducing belief acquisitions but by the possibility of people acquiring beliefs for reasons.

70

Note that this does not require that the subject’s belief be positively supported by truth indications. It seems perfectly possible to consider that my mental state is a belief even if I do not presently have evidence supporting the truth of its propositional content. As Frankish notices, “the very fact that one has come to believe a proposition affords one to think it true. It is not impossible, then to acquiesce in the possession of an unsupported belief (unsupported, that is, by anything other than the fact of its own existence)”. Frankish (2007), p. 531.

50 Second, from a claim, which concerns our inability to acquire belief directly for non-epistemic reasons, that is to say, the claim that Williams tries to establish: (W*) People cannot acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons. Two options are available to infer W* from W. The less straightforward way begins by recalling what philosophers of action take as being necessarily the case when an agent performs an action for a reason. More specifically, the agent must be disposed to provide an immediate explanation of why he performs this action. That is to say, a belief acquired by a believer won’t qualify as a belief acquired for a reason, if the believer is not disposed to state the desire which motivates him to acquire this belief in an explanation of why he acquired it. Now, a disposition to provide such an explanation certainly presupposes a disposition to consider the mental state that he acquired to be a belief acquired for a non-epistemic reason. And precisely what W teaches is that the believer is not disposed to consider the mental state that he acquired for a non-epistemic reason to be a belief. More formally, the first option completes Williams’ argument in the following way: (W1) If I acquire a belief for a non-epistemic reason, then I am, by definition, disposed to state the motivating desire in an explanation of why I acquired this belief; (W2) If I am disposed to state the motivating desire in an explanation of my belief acquisition, then I am disposed to consider the mental state acquired to be a belief and to consider that I acquired it for a non-epistemic reason; (W) When a believer hypothetically acquires a belief for a nonepistemic reason, it is impossible for him to consider simultaneously both that he acquires a belief that p and that he acquires this belief for a non-epistemic reason; Then (W3) I cannot acquire a belief for a non-epistemic reason; (W4) What is true of myself is true about other people; Then W* People cannot acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons. Note that a more straightforward way of inferring W* from W would consist in adding the following premise to W:

51 (Z) A mental state which is not considered by the one who is in it to be a belief is not a belief. That is to say, I cannot be wrong when I consider my mental state to be something other than a belief. A mental state which is not my belief to my eyes is not a belief tout court. I doubt Z is correct71. But its truth is not what is of interest to me here. For, even if Williams’ ultimate goal is to provide a defence of W, his own way of inferring W* from W consists in neither of the two options I have just suggested. He rather adds the following piece of reasoning immediately after his aforementioned argument: “But if I can acquire beliefs at will, I must know that I am able to do this; and could I know that I was capable of this feat, if with regard to every feat of this kind which I had performed I necessarily had to believe that it had not taken place”.72 It is useful to reformulate his additional claim as well: 12nd Because it is impossible for me to consider simultaneously both that I believe that p and that I acquire this belief for a nonepistemic reason, when I hypothetically acquire a belief at will (W), I will never know that I possess the ability to acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons; 22nd I do not have the ability to acquire beliefs for nonepistemic reasons unless I know that I have it; 32nd I do not have the ability to acquire beliefs for nonepistemic reasons; 42nd What is true of myself is true about other people; Then W* People cannot acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons. The problem with Williams’ additional claim is that statements 12nd and 22nd are clearly questionable. First, it is not true that I am necessarily ignorant that I possess some ability unless I am aware of having successfully exercised this ability. For instance, I can know that I possess this ability thanks to the testimony of others. Second, the claim 71

Winters denies Z in Winters (1979) p. 247. This also the case of Williamson when he claims that the transparency thesis does not apply to beliefs. See Williamson (2000), pp. 24-25. 72 Williams (1973), p. 148.

52 according to which I cannot have a capacity unless I know that I have it is obviously false. For instance, I might be able to lower the rate of my heartbeat directly without being aware of having this capacity.73 Then Williams’ additional argument does not seem to be able to secure the transition between W and W*. “TO BELIEVE THAT P IS TO BELIEVE THAT P IS TRUE” One can wonder why Williams makes the effort of adding the quite perilous claim just discussed. Indeed, at first sight, at least, Williams seems to have at hand a much more straightforward way of reaching the conclusion W*. Discussing the features of beliefs as constituting a specific category of mental states, Williams’ quite famous claim is that beliefs “aim at truth”.74 Williams also specifies what he means by this: “to believe that so and so is one and the same as to believe that that thing is true”.75 According to Williams, a mental state the content of which is the proposition p qualifies as a belief that p only if it is a belief that p is true since a belief that p is identical to a belief that p is true. I carry out a closer examination of this claim below in order to show why it is problematic. For the moment, I would like to point out that Williams would not have to appeal to the additional claim criticized above if this claim could itself resist critique. His claim that to believe that p is one and the same as to believe that p is true is sufficient to reach W*. 1** A mental state is a belief that p only if it is a belief that p is true; 2** A mental state which is directly acquired for a nonepistemic reason is not a belief that p is true;76 73

This is Winters’ example. For more detail, see Winters (1979), pp. 254-255. Williams (1973), p. 137. See pp. 136ff. for the other characteristics of beliefs. 75 Williams (1973), p. 137. This is, I believe, a clearer formulation of Williams’ more famous expression: “to believe that p is to believe that p is true”. 76 It could be a belief that p is true if it was the indirect result of a non-epistemic motivation. That is to say, only if I perform some manipulation of my current set of evidence, which makes me believe that p is true. I discuss indirect acquisitions of belief for non-epistemic reasons in the next chapter. 74

53 3** A mental state which is directly acquired for a nonepistemic reason is not a belief; Then W* People cannot acquire “beliefs” for non-epistemic reasons.77 Believing vs. imagining We just saw that Williams’ famous claim according to which “to believe that p is one and the same thing as to believe that p is true” is sufficient to show that people cannot acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons as they can move their body for non-epistemic reasons. However, and as has been observed already,78 premise 1** does not express a specific feature of belief in contrast to other kinds of mental states. Premise 1** is mutatis mutandis also true of mental states other than beliefs. For instance, it is true also that a mental state is a state of imagining that p only if it is a state of imagining that p is true or that a mental state is a desire that p only if it is a desire that p is true or that a mental state is a state of accepting that p only if it is a state of accepting that p is true, etc. But, as it is generally less clearly notified, this does not explicitly raise a worry as long as we do not substitute “imagine”79 for “believe” in the two stars argument above. 1I** A mental state is a state of imagining that p only if it is a state of imagining that p is true; (analogue to 1**) 2I** A mental state which is acquired for a non-epistemic reason is not a state of imagining that p is true. (analogue to 2**) 3I** A mental state which is acquired for a non-epistemic reason is not a state of imagining; (analogue to 3**) Then

77

There is no need to consider separately what happens just before the acquisition of the belief that p and what happens since the voluntary acquisition of a belief and as long as I maintain this belief. 78 See for instance, Engel (2005), Owens (2003), Shah (2003), Velleman (2000b), Wedgwood (2002). 79 I would reach the same conclusion by substituting “accept” or “desire”.

54 4I** People cannot acquire “states of imagining” for nonepistemic reasons (analogue to W*) Premise 1I** seems as plausible as premise 1**. The worry is that it leads, in a similar way, to the undesirable conclusions 3I** and 4I**. If the double star argument were perfectly acceptable, we would be compelled to accept conclusion 4I** since there are no more reasons to distrust premise 1I** than there are reasons to question the truth of premise 1**. This sheds light on the fact that premise 1** does not express what is specific about beliefs that distinguishes them from other kinds of mental state. The crucial thing to notice here is that premise 2* above does not raise the same difficulty. The following is the one star argument in which I have substituted “imagine” for “believe”: 1I* After having acquired a state of imagining for a nonepistemic reason, when I will be thinking about what I have just achieved, I will actually be thinking that I acquired a state of imagining for a non-epistemic reason; 2I* I cannot consider both that the mental state that I acquired is a as a state of imagining and that I acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason; 3I* Then after having acquired a state of imagining for a nonepistemic reason, I will not be able to consider the mental state that I acquired as a state of imagining. Once again, the conclusion of the argument 3I* is undesirable. But this time, the premise 2I*, the analogous premise of premise 2*, is clearly wrong. When Amy imagines that she is lying on a beach while she is sitting in her living room (p), she is certainly able to consider her mental state as an act of imagining that p while being able to explain her acquisition of the state of imagining that p by referring to its pleasantness, etc. Actually, if Amy was thinking that she is in this mental state in virtue of some truth indications regarding p, we would be

55 reluctant to say that Amy really imagines that she is lying on a beach.80 We would be inclined to say that Amy believes that she is lying on beach. The fact that premise 2* has no valid analogue for the states of imagining suggests that this premise really points to the feature of belief, in regard to truth, which distinguishes it from other kinds of mental states. It is also the claim which explains —whether you prefer the first or the second option allowing the inference of W* from W— the initial intuition to be explained: the outward impossibility of acquiring belief for non-epistemic reasons. To say it differently, the explanation why we cannot acquire beliefs for non-epistemic reasons while we can imagine things for non-epistemic reasons lies —as Williams precisely wants to show—in the conceptual truth expressed by premise 2* above: The concept of belief is such that I cannot consider both that the mental state that I acquired is a belief and that I acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason.81 Transparency My next goal is to show that premise 2* also has the advantage of accounting for a specific feature of deliberations about beliefs, namely: transparency. 80

I do not mean that Amy cannot imagine that she believes that she is lying on the beach in virtue of some truth indications, for instance, by imagining the sensation that the sun would produce on her skin. Certainly when I am imagining that p, I am able to imagine having evidences supporting the truth of p. It is important to distinguish between my reason to imagine that p and my imaginary evidence to believe that p is true while imagining that p. My reason to imagine that p is non-epistemic if the reason why I imagine that p is that it is a pleasant, agreeable relaxing state to be in. Furthermore, I do not mean, either, that it is impossible to act out of a state of imagining. My suggestions are not opposed to Velleman’s at least on this particular point. See Velleman (2000b), pp. 256ff. 81 The specific difference between beliefs and other kinds of mental states has sometimes been accounted by appealing to a variation in their directions of fit. The claim is that beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit, which is opposite to the one characterizing the other kinds of mental states. I am not denying that this is a correct account of their difference but it certainly needs to be specified. The previous account provides, I hope, such a specification.

56 What is transparency in this context?82 Transparency refers to the following characteristic of our deliberations about beliefs: when I ask myself whether I should believe that p, this amounts to asking myself whether p is true. There is no “gap” between the questions: should I believe that p and is p true? I can never discover that p is true and still ask myself whether p is something that I should believe. Providing an answer to one of these two questions necessarily consists in answering the other one. Transparency is a feature that distinguishes deliberation about beliefs from other kinds of deliberation like deliberation about what we should accept or deliberation about what we should imagine. Indeed, the question whether I should accept that I am a very gifted pool player is not immediately settled by the reason I have for accepting this, for instance, because it helps me play better. It could be that this reason is overridden by a reason not to accept that I possess such a talent, for instance, because such an idea will increase the chance that I spoil the pool table’s baize. How does premise 2* above —the claim that I cannot consider a mental state acquired for a non-epistemic reason to be a belief— account for transparency? This is quite straightforward: according to premise 2*, if I take into account any considerations other than considerations supporting the truth of p, in the deliberation about whether to believe that p, I will not be able to consider the mental state about which I am deliberating to be a belief. Then, when I am deliberating about whether I should believe that p, it is impossible that I take into account any considerations other than considerations supporting the truth of p. Consequently, as soon as the latter are set, my deliberation is settled, which is, well and truly, the claim of transparency.83 82

See Shah (2003). Shah attributes the paternity of the notion to Richard Moran. Note that this explanation of transparency is very comparable to Shah’s who grounds his own account on a very similar —if not identical— conceptual truth about beliefs. Shah considers that I cannot be moved by considerations other than those relevant to the truth of p during my deliberation whether to believe that p because getting through such a deliberation presupposes the exercise of the concept of belief and such an exercise involves that I am moved only by considerations relevant to the truth of p. That is to say, Shah’s explanation is that I can consider the mental state I am currently deliberating about to be a belief only if my deliberation is led exclusively by truth indications. See Shah (2003), pp. 467ff. 83

57 The teleological account I would like to consider now the plausibility of the teleological account, which certainly constitutes the main rival way of accounting for the specific feature of beliefs in regard to truth. The teleological account refers more explicitly to Williams’ famous adage: “beliefs aim at truth”, since its main claim is that truth is the goal of beliefs. This claim raises an immediate worry: beliefs cannot have goals themselves, only believers can.84 When one tries to flesh out the meaning of the expression “beliefs aim at truth”, one has to refer, at some point, to the goal of the believer. Velleman used to suggest85 such a teleological account of the distinctive feature of beliefs compared to other kinds of mental states (states of imagining, states of accepting, etc.) regarding the relation of beliefs to truth: “What distinguishes believing a proposition from imagining or supposing it is… the aim of getting the truth value of that particular proposition right, by regarding the proposition as true only if it really is. Belief is the attitude of accepting a proposition with the aim of thereby accepting a truth”.86 That is to say, a subject S believes a proposition p only if (i) he regards p as true and simultaneously (ii) pursues the aim of regarding it as true only if it is true. By contrast, when S imagines that p, he also regards p as true but he does not have such a simultaneous aim. According to a teleological account, truth is the essential goal of the process of acquiring beliefs. It is essential in the sense that the process would not count as the process of forming a belief that p, if I did not have the goal of regarding p as true only if it is true. In an analogous way, the goal of feeding people is the essential goal of my activity of cooking. When I do not aim at providing food to myself or someone 84

As Engel, paraphrasing Wedgwood, formulates it: “ beliefs do not ‘aim’ at anything by themselves, they do not contain little archers trying to hit the target of truth with their arrows. In this sense the claim must be metaphorical.” Engel (2005), p. 77. See also Wedgwood (2002), p. 267. 85 Velleman seems to have given up this position in a more recent article co-written with Shah. See Shah & Velleman (2005). 86 Velleman (2000b), p. 9.

58 else, for instance, when I am in the kitchen mixing whisky, lemon and sugar with the plan of curing my cold, my activity does not count as cooking. Three objections to the teleological account The teleological account encounters at least three main difficulties. First, it does not seem to point to what is really distinctive of beliefs compared to certain other kinds of mental states like guesses, conjectures. As Engel states it: “The intentional aim of a guess is truth too. In that respect, guesses are quite unlike imaginings, for instance”.87 When I guess that p, it is also the case that I regard p as true with the aim of regarding p as true only if it is true. Secondly88, it is unquestionable that the formation of beliefs is not always regulated by the goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true. Our beliefs do not always result from considerations regarding the truth of p. Some beliefs are unconsciously caused by non-epistemic motives. Consider, for instance, Patty’s belief that her friend Emma did not betray her, which is the result of an irresistible desire to keep Emma among her friends. The teleologist can account for such an example by weakening his claim. He can say that the goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true does not have to be the only regulating goal in the formation of beliefs. Nevertheless, the goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true has to keep some weak regulating role in order for the formation of Patty’s belief to count as a formation of a belief and not just a formation of a fantasy. Even if the formation of my belief that p is mainly regulated by a non-epistemic goal, this formation is always, at least weakly, regulated by the goal of regarding p as true only if it true. This is visible in the fact that Patty’s mental state can hardly being considered as a belief if her mental state is not supported by any truth indications. For instance, if Patty was still thinking that Emma is her friend even once she caught Emma kissing her boyfriend, we would be reluctant to count her mental state as a belief. The regulating aim of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true cannot be entirely ruled out of the formation of beliefs. For this reason, even when the non-epistemic 87

Engel (1999). According to Engel, this point is up to Owens (2003). I owe the second objection to Shah. See Shah (2003), pp. 460-65 and Shah &Velleman (2005), pp. 500-501.

88

59 interest of a subject constitutes the salient explanation of the acquisition of the belief that p, the considerations supporting the truth of p will keep playing a role in the whole causal story which leads to the acquisition of this belief. The problem for the teleological account is that once it has been weakened in such a way, it is not able any more to explain the phenomenon of transparency, that it is to say, it is not able to explain why only considerations supporting the truth of p enter into play when we deliberate whether we should believe that p. Indeed, as soon as the teleologist has accepted that the formation of beliefs can sometimes be regulated by non-epistemic goals, like the goal of saving one’s marriage, he looses the ability to explain why the goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true is the exclusive regulating goal of the specific sort of belief-formation called doxastic deliberation. To summarise, the supporter of the teleological account faces a dilemma: either he is able to explain transparency but is unable to account for the fact that some belief acquisitions unconsciously result from processes guided by interests, desires, etc. Or he is able to account for this fact but loses the explanation of transparency. According to me, the teleological account encounters a third difficulty. My suggestion is that, by contrast to premise 2* — the premise according to which I cannot consider both that the mental state that I acquired is a belief and that I acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason — the teleological account is unable to account for the intuition that it is impossible to acquire beliefs directly for non-epistemic reasons. To show this, I would like to consider whether the composite state of (i) regarding the proposition p as true (ii) with the goal of regarding p as true only if it is true —that is to say the state of believing that p— is a state that I can possibly bring about for a non-epistemic reason. In more detail, I would like to consider whether: (i) the state of regarding a proposition p as true is a state that I can bring about for a non-epistemic reason; (ii) the state of having the goal of regarding p as true only if it is true is a state that I can bring about for a non-epistemic reason.

60 If I can maintain these both states for non-epistemic reasons, it seems that the teleologist account, as such, is unable to account for the initial intuition just mentioned. Now, these seem to be states that I can induce in myself for nonepistemic reasons. (i) The state of regarding a proposition as true is clearly a state that I can adopt for a non-epistemic reason. Indeed, regarding a proposition as true is a kind of mental state which is involved in states, like imagining that a proposition is true, which are obviously states that I bring about for nonepistemic reasons.89 (ii) The state of having the goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true seems also to be a state that I can induce in myself for nonepistemic reasons. At least some of my goals are objectives that I set myself for non-epistemic reasons, that is to say, while being, at least, disposed to state my motivation in an explanation of why I set myself this goal. Now nothing in the teleological account, as such, precludes my goal of regarding a proposition as true only if it is true from being a goal that I can assign to myself for non-epistemic reasons. For instance, the aim of regarding propositions dealing about the history of France as true only they are true is a goal that I can ascribe to myself just because I want to avoid looking ignorant in front of my friends. CONCLUSIONS Let me try to summarise the main points that I tried to make in this chapter. 1. Regarding the possibility of acquiring beliefs directly for nonepistemic reasons: I tried to show that the explanation of the intuition according to which it is impossible to acquire beliefs directly for non-epistemic reasons lies in the following fact: It is impossible for a subject S to consider both that the mental state he acquired is a belief and that he acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason.90 89

As Velleman states: “Whatever regarding-as-true turns out to be, it will still be involved in more than believing, since it will be involved, for example, in supposing or assuming, and in propositional imagining as well”. Velleman (2000b), p. 250. 90 For a very similar conclusion see Pojman (1985) and (1992). More recently, Engel (1999) and Frankish (2007).

61 That is, the explanation lies in a conceptual truth about beliefs, a statement to the effect that the concept of belief is such that we cannot categorize a mental state as a belief in such and such conditions. It is also endowed with the kind of necessity that characterizes conceptual truths.91 Necessarily, acquiring a belief is not a thing that I am able to do directly for a non-epistemic reason as I can move my body for a non-epistemic reason. This conclusion provides us with a negative but nevertheless important result regarding the more general goal of understanding the conditions under which people are responsible for their belief acquisitions. The sort of doxastic responsibility, which can properly be attributed to believers, is not analogous to the sort of responsibility, which can properly be attributed to agents for the bodily movements they directly perform for reasons. If people are sometimes responsible for their belief acquisitions, it is not in the way they are responsible for the bodily movements they directly perform for reasons. I will call the thesis to the effect that doxastic responsibility, if such a thing exists, is more restricted than practical responsibility, i.e. responsibility for actions, the thesis of limited doxastic responsibility. I also observed that the conclusion concerning my inability to consider my mental state to be a belief when I simultaneously consider that I acquire this mental state for a non-epistemic reason (W) has to be distinguished from the claim which concerns the possibility of being directly caused to acquire beliefs by desires which are not reasons, that 91

It is interesting to relate this conclusion to the general topic of the “normativity of belief” by stating that the claim: “it is impossible for a subject S to consider his mental state vis-à-vis p to be a belief that p, if he acquired this mental state for a non-epistemic reason” naturally leads to the formulation of the following norm of belief: “a mental state does not count as a belief if you acquired it for a nonepistemic reason, so you should not consider such a mental state a belief”. If the latter is a norm, this is a conceptual or constitutive norm: a norm telling us what a belief is, under which conditions a mental state counts as a belief and then what we should take as beliefs and what we should avoid considering as such. This sort of norm does not necessarily conflict with, and needs to be distinguished from, norms telling us under which conditions a belief is correct. For instance, it does not clash with Wedgwood’s “fundamental epistemic norm”, roughly, the principle that a belief is correct if and only if the proposition believed is true. See Wedgwood (2002).

62 is, thesis (U). Thesis (U), I said, is at least potentially correct. If this is so, there is no reason to dismiss the possibility that people can be held responsible for their unconscious belief acquisitions in the way they can be held responsible for their bodily movements when they qualify as activities. More concretely, the last statements have the following consequences: even if the only way of saving my friend’s life is to believe that the Swiss football team won the European Championship, I cannot be held responsible for not having acquired this belief directly for this nonepistemic reason.92 The reason why I cannot be held responsible in this case is not similar to the reason why I cannot be held responsible for not having helped him when I am tied to a tree. In the former case, I am, not contingently, but necessarily, unable to acquire the belief that the Swiss football team won the European Championship directly for a nonepistemic reason. Now let us imagine that I have unconsciously and directly induced the acquisition of this belief by my devouring passion for the Swiss performances. In this case, it is appropriate to hold me responsible for having acquired this belief. Of course, this does not involve that I deserve to be strongly blamed or praised for it. At least, not more than when I am unconsciously driven to perform a bodily movement by one of my desires. 2. Regarding the distinction between beliefs and others kinds of mental states like imagining, assuming, accepting propositions. 2.1 I tried to show that premise 2*, unlike premise 2**, refers to a feature of beliefs that distinguishes them from other kinds of mental states. Two results support this conclusion: 2.1.1 Premise 2* accounts for the initial intuition according to which it is impossible to acquire a belief directly for a non– epistemic reason while it is possible to acquire states of imagining directly for non-epistemic reasons; 2.2.2 Premise 2* provides an explanation of transparency, which is a specific feature of deliberation about what to believe. 92

I could probably be blamed for not having this reason, i.e., for not desiring saving my friend.

63 2.2 Finally, I tried to show that the supporter of the teleological account not only has problems explaining transparency but seems also to encounter difficulties when he tries to explain the initial intuition just mentioned.

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CHAPTER 3: THEORETICAL AND PASCALIAN CONTROL Let me recall briefly the strategy at work in the previous chapters. I claimed that the acquisition of belief needed to be something that we can perform for reasons in order to be distinguished from activities and mere bodily happenings and to qualify as something we can be held fully responsible for. I noticed that there are direct and indirect ways of performing actions for reasons. When I raise my finger in order to ask a question, my raising my finger —like many bodily movements— is directly performed for a reason in the sense that I do not need to perform another more basic action in order to raise my finger. When I switch on the light, my action of switching on the light is indirectly performed in the sense that I need to perform another more basic action; I need to flip the switch. One of the conclusions of my last chapter was that it is impossible to acquire a belief, directly, for a reason, while it is possible to move our body, directly, for a reason. More accurately, cases in which I would acquire a belief directly for an epistemic reason seem self-contradictory while it is impossible to acquire a belief directly for a non-epistemic reason. Our concept of belief is such that we cannot consider a mental state acquired for a non-epistemic reason to be a belief. Accordingly, if there is such a thing as doxastic responsibility, it is more limited than practical responsibility. In this chapter, I consider whether beliefs can be acquired indirectly for epistemic or non-epistemic reasons and describe the various forms that the indirect way of acquiring beliefs could take. Before getting into the heart of the matter, I need to make two preliminary remarks. First preliminary remark The hypothesis that beliefs can be acquired indirectly for non-epistemic reasons raises an immediate worry. To see this, let me recall the example I provided in order to illustrate such a case. A mother has evidence that her son stole money from her purse. But she acquires the belief that he did not do it, for a non-epistemic reason, because she is afraid to spoil her relationship with him by believing the contrary. I already said that the action by which the mother acquires her belief consists in modifying in the relevant way the set of evidence she

65 possesses. What I did not mention is that the modification of her evidence is not just one action among others that she could have picked in order to satisfy her desire. In order to acquire the belief that pleases her, the mother has to perform the action of modifying the evidence she possesses. And the reason why this is so appears now more clearly: it is impossible for the mother to acquire the belief that her son did not steal directly, just because she thinks this is a good thing to believe. The only possible way of acquiring the belief for this reason is indirect and consists in providing herself with what she thinks will cause the acquisition of the belief that her son did not steal from her, that is to say, evidence that her son did not do it. But this description is problematic. It does not seem that the mother can have kept in mind her original reason at the moment she acquires the belief that her son did not steal from her. At one point in the process, which leads from her starting to modify the set of her evidence to the moment just before the acquisition of the belief, it seems that she must have forgotten93 that she is acting like this in order to acquire the belief that pleases her. This also follows from the previously discussed premise according to which people cannot consider the mental state they acquire to be a belief if they acquire it for a non-epistemic reason. Does this make acquisitions of belief for non-epistemic reasons impossible? I would like to consider and reject two main temptations to think so. First, we could be tempted to say that it is impossible to forget the reason why I perform an action while I am performing it. This is perhaps true regarding direct performances of action or performances of bodily movements. Maybe, I cannot forget the reason why I raise my finger, while I am raising my finger for a reason. However that may be, I’m interested in the possibility of forgetting my reason for performing an 93

Note that forgetting the initial non-epistemic reason is not an absolute necessity. Suppose that the mother tells you this: “I remember that I wanted to acquire the belief that my son is not guilty and that I started trying to convince myself that this was the case. Fortunately for me, I did not have to try further since I now have new evidence that he did not steal money from my purse and am able to believe this on that ground.” If the new evidence the mother put forward is evidence she actually possesses as a result of her own unconscious manipulation, then she acquires her belief, indirectly, for a non-epistemic reason while remembering her original motivation. The only impossible thing is that the mother thinks that she acquires this belief for the non-epistemic reason she remembers having.

66 action while I am indirectly performing this action and, as the following example tends to show, this is certainly possible. Suppose that I start cooking a nice “boeuf bourguignon” for my friend Chris for the reason that I know how much he loves French dishes and because I want to please him. While the dish is slowly cooking on my oven, I unfortunately slip on an onion skin and fall. I seriously injure myself in this accident to the point that I completely forget that the reason why I am cooking a “boeuf bourguignon” was that I want to please my friend Chris. Second, we could be tempted to say that if I completely forget the reason why I am performing an action, this action does not count as an action performed for a reason, when performed. As I said in the first chapter of this work, it is certainly true that my bodily movement qualifies as an action performed for a reason only if I am disposed to mention the reason why I am performing this bodily movement while I’m performing it. But this is not valid for actions which are not as basic as bodily movements. Once my “boeuf bourguignon” has finished cooking, once the action of cooking a “boeuf bourguignon” is performed, it certainly counts as an action performed for a reason even if I forgot the reason why I started performing this action while I am performing it, i.e. while the “boeuf bourguignon” is getting prepared in my kitchen. Analogously, once the mother acquired the belief that her son did not steal from her by manipulating her evidence, her acquiring this belief qualifies as something that she performed for a non-epistemic reason even if she had to forget her initial motivation. According to what I mean by “an indirect acquisition of a belief for a non-epistemic reason”, the belief that p is acquired, indirectly, for a nonepistemic reason if the action of modifying the set of evidence, by which the believer acquires his belief, was initiated by a non-epistemic reason, no matter that the believer forgets his initial reason. I concede that this is not the most common way of deceiving ourselves. Most of the time, there is no initial non-epistemic reason. We are just caused to modify the set of our evidence by unconscious desires not to believe what our current set of evidence supports. I have only tried to show that cases in which people have non-epistemic reasons to change their mind, and, finally, change their mind as a causal result of this initial reason, are not inconceivable.

67 Even so my attention in this chapter will be mainly focussed on a much more common phenomenon: cases in which people acquire a belief as a causal result of an initial epistemic reason, as a result of a desire to acquire a true belief about a topic. Second preliminary remark My second preliminary remark is terminological. Until now, the question I addressed was formulated in terms of the possibility of a belief being acquired, directly or indirectly, for a reason (epistemic or non-epistemic). I expressed myself in this way because, according to me, the vocabulary of the philosophy of action better illuminates what exactly is the interesting and difficult philosophical question when, roughly said, philosophers try to understand whether and how beliefs can be motivated rather than just caused. Now there is another way of formulating the same question. Instead of asking whether beliefs can be directly or indirectly acquired for reasons, many philosophers rather ask whether we can directly or indirectly control our belief acquisitions or whether belief acquisitions are under our direct or indirect control. This is for instance the case with William Alston whose objections I am about to consider. For the sake of understanding, it is necessary that I adapt my terminology to Alston’s. When I speak below of “the acquisition of a belief being under my indirect control”, this means the same thing as “my indirect acquisition of a belief for a reason (epistemic or non-epistemic)”. An important thing to say already is that even if the exercise of control is necessary, most of the time94, for ascribing responsibility, the notion of control is not equivalent to the notion of responsibility. According to this conception of control, a person can have control over the performance of his action without being responsible for it. I tackle the problem of the conditions under which someone is responsible for the action performed under his control in the following chapter.

94

Sometimes, people are held responsible for the unwanted consequences of their actions. In these cases, they are responsible for something that they did not want to induce and, therefore, for something that they did not control in the sense specified above. In this case, Alston claims, people actually exercised indirect influence on the performance of their non-basic actions. See Alston (1988), p. 278. For the sake of simplicity, I am momentarily going to leave this option aside and will consider it separately at the end of this chapter.

68 TWO FORMS OF INDIRECT DOXASTIC CONTROL If I am right to think that belief acquisitions can be motivated either by epistemic or by non-epistemic reasons, then indirect control of belief acquisitions can potentially take two forms: 1. I exercised theoretical control over the acquisition of a belief if and only if, I acquire this belief by performing one or several more basic action(s) consisting in a truth-oriented modification of my current set of evidence and my performance of the more basic action(s) is motivated by an epistemic reason, i.e., a desire to acquire a true belief about a topic; 2. I exercised Pascalian control over the acquisition of a belief if and only if, I acquire this belief by performing one or several more basic action(s) consisting in a manipulative modification of my current set of evidence95 and my performance of the more basic action(s) is motivated by a non-epistemic reason, i.e., a desire to acquire a pleasant, useful, belief. I believe the exercise of the first form of control is very frequent. Moreover, even if the second form of indirect control is clearly less commonly exercised, I do not think that it is completely insignificant. William Alston famously argued that we did not possess any of the forms of control of belief acquisition that would ground the ascription of responsibility. According to Alston, doxastic control is not only limited as I previously concluded but (almost completely) nonexistent. My goal below is to reply to the objections that some of Alston’s claims represent for the two aforementioned forms of indirect doxastic control.

95

The truth-oriented or manipulative modification of my current set of evidence might be indirect. When I indirectly modify my current of evidence, what I initially modify is my cognitive habits or competencies. The modification of my current set of evidence results from this initial and intentional change in my habits. Instead of directly changing her present set of evidence in order to end with a set supporting the truth of the proposition that her child is innocent, the mother of the example above could have cultivated the disposition of being naïve every time the honesty of her child is concerned. Thanks to Klemens Kappel for having helped me to see this point.

69 Theoretical control As I said, I exercise theoretical control over a belief acquisition if I acquire a belief, for an epistemic reason, by collecting new pieces of evidence. For instance, if I want to acquire a true belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” and acquire a belief about the spelling of this word by opening a dictionary at the relevant page, I exercised theoretical control of the acquisition of such a belief. Alston’s objection against theoretical control As Alston notices theoretical control seems to be similar to the indirect control that I exercise when I perform the action of turning on the light by performing a more basic action —flipping the switch— as a causal result of my desire to turn on the light. There is, indeed, some similarity between the theoretical control that I exercise when I acquire a belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” and the control that I exercise when I perform the action of turning on the light. Both involve control of the performance of a non-basic action by performing a more basic one. In view of this, it seems appropriate, at first sight, to claim that I have theoretical control of the beliefs acquired by collecting new pieces of evidence —consulting a dictionary, opening the door to know what happens behind it, etc.— as I have indirect control of the non-basic actions performed by completing a more basic action—the action of turning on the light by flipping the switch, of opening a door by kicking it, etc. But, Alston objects, this would be ignoring: “the difference between doing A in order to bring about E, for some definite E, and doing A so that some effect within a certain range will ensue. In order that the ‘looking for more evidence’ phenomenon would show that we have immediate voluntary control over propositional attitudes in basically the way we do over the positions of doors and light switches it would have to be the case that the search for evidence was undertaken with the intention of taking up a certain particular attitude toward a particular proposition. For only in that case

70 would the outcome show that we have exercised voluntary control over what propositional attitude we take up.”96 Alston’s claim, with which I agree, is that there is a discrepancy between the theoretical control I exercise when I acquire a belief by opening a dictionary and the control I exercise when I turn on the light by flipping the switch. In the former case, the acquisition of the particular belief that p causally results from a desire to know whether p or not-p. In the latter case, the performance of a particular action, the action of turning on the light in this room, and not in any other room, causally results from a particular desire to turn on the light in this room.97 Reply to Alston’s objection against theoretical control I would like to reply to Alston’s objection by providing an example in which (i) it seems that the agent has control over the performance of his action, and (ii) the form of control he exercises is strictly analogous to theoretical control. Here I such an example: Nestor is the manager of a building standing in the neighbourhood of an airport. Every evening, he is in charge of flipping a switch in order to turn on one of the four neon signs located on the roof of this building. This is an action that Nestor performs every day, at nightfall, since it reduces the probability of accident when aircrafts are landing. The lighting system is conceived in such a way that it takes the orientation of the wind into account. When Nestor’s action is, as a matter of fact, the action of turning on the east neon sign, it does not 96

Alston (1988), p. 271. According to Alston, there is a second reason to believe that the immediate control of non-basic actions has no analogue in the doxastic realm. When I want to acquire a belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”, I am not always warranted to acquire a belief about the spelling of this word. My investigation may result in the suspension of my judgment. I do not think this constitutes a genuine dissimilarity. When I flip the switch in order to turn on my bedside lamp, it might also be the case that I do not succeed in performing the action that I want to perform, for instance, if the bulb of my lamp is spoiled. I do not control all the causal factors that will lead me to perform successfully the action of turning on the light, as I do not control all the causal factors that will lead me to acquire a belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”.

97

71 result from his desire to perform this particular action, but from his desire to turn on one of the neon signs whichever. The action of turning on the east neon sign is not performed under his control but the action of turning on one of the neon signs whichever is under his control. To be sure, in case of an accident due to Nestor’s failure to switch on one of the neon sign, it seems inappropriate to excuse Nestor by claiming that he had no control of the turning on of the neon signs. Alston also presents such an example: “I am a servant and I am motivated to bring the door into whatever position my employer chooses. He has an elaborate electronic system that involves automatic control of many aspects of the household, including doors. Each morning he leaves detailed instructions on household operations in a computer. Doors can only be operated through the computer in accordance with his instructions. There is no way in which I can carry out an intention of my own to open or to close a door. All I can do is to actuate the relevant program, and let things take their course. Since the employer’s instructions will be carried out only if I actuate the program, I am responsible for the doors’ assuming that whatever position he specified, just as I was responsible for taking up some attitude or other toward some proposition within a given range. But I most emphatically am not responsible for the front door’s being open rather than closed, nor can I be said to have voluntary control over its specific position… I had no control over that; it was not subject to my will. And that’s the way it is where the only voluntary control I have over my propositional attitudes is to enter onto an investigation that will eventuate in some propositional attitude or other, depending on what is uncovered. That would be no basis for holding me responsible for believing that p rather rejecting or withholding it, no basis for requiring me or forbidding me to believe that p, or for reproaching me for doing so.”98

98

Alston (1989), p. 272.

72 It is crucial to note that Alston does not deny that the agent of his example exercises a form of indirect control. 1. The agent has control over the door assuming whatever position his employer specified; 2. But the agent does not have control over the front door being open rather than closed. The same thing is, of course, true for Nestor. 1* Nestor has control over his turning on one of the neon signs whichever (or over his making one of the neon signs be turned on); 2* But Nestor does not have control over his turning on one particular neon sign (or of his making one particular neon sign be turned on). On the one hand, this looks like a very plausible suggestion. Nestor really does not seem to have control of his switching on a particular neon sign, for instance, the east neon sign. Suppose that the system did not work properly last Monday. Consequently, Nestor turned on the west neon sign rather than the east one and this nearly caused a crash. Clearly, Nestor is not responsible for having performed the action of turning on the west neon sign rather than the east one and this is because he has no control of his switching on a particular neon sign. Suppose now that the system works perfectly and that Nestor performs the action of turning on the east neon sign. On the other hand, claiming that Nestor has control of his switching on one of the neon signs whichever without attributing control for having switched on the east neon could sound odd. After all, if Nestor succeeds in switching on one of the neon signs, this entails that he succeeds in switching on a particular neon sign, either the east one, or the west one, etc. This seems true because the property, possessed by Nestor’s action, of making one of the neon signs whichever be switched on is a determinable property under which falls the property of making the east neon sign be switched on and the property of making the west neon sign be switched on, etc.99 “A determinable property —if such a thing existed— would be a property which can be possessed by a thing only by being

99

I am grateful to Olivier Massin for having helped me to establish this parallel.

73 possessed in one or another specific value or form, where the various possible values or forms are mutually incompatible”.100 For instance, the property of being coloured would be a determinable property since a thing can be coloured only by being, specifically, blue or red or brown, etc. The properties by which one determinable property D is possibly possessed constitute the various determinate properties that fall under D. We are tempted to think that Nestor having control of his switching on one of the neon signs whichever implies that he has control of his switching on the east neon sign and the explanation of this inclination certainly lies in the fact that the property of making one of the neon signs whichever be switched on is a determinable property which can be possessed by his action only by being possessed in one or another specific form. That is to say, only if his action is an action of making the east neon sign be switched on or an action of making the west neon sign be switched on, etc. Roughly speaking, if someone has control over the occurrence of a determinable property, it seems that he also has control over the occurrence of one of the determinate properties that fall under this determinable property. Now, there are two ways of specifying claims 1* and 2* depending on which metaphysical view we adopt regarding the existence of determinable properties. Reductionist and non-reductionist conceptions of determinable properties According to the first metaphysical view, there are no determinable properties. The only existing properties are determinate properties. What seems to be a determinable property actually consists in various determinate properties disjunctively related. The following are reformulations of statements 1* and 2* that take seriously the reductionist conception of determinable properties: 1∪ Nestor has control over his action exemplifying the disjunctive property of making either the east neon sign be switched on or the west neon sign be switched on, etc;

100

Elder (1996), p. 150.

74 2∪ But Nestor has no control over his action exemplifying the determinate property of making the east neon sign be switched on. According to the second metaphysical view, determinable properties are genuine components of the world as much as determinate properties.101 Here are reformulations of claims 1* and 2* grounded on the second metaphysical conception of determinable properties: 1D Nestor has control over his action exemplifying the determinable property of making one of the neon signs be switched on; 2D But Nestor has no control over his action exemplifying the determinate property of making the east neon sign be switched on. I do not want to take a stance in the debate bearing upon the metaphysics of determinable properties. Rather I would like to consider what the implications of each of these metaphysical views are for our understanding of theoretical control. To begin with, I will consider what happens when one assumes, like the first metaphysical conception, that determinable properties do not exist. If 1∪ and 2∪ are both true, then the principle C∪, which is supposed to rule the attribution of control in Nestor case, is wrong. C∪ If S has control of his action a being F or G, etc., then S has control of a being F or S has control of a being G, etc. Here is a more formal expression of the principle C∪: C∪(Fa ∪ Ga) ⊃ C(Fa) ∪ C(Ga) When I started considering these ideas, my initial thoughts were that principle C∪ really rules the attribution of theoretical control and that I need to find a reason to reject either claim 1∪ or claim 2∪. Indeed, there is something intuitively appealing in the statement that if I have control of the door being open or closed, when it is the case that the door is open rather than closed, I have control of the door being in this state. As we 101

Briefly said, the main challenge faced by the supporters of the second metaphysical conception is that of showing that determinable properties are something more than just a disjunction of determinate properties. See Elder (1996).

75 are going to see, this intuition is misleading and it is probably explained by the fallacious tendency to consider the attribution of control as working analogously to the distribution of truth-values in the truth table of disjunction. To see this, it is important to make clear that to have control of my action a being F is to have control over the actual exemplification by a of the property F. To say it differently, to have control of my action a being F is to have control of “a is F” being true. This can be formalized in this way: C(Fa) = C[(Fa) being true] Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for propriety G: C (Ga) = C[(Ga) being true]. The same is, mutatis mutandis, also true for the disjunctive property of being Fa ∪ Ga: C(Fa ∪ Ga) =C[(Fa ∪ Ga) being true] To have control of a being F ∪ G is to have control over the actual exemplification by a of the disjunctive property of being F ∪ G. Recall now the truth table of disjunction. If (Fa ∪ Ga) is true, either [(Fa) is true ∩ (Ga) is false], or [(Ga) is true ∩ (Fa) is false] or [(Fa) is true ∩ (Ga) is true]. If the attribution of theoretical control is C(Fa) C(Ga) C(Fa ∪ Ga) modelled on the truth table of the 1 1 1 disjunction, then C∪ is correct. When a 1 0 1 subject S has control over [(Fa ∪ Ga) 1 1 being true], either S has control over [(Fa) 0 0 0 being true ∩ (Ga) being false], or S has 0 control over [(Ga) being true ∩ (Fa) being false] or S has control over [( Fa) being true ∩ (Ga) being true]. But why should we think that theoretical control is ruled analogously to the distribution of truth-values to propositions? The explanation why we are prone to accept this idea probably lies in the natural propensity to apply the logical framework of the disjunction. Once we are conscious of this misleading tendency, the only thing that the truth table of the disjunction teaches us is that when a subject S has

76 control of [(Fa ∪ Ga) being true], then, either (Fa) is true, or (Ga) is true or [(Fa) ∩ (Ga)] is true. The truth table of the disjunction does not teach us that it is impossible for S to have control of a being F or G without having control of a being F or of a being G. Now let me consider briefly what happens if one prefers the second metaphysical conception according to which determinable properties are genuine constituents of the world. Claims 1D and 2D imply the denial of the principle CD. CD If S has control of his action a possessing a determinable property D, then S has control of a possessing the determinate properties that fall under the determinable property D. My impression is that CD lacks the intuitive but misleading appeal of C∪. We are less tempted to spread out control in the way suggested by principle C∪ when we assume the existence of determinable properties. This is probably explained by the fact that we are less prone to apply the relational framework of the determinable-determinate properties than the logical framework of the disjunction. Let me go back to Nestor’s case. The last considerations show that nothing prevents claims 1* and 2* from both being true. The fact that Nestor has control of his turning on one of the neon signs whichever does not imply that Nestor does not have control of his turning on one particular neon sign. Moreover, claims 1* and 2* can both be true even though the property of making one of the neon signs whichever be turned on consists in a determinable property or in a disjunction of determinate properties. Now it is time to apply all this to the doxastic domain. The sort of control exercised by Nestor is analogous to theoretical control, the sort of control that I exercise when I acquire belief by collecting new pieces of evidence as a causal result of my desire to acquire a true belief about a topic. That is to say, the following principle does not rule the ascription of theoretical control: TC If a believer B has control of his acquiring a belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”, then B has control of his acquiring the belief that the word “ornithorhynchus” has three “h”s.

77 That is to say, when I acquire a belief that the word “ornithorhynchus” has three “h”s as a result of my desire to acquire a true belief about this topic, the acquisition of a belief about this topic is under my theoretical control. But the acquisition of the belief that the word “ornithorhynchus” has three “h”s is not something of which I had any control. Alston himself recognized the existence of theoretical control. But he considers it insignificant. “Consider propositions concerning what is visible. I have the power to open my eyes and look about me, thereby putting myself in a position, when conditions are favourable, to reliably form propositions about the visible environment. No one, I suppose, would take this to show that I have immediate voluntary control over what I believe about the visible environment or about my remembered experiences. And yet this is essentially the same sort of thing as the search for additional evidence, differing only in the type of belief forming mechanism involved.”102 Before concluding the discussion about theoretical control, I would like briefly to answer this criticism. Alston’s claim above is twofold. First, he contends that theoretical control is very commonly ascribed. People exercise this sort of control every time they put themselves in a position which makes them likely to acquire a true belief about a topic. For instance, when I open a door in order to acquire a belief about what happens behind it or when I turn my head in order to acquire a belief about the origin of a noise. I agree with Alston on this point. It is true that the control I exercise when I acquire a belief by performing a scientific experiment or by consulting a dictionary belongs to the same kind as the one I exercise when I acquire a belief about a noise beside me by turning my head. They differ only quantitatively regarding the complexity of the means by which I acquire my belief. But I do not see —as Alston states secondly— why we should say that I do not exercise any control when I acquire a belief by performing such a simple movement as turning my head, opening a door, etc. Indeed, it is 102

Alston (1988), pp. 272-3. This is probably Alston’s strategy to avoid recognizing the possible existence of epistemic duties while having to accept the existence of this kind of epistemic responsibility.

78 really because I want to know what makes a noise behind me that I turn my head and in turn acquire a belief about what makes this noise. The movement of turning my head is something that I perform for the reason that I want to acquire a belief about the origin of this noise. I do not see why we should deny that I exercise some control of the acquisition of a belief bearing upon the origin of this noise. Let me try to summarise the last considerations. First, we noticed that the control that I exercise when I turn on the light in my room as a result of my desire to turn on the light is not strictly analogous to the theoretical control I exercise when I acquire a belief about a topic by collecting new pieces of evidence as a result of my desire to acquire a true belief about this topic. Nevertheless, it is possible to conceive examples, like Nestor’s example, in which the control exercised over the performance of an action is completely analogous to the theoretical control. In these cases, the agent controls the performance of, what I will call his determinable action, for instance, the action of switching on one of the neon signs whichever. But he does not control the performance of his determinate action that falls under the determinable one, for instance, the determinate action of switching on the east neon sign. Analogously, when I acquire the belief that there is no milk left in the fridge by opening the door of the fridge, for the reason that I want to know about my stock of milk, I exercise control of the acquisition of a determinable belief, the content of which concerns my stock of milk. But I do not exercise control of the acquisition of the determinate belief that there is no milk left. Consequently, I believe Alston is wrong to deny any relevance to theoretical control. Theoretical control is a common form of control, which is certainly able to ground the ascription of responsibility.103

103

If I want acquire the belief that the light is on in my room, I can control the acquisition of this particular belief simply by performing the action of turning on the light in my room. This is certainly another form of indirect doxastic control that people are able to exercise. However, I am not going to discuss this form of control further in this work. As Feldman notices, indeed, “we do not often exercise this control and our ability to control our belief in this way is epistemically insignificant”. Feldman (2004), p. 171. By contrast, theoretical control is frequently exercised and is undoubtedly significant.

79 Pascalian control The second form of control that I would like to discuss owes its name to the sort of control that Blaise Pascal suggests his reader to exercise in order to believe in God: “You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness”.104 I exercise Pascalian control over the acquisition of a belief when I acquire this belief for a non-epistemic reason by performing a number of actions which can jointly be described as a manipulation of my evidence.105 This is the form of indirect control that the mother in the example above exercises when she acquires the belief that her son did not steal money from her purse. Alston’s objection against Pascalian control As Alton noticed, we definitely exercise what looks like an analogous form of control over our actions. It is the case when the non-basic action that we want to achieve requires that we perform many more basic actions repeatedly, over a period of time.106 Losing weight, preparing a 104

Pascal (1909), p. 87. Pascal’s suggestion is that his reader should act as if he believes in God in order to believe in God. Hence, what Pascal has in mind seems more similar to what I previously called the indirect modification of our current set of evidence. See note 3 above. He suggests the reader to change his habits in order to modify gradually what he considers as being true and in order to be finally able to believe in God. I am very grateful to Daniel Schulthess for pressing for clarification. 105 Govier also makes use of the expression “Pascalian control” in Govier (1976). He has something quite similar in mind as well. He says: “Pascalian control over belief works as follow: one decides that it would be a good thing if he believed something; one thinks of actions he could take which would be likely to result in his coming to hold this belief; one takes this actions; and, if all works well, one then believes as desired”. Govier (1976), p. 652. 106 See Alston (1988), p. 274.

80 Christmas dinner, are actions the achievement of which necessitates the performances of many more basic actions. But, Alston objects, beyond this appearance of similarity, we do not exercise Pascalian control as we control the achievement of non-basic actions by performing many more basic ones. Here is a reformulation of his objection: 1. Even if people sometimes succeed in acquiring beliefs for non-epistemic reason by manipulating their evidence, this is rarely the case; 2. People exercise control of the performance of an action only if they are successful when they try hard enough; Then 3. People do not exercise Pascalian control.107 Reply to Alston’s objection against Pascalian control It is certainly true that the probability of success if I try to acquire a belief for a non-epistemic reason by manipulating my evidence is low. However premise 2 deserves further investigation. Premise 2 of Alston’s argument is ambiguous between two interpretations depending on whether it refers to an action the performance of which is achieved (2.1) or an action the performance of which is planned or considered (2.2). 2.1 People exercise control of the performance of an action only if their attempt to perform it is successful. This merely means that a person’s failure to perform an action is not under his control when his chance of succeeding is so low that he actually fails. That is to say, a person’s failure is not under his control when a lack of motivation, a lack of enthusiasm, etc., is not what saliently explains why he fails. Interpreted in this way, Alston’s objection is just missing its target. It says something about control in general and does not concern specifically doxastic control. As long as the unavoidable intervention of some external causal factors is what explains my actual failure to acquire a belief for a non-epistemic reason, my failure was not under my control. This is true even if the probability of succeeding is high. As long as I have been caused to fail by the unlucky interference of external events, my failure is not under my control no matter how important my real chance of succeeding generally is. 107

See Alston (1988), p. 276.

81 The second way of understanding Alston’s objection consists in interpreting 2 in the following way: 2.2 People exercise control over the performance of an action only if they are generally successful in performing this kind of action when they try hard enough. This implies that people can never be held responsible or blamed for having failed to perform an action when their probability of succeeding was low. The problem is that this is very often not true. Suppose that I learn that my chance of succeeding at an exam is very low even if I have worked very intensively. If I do not present myself to my exam, you could be tempted to blame me for not having taken my chance. Here is another example that challenges the general idea according to which control is ruled out when the bringing about of a state of affairs is very improbable. When I take a plane, the probability that I perturb the normal functioning of the flight instruments by keeping my mobile phone switched on is very low. However, stewardesses blame passengers for not having switched off their mobile phone. This, obviously, implies that passengers exercise a form control of what they are doing. More accurately, I believe that passengers have control over the action of increasing the probability of accident. To say it differently, they have control over their not trying to avoid an accident and, in the example above, I have control over my trying to pass my exam.108 In brief, I think Alston’s objection does not provide sufficient grounds to think that we do not exercise Pascalian control or that Pascalian control is unable to ground the ascription of responsibility. Moreover, the discussion of Alston’s objection makes clear the importance of our trying to exercise indirect doxastic control. Even if our attempts to acquire a belief, indirectly, for a non-epistemic reason are most often

108

This is a reply that Alston anticipates when he claims: “I might be blamed for not trying to produce it or for not trying hard enough, but that is another matter”. But this is not another matter. What I hope I have shown by presenting the alternative interpretation is that Alston’s objection inevitably leads to the consideration of our trying to perform actions. See Alston (1988), p. 276.

82 unsuccessful, it might remain true that we should sometimes have tried to exercise such control.109 Indirect doxastic influence on belief acquisitions To be complete, I need to say a few words about what I shall call our indirect influence over belief acquisitions since it allows for the attribution of doxastic responsibility in certain circumstances.110 The most important thing to notice is that indirect influence does not constitute a form of indirect control over belief acquisitions in the sense that a belief acquisition which results from the exercise of such influence is not acquired for a reason, i.e. is unintentional. 109

It is useful to relate Hieronymi’s views regarding doxastic control to my own distinction between theoretical control and Pascalian control. In Hieronymi (2009), Hieronymi distinguishes between two forms of control exercised over beliefs (and intentions): evaluative control and managerial control. The conception of these two forms of control relies on a certain assumption: “the assumption that certain of our attitudes embody our answer to a question or set of questions”. (p. 36) Beliefs are such attitudes. Believing that p embodies a positive answer to the question of whether p in the sense that if one settles for oneself positively the question of whether p then one believes p. Note that this assumption refers to something very similar, if not identical, to the transparency of our doxastic deliberation discussed in chapter 2. Now, evaluative control, Hieronymi says, is the form of control that we exercise over beliefs by revising one’s answer to the question whether p, that is by revising our take on things. By contrast, managerial control is the form of control exercised when we act upon our beliefs “so as to affect them according to our purposes, in roughly the way we can act upon any object”. (p.1) We can take steps designed to bring it about that we believe that p. You can manipulate your beliefs “by providing reasons for yourself”, by undergoing hypnosis, inducing amnesia, or convincing yourself that an alternative interpretation of your situation is equally justified, and so successfully change your attitudes. (pp. 5-6) Contrary to evaluative control, to exercise managerial control is undoubtedly to exercise agency. Clearly, theoretical control and Pascalian control are two distinct forms of managerial control. Regarding evaluative control now, as Hieronymi states, exercising evaluative control is not exercising full-blooded agency since evaluative control does not display the most familiar features of agency. If this is so, evaluative control is not sufficient to ground the attribution of doxastic responsibility. This allows me to leave the consideration of our exercising evaluative control aside in this study. 110 See Alston (1988), pp. 278ff.

83 I exercise my indirect influence over the performance of an action A when I perform A unintentionally by performing another action for a reason. For instance, when I worsen my cholesterol level by accepting five servings of foie gras, my worsening of my cholesterol level is something over which I have indirect influence —and for which I am possibly responsible—even if I did not eat all this foie gras for the reason that I want to worsen my cholesterol level. Analogously, suppose that I acquired the belief that my flatmate takes drugs by opening his pharmacy kit to find an aspirin. Since the reason why I acquired this belief is not that I wanted to know whether my flatmate takes drugs, the acquisition of this belief is something over which I merely exercised an indirect influence. Nevertheless, this is something for which I could be held responsible in certain circumstances. To conclude I would like to provide some schematic descriptions of what happens when a subject S acquires a belief as a result of his having exercised theoretical control, Pascalian control and indirect influence respectively.

84 Theoretical control S acquires the belief that p as a result of his having exercised theoretical control over the acquisition of a belief the content of which deals with the truth of the proposition p. 1. S desires to acquire a true belief about the truth of the proposition p.

2. S performs one or several actions consisting in providing himself with different pieces of evidence, which he thinks will cause him to acquire a true belief about the truth of the proposition p. His action(s) can also be described as a truth-oriented modification of his current set of evidence For instance, S turns his head to the left, S opens a dictionary, S carries out a scientific experiment, etc.

3. S acquires the supposedly true belief that p on the ground of the modified set of pieces of evidence which he possesses and which support p.

85 Pascalian control S acquires the belief that p as a result of his having exercised Pascalian control of the acquisition of a belief that p. 1. S desires to acquire the pleasant belief that p. 2. S performs one or several actions consisting in providing himself with different pieces of evidence, which he thinks will cause him to acquire the belief that p. His action(s) can also be described as a manipulative modification of his current set of evidence. For instance, S asks a hypnotist to make him forget some of the beliefs he already possesses, avoids reading some newspapers, watches exclusively racist programs on television, etc. 3. S acquires the supposedly pleasant belief that p on the ground of the modified set of pieces of evidence which he possesses and which support p. Indirect influence S acquires the belief that p as a result of his having exercised indirect influence over the acquisition of the belief that p. 1. S desires to perform an action for a reason. e 2. S performs one or several actions, which consists in providing himself with different pieces of evidence but which is unintentional under this description, i.e., the action of providing himself with pieces of evidence is not an action that S performs for a reason. 3. S acquires the belief that p on the ground of the modified set of evidence which he possesses and which supports p.

86 There are a few important comments to make regarding these schematic descriptions. First concerning the two arrows of each schema. They refer to the two causal relationships in virtue of which the acquisition of the belief that p is indirect. The continuous line arrow represents relationships that are not only causal. For instance, S’s desire to acquire a true belief about the truth of p is the cause but also part of the motivating reason why he performs the action of opening the dictionary. By contrast, the dotted line arrows represent mere causal relationships. S having different pieces of evidence is not a motivating reason to acquire a belief but only what causes the acquisition of a belief. When the initial motivating reason is epistemic, if S is asked why he acquired the belief that p, the most accurate explanation he can give is that some of his actions —looking behind him, inquiring, etc.— provided him with a set of evidence supporting the truth of p and the reason why he performed these actions is originally that he desired to acquire a true belief about p. A shorter explanation is to say that S acquired the belief that p for the reason that he desired to acquire a true belief about p. Things are different when S’s initial reason is non-epistemic since, as discussed at the very beginning of this chapter, it is impossible for S to explain his acquisition of the belief that p by mentioning his nonepistemic reason. This explanation can only be given from a third-person perspective. It says that the acquisition by S of the pleasant belief that p is the causal result of S having different pieces of evidence and that S modified his evidence for the reason that he wants to acquire a pleasant belief. Once again, a shorter explanation is to say that S indirectly

87 acquired the pleasant belief that p for the reason that he desired to acquire the pleasant belief that p.111 UNLIMITED DOXASTIC CONTROL CONSIDERED The goal of the present chapter is to show that we are able, at least, to exercise two distinct forms of indirect control of our belief acquisitions: theoretical control and Pascalian control. By contrast, the conclusion of the previous chapter was that we are unable to exercise direct control of our belief acquisitions, as we are able to exercise direct control of our bodily movements. Briefly said, then, the lesson of the last two chapters is that we enjoy only a limited form of control of our belief acquisitions. Ryan’s unlimited doxastic control In a quite recent paper112, Sharon Ryan claims to show among other points113 that we enjoy unlimited control of the acquisitions of our doxastic attitudes. Since this view clearly conflicts with my own conclusion, I would like to discuss Ryan’s position in the following pages. First, Ryan takes on claims of various philosophers supporting the statement to the effect that the acquisitions of doxastic attitudes are never under our control. Interestingly Ryan’s replies to their claims never target the direct form of control, which is the only form that I denied up to here. Her replies to Feldman are paradigmatic.

111

To express the same idea differently, two very different “requirements” are involved in the process of indirectly acquiring the belief that p for a non-epistemic reason. There is the end-means requirement of rationality that requires, if I want to acquire the belief that p, that I intend to modify my current set of evidence accordingly. For a recent discussion of the end-means requirement of rationality, see Broome (2009). The second requirement involved is the one according to which I cannot consider both that the mental state that I plan to acquire is a belief and that I am going to acquire this mental state for a non-epistemic reason. The second requirement is more fundamental in the sense that it explains why I am expected to intend modifying my current set of evidence. 112 See Ryan (2003). 113 The first part of her paper is devoted to showing that the “ought implies can” principle is misleading. That is to say, Ryan’s initial strategy is to argue against the first premise of the traditional “deontological” argument against doxastic voluntarism. See the introduction of this work, note 8 and Ryan (2003), pp. 48-60.

88 Ryan considers Feldman’s claim according to which if I want to raise my hand, I can just do so, while I cannot acquire the belief that it will rain shortly just because I want to.114 Her first reply115 to Feldman is the following: “forming a doxastic attitude need not be much like raising my hand to be free. Typically, the raising of one’s hand is not important to us. If you ask me to raise my hand, I might look at you blankly and think, ‘whatever’, and raise my hand. Often, beliefs are not like this”.116 Acquiring a belief, Ryan says, is rather like performing an action which you believe will have important consequences.117 In these circumstances, your action is under your control but “it is false that you could just raise your hand”.118 Therefore, she concludes even if you cannot “just believe” something like this, that does not show that belief acquisitions are not under your control. Obviously, the issue addressed by Ryan is not the possibility of acquiring beliefs, directly, for non-epistemic reasons, i.e. the existence of direct control, but the rather plain one that we exercise control of our actions even when their performances weigh heavy on us.119 Here is what she secondly replies to Feldman: “It is not really true that I can just raise my hand if I want to. Lots of other things need to be true as well. For example, my brain has to be working correctly, my arm has to be working correctly, and so forth…Similarly, in the case of belief we need more than a just a desire to believe in order to believe freely. If I want to believe freely that it will start raining shortly, lots of 114

See Feldman (2001), p. 80. More accurately, Ryan addresses three objections to Feldman’s claim. I do not mention the third one, which is insignificant for my purposes and quite easy to circumvent. 116 Ryan (2003), p. 64. 117 I am not sure that this is always the case. There are belief acquisitions, which do not inevitably have important consequences like my acquisition of the belief that the last name written on the page 542 of the telephone book of the city of Berlin is Klaus Schmidt. I leave this issue aside here. 118 Ryan (2003), p. 64. 119 This makes me think that she misinterprets Feldman’s claim. My own opinion is that Feldman is actually addressing the more specific issue of our ability to acquire beliefs, directly, for non-epistemic reasons, that is to say, to exercise direct control of our belief acquisitions. 115

89 other things would have to be true too. Most importantly, it would have to seem to me that it will start raining shortly.” In short, Ryan’s claim is that an action can be “free” or “performed under control” —these are synonymous terms in her paper— even when my desire to perform it is not causally sufficient in order to perform it. Therefore, the impossibility of acquiring beliefs just because I want to, and more specifically, the necessity of possessing evidence that it will rain shortly, in order to acquire the belief that it will rain shortly, does not prevent the acquisition of my belief that it will rain shortly from being under my control. Not only does her claim not address the possibility for a belief acquisition to be under our direct control; it even seems to put forward the view that I have just defended, according to which the acquisition of a belief for a motivating reason inevitably takes an indirect path. Up to this point, Ryan’s views do not seem to provide any objection to the conclusion of the second chapter of this work, according to which, when we acquire beliefs, we are unable to display the sort of direct control that we are able to exercise when we perform a bodily movement. Pieces of evidence vs. motivating reasons My disagreement with Ryan emerges when she claims: “I think that there is ordinarily no relevant difference between the doxastic attitudes we take toward propositions and other actions a compatibilist would regard as free”.120 If a “free” action is an action performed under the agent’s control, what she means is that our doxastic control is exactly analogous to the control we have over our actions. By contrast, my own claim is, precisely, that there is no analogue, in the doxastic realm, of the direct control exercised over bodily movements. Her argument is the following: 1. A sufficient and necessary condition for an action being performed under my control is that it is performed intentionally. 2. “Doxastic attitudes are typically held intentionally”121 3. Then, the acquisitions of doxastic attitudes —beliefs, suspensions of judgment— are typically under our control. 120 121

Ryan (2003), p. 71. Ryan (2003), p. 70.

90 Note that Ryan makes a specific use of the adverb intentionally: “By ‘intentionally’ I do not mean that they are held because of any explicit intention to believe (or disbelieve or suspend judgment) or any explicit decision to take on a particular doxastic attitude… I think consciously deciding to do x or explicitly intending to do x is sufficient, but not necessary, for doing x intentionally. Doing something purposefully is necessary for an action to be done intentionally”.122 If the acquisition of a belief is under my control if only if it is performed intentionally and if doing something purposefully is necessary for an action to be done intentionally, then an acquisition of a belief will be under my control only if I acquired this belief purposefully. Obviously, then, a lot depends of what Ryan’s notion of purposefulness is. Unfortunately, she does not say so much about it. Trying to extrapolate, I see two mains ways of interpreting the notion of purposefulness. My worry with Ryan’s view is that both interpretations seem to lead to a dead end. According to the first interpretation, a purposeful belief acquisition is an acquisition, which has been caused by a conative state, let me say a desire, without this desire constituting a motivating reason to acquire this belief. The problem is that being caused by a desire is clearly not sufficient for my bodily movement to qualify as an action performed under my control. For instance, James’ action of setting his alarm clock one hour too late is not performed under his control when it is unconsciously driven by his desire to arrive late at his professional appointment and not to get this job. In this sense, being purposeful is only sufficient for a bodily movement to qualify as an activity. But Ryan’s conclusion is clearly not limited to activities, Freudian slips, etc.123 Her claim is that standard belief acquisitions are as controlled as full-blooded actions. Consciously intending to perform an action, Ryan states, is not necessary for an action to be purposeful. But, as I said already, you can perform an action for a reason without consciously intending to perform 122 123

Ryan (2003), pp. 70-1. See chapter 1 for the distinction between activity and actions.

91 it.124 Then, “acquiring a belief purposefully” could mean “acquiring a belief for a reason”. A way of extrapolating further from this second interpretation consists in asserting: “Acquisitions of belief are typically purposeful in the sense that when you acquire a belief that p you typically acquire this belief because or for the reason that you think that p is true, i.e. because you have evidence supporting p”. This is, I suspect, very close to what Ryan has in mind. The second interpretation of the notion of purposefulness points to an error the detection of which is crucial for the discussion of doxastic responsibility. The mistake consists in considering the evidence supporting the truth of proposition p to be a motivating reason. I argued against the identification of evidence and motivating reasons in the first chapter of this study. Recall the outlines of my argument: 1. Even according to a strict anti-Humean conception of motivation, my having a motivating reason to perform an action involves my having a desire, my being in a state which has the mind to world direction of fit; 2. My having evidence does not involve my being in a state which has the mind to world direction of fit; 3. Then my having evidence indicating that proposition p is true does not consists in my having a motivating reason to acquire the belief that p. The tendency to identify evidence with motivating reasons comes from the fact that the question whether someone has exercised control over the performance of his action is settled by considering how this person was motivated. More specifically, Ryan’s project of considering that all belief acquisitions are under our control—even those which are clearly not motivated by a desire but are rather just caused by the exercise of a cognitive faculty, for instance the faculty of perception—forces her to conflate evidence and motivating reasons.

124

When I greet my neighbour while being buried in my thoughts, I perform this action without consciously intending to do it. Nevertheless, if certain conditions are satisfied, my action counts as an action performed for a motivating reason. For more detail, see my chapter 1.

92 A way of circumventing this difficulty is to confine, as I do, ascriptions of doxastic control to cases in which belief acquisitions are motivated, as it is the case with the theoretical and the Pascalian form of control. Ryan’s argument, then, is not sufficient to shake the main lesson of the last two chapters, which is that we enjoy only limited doxastic control. Steup’s unlimited doxastic control Like Ryan, Matthias Steup promotes the idea that we have unlimited doxastic control of our belief acquisitions. Steup’s argument supporting unlimited doxastic control is different from Ryan’s. Most significantly, Steup’s argument —unlike what seems to be Ryan’s view— does not involve the identification of my having evidence supporting the truth of p to a motivating reason. At first sight at least, his argument does not presuppose that my possessing evidence supporting the truth of p provides me, by itself, with a motivation to acquire the belief that p Briefly, Steup’s argument is the following: 1. We can decide what to believe by weighing evidence, by engaging in epistemic deliberation, as we can decide what to do by engaging in practical deliberation; 2. When I act in certain way because I have decided to act in that way, my act is under my control; Then 3. When I take a doxastic attitude because I have decided to take it, my taking this doxastic attitude is under my control. Obviously, Steup’s argument supporting unlimited control crucially depends on the idea that doxastic deliberation works analogously to practical deliberation. It is certainly true that we can decide what to do by considering our reasons to perform one action or another. For instance, if I desire not to be late for my first day of work and consider the advantages of various actions: taking public transport, cycling to work, or taking my car, this practical deliberation will normally allow me to make a decision about the best action to perform in order to satisfy my desire. Finally, if I take my bicycle to work because I decide that cycling to work is the best action to perform, this action is performed under my control.

93 But is the analogy complete? Do we really decide what to believe by weighing our evidence as we decide what to do by considering the advantages of various actions? As Steup notices himself, there is an undeniable dissimilarity between doxastic and practical deliberation. “In the case of an alleged doxastic decision, there is nothing left to do. Once the ‘decision’ has been made, that is, once one has concluded that one’s evidence for p is better than one’s evidence against p, one believes that p. This is different in the case of practical decisions: once one has decided to do a certain thing, there is something that is left to do: the thing one has decided to do”.125 This brings us back us to the feature of doxastic deliberation called “transparency” discussed in chapter 2. Now, if doxastic deliberations necessarily end up with acquisitions of doxastic attitudes, it is unnecessary to contend that doxastic deliberations also give birth to decisions to acquire these doxastic attitudes. Doxastic deliberation is merely a process which terminates with the acquisition of a doxastic attitude. Postulating the existence of a decision to acquire this doxastic attitude is unnecessary and misleading. What Steup considers as a process leading to a decision to believe is simply a process leading to the acquisition of a belief. I believe the objection is sound and that transparency of doxastic deliberation prevents it from being analogous to practical deliberation in the way the first premise of Steup’s argument requires. My goal in the following paragraphs is to show why Steup’s reply to this objection fails. Steup does not deny that doxastic deliberation is transparent but rejects the alleged implication of transparency. According to Steup, the fact that we instantaneously acquire the doxastic attitude we take to be supported by our evidence when we make doxastic decisions is not a reason to deny that making a doxastic decision, and acquiring the doxastic attitude one has decided to take, are distinct mental events. Steup’s argument supporting the latter claim is the following: “Let’s suppose you decide your evidence supports believing that p. If so, you have formed a belief: the belief that your evidence supports believing that p. Of course, that belief has a 125

Steup (2000), p. 37.

94 different content from the belief that p, the belief that you take to be supported by your evidence. Let us call the former the verdict belief, and the latter the object belief. According to the objection, to form the verdict belief is to form the object belief. But that cannot be true, for there is a different content in each case.” First of all, it is crucial to notice that this reply mentions a decision that your evidence supports believing that p and not a decision to believe that p. The doxastic decision Steup has in mind, here, is not a decision to acquire a doxastic attitude. It is a decision, which bears upon the way your evidence supports the acquisition of a doxastic attitude. To differentiate the two sorts of doxastic decisions, let me call the decision that your evidence supports the acquisition of the belief that p, your evidential doxastic decision (EDD), and speak of a genuine doxastic decision (GDD), for your decision to believe that p. Importantly, the shift from GDD to EDD is what allows Steup to contend that your making a doxastic decision —the decision that your evidence supports the acquisition of the belief that p— is a distinct mental event from your acquiring the belief that p even if they both simultaneously take place as a result of your doxastic deliberation. But conceiving doxastic decisions as EDDs rather than GDDs raises two very serious difficulties. The first difficulty is that, unlike GDDs, postulating EDDs does not allow us to draw the conclusion that we have unlimited doxastic control of the acquisition of our doxastic attitudes. As I just said, your decision that your evidence supports the acquisition of the belief that p needs to be distinguished from your decision to do one thing or the other. While the latter is a conative state, a state which manifests a motivation to act in a way or another, the former is not. Making a decision that your evidence supports the acquisition of the belief that p is drawing a conclusion regarding your evidence. It is not being inclined to do one thing or the other. As Steup seems even to admit in the quotation above, to decide that your evidence supports believing that p is to believe that your evidence supports the belief that p. If this is so, it is possible to address to Steup an objection, which is similar to the one that I addressed to Ryan. A decision that my evidence supports the acquisition of the belief that p has only the terminological appearance of being able to move me. But it is actually a state, which

95 has the world to mind direction of fit exclusively, and which is, therefore, insufficient to motivate me to do something. This is why, I believe, the shift to EDD is not viable for the purpose of concluding that we have unlimited control of the acquisition of our doxastic attitudes on the ground of our making doxastic decisions. In brief, determining that we have control of our belief acquisition consists in showing that we can acquire beliefs for reasons, that belief acquisitions are sometimes the results of our motivation to acquire them. Decisions to acquire beliefs are such motivating states. If things like GDD existed, this would indicate that we have control over our belief acquisitions. But as we saw, postulating GDDs seems to be superfluous. On the other hand, EDDs are not motivating states and therefore do not teach anything regarding our doxastic control. The fact that your making an EDD causes your believing that p, does not indicate that you have control over the acquisition of this belief, any more than the fact that your smelling a mouth-watering odour causes your being hungry indicates that you have control of your feeling of hunger.126 The second problem with the shift from GDD to EDD is a difficulty pointed to by Feldman in his written comments on Ryan’s paper. If the acquisition of a belief previously requires a doxastic decision and if this doxastic decision involves or consists in my believing that my evidence supports the acquisition of such or such doxastic attitude, then “it seems as if one must form an infinite regress of ever more complex beliefs in order to form one belief”. 127 To conclude, Ryan and Steup’s views do not provide, I believe, reasons to think that we enjoy more than a limited, indirect, control of our belief 126

This problem is already perceptible in Steup’s description of what happens when I make a doxastic decision: “I execute a decision, say, to believe that p, if I form the belief that p, and my having concluded that my evidence supports p is a contributing factor in the causal history of that belief”. Steup (2000), p. 34. “Forming the belief that p as a causal result of my having concluded that my evidence supports p” is compatible with my forming the belief that p being something which simply happens to me. This description does not involve that I have been motivated in one way or another to form the belief that p. That is, if this is what “executing the decision to believe that p” means, then I can execute a decision to believe that p without the acquisition of the belief that p being something under my control. 127 See Ryan (2003), p. 69.

96 acquisitions. As we saw, theoretical and Pascalian control constitute the two main forms of control we exercise over our belief acquisitions. This of course has direct relevance for the upcoming formulation of the conditions under which we are responsible for our belief acquisitions. More accurately, there are two main kinds of situations in which we can start asking whether people satisfy the conditions under which they we are responsible for their belief acquisitions. Namely, when they acquire a belief as a result of their exercising theoretical or Pascalian control.

97

CHAPTER 4: DOXASTIC RESPONSIBILITY AS RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONSEQUENCES One of the important conclusions of the last two chapters is that we are able to exercise only an indirect form of control over our belief acquisitions. That is to say, the way in which we can acquire beliefs for epistemic or non-epistemic reasons is inevitably indirect. Acquisitions of belief for reasons are performances that we are able to achieve only by performing more basic actions. The philosophical discussion bearing upon the ascription of doxastic responsibility generally ends with this sort of statement, i.e. with considerations regarding our ability to exercise control of belief acquisitions. Of course, having exercised control is a crucial necessary condition to satisfy in order to be responsible and this explains why any examination of doxastic responsibility needs to start with the consideration of doxastic control.128 But, having exercised control over the performance of an action, i.e. having performed an action for a motivating reason, is not sufficient for being responsible. You can perform an action for a motivating reason without being responsible for it. My goal in this chapter is to extend the conclusion according to which we are only able to exercise indirect control over our belief acquisitions. I would like to suggest an account of the conditions under which we are responsible for our belief acquisitions, which is grounded on this conclusion. RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONSEQUENCES As the schemas above illustrate, acquisitions of belief for reasons are structurally analogous to the performance of non-basic actions. Sam’s non-basic action of killing the mayor, for instance, consists in his more basic action of pulling the trigger inducing the death of the mayor or the occurrence of an event consisting in the mayor being killed. Analogously, the acquisition of the belief that p, for a reason, is a complex metaphysical state of affairs, which consists in an action of modifying my current set of evidence, causally inducing an event consisting in my acquisition of the belief that p. My acquisition of the belief that p, for a reason, occurs when the event consisting in my 128

For the sake of simplicity, I leave the unintentional influence on our belief acquisitions aside in the beginning of this chapter and will go back to it at the end of it.

98 acquisition of the belief that p takes place, as Sam’s action of killing the mayor occurs when the event consisting in the death of the mayor takes place. The minor difficulty regarding belief acquisitions is that distinguishing between the complex state of affairs and the event determining the occurrence of this state of affairs is, terminologically speaking, not as handy as differentiating between the complex non-basic action consisting in the murder of the mayor and the event consisting in the death of the mayor. The expression “the acquisition of the belief that p” might refer to the complex state of affairs. But it might also refer to the event which is entailed in this complex state of affairs and which delineates its occurrence. To distinguish between the two meanings of the expression “the acquisition of the belief that p”, I will speak of “the resultant acquisition of the belief that p” to refer to the event and will keep the expression “the acquisition of the belief that p” to refer to the more complex and causal state of affairs. If the performance of a non-basic action (A) consists in the performance of a more basic action (a), which causally induces the occurrence of an event (e) then, certainly, being responsible for A consists in being responsible for e. To say it differently, being responsible for a non-basic action A consists in being responsible for the consequence of the more basic action a which constitutes it. This is true mutatis mutandis in the doxastic realm. If the acquisition of a belief (B) consists in the performance of a more basic action (b), which causally induces the resultant acquisition of a belief (e) then, being responsible for B consists in being responsible for e. Being responsible for the acquisition of a belief consist in being responsible for the resultant acquisition of a belief. Therefore, offering an account of the conditions under which someone is responsible for his belief acquisition —as I wish to provide in this chapter— consists in formulating the conditions under which someone is responsible for the consequence of his action of modifying his current set of evidence. My main goal below is to apply the main results of the general discussion regarding our responsibility for the consequences of our actions to the specific case of resultant belief acquisitions.

99 Responsibility for basic actions Besides being very often responsible for their basic actions, people are also frequently responsible for what happens in the world as a result of these basic actions, i.e. for the consequences of their basic actions. I might be responsible for the mess in the kitchen, for the door being open, for the anger of my brother. Now, of course, there are also many happenings in the world for which I am obviously not responsible. I am not responsible for Lady Diana’s car accident, for the rain during your wedding day, etc. I am not responsible for the actions of others or what happens to them as long as they are not the consequences of my actions. Unsurprisingly, an account of the conditions under which a subject is responsible for the consequences of his basic action relies on an account of the conditions under which a subject is responsible for his basic action. Hence, I will start by saying a few words concerning the latter conditions. The conception of responsibility I favour is compatibilist.129 The distinctive claim of a compatibilist conception of responsibility is that the lack of alternative possibilities does not preclude the ascription of responsibility. To say it differently, the truth of determinism does not prevent us from acting freely in certain circumstances and, then, from being responsible.130 Consider the following classical example: Sam tells Jack about his plan to kill the mayor of the town on St-Patrick’s Day. Sam has personal reasons to try to kill the mayor. He is very angry at the mayor’s decision not to increase the salary of the police officers this year. Sam is not forced to desire to perform this action. He has not been hypnotized nor drugged, etc. Jack is also a police officer and shares with Sam the desire to kill the mayor. But Jack is not as much of a desperado as Sam. He ensures that Sam will pull the trigger at the appropriate moment by secretly installing a device in Sam’s brain, which 129

Taking a stance in the debate opposing the supporters of determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism will clearly drive me far away from my main interests in this work. Without settling this question, however, it could be certainly fruitful to consider our doxastic responsibility from a determinist and a libertarian point of view. I content myself with the adoption of a compatibilist point of view below. 130 See mainly Frankfurt (1971), Frankfurt (1988).

100 allows him to control Sam’s basic actions if necessary. On StPatrick’s Day, Sam carries out his plan without Jack having to interfere. He shoots the mayor by pulling the trigger. Obviously, Sam is responsible for his non-basic action of pulling the trigger. He is responsible for his action even if he was unable to perform another basic action since Jack would have interfered if he had decided not to pull the trigger. More generally, what this sort of example is supposed to teach is that a subject can be responsible for performing a basic action A even if he was unable to perform another basic action. Ascription of responsibility for basic actions only requires that no responsibility-undermining factor plays a role in the actual sequence that leads to the performance of the basic action. It only requires that Sam’s actual action does not result from hypnotization, manipulation of his brain, etc. A shorter way of formulating this idea is to say that ascription of responsibility for basic action requires that the actual action of the agent be reasons-responsive. Strong, weak and moderate reasons-responsiveness John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer a complete and useful account of responsibility in terms of reasons-responsiveness.131 They start by providing an account of what they call strong reasonsresponsiveness. My actual basic action is strongly responsive to my reasons if and only if, In any counterfactual scenario in which I have sufficient reasons to act differently 1. I would recognize that I have sufficient reasons to act differently and; 2. I would act differently as a result of this recognition. That is to say, two main conditions have to be fulfilled in order for my actual basic action to be strongly reasons-responsive. My actual situation must be such that I would recognize sufficient reasons to act differently if there were such reasons. This is the receptivity condition. My actual situation must also be such that I would be appropriately motivated by what I would consider as sufficient reasons to act differently. This is the reactivity condition. 131

See mainly Fischer&Ravizza (1998).

101 The problem with strong-responsiveness is that it is too strong. There are cases in which people seem responsible for their basic actions without these actions being strongly reasons-responsive. Here is such a case: Paul is walking in the direction of the fruit market because this is a place where you can find fresh raspberries. Now suppose that Paul would walk to the fruit market even if he had recognized that he has sufficient reasons to act differently. He would walk to the fruit market even if he had recognised that this detour will prevent him from arriving on time at an important business meeting. Indeed, Paul would be weakwilled and would choose to walk to the fruit market even after having recognized that his having a business meeting provides him with sufficient reason to act differently. In this example, Paul is certainly responsible for his actual action: his action of going to the fruit market. Nevertheless, his action is not strongly responsive to reasons. He would not act differently even if he had reasons to act differently. The second necessary condition is not satisfied while Paul is responsible for his actual action. This leads Fischer and Ravizza to suggest a weaker account of reasonsresponsiveness. My actual basic action is weakly responsive to my reasons if and only if, There is one possible scenario in which I have sufficient reasons to act differently and in which: 1. I would recognize that I have sufficient reasons to act differently and in which; 2. I would act differently as a result of this recognition. In the example above Paul’s action is weakly responsive to reasons if there is, at least, one scenario in which Paul would not go to the fruit market as a result of his recognition of a sufficient reason to do something else. Such a weak conception of reasons-responsiveness is problematic as well. It is too weak to rule out cases in which we intuitively do not ascribe responsibility because we do not understand why the agent would act differently in the counterfactual scenario that determines that his actual action is reasons-responsive. For instance, suppose that the reason why Paul goes to the fruit market is that raspberries are generally less expensive there than at supermarkets.

102 Now suppose that the only scenario in which Paul would act differently is one on which the market gardener would give him raspberries for free. We are reluctant to hold Paul responsible for going to the fruit market since we do not understand why the fact that the market gardener gives him raspberries for free constitutes a sufficient reason to act differently. The underlying idea is that Paul’s action of going to the fruit market is not genuinely responsive to his reasons, if he would not go to the fruit market for what seems to be a stronger reason to go. The challenge is to find a middle way between strong and weak reasonsresponsiveness. Recall the distinction between the receptivity and the reactivity condition. My actual action is strongly receptive to reasons if I would recognize any sufficient reasons to act differently, if there were sufficient reasons to act differently. My action is strongly reactive to reasons if I would act differently as a result of what I would recognize as a sufficient reason to act differently. Now notice that the two worries raised by the examples presented are of two corresponding kinds. The difficulty emerging from the possibility of being weak-willed, but nevertheless responsible, concerns Paul’s reaction to alternative reasons. The difficulty emerging from the impossibility of being responsible while displaying an incomprehensible pattern of reasons concerns Paul’s receptivity to alternative reasons. A way of solving these two worries is to deal differently with the receptivity and the reactivity conditions.132 This leads to the formulation of a moderate conception of reasons-responsiveness: My actual basic action is moderately responsive to reasons if and only if: 1. There is, at least, one possible scenario in which I would act differently as a result of what I would recognize as a sufficient reason to act differently 2. The fact that I would recognize this reason as a sufficient reason to act differently, in this scenario, is understandable.133

132

This is Fischer and Ravizza’s strategy: “We contend that the reactivity to reasons and receptivity to reasons that constitute responsiveness relevant to moral responsibility are crucially asymmetric. Whereas a very weak sort of reactivity is all that is required, a stronger sort of receptivity to reasons is necessary for this kind of responsiveness”. Fischer&Ravizza (1998), p. 69.

103 This brings out the already mentioned fact that having exercised control over the performance of a basic action is not sufficient for being responsible for the performance of this basic action. I can perform a basic action for a reason without being responsible for it. I will not be responsible for the action that I performed for a reason if the performance of this action is not (moderately) reasons-responsive, that is, if there is no possible scenario in which I would act differently as a result of a comprehensive recognition of a sufficient reason to act differently. For instance, when a panicked sea captain jettisons his cargo as the result of an irresistible fear while his ship is caught in a storm, his action is performed for a reason, i.e. is performed under his control, in the sense that it is caused in an appropriate way by the skipper’s desire and belief, but the sea captain is not responsible for his action since his action is not moderately responsive to reasons.134 Responsibility for the consequences of actions As I said, because doxastic control is inevitably indirect, doxastic responsibility needs to be modelled on our responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Hence, the next issue to tackle concerns the conditions under which someone is responsible for the consequences of his actions. Responsibility for consequences raises a difficulty for any compatibilist account of responsibility like the aforementioned moderate moderateresponsiveness one. Consider the following example: Entering the library this morning, I discover that a pyromaniac set fire to it. I also notice directly that he intentionally set fire to different parts of the library in order to increase the damaging effect of his action. Unfortunately, the different fire centres are already too intense for me to totally extinguish any of them. The only thing I can do is to weaken one of the fire 133

More accurately, what is necessary for satisfying the receptivity condition is that “the person exhibits an appropriate pattern of reasons-recognition. In other words, we want to know if … he recognizes how reasons fit together, sees why one reason is stronger than another, and understands how the acceptance of one reason as sufficient implies that a stronger reason must also be sufficient.” Fischer&Ravizza (1998), p. 71. 134 See Fischer&Ravizza (1998), pp. 82-3.

104 centres in order to reduce the devastating effect of the fire in a specific area. But whatever the intensity of my efforts, I cannot avoid the destruction of the library. Obviously, I am not responsible for the destruction of the library. Now, the reason why I am not responsible for its destruction is that I was not able to prevent it. The only thing for which I am responsible is for having reduced the intensity of the fire in a specific area. This sort of example is supposed to show that the main compatibilist claim does not apply to responsibility for consequences. Responsibility for consequences does require alternative possibilities. It requires that I could have avoided the destruction of the library. Nevertheless, in some cases, people seem responsible for the consequences of their actions even if these consequences are unavoidable. Consider again the example in which Sam’s action of pulling the trigger causes the death of the mayor on St-Patrick’s day. He is certainly responsible for the death of the major even if this consequence is inevitable. Recall that Jack would intervene if Sam had decided not to pull the trigger. In a similar way, if my action of reducing the intensity of the fire in a specific area of the library has the consequence of saving a few books from the flames, this seems to be a consequence of my action for which I am responsible even if I am actually unable to avoid it, even if someone else would save these three books if I had decided not to reduce the intensity of the fire in a specific area. We are left with two contradictory intuitions regarding the necessary conditions governing the ascription of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. First intuition: In some cases, the ascription of responsibility seems precluded because the consequences are unavoidable. This tends to show that the possibility of avoidance is a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility for consequences. Second intuition: In other cases, the ascription of responsibility is appropriate even if the consequences are unavoidable. Van Inwagen’s solution

105 One interesting way of disentangling this situation has been initially offered by Van Inwagen.135 His solution distinguishes between two metaphysical conceptions of consequences. When I say that the death of the mayor is a consequence of Sam’s action, I can either refer to a particular consequence of his action or to, what I will call, following Fischer and Ravizza, a consequence-universal. Considered as a particular consequence, the death of the mayor resulting from Sam’s self-motivated action is not the same particular consequence as the one that results from Sam’s action being induced by a device implanted in his brain. They are two distinct particular events since two different causal pathways bring them about.136 Considered as a consequence-universal, the death of the mayor is a single metaphysical entity, which can obtain in various ways: as a causal result of Sam’s self-motivation or as a causal result of Sam’s brain being manipulated by Jack. Before considering Van Inwagen’s solution in more detail, I would like to clarify a small point. The next considerations could look like a naïve adjustment but, I believe, the following point deserves to be formulated accurately in order to avoid any confusion. My initial worry with the discussion concerning the ascription of responsibility for consequence-universals is that I find the expression: “responsibility for consequence-universals” slightly confusing. Note in passing that this is, sometimes, the exact way in which philosophers like Van Inwagen, Fischer and Ravizza formulate the problem. The only meaningful way of understanding the expression: “responsibility for a consequence-universal” is to interpret it as being synonymous with “responsibility for the obtaining of a consequenceuniversal”. If I kill my neighbour’s cat by driving inattentively, I am responsible for the obtaining of a consequence-universal consisting in the death of my neighbour’s cat. But, obviously, there is no sense in saying that I am responsible for the consequence-universal consisting in the death of my neighbour’s cat. If my neighbour drives over his cat himself, without my being able to do anything against it, the same consequence-universal is engaged but there is nothing for which I am 135

See Van Inwagen (1978). Van Inwagen makes use of the Davidsonian criterion of individuation of events: two descriptions of events refer to the same event, if and only if they refer to an entity which has the same cause and the same effects. See Van Inwagen (1978), p. 208.

136

106 responsible. Part of Van Inwagen, Fischer and Ravizza’s formulations precisely support this interpretation. For instance, Fischer and Ravizza address the issue of the responsibility “for a consequence-universal that one cannot prevent from obtaining”.137 Still more patently, according to Van Inwagen: “A person is morally responsible for a state of affairs only if (that state of affairs obtains and) he could have prevented it from obtaining.” The only comprehensive way of introducing universals into a discourse regarding the ascription of responsibility is to speak in terms of “responsibility for the obtaining of a consequence-universal”.138 Speaking of “responsibility for consequence-universals” is probably just a shorter way of expressing the same idea. For the sake of clarity, however, I will rather make use of the longer expression while discussing Van Inwagen’s argument and Frankfurt’s reply below. Consequences as particular events Let us suppose that the death of the mayor is a particular consequence of Sam’s action. As such, it is far from being obvious that the death of the mayor is unavoidable. This is not clear since the event consisting in the death of the mayor being caused by the intervention of a brain device is not the same particular event as the one resulting from Sam’s selfmotivated action. That is to say, once we make clear that we think about the consequence of Sam’s action as a particular, it appears that the second intuition is misleading.139 Consequence-universals 137

Fischer&Ravizza (1998), p. 121. If this is true, it might become difficult to state precisely what distinguishes responsibility for consequence-universals from responsibility for particular events. Some conceptions of events consider the obtaining of properties in space and time as particular events. See, for instance, Kim (1993) and Chisholm (1976). 139 It is inevitably meaningless to speak of the unavoidability of a particular event. If an event is a particular entity, there is no sense in asking whether this particular event is avoidable or unavoidable. Talking of the unavoidability of an entity presupposes that there could be a world in which this entity does not exist. But if the entity in question is a particular, there is no sense in speaking of a world in which this entity does not exist. 138

107 Now suppose that the consequence of Sam’s actions is a consequenceuniversal. In this case, it is true that Sam is not able to prevent the consequenceuniversal consisting in the death of the mayor from occurring. But, Van Inwagen contends, the second intuition is misleading: Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of this consequence-universal consisting in the death of the mayor. According to Van Inwagen’s own terminology: Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the consequence-universal the canonical name of which is [C (mayor is dead)].140 My goal in the following lines is to offer a condensed formulation of Van Inwagen’s argument supporting the latter claim. 1. Van Inwagen starts by claiming that Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the following disjunctive consequenceuniversal: [C (either the mayor is dead as a result of Sam’s autonomous action or the mayor is dead as a result of Jack’s intervention)]. To formulate the same idea in a shorter way, let me say that Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the disjunctive consequence-universal the name of which is [C (either the mayor is dead as a result of cause A or the mayor is dead as a result of cause B)]. 2. Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the consequence-universal [C (either the mayor is dead as a result of cause A or the mayor is dead as a result of cause B)] since, no matter the movement Sam performs, the disjunctive

140

Van Inwagen’s canonical names of consequence-universals result from prefixing “it being the case”, abbreviated “C”, to a proposition. For instance, [C (the Mayor is dead)] names the consequence-universal, which consists in the Mayor being dead. See Van Inwagen (1978), p. 211.

108 proposition embedded in the name of this consequenceuniversal will be true.141 3. For the same reason, Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the consequence-universal [C (either the mayor is dead as a result of cause A or the mayor is dead as a result of cause B or the mayor is dead as a result of any other cause)]. 4. Now, Van Inwagen notices, the latter consequence-universal is equivalent to [C (the mayor is dead)], by which he means that their respective embedded propositions are true in the same possible worlds. 5. Then Sam is not responsible for the occurrence of the consequence-universal [C (the mayor is dead)] any more than he is responsible for the occurrence of the consequenceuniversal [C (either the mayor is dead as a result of cause A or the mayor is dead as a result of cause B or the mayor is dead as a result of any other cause)]. If this argument is sound, the second intuition is also deceptive when consequences are identified as universals. In this case, there are alternative possibilities but no responsibility. Consequently, it seems that we are bound to trust predominantly the first intuition to the effect that ascription of responsibility for consequences requires alternative possibilities. This would problematically shrink the range of the compatibilist conception of responsibility. Frankfurt’s reply: personally and impersonally unavoidable failures 141

This clearly distinguishes the occurrences of the disjunctive consequenceuniversals discussed by Van Inwagen from the occurrence of the disjunctive state of affairs considered previously: the state of affairs consisting in making either the east neon sign or the west neon sign to be switched on, etc. Sam cannot be responsible for the occurrence of the disjunctive consequence-universal consisting in the Mayor being killed either by him or by Jack since, no matter what Sam does, this disjunctive consequence-universal will obtain. On the contrary, it is possible to hold Nestor responsible for the occurrence of the state of affairs consisting in making either the east neon sign or the west neon sign to be switched on. In Nestor’s case, it is wrong to claim that the disjunctive consequence-universal consisting in neither the east neon sign, nor the west neon sign, being switched on, will obtain no matter what Nestor does. If Nestor flipped the switch, one of the neon sign would, normally, be turned on.

109 The presentation of Frankfurt’s reply to Van Inwagen requires three preliminary remarks. First, the main part of Frankfurt’s answer addresses the possibility of being responsible for our failures to perform an action when these failures are unavoidable. At first sight, Frankfurt’s reply does not concern directly the problem of the conditions under which we are responsible for the consequences of our actions. However, as we will see, Frankfurt’s considerations about failures have direct implications for the ascription of responsibility for consequences. Second, while discussing Frankfurt’s answer, it is important to keep in mind that his reply exclusively deals with the obtaining of universals. Frankfurt does not even mention the question of my responsibility for my particular failure to act. Third, Frankfurt stresses that Van Inwagen’s conclusion is that Sam is not fully responsible for the death of the mayor. What Frankfurt means by this is that Sam pulling the trigger is sufficient but not necessary in order for the universal consisting in the death of the mayor to obtain.142 The issue addressed by Frankfurt is, more precisely, the ascription of full responsibility for the unavoidable occurrence of a consequenceuniversal. Frankfurt’s reply to Van Inwagen is grounded on a distinction between two sorts of failure.143 Consider the following example: While I am at home, I am the witness of someone being robbed and beaten. I think about calling the police but finally I do not do this and stay seated in my armchair because I am afraid that the robbers could hear of it and wreak their vengeance on me. According to Frankfurt, two sorts of failure are displayed here. The first sort of failure is one: “for which the person’s movement themselves, considered wholly apart from their consequences, are both a sufficient and a necessary condition.”144 In this example, the failure that is exclusively a matter of my movements is my failure to stand up. This has to be distinguished from my failure to call the police, which is —as Frankfurt claims—a failure to make the 142

See Frankfurt (1988), p. 99. See Frankfurt (1988), pp. 101-103. 144 Frankfurt (1988), p. 101. 143

110 police’s phones ring. Unlike my failure to stand up, my failure to call the police requires the obtaining of a universal which is external to my body and which consists in the police’s phones remaining silent.145 Now let us modify the example in order that both failures are unavoidable. In order for my failure to stand up to be unavoidable, we have to amend the example in such a way that my remaining seated is unavoidable. For instance, by specifying that my flatmate has implanted a device into my brain that would force me to stay seated if I had decided to stand up and to pick up the phone. In this case —Frankfurt says— my failure is personally unavoidable. In order for my failure to call the police to be unavoidable, I have to modify the example above in such a way that I would fail to call the police even if I had stood up and had picked up the phone. For instance, if my phone system is actually broken, I would not make the police’s phones ring even I decided to call the police. When my phone system is broken, my failure to call the police is impersonally unavoidable. It is “unavoidable because of events or states of affairs that are bound to occur or to obtain no matter what the person himself does.”146 On the ground of the distinction between personally and impersonally unavoidable failures, Frankfurt offers the following reply to Van Inwagen. When my failure is impersonally unavoidable, Van Inwagen is right. I am not (fully) responsible for my failure to call the police when my phone system is in such a state that I would fail to call the police even if I had decided to stand up and pick up the phone. The reason why I am not (fully) responsible in this case is, precisely, that I am not able to avoid the obtaining of the universal consisting in the police’s phones remaining silent. To formulate the same conclusion by making use of Van Inwagen’s terminology, Frankfurt agrees that I am not (fully) responsible for the occurrence of the consequence-universal [C (the police’s phones do not ring)] since I am not (fully) responsible for the occurrence of the 145

Of course, my failure to stand up can be described as a failure to call the police. What Frankfurt insists on is that in order for my failure to stand up to be a failure to call the police, something external to me has to take place. The police’s phones need to remain silent. 146 Frankfurt (1988), p. 102.

111 consequence-universal [C (either the police’s phones do not ring because I stay seated or the police’s phones do not ring because my phone’s system is broken)].147 Now the latter universal is equivalent to the universal [C (the police’s phones do not ring)]. Now the situation is distinct when the person’s failure is personally unavoidable. Frankfurt’s own example of a personally unavoidable failure is one in which a driver Q fails to keep his eyes straight ahead because he prefers looking at the scenery on the left and in which something would distract Q, if Q had not looked at the scenery on the left. Here is what Frankfurt contends regarding this example: “In these circumstances, Q cannot keep his eyes straight ahead. Is he morally responsible for failing to do so? Of course he is! The fact that he cannot avoid failing has no bearing upon his moral responsibility for the failure since it plays no role in leading him to fail. Failing to keep one’s eyes straight ahead is exclusively a matter of what the person himself makes, it is constituted by what the person himself does and what the person does is therefore both a sufficient and necessary condition for it. It cannot be said, then that Q’s failure would have occurred no matter what he had done—i.e., regardless of what bodily movements he made. If he had not moved his eyes to the left at all he would not have failed.”148 In Q’s situation, it is not true that, no matter what bodily movements he performs, the following disjunctive proposition will be true: either Q does not keep his eyes straight ahead because he prefers looking at the scenery on the left or Q does not keep his eyes straight ahead because he is distracted. This proposition will not be true if Q keeps his eyes straight ahead. This is what distinguishes cases like Q’s, in which the failure is personally unavoidable, from cases in which the failure is impersonally unavoidable.

147

Recall that the reason why I am not (fully) responsible for the occurrence of the universal [C (either the police’s phones do not ring because I stay seated or the police’s phones do not ring because my phone’s system is broken)] is that, regardless of my bodily movements, the disjunctive proposition embedded in the canonical name of the universal will be true. 148 Ibid., p.101.

112 Finally, this allows Frankfurt to conclude that people are (fully) responsible for some of their unavoidable failures. They are (fully) responsible for their personally unavoidable failures. The reason why I am not (fully) responsible for my impersonally unavoidable failure to call the police when my phone system is out of order but (fully) responsible for my personally unavoidable failure to stand up is that the former failure, unlike the latter, will obtain no matter what bodily movements I perform. Obviously, if I do perform the movement of standing up, I do not fail to stand up. But, even if I do stand up, it is still possible that I fail to call the police because of the occurrence of some external events. Frankfurt’s reply considered Frankfurt’s reply raises, almost immediately, a new worry. When a failure is personally unavoidable —for instance, when the driver’s failure to keep his eyes straight ahead is unavoidable— it is, indeed, wrong to claim that the driver would fail to keep his eyes straight ahead no matter what movements he performed. However, it is correct to claim that he would fail to keep his eyes straight ahead no matter what decision he would make.149 Even if the driver decided not to look at the interesting scenery on the left, he would be distracted and would fail to keep his eyes straight ahead. Now there is no reason to think that a person is (fully) responsible for the obtaining of a universal —a failure to keep his eyes straight ahead — that would obtain no matter what he decided. It does not seem that I am (fully) responsible for the obtaining of the disjunctive universal [C (either I remain seated because I decided to do so or I remain seated because a device in my brain forces me to remain seated)] because this universal would obtain no matter what I decided. Now, applying Van Inwagen’s strategy, this disjunctive universal is equivalent to the universal [C (I remain seated)] in the sense that their embedded propositions are true in the same possible worlds. Consequently, I am not (fully) responsible for the obtaining of the universal consisting in my body remaining seated because this universal would take place no matter what I decided.

149

Van Inwagen raises a similar objection. See Van Inwagen (1978), pp. 215-16.

113 More generally, Frankfurt’s reply encounters a difficulty which brings us back to the metaphysical structure of non-basic actions. What he considers as a personally unavoidable failure—the failure to stand up— can be further analysed as the obtaining of a certain consequenceuniversal —my body’s being seated— which causally results from a more basic failure—a failure to make the decision of standing up. It is possible to analyse someone’s failure to do p in terms of the obtaining of a consequence-universal, which results from his more basic failure to do something else, as long as one does not reach the level at which it seems impossible to provide a further analysis of the failure by which I fail. That is to say, as long as we did not reach the level at which the failure really seems to be basic. Once again, I would like to avoid taking a stance regarding the question whether there are such basic actions/failures and what their exact nature is if they exist. I just want to point clearly to what Frankfurt’s reply presupposes regarding this issue. As long as it will be possible to analyse my failure to perform an action A in terms of the obtaining of a universal e, which causally results from my failure to perform a more basic action a, it will be possible to picture external events intervening between the occurrence of e and the performance of a in such a way that the failure to perform action A would occur no matter what I decided. Or alternatively, as long as we did not reach the level of the basic failures—if such a level exists— we will not be able to consider a failure to perform an action as a personally unavoidable failure. To conclude, Frankfurt’s reply to Van Inwagen presupposes the existence of basic failures and is only applicable to them.150 Cases in which the unavoidability of a failure does not preclude ascription of (full) responsibility are cases in which the failure is basic, 150

If the above considerations are correct, we are not (fully) responsible for the vast majority of our unavoidable failures. This follows from: 1. the fact that the vast majority of our unavoidable failures are impersonally unavoidable since impersonally unavoidable failures are simply unavoidable failures that are non-basic. 2. the claim to the effect that we are not (fully) responsible for our impersonally unavoidable failure.

114 i.e. is such that it cannot be further analysed in terms of the bringing about of a consequence-universal by failing. On the other hand, cases in which the unavoidability of a failure precludes ascription of full responsibility are cases in which the failure is non-basic. When a non-basic failure is unavoidable, one and the same failure —recall that Frankfurt’s reply addresses the counterpart of the universals of Van Inwagen’s argument— would obtain no matter what I did, decided, etc. Responsibility for non-basic failures and responsibility for the consequences of actions The last considerations have immediate repercussion for the formulation of the conditions under which people are (fully) responsible for the consequences of their actions. What I previously said about our responsibility for non-basic actions is true mutatis mutandis regarding our responsibility for our non-basic failures. A non-basic failure to perform action A can be considered as a complex metaphysical entity, which consists in a more basic failure to perform action a causing the obtaining of a consequence-universal e. Consequently, claiming that I am not (fully) responsible for my nonbasic failure to perform action A when this failure is unavoidable amounts to saying that I am not (fully) responsible for the consequence of my failure to perform action a when the occurrence of this consequence-universal is unavoidable. The consequence of the latter considerations is that I am never (fully) responsible for the occurrence of a consequence-universal when it is the inevitable consequence of one of my failures to act. Now, as Frankfurt recognizes “there is no inherent difference between performances and failures” which might prevent us from drawing a similar conclusion regarding non-basic actions. It is also true that I am never (fully) responsible for the occurrences of the consequenceuniversals that are the inevitable consequences of my actions. Finally, Frankfurt’s reply to Van Inwagen does not seem able to avoid the aforementioned cut of the compatibilist conception of responsibility for basic actions. Let me go back to the problematic conflict of intuitions presented initially. On the one hand, the fact that I cannot avoid a consequence seems to preclude the ascription of responsibility. We are tempted to say

115 that I am not responsible for the destruction of the library in virtue of the fact that I was unable to avoid this consequence. On the other hand, we are tempted to say that I am responsible for the reduction of the fire intensity in a specific area even if I was not able to avoid this consequence. The discussion of Van Inwagen and Frankfurt’s positions just taught us that the second intuition is misleading, at least, if it concerns ascription of full responsibility for occurrences of consequence-universals. I am not fully responsible for having caused the obtaining of a consequenceuniversal by performing an action when the obtaining of this consequence-universal is unavoidable. If the consequence is considered as a particular, it is not even clear that we can speak of an “unavoidable consequence”. The sensitivity condition There is another way of dealing with this apparent conflict of intuitions. It simply consists in stressing that the reason why I am not responsible for the inevitable destruction of the library is not the same than the reason why I am not responsible for the unavoidable occurrence of the consequence-universal consisting in the decrease of the devastating effect of the fire in a specific area. The reason why I am not responsible for the complete destruction of the library, in these circumstances, is that it is not a consequence of one of my basic actions, i.e. not something for which I can possibly be held responsible. This is obviously not the reason why I am not responsible for the unavoidable occurrence of a consequence-universal according to Van Inwagen. The complete destruction of the library is not a consequence of my failure to do more than reducing the fire intensity in a specific area for the strength of the fire is already such that my failure does not play any role in the causal history that leads to the complete destruction of the library. Even if I had done more than reducing the fire intensity in a specific area, the library would have been completely destroyed. More generally, an event qualifies as the consequence of one of my basic actions if and only if, ceteris paribus, this event would not have taken place if I had performed another action. Following Fischer and Ravizza, I suggest calling this condition the sensitivity condition.151 151

See Fischer&Ravizza (1998), pp. 106-115.

116 When we claim that the decrease of the devastating effect of the fire was unavoidable, we clearly do not mean that this event does not qualify as the consequence of my action. On the contrary, we assume that the decrease of the devastating effect of the fire is the causal consequence of one of my actions and we consider this consequence as unavoidable in virtue of the fact that it would occur even if I did not try to reduce the fire intensity. Accounts of responsibility for consequences Taking all this into account, I am now ready to formulate the conditions under which I am responsible for the consequences of one of my actions, considered, successively, as a particular consequence and as a consequence-universal. I am responsible for the particular event e which is causally related to one of my actions a if only if: 1. The event e is the consequence of my action a. That is to say, there would be no event e if I did not perform a (=the sensitivity condition); 2. My action a is moderately reasons-responsive (=the reasonsresponsiveness condition); 3. I was able to predict that performing a would cause e (=the predictability condition). I am responsible for the obtaining of the universal E which is causally related to one of my actions a if only if: 1. The obtaining of the universal E is the consequence of my action a. That is to say, the universal E would not occur if I did not perform a; (=the sensitivity condition); 2. My action a is moderately reasons-responsive (=the reasonsresponsiveness condition); 3. I was able to predict that performing a would cause the obtaining of E (=the predictability condition); 4. The obtaining of E was avoidable (=the avoidability condition). The second condition simply expresses the idea that I am not responsible for the consequence of my action if I am not responsible for this action.

117 The fourth condition has been sufficiently discussed in order for its justification to be passed over here. But the third condition deserves further comment. It is supposed to account for the vast number of cases in which somebody’s action has a consequence that the agent was not pursuing but for which he seems nevertheless responsible. If I have a car accident as a result of using my mobile phone while I am driving, I am responsible for the consequence of my action even if the reason why I am using my mobile phone is not that I want to have a car accident. On the other hand, it is supposed to rule out ascription of responsibility when the consequence of one of my actions is so unpredictable that it would be inappropriate to blame or praise me for it. Of course, it is not always easy to determine accurately whether I was able to predict that such or such action will have such or such consequence. But this is fortunately not a problem I need to settle. The only important thing to keep in mind is that such a predictability condition is needed in an inclusive account of the conditions under which people are responsible for the consequences of their actions. In most of the cases, however, the satisfaction of the predictability condition is presupposed by the fulfilment of the reasons-responsiveness condition. This is the case every time when my motivating reason to perform the action a precisely involves a desire to cause the obtaining of the consequence-universal E. When my reason to try to reduce the intensity of the fire is that I want to decrease the devastating effect of the fire, it is useless to ask whether I was able to predict that my action would have this consequence. If the decrease of the devastating effect is what I am consciously pursuing by trying to reduce the intensity of the fire in this area, then, of course, I was able to predict that my action would have this consequence. Hence I have to reformulate conditions 2 and 3 in order to take this last remark into account. I am responsible for the particular event e which is causally related to one of my actions a if only if: 1. The event e is the consequence of my action a. That is to say, there would be not event e if I did not perform a; (=the sensitivity condition) 2. My action a is moderately reasons-responsive (=the reasonsresponsiveness condition); 3. Either my reason to perform action a involves a desire bearing upon the bringing about of e, by performing a, or I was

118 able to predict that performing a would cause e (=the predictability condition). I am responsible for the obtaining of the universal E which is causally related to one of my actions a if only if: 1. The obtaining of the universal E is the consequence of my action a. That is to say, the universal E would not occur if I did not perform a; (=the sensitivity condition) 2. My action a is moderately reasons-responsive (=the reasonsresponsiveness condition); 3. Either my reason to perform action a involves a desire bearing upon the bringing about of E, by performing a, or I was able to predict that performing a will cause the obtaining of E (=the predictability condition); 4. The obtaining of E was avoidable (=the avoidability condition). My present goal is not to provide an unshakeable account of responsibility for consequences and I am not pretending that the latter account avoids every difficulty. Perhaps it does not always match our intuitions and, accordingly, requires modification. But it seems at least to work appropriately in many cases, even in the following notoriously152 difficult example: Suppose that there is a speeding train approaching a fork in the track controlled by a switch. The switch is set for track 2 but it is in my power to flip the switch and to make the train run on track 1. I am also able not to flip the switch. I also know that the two tracks converge later to a place where a dog is tied. That is to say, whatever action I perform the train will hit the dog. Finally, I just stay completely petrified by the idea that I cannot do anything to save this poor dog from being run over by a train. In this case, I am not responsible for the obtaining of the consequenceuniversal consisting in the death of the dog. I suggest that we treat this example like the case in which I cannot avoid the complete destruction of the library. The reason why I am not responsible for the death of the 152

See Fischer and Ravizza (1998), p. 109. See Rowe (1989), p. 154.

119 dog is that it is not the consequence of my failure to act. My failure to act does not play any role in the causal history that leads to the death of the dog. Even if I was not in this train and was actually drinking a cocktail on Lulu Island, the train would have killed the dog. The death of the dog and the destruction of the library are like the car accident of Jörg Haider. They do not belong to the classes of entities for which I can possibly be held responsible since they are neither one of my basic action nor a consequence of one of my basic or non-basic actions. Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions, theoretical and Pascalian control It is now possible to bring together the accounts of responsibility for consequences just mentioned and the two forms of control distinguished in the previous chapter: theoretical and Pascalian control. Let me recall briefly what I previously said regarding theoretical control. First, I exercise theoretical control when I acquire a belief by performing one or several action(s) consisting in a truth-oriented modification of my current set of evidence and when my performance of these action(s) is motivated by an epistemic reason, i.e., a reason involving a desire to acquire a true belief about a topic. Second, when I acquire the belief that p by exercising theoretical control, the object of my control is not the acquisition of what I called a determinate belief, i.e., a belief the content of which is the proposition p. What I control is the acquisition of a determinable belief, a belief the content of which deals with the relevant topic. For instance, when I acquire the belief that the word “ornithorhynchus” has three “h”s as a result of my desire to acquire a true belief about the spelling of this word, I do not exercise control over the acquisition of the belief that the word “ornithorhynchus” has three “h”s. I exercise control over the acquisition of a belief the content of which deals with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”. If this is so, what an account of theoretical responsibility for consequences will determine is whether I am responsible for the resultant acquisition of a belief the content of which deals with a specific topic. Account of theoretical responsibility When the acquisition of a belief that p is causally related to the truthoriented modification of my current set of evidence, I am responsible for

120 the resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T if and only if: 1. The resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T satisfies the sensitivity condition. That is to say, the resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T, would not occur if I did not modify my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way; 2. The action(s) consisting in a truth-oriented modification of my current set of evidence is (are) moderately reasonsresponsive; 3. The resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T, which is the consequence of my modifying my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way, is not unavoidable. That is to say, if I had decided not to modify my current set of evidence in this way, I would not have modified my current set of evidence and the resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T would not have occurred.153 More concretely, I am not responsible for the resultant acquisition of a belief the content of which deals with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”: 1. If I am engaged in a learning process, which will end up with the acquisition of a belief dealing with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”, no matter whether I open or do not open a dictionary. In this case, the resultant acquisition of a belief the content of which deals with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” is not the consequence of my action of opening a dictionary any more than the death of the dog, in the example above, is the consequence of my failure to flip the switch and to make the train run on another track. (violation of condition 1) 153

This condition is required as long as the resultant acquisition of the belief is considered as a consequence-universal. To build an account of theoretical responsibility in which the resultant acquisition of the belief is considered as a particular, we simply need to skip the third condition. Note also that an account of theoretical responsibility does not need to mention the predictability condition. When I exercise theoretical control, indeed, my reason to modify my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way involves, by definition, a desire bearing upon the resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T.

121 2. If there is no scenario in which I would have acted differently as a result of what I would recognize as a sufficient reason to act differently. (violation of condition 2) If I suffer from a pathological need to consult dictionaries in order to learn the spelling of words, it does not seem that I am responsible for my acquisition of a belief dealing with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”. 3. If my English teacher implanted a device in my brain that would drive me to perform the action of opening the dictionary if I had decided not to look for the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”. (violation of condition 3) Since, often, we hold people responsible for their failure to believe such or such thing —as when I state that you should have known that I am gluten-intolerant— it is interesting to state the conditions under which someone is responsible for his failure to acquire a true belief about a topic. When my failure to acquire a belief the content of which deals with topic T is causally related to my failure to modify my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way, I am responsible for the resultant acquisition of a belief, the content of which deals with topic T if and only if: 1. The resultant failure to acquire a belief the content of which deals with topic T satisfies the sensitivity condition. That is to say, the resultant failure would not occur if I did not fail to modify my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way. 2. My failure to modify my current set of evidence in a truthoriented way is moderately reasons-responsive; 3. The resultant failure to acquire a belief the content of which deals with topic T, which is the consequence of my failure to modify my current set of evidence, is not unavoidable. That is to say, if I had decided to modify my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way, I would have modified my current set of evidence in this way and the resultant failure to acquire a belief the content of which deals with topic T would not have occurred. More concretely, I am not responsible for the resultant failure to acquire a belief the content of which deals with the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus”:

122 1. If the resultant failure is not a consequence of one of my actions, for instance, if someone tore out the relevant page of the dictionary. In this case, the resultant failure would have occurred even if I had performed the action of opening a dictionary. (violation of condition 1) 2. If I am pathologically scared by dictionaries and there is no scenario in which I would have opened a dictionary in order to acquire a belief about a spelling of word “ornithorhynchus” as a result of what I would have recognized as a sufficient reason to perform this action. (violation of condition 2) 3. If one of my classmates implanted a device in my brain that would drive me not to perform the action of opening the dictionary even if I had decided to look for the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” in a dictionary. (violation of condition 3) Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions and Pascalian control First, recall that when I exercise Pascalian control of the acquisition of a belief, I acquire this belief by performing one or several more basic action(s) consisting in a manipulative modification of my current set of evidence and the performance of the more basic action(s) is motivated by a non-epistemic reason, i.e., a reason involving a desire to acquire a pleasant, useful, belief. Second, when I exercise Pascalian control, what I control is the acquisition of a belief, the content of which is the proposition p. For instance, when a mother acquires the belief that her son did not steal from her purse as a result of her desire to preserve her relationship with him, she exercises Pascalian control of the acquisition of a belief with the determinate content that her son did not steal from her purse. Hence, what an account of Pascalian responsibility for consequences further indicates is the conditions under which I am responsible for having acquired a belief with a determinate content for a non-epistemic reason. Account of Pascalian responsibility When the acquisition of a belief that p is causally related to the manipulative modification of my current set of evidence, I am responsible for the resultant acquisition of the belief that p if and only if: 1. The resultant acquisition of the belief that p satisfies the sensitivity condition. That is to say, the resultant acquisition of

123 the belief that p would not occur if I did not modify my current set of evidence in a manipulative way; 2. The action(s) consisting in a manipulative modification of my current set of evidence is (are) moderately reasonsresponsive; 3. The resultant acquisition of the belief that p, which is the consequence of my modifying my current set of evidence in a manipulative way is not unavoidable. That is to say, if I had decided not to modify my current set of evidence in this manipulative way, I would not have modified my current set of evidence and the resultant acquisition of the belief that p would not have occurred. Responsibility for trying hard enough Let me recall the main line of one of Alston’s objections considered above. When I acquire or fail to acquire a belief with a determinate content for a non-epistemic reason, my chance of succeeding is so low that it is anyway inappropriate to ascribe to me any responsibility for having succeeded or for having failed. I replied by stressing the importance that we attribute to the fact that people have tried to induce or to avoid the obtaining of a consequence when we assess their behaviour. Now I am in position to develop this suggestion. Roughly, when I fail to acquire a belief —either a true belief about a topic or the pleasant belief that p— while I have tried to acquire such a belief, what happens is that something did not work as I was predicting in the causal chain, which relates my action of trying to the resultant acquisition of the belief, which I am pursuing. To say it briefly, my trying was not causally sufficient to induce the resultant acquisition of the belief. Obviously, the latter situation needs to be distinguished from the one considered above in which I failed because I did not try. Therefore, there are two main kinds of cases in which I am possibly responsible for my failure to acquire, let me say, a true belief about a topic. As we just saw, I am possibly responsible when I fail to try, i.e. when I did not perform the action of modifying my current set of evidence in a truth-oriented way for the reason that I did not want to perform this action.

124 But I am also possibly responsible for not having tried hard enough. That is to say, for having tried in a way which insufficiently warrants my action of trying to be causally efficient. For instance, suppose I desire to acquire a true belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” but fail: I acquire a false belief about the spelling of “ornithorhynchus” as a result of my action of consulting a bad dictionary. In this case, what I am possibly responsible is for having tried poorly, for having performed an inappropriate action in order to acquire a true belief about the spelling of a word. The same thing is true when my failure is a failure to acquire a belief about the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” as a result of my action of consulting a children’s dictionary, which does not contain this word. To sum up, when I try to acquire a true belief about a topic and fail because something interferes in the causal chain, which is supposed to relate my trying to the resultant acquisition of a true belief, we need to distinguish between cases in which I am not responsible for my failure and cases in which I am responsible for not having tried hard enough. Moreover, cases in which I am responsible for not having tried hard enough need to be differentiated from the cases considered above, in which I am responsible for my failure because I did not want to try and did not try for this reason. Responsibility for resultant belief acquisitions and indirect doxastic influence When I exercise indirect doxastic influence over the acquisition of the belief that p, I do not acquire the belief that p for the reason that I want to acquire a true belief about a topic or for the reason that I want to acquire the belief that p. The resultant acquisition of the belief that p is the unintentional effect of my action of modifying my current set of evidence as, my worsening my cholesterol level is the unintentional result of my eating five servings of foie gras. Clearly, I am not always responsible for what I unintentionally induce by performing an action. In this sort of case, the attribution of responsibility crucially depends on my ability to predict the effects of my action. This is point at which we hint already with the formulation of what I called the predictability condition. Finally, here are the sufficient and necessary conditions under which the resultant acquisition of the belief that p is something for which I am

125 responsible when it is the unintentional causal result of my action(s) of modifying my current set of evidence: 1. The resultant acquisition of the belief that p satisfies the sensitivity condition. That is to say, it would not occur if I did not modify my current set of evidence in this way; 2. The action(s) consisting in a modification of my current set of evidence is (are) moderately reasons-responsive; 3. The resultant acquisition of the belief that p, which is the consequence of my action of modifying my current set of evidence in this way, is not unavoidable. That is to say, if I had decided not to perform an action, which satisfies this description, I would not have modified my current set of evidence and the resultant acquisition of the belief that p would not have occurred; 4. I was able to predict that performing an action which can be described as an action of modifying my current set of evidence would cause the resultant acquisition of the belief that p. Responsibility for believing The goal of this chapter is to provide various accounts of the conditions under which a person can be held responsible for his belief acquisitions. These accounts are grounded on what I have previously concluded regarding our ability to exercise control of our belief acquisitions. The variety of these accounts reflects the fact that there are, at least, two distinct ways of exercising control of belief acquisitions and one way of influencing them. More importantly, the accounts presented put together the conditions under which I am responsible for the resultant acquisition of a belief, by which they reflect the important fact that our doxastic control is inevitably indirect. As I said, the resultant or consequential acquisition of the belief that p is a state of affairs, which takes place at some instant as a causal result of my action of modifying my current set of evidence in some way. By contrast, believing that p is a state, which can last for a more or less long time. But to be in the state of believing that p requires only that I acquired the belief that p. To be in the state of believing that p is not to maintain actively the belief that p. To be in the state of believing that p is a passive state, in which I am, as soon as I acquired the belief that p. This is inevitably so, because the event which consists in the acquisition of the belief that p by me, is the metaphysical boundary of the state of

126 believing that p. For this reason, I believe that what I have just claimed regarding the conditions under which I am responsible for the resultant acquisition of the belief that p is true mutatis mutandis regarding my responsibility for believing that p. That is to say, the bearing of the aforementioned accounts of doxastic responsibility can be extended to states of believing.

THE NORMATIVE PROBLEM

129

CHAPTER

5:

EPISTEMIC

PRAISEWORTHINESS

AND

BLAMEWORTHINESS

In the previous chapter, I spelt out the conditions under which we are responsible for resultant belief acquisitions, which are the consequences of our actions of modifying our current set of evidence. I deliberately avoided dealing with the question of what makes me either praiseworthy or blameworthy for my belief acquisition once it is clear that I am responsible for it. If belief acquisitions are performances for which we can be either praised or blamed, then, inevitably some belief acquisitions are more or less desirable than others, i.e. are better or worse than others.154 The next problem under scrutiny concerns the nature of the desirability or goodness*155 of belief acquisitions, which, in turn, makes us either blameworthy or praiseworthy for what we believe.156 EPISTEMIC AND NON-EPISTEMIC DESIRABILITY Let me start with some intuitive considerations. The acquisition of a false belief seems to be an undesirable thing from one point of view. But a false belief which is pleasant seems to be a desirable thing from 154

The minimally realist presumption of this work is that the final/instrumental goodness or badness of a belief acquisition does not exclusively consist in its being the object of a positive or a negative attitude. For a state of affairs, to be desirable, it is not sufficient that it is desired. 155 The term “goodness” belongs to the vocabulary of value. Strictly speaking, the term “goodness” refers to the property of possessing a positive value property, either final or instrumental. As we will see in more detail below, value properties constitute only one class of normative properties. Deontic properties and aretic properties constitute two other classes of normative properties. In the following chapters, I would like to make a general use of the term “goodness” and its cognates. I will employ it to refer to the property of possessing a positive normative property regardless of whether it is a positive value property or another positive normative property. To avoid any confusion, I will write “goodness*” and “good*” when I want to refer to the property of possessing a positive normative property of whatever kind and will keep the usual expression for referring to the more specific property of possessing a positive value property. 156 There are, obviously, cases in which we are neither blameworthy, nor praiseworthy for our belief acquisitions. They are either cases in which we are not responsible for our belief acquisitions or cases in which our belief acquisitions are neither good nor bad, for instance, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

130 another point of view. We generally consider that it is inappropriate to believe everything that we are told without examination. But a belief acquired without any further consideration for its truth might be a desirable thing if it promotes my happiness. Conversely, the acquisition of a belief which is devastating for my psychological health looks like an undesirable thing from one point of view. But if it is the result of an extended and serious psychoanalytical inquiry and is very well grounded, it is also admirable. At first sight, the desirability of belief acquisitions seems to be twofold. There seem to be two distinct sorts of ends the promotion of which determines whether belief acquisitions are desirable: the epistemic and the non-epistemic ends. But, perhaps, the epistemic desirability is just a specific sort of non-epistemic desirability. In the last part of this work, I consider the possibility of conflating epistemic desirability and nonepistemic desirability. However, in the present chapter and the following one, I focus on the epistemic desirability of belief acquisitions, on the epistemic praiseworthiness/blameworthiness for belief acquisitions. The sphere of epistemic evaluation seems to be the most crucial topic to consider in this study for it is specific to belief acquisitions, by contrast to actions. I would like to start by discussing what I take to be the fundamental epistemic end, that is to say, the end from which the epistemically desirable doxastic states draw their epistemic desirability. THE FUNDAMENTAL EPISTEMIC END Like many philosophers,157 I think that the fundamental epistemic end consists in the acquisition of true beliefs rather than false ones. It is notoriously difficult to formulate this end in an unproblematic way. Moreover, I have to confess that I do not know of any conclusive argument for embracing this claim and can only provide hints to support it. The first incentive comes to mind when we try to figure out how insecure our situation would be if we had only false beliefs. It is doubtful that we would be able to survive for long. If there is one task that we want our cognitive faculties to achieve correctly, it is to provide us with true beliefs about the world around us. Acquiring true beliefs 157

See, for instance, Alston (2005), Bonjour (1985), Feldman (1988), Goldman and Olsson (2009), Marian (2005).

131 seems to be of the utmost importance since it is absolutely essential to our survival. This claim also gains some support once it is shown that the other options—i.e. the promotion of understanding, the acquisition of a coherent set of beliefs, the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of justified beliefs—constitute less plausible candidates for the role of the fundamental epistemic end. I do not deny that they constitute epistemically desirable states of affairs but I think that they are not as fundamentally desirable as the acquisition of true rather than false beliefs. My goal in the following paragraphs is to offer a brief defence of this view. Other epistemically desirable states Understanding When we desire to understand a phenomenon, we desire to understand the phenomenon correctly. What makes the understanding of something desirable is that it provides us with a better insight about how objects, events, etc., in the world, work together. The end of understanding something is desirable only with regard to the more fundamental end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs about the interrelation of objects, events, etc., in the world. It is definitely a desirable thing to understand propositions or to understand why a proposition p is true. But the reason why it is desirable is that the understanding of the truth of p consists in the acquisition of many true beliefs, which explain why p is true. To be sure, we will not say that I understand why p is true if my explanation appeals mainly to false beliefs. That is, understanding certainly constitutes an epistemic end but it is not as fundamental an end as the end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs. Coherence Things look slightly different regarding the end of acquiring a coherent set of beliefs. The acquisition of a coherent set of beliefs does not necessarily consist in the acquisition of true beliefs. Beliefs belonging to a coherent set are at best probably true. The acquisition of a coherent set of beliefs derives its own desirability from its being the probable

132 indication that the beliefs belonging to the set are true.158 That is, coherence draws its desirability from the more fundamental desirability of acquiring true beliefs. Knowledge The acquisition of knowledge seems to be highly desirable. Why shouldn’t we think then that it constitutes a more fundamental epistemic end than the mere acquisition of true beliefs?159 It is commonly accepted that the acquisition of a true belief counts as a piece of knowledge only if its truth is non-accidental. This is the general lesson taught by the various sorts of cases in which luck is present, in which a subject’s acquisition of a true belief is “Gettierized” in such a way that it does not seems to constitute a piece of knowledge.160 Making a simple use of this lesson, it seems that the desirability of the acquisition of a true belief which is a piece of knowledge must differ from the desirability of the acquisition of a mere true belief in virtue of its being accidentally true. How is it possible to make sense of the superior desirability of the acquisition of a true belief the truth of which is non-accidental? It has been correctly claimed161 that non-accidental truth draws its additional desirability from its indicating that further beliefs acquired in a similar way will probably be true. If the truth of a belief acquired in a way is non-accidental, it is probable that other beliefs acquired in this way will also be true. When I non-accidentally get rid of a headache, let me say, by taking aspirin, I will probably be able to get rid of the next headache by using the same means. Moreover, getting rid of a headache by taking aspirin is better than getting rid of a headache by drinking a glass of red wine for the reason that taking aspirin is an efficient way of 158

Perhaps coherence does not even constitute such an indication. I do not need to tackle this complex issue here. See Olsson (2005) for a detailed study of the truthconduciveness of coherence. 159 My reason not to consider the acquisition of knowledge as a fundamental epistemic end is distinct from Alston’s who consider the acquisition of knowledge as a proper end though a less fundamental one. See Alston (2005) p. 35. 160 When I consider whether knowledge is the most fundamental epistemic goal, I adopt the classical conception of knowledge according to which a piece of knowledge is a justified true belief plus some feature which prevents its Gettierisation. The rest of what I claim in this study does not rely on such conception of knowledge. See note 22 of the chapter 6 below. 161 See Goldman and Olsson (2009).

133 curing headaches, which will probably help my getting rid of my next headache as well. Similarly, the acquisition of a belief in a nonaccidental way is better since this way of acquiring beliefs will probably lead to the acquisition of further true beliefs next time it is used. While the acquisition of a true belief is desirable as an end, its being non-accidentally true is desirable as a means. If so, the desirability of knowledge, the desirability of the acquisition of a true belief, the truth of which is non-accidental, can be broken up in two components of desirability: the desirability of the acquisition of a true belief and the desirability of the acquisition a belief, which indicates that the beliefs acquired in a similar way will also be true. Finally, then, the acquisition of knowledge draws its twofold desirability from the fundamental desirability of the acquisition of true beliefs. Justifiedness The explanation of why the acquisition of a justified belief is not the most fundamental epistemic end is rather straightforward. Part of the following discussion will be devoted to showing that epistemologists have fundamentally different notions in mind when they try to account for the “justification” or the “justifiedness” of belief acquisitions. One of my main suggestions in this work is to keep the use of the terms “justification”, “justifiedness”, and “unjustifiedness” to refer to a general and non-technical feature and to replace these terms by distinct ones when something more specific is meant. Here is what, I believe, is the general and non-technical meaning of “justified”, “unjustified”, etc. When I claim that my action was justified, I do not mean that my action was good or desirable for its own sake. I mean rather that my action was a good action to perform taking into account the end it helped me to achieve. Analogously, when I state that the mother’s belief that her son did not steal from her is justified, what I mean is that her belief is permitted, all right or even desirable regarding the achievement of an end. When a belief acquisition qualifies as justified, in this non-technical sense, it is in virtue of a more fundamental end. Therefore, the acquisition of a justified belief cannot constitute our more fundamental epistemic end.

134 The fundamental epistemic end: some specifications Now, the claim that the acquisition of true rather than false beliefs constitutes the most fundamental epistemic end requires further specification. First, I would like to make clear that this claim does not involve the obviously untenable view that human beings always consciously aim at acquiring true rather than false beliefs when they acquire true beliefs. Most true beliefs acquired, for instance, through my sense perception, are not true beliefs acquired as a result of any conscious desire to acquire true rather than false beliefs. These perceptual beliefs realize the most fundamental epistemic end but are not acquired as a result of my conscious desire to achieve this end. Second, one well known difficulty is that a very efficient way of achieving the goal of acquiring true beliefs consists in acquiring true beliefs about every person living in the same city by reading the phone book. Since this does not look like a desirable thing to do —so the objection goes —the acquisition of true rather than false beliefs cannot be considered as the most fundamental epistemic end. Alston’s suggestion to circumvent the problem is by specifying that the most fundamental epistemic end is to acquire a true rather than a false belief about a topic which is of some importance for us.162 But I do not believe that this precision is needed. To see why, it is important to make explicit the intuition on which this objection is grounded. The reason why acquiring true beliefs by reading the phone book does not seem to be a desirable action to perform is that there are certainly more important things to do. Acquiring true beliefs by reading the phone book is a waste of time. Wasting your time is certainly undesirable. The important thing to notice is that wasting your time by acquiring useless true beliefs is non-epistemically undesirable. It is undesirable since it prevents the possible achievement of non-epistemic ends. Therefore as long as you assume —as I did until now— that epistemic and non-epistemic ends are two independent sorts of ends, one and the same activity —acquiring true beliefs about every person living in the same city— can be epistemically desirable while non-epistemically undesirable. Third, note that there are two distinct and relevant policies for achieving the end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs. We can try to maximize the quantity of true beliefs we acquire or minimizing the 162

See Alston (2005), p. 32.

135 amount of false beliefs.163 The emergent question concerns the correct balance to adopt. When shall we prefer the riskier policy of acquiring true beliefs rather than the prudent one of avoiding acquiring false ones? I have to confess that I do not know how to answer accurately this question. This would be problematic if my goal in this work were to propound the principles of an ethics of belief. That is to say, if my objective was to offer principles that people should respect in various circumstances in order to behave in an epistemically correct way. But since my goal in this work is metaethical in the sense that I rather aim at providing the framework in which an ethics of belief can possibly be elaborated, it is fortunately not a question that I need to answer. I can content myself with claiming that what fundamentally makes certain belief acquisitions epistemically better than others is related to the end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs. Epistemic and non-epistemic ends: summary Regarding non-epistemic ends, I shall consider that any end, which does not draw its desirability from its relation to the fundamental epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs is non-epistemic. The acquisition of a pleasant or a morally good belief, or the acquisition of a belief which makes others or myself happy, are acquisitions of beliefs, which are desirable non-epistemically, i.e. are desirable regarding the way they promote or help to promote non-epistemic ends. By contrast, I am not going to take a stance regarding the primacy of one or other nonepistemic end. I will assume that happiness, pleasure, welfare, etc., are all on a par. To sum up, it seems that the desirability of belief acquisitions can be assessed with regard to two different sorts of end: the epistemic end and the non-epistemic ends. When the desirability of a belief acquisition is assessed with regard to the epistemic end, it is evaluated according to the way it achieves —or causally contributes to achieving— the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs. When the desirability of a belief acquisition is assessed with regard to non-epistemic end, it is evaluated according to the way it achieves —or causally contributes to achieving— an end which does not draw its own

163

James’ essay “The Will to Believe” is the locus classicus for this view. See James (1905).

136 desirability from the way it achieves—or causally contributes to achieving— the end of acquiring of true rather than false beliefs. VARIETIES OF EPISTEMIC GOODNESS* The distinction between achieving an end and causally contributing to the achievement of an end is well known in the theory of value. Philosophers traditionally distinguish between the possession, by states of affairs, of final and instrumental value properties. Final and instrumental epistemic goodness A state of affairs possessing a final positive value property consists in a state of affairs which is finally desirable or valuable, i.e. desirable or valuable for its own sake. A state of affairs possessing an instrumental value property consists in a state of affairs which is instrumentally desirable or valuable. i.e. desirable or valuable in virtue of its causing the exemplification of a final positive value property. That is to say, final value properties are particular instantiations of the epistemic and the non-epistemic ends presented above. The crossing of the distinctions between epistemic and non-epistemic ends, on the one hand, and between final and instrumental value properties, on the other hand, gives birth to four different value properties. The possession of each of them characterizes belief acquisitions differently.164 1. A finally and epistemically valuable belief acquisition consists in the acquisition of a true rather than a false belief ; 2. An instrumentally and epistemically valuable belief acquisition consists in the acquisition of a belief, which causes the acquisition of further true beliefs ; 3. A finally and non-epistemically valuable belief acquisition consists in the acquisition of a pleasant, morally good, etc., belief, depending which value qualifies as the final nonepistemic value ; 4. An instrumentally and non-epistemically valuable belief acquisition consists in the acquisition of a belief, which causes the acquisition of further finally valuable beliefs. 164

Each of these properties can be either positive or negative. For the sake of brevity, I content myself with the presentation of cases in which the final and the instrumental value property of a belief acquisition is positive.

137 Belief acquisitions are frequently finally and instrumentally epistemically valuable since the acquisition of a true belief contributes often to the acquisition of further true beliefs. Obviously, nothing prevents one and the same belief acquisition from being finally and instrumentally non-epistemically valuable. This is the case when the acquisition of, let me say, a pleasant belief contributes to the acquisition of further pleasant beliefs. Some philosophers have called into question the possibility of the epistemic and the non-epistemic evaluation of one and the same belief acquisition diverging. That is to say, the possibility of one and the same belief acquisition being epistemically valuable while non-epistemically disvaluable, or conversely. As I said, I consider this possibility of divergence later in this work. For now and in the rest of this chapter, I would like to focus my attention on the epistemic evaluation of belief acquisitions, exclusively. That is to say, on the distinct ways in which a belief acquisition can be a good* thing with regard to the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs. As we just saw, being finally valuable and being instrumentally valuable constitute the two first ways, for the acquisition of a belief, to be a good* thing with regard to this epistemic end. Epistemic rationality and epistemic commendability But an agent’s performance can be assessed according to other standards, standards which do not depend on its possessing either a final or an instrumental value property. Richard Foley offers the following example in order to account for this variety: “Suppose that Smith, who wants to drive to the shore as quickly as possible, is at an intersection with roads going off in four directions, and he is considering which of the four roads he should take. He has never driven any of the roads. However, he has just seen a car pulling a boat take the northern road. If he were to reflect for a moment on the significance of this, he would conclude that the car is probably on its way to the shore, since it is early morning and in the early morning more people with boats are travelling towards the shore than away from it. However, he does not reflect on what he has seen and instead believes that the eastern road is the one most

138 likely to get him to the shore quickly…On the other hand, unbeknownst to anyone in the community, the southern road has just become temporarily blocked by a rock slide and, thus, it is only the western road that will get Smith to the shore today, albeit much later than he had hoped because of its very indirect route”.165 On the basis of this example, Foley distinguishes between various ways of assessing performances.166 One of them corresponds to what I have just called the instrumental value of a performance. In this example, taking the western road is the instrumentally valuable action to perform with regard to the goal of driving to the shore as quickly as possible. On the other hand, Foley notices, since Smith is convinced that the eastern road is the only road which leads to the shore, it would certainly be irrational for him to take any other. That is, taking the eastern road is the rational action to perform when you want drive to the shore and you think that the eastern road is the road to the shore. Finally, it seems that the commendable action to perform is the action of taking the northern road. It is the commendable action to perform in the sense that it is the action that Smith would have performed if he had paid the appropriate attention to the fact that a car pulling a boat took the northern road. To express the same idea in more general terms, it is the action that Smith would have performed if he had tried hard enough, if he had done his best to achieve the goal of reaching the shore or if he had put sufficient effort into the achievement of his goal. This diversity of judgments manifests the variety of standards which are able to rule the evaluation of actions. Let me formulate these standards more explicitly. Standard of instrumental goodness

165

Foley (2002). Note that Foley distinguishes between various standards of “rationality”. I prefer the idiom goodness* and keep the terms “rationality” and “rational” to refer to a specific form of goodness*. According to Foley also, there are four ways according to which an agent’s performance might qualify as rational. I am about to discuss three of them. I leave aside the standard of rationality, which relies on what is commonly believed in the community to which the agent belongs. See Foley (2002). 166

139 If E is a finally valuable end, a subject S’s action is instrumentally E-valuable if it causally contributes to the achievement of E. Standard of rationality A subject S’s action is G-rational at t if it is such that if S was pursuing goal G, this action would contribute to the achievement of G according to what S thinks at t.167 Standard of commendability A subject S’s action is G-commendable if it is such that if S was pursuing goal G,168 this would be the action performed by S as a result of his trying hard enough to achieve goal G. My suggestion is that being instrumentally valuable, being rational and being commendable constitute three distinct and independent ways for an action to be assessed positively, to be good*. There is no need to defend further the idea that ascribing instrumental value to a 167

Kolodny’s distinction between “normativity of rationality” and “normativity of reasons” seems very similar to the distinction between the goodness* attached to rationality and the goodness attached to instrumental goodness. Kolodny differentiates between two sorts of cases in which we say: “you ought to”. In the first sort of cases, we are saying something about the relationship between your attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. “You ought to” means “it would be irrational of you not to’’. For instance, when I say: “Fine. Since that’s what you intend, you ought to intend to open a new box of cigarettes; it would be irrational for you not to.” In the second sort of cases, we are saying something about the relation between your situation and your attitudes. “You ought to” means “there is reason to”. For instance, when I say: “You ought to intend to leave; you have reason to! The building is on fire!” See Kolodny (2005), pp. 509-10. 168 The appeal to hypothetical goals is required in order to keep the plausibility of the mentalist and the accessibilist conception of justification of belief acquisitions. I am about to claim that a justified belief acquisition is a rational belief acquisition according to the mentalist conception of justification and that it is a commendable belief acquisition according to the accessibilist conception of justification. Now, in many cases, our belief acquisitions are not motivated. They do not result from any desire to believe something true, they simply happen to us. This is the case, for instance, of number of beliefs acquired on the ground of perceptual experiences. Among these beliefs some are undeniably justified. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to require that the believer actually pursue the epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs in order to acquire a rational or a commendable belief. The last objection is raised by Kelly (2003) in the general objection he addresses against the instrumental conception of epistemic rationality.

140 performance is to evaluate it positively. Performing rational actions is also normally regarded as desirable. If Smith had taken the western road, his action would have seemed good* in a way but his action would have been irrational and had seemed bad* in another way. The specific goodness* of commendable actions is manifested by our tendency to claim that it is the action that the agent should perform, in these circumstances, taking into account that he pursues goal G. I say more below about what makes a commendable performance a good* thing. 169 Analogously, the acquisition of a belief can be good* according to these three distinct standards: 1. A subject S’s acquisition of a belief is instrumentally epistemically valuable if it causally contributes to the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs; 2. A subject S’s acquisition of a belief is epistemically rational at t, if it is such that if S was pursuing the goal of acquiring true beliefs, this belief acquisition would contribute to the achievement of G according to what S thinks at t; 3. A subject S’s acquisition of a belief is epistemically commendable if it is such that if S was pursuing the goal of acquiring true beliefs, this would be the belief that S would acquire as a result of his trying hard enough to achieve the goal of acquiring true beliefs.170 As we saw, an obvious way for a belief acquisition to be a good* thing regarding the end of acquiring true rather false beliefs consists in being the acquisition of a true belief. 169

Plantinga’s distinction between various notions of rationality is very similar to the distinction I make between instrumental goodness, rationality and commendability. According to Plantinga, indeed, a rational performance might be: 1. what would in fact contribute to your goals; 2. what you take it would contribute to your goals; 3. what you would take it would contribute to your goals if you were not distracted and were also to reflect sufficiently, and so on. See Plantinga (1993). 170 All this is correct mutatis mutandis in the non-epistemic realm. That is, the same conditions are mutatis mutandis for instrumentally non-epistemically valuable, nonepistemically rational, non-epistemically commendable belief-acquisitions. But as I said, in this chapter and in the following one, I focus on the epistemic realm of evaluation.

141 For the sake of completeness, let me mention that I should have started the list above with the following statement: 0. A subject S’s acquisition of the belief is finally epistemically valuable if it is the acquisition of a true belief. VARIETIES OF EPISTEMIC PRAISEWORTHINESS AND BLAMEWORTHINESS If a subject S deserves to be praised or does not deserve to be blamed when he is responsible for the occurrence of a good* state of affairs, and if there are various ways for the state of affairs consisting in the acquisition of a belief to be epistemically good*, then it seems that there are as many ways of being epistemically praiseworthy or epistemically irreproachable, as there are ways for the acquisition of a belief to be epistemically good*. My goal in the rest of this chapter is to consider whether this suggestion is correct. Final and instrumental blameworthiness

epistemic

praiseworthiness

and

Final epistemic praiseworthiness A subject S is epistemically praiseworthy for his finally epistemically valuable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. his acquisition of the true belief that p, when S is responsible for having acquired a true belief about p. I hope I have settled the problems that the conception of an occasional responsibility for the acquisition of true beliefs raises. If this is so, nothing seems to prevent us from praising people when they are responsible for what they truly believe. Instrumental epistemic praiseworthiness A subject S is epistemically praiseworthy for his instrumentally epistemically valuable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. his acquisition of a belief that causally contributes to the acquisition of further true beliefs, when S is responsible for having acquired such a belief. When a subject is responsible for having acquired a true belief about a topic, he is very often responsible for having acquired a belief, which causally contributes to the acquisition of further true beliefs. Indeed, not

142 only does the acquisition of a true belief generally cause the acquisition of further true beliefs, but frequently also a subject’s epistemic motivation to acquire a true belief about a topic is not strictly limited to the acquisition of a true belief about this topic. Habitually, part of S’s motivation is to acquire further true beliefs on the ground of what he desires to believe truly about p.171 However, a case in which S is responsible for having acquired a true belief about p without being responsible for having acquired a belief, which causally contributes to the acquisition of further true beliefs, is conceivable. Suppose S wants to know how to spell the word “ornithorhynchus” but is really completely disinterested in what the spelling of this word teaches about the appearance of this animal. In this case, even if the acquisition of a true belief concerning the spelling of the word “ornithorhynchus” causally induces S to acquire a true belief about the look of this animal, this will not be something for which S is responsible. An opposite case —a case in which S is not responsible for having acquired a true belief about p, but is responsible for having acquired a belief which causally contributes to the acquisition of further true beliefs— is conceivable as well. Suppose that my goal is to acquire true beliefs about the qualities of Japanese gastronomy. I think that the acquisition of unbiased beliefs about this topic requires that I get rid of my prejudices by acquiring the belief that nowadays there are as many famous Japanese chefs are there are renowned French chefs. For this reason, I instill in myself —by modifying my current set of evidence in a manipulative way— the true belief that the number of recognized Japanese chefs equals the number of French ones. In this case, I am responsible for having acquired a belief which promotes the acquisition of further true beliefs. But I am not responsible for the acquisition of the true belief that the number of recognized Japanese chefs is the same than the number of French ones. Final epistemic blameworthiness A subject S is epistemically blameworthy for his finally epistemically disvaluable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e.

171

For the sake of simplicity, I leave here aside the possibility that S might be responsible for the unintentional acquisition of further true beliefs. That is to say, I omit the point —discussed in the chapter 3 above— that the mere indirect influence that a subject might exercise on the acquisition of further true beliefs is sufficient for the ascription of responsibility.

143 his acquisition of the false belief that p, when S is responsible for having acquired a false belief about p. Instrumental epistemic blameworthiness A subject S is epistemically blameworthy for his instrumentally epistemically disvaluable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. the acquisition of a belief, which is not something, which causally contributes to the acquisition of further true beliefs, when S is responsible for having acquired such a belief. Note that an account of the conditions under which someone is epistemically blameworthy can be either broad or narrow according to the scope of the negation in italics.172 Broad instrumental epistemic blameworthiness A subject S is epistemically blameworthy for his instrumentally epistemically disvaluable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. his acquisition of a belief, which does not causally contribute to the acquisition of further true beliefs when S is responsible for having acquired such a belief. Narrow instrumental epistemic blameworthiness A subject S is epistemically blameworthy for his instrumentally epistemically disvaluable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. his acquisition of a belief, which causally contributes to the acquisition of false rather than true beliefs, when S is responsible for having acquired such a belief. According to the broad account, a subject deserves to be blamed if he is responsible for having acquired a causally inefficient belief, like the belief that there were 345 breadcrumbs on my breakfast table two weeks ago. The acquisition of a causally inefficient belief is certainly

172

Broad instrumental blameworthiness is contradictory to instrumental praiseworthiness while narrow instrumental blameworthiness is contrary to instrumental praiseworthiness.

144 something for which we do not deserve to be praised.173 But I do not think that it is something for which we deserve to be blamed, at least, epistemically blamed. As I said, I might be non-epistemically blameworthy for having wasted my time counting breadcrumbs in order to acquire a true belief about the exact quantity of them on the table. But the question of my non-epistemic blameworthiness requires a separate answer as long as the epistemic end of acquiring true rather than false belief is not considered as a non-epistemic one. Therefore, I believe it is certainly preferable to adopt the narrow account. Epistemic praiseworthiness/blameworthiness for rational belief acquisitions Rational epistemic praiseworthiness A subject S is epistemically praiseworthy for his epistemically rational acquisition of the belief that p when S is responsible for his epistemically rational acquisition of the belief that p. My next goal is to show that such an account of rational epistemic praiseworthiness is flawed from the beginning. Indeed, it is meaningless to speak about a subject’s responsibility for having acquired an epistemically rational belief. According to the standard of rationality I presented above, a rational performance is a performance which promotes the achievement of one of the agent’s hypothetical goals, from the agent’s perspective. That is, according to this simple standard, the rationality of a performance presupposes the hypothetical pursuit of a goal. Note that performing rational actions does not seem to be a goal in itself. It is rather the side-effect of a desire to achieve an end. When Smith wants to achieve the end of driving to the shore, he will generally perform the action that constitutes the best means to achieve this end according to what he believes. That is to say, he will generally perform a rational action, but he does not desire to perform a rational action. His performing an action which is rational, is the foreseen side-effect of his intentionally performing an action that constitutes an appropriate means 173

Claiming that the acquisition of a causally inefficient belief is sufficient for being praised is as counterintuitive as claiming that my action of rubbing my eyes when I get up this morning was praiseworthy. Praiseworthiness seems to require more than the performance of actions which do not have any disvaluable consequences.

145 to satisfy his desire according to him.174 Thus, if it were conceivable to ascribe responsibility for having performed rational actions, it would be in the way we ascribe responsibility for the foreseen side-effects of our actions. Now, remember that according to a reason-responsive account of responsibility, an agent is responsible for his action —no matter whether it is a side-effect or not— only if it is moderately responsive to his reasons; briefly said, only if the agent would have recognized a sufficient reason to act differently and would have acted differently for this reason. Hence, it seems that an agent is responsible for his having performed a rational action only if he would have acted irrationally for what he would have recognized as a sufficient reason to perform an irrational action. I do not think that such counterfactual scenario is conceivable. Indeed, the recognition of a sufficient reason to perform an irrational action seems to turn the supposed irrational action into a rational one. Suppose that I offer Smith 9000 pounds for performing an irrational action rather than the rational one he was planning to perform on the ground of his desire to drive to the shore and his belief that the eastern road is the road to the shore. My offer seems to intervene in Smith’s practical deliberation by defeating his initial desire to drive to the shore in a way which does not allow us anymore to consider his action of taking, let me say, the southern road, as an irrational one. However that may be, such a counterfactual scenario is definitely inconceivable in the case of belief acquisitions. If the goal is the acquisition of true beliefs and if I infer that p is a false proposition as a result of deliberating about the truth of p, the rational belief to acquire is a belief that p is false. In this case, however, there is nothing I can do except adopt the rational belief that p is false.175 Therefore, it is inappropriate to speak of someone’s responsibility for his epistemically rational belief acquisition and thus pointless to try to determine when 174

See Von Wright (1963), pp. 123-125, for a similar distinction between the intended and the unintended but rightly foreseen consequences of my action. 175 This is the consequence of the transparency of doxastic deliberation discussed in the second chapter of this work. As we saw as well, it is certainly possible to induce indirectly the acquisition of the belief that p is true for the reason that someone offers me several millions pounds to believe this. But, this will clearly not count as an irrational acquisition of belief anymore.

146 someone is praiseworthy for such an epistemically rational belief acquisition. Epistemic praiseworthiness for epistemically commendable belief acquisitions and epistemic blameworthiness for epistemically noncommendable belief acquisitions Epistemic praiseworthiness for epistemically commendable belief acquisitions A subject S is epistemically praiseworthy for his epistemically commendable acquisition of the belief that p when S is responsible for his epistemically commendable acquisition of the belief that p. Remember that an epistemically commendable acquisition of belief is not inevitably the acquisition of a true belief. S’s acquisition of the belief that p is epistemically commendable if the belief that p is a belief that S would acquire as a result of his trying hard enough to achieve the goal of acquiring true beliefs. An epistemically commendable belief acquisition is a belief acquisition for which the believer is not instrumentally blameworthy either. The fact, indeed, that the subject did his best to achieve the end of acquiring true belief rules out the possibility of holding him responsible for having failed to acquire a true belief. Now, what is it that determines the threshold at which the believer has tried sufficiently hard in order to be irreproachable, is related to the quality and the quantity of the evidence on which his belief acquisition is grounded. For instance, a subject cannot be criticized for acquiring the belief that p if this is the result from his having carried out an extensive inquiry regarding the truth of p. He cannot be blamed either for acquiring the belief that p if the acquisition of the belief that p results from the subject possessing what looks like a very strong piece of evidence, for instance, the seemingly indefeasible perceptual evidence that p is true. A shorter expression of this general idea is to say that a subject cannot be criticized for acquiring the belief that p if the acquisition of this belief is grounded on a sufficient set of evidence. The acquisition of the belief that p is epistemically commendable if the belief that p is the belief that S would acquire as a result of his trying hard enough to achieve the goal of acquiring true beliefs. And S’s belief acquisition is the result of his trying hard enough if it is grounded on a

147 sufficient set of evidence. Hence the acquisition of the belief that p is epistemically commendable if it is grounded on a sufficient set of evidence. It is a notoriously difficult task to determine the threshold at which the acquisition of a belief is grounded on a sufficient set of evidence, for instance, the threshold at which the believer’s inquiry has been assiduous enough.176 I content myself with the formulation of the following sufficiency condition: The acquisition of the belief that p is grounded on a sufficient set of evidence E, that is to say, is commendable if: 1. the belief that p is a true belief and; 2. the resultant acquisition of the true belief that p is the consequence of my possessing the set of evidence E, that is to say, if I would not have acquired the true belief that p if I had not had the set of evidence E. Conversely the set of evidence E which grounds the acquisition of the belief that p is, for sure, insufficient, that is to say, the acquisition of the belief that p is non-commendable if: 1. the belief that p is a false belief and; 2. the resultant acquisition of the false belief that p is the consequence of my possessing the set of evidence E, that is to say, I would not have acquired the false belief that p if I had not had the set of evidence E. Now cases in which a subject S is responsible for his epistemically commendable belief acquisition are cases in which S’s trying hard enough to acquire a true belief is moderately responsive to S’s reasons. For instance, suppose that S’s mental illness is such that there is no scenario in which S would have recognized a sufficient reason to refrain himself from carrying out an extended inquiry in order to determine whether p is true. In this case, S does not seem to be responsible for his epistemically commendable acquisition of the belief that p. In this case,

176

I would probably have had to consider this question in more detail if my goal in this work had been to offer the principles of an ethics of belief. Since my ambition is only to provide a framework for the elaboration of an ethics of belief, I can postpone the consideration of this delicate question.

148 the belief that p is the commendable belief to acquire. But S is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy for his commendable belief acquisition. Contradictorily, a non-commendable belief acquisition is a belief acquisition, which is grounded on an insufficient set of evidence. Epistemic blameworthiness for epistemically non-commendable belief acquisitions A subject S is epistemically blameworthy for his epistemically non-commendable acquisition of the belief that p, i.e. his acquisition of a belief which is grounded on an insufficient set of evidence, when S is responsible for his epistemically noncommendable acquisition of the belief that p. Cases in which a subject S is responsible for his epistemically noncommendable acquisition of the belief that p are cases in which S’s not trying hard enough to acquire a belief on a sufficient set of evidence is moderately responsive to S’s reasons. Suppose, this time, that S’s mental deficiency is such that there is no scenario in which S would have recognized a sufficient reason to collect evidence in order to determine whether p is true. In this case, S is not responsible for having acquired the non-commendable belief that p. Final clarifying remarks It is important to bear in mind that an epistemically non-commendable acquisition of belief that p is non-commendable in regard to the goal of acquiring true beliefs. A subject S’s ill grounded acquisition of a belief is epistemically non-commendable given that S’s hypothetical goal is to acquire true beliefs. It might be perfectly commendable with regard to a non-epistemic goal. When I am epistemically blameworthy for having acquired an epistemically non-commendable belief, I am blameworthy for not having tried hard enough to achieve the epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. By contrast, when I am epistemically praiseworthy for my epistemically commendable belief acquisition, I am praiseworthy for having put sufficient effort into the achievement of this epistemic goal. As I have just said, when I am blameworthy for having acquired an epistemically non-commendable belief, my fault does not consist in having tried to acquire a belief which achieves a non-epistemic goal rather than the epistemic one. It might be true, however, that my being

149 negligent in my gathering evidence is the unconscious consequence of a non-epistemic motivation. Suppose that my more specific goal is to acquire a true belief about the weather this weekend and I acquire the belief that it is not going to rain by carrying out a poor inquiry. I ask my grandmother —who is always excessively optimistic about the weather— but do not check her word in a newspaper. Now if the reason why I do not inquire further is that I suddenly find myself pleased with the belief that it is not going to rain this weekend, then my being negligent in my collecting evidence about the weather is the unconscious consequence of a non-epistemic motivation. But my being negligent in my collecting evidence regarding the truth of p is not always the result of a non-epistemic motivation to acquire, let me say the belief that p rather than not-p. It might also be the consequence of my laziness or of my lack of sufficient motivation to get at the truth regarding p. To sum up, I tried to show that there are two main sorts of epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness: 1. I can be epistemically praised for having succeeded and for having acquired a true belief or for having acquired a belief which causally contributes to the acquisition of true beliefs; 2. I can be epistemically praised for having sufficiently tried to acquire true beliefs; 3. I can be epistemically blamed for having failed and for having acquired a false belief or for having acquired a belief which causally contributes to the acquisition of false beliefs; 4. I can be epistemically blamed for not having sufficiently tried to acquire true beliefs. I am epistemically finally praiseworthy for having acquired a true belief when I am responsible for this success. But we saw in the previous chapter that I cannot be responsible for having acquired a true belief if the acquisition of a true belief is not the consequence of my manipulating the evidence in a truth-oriented way. That is to say, if the acquisition of a true belief is not the consequence of my having tried to acquire a true belief.177 Now, when the acquisition of a true belief is the consequence of my action of trying to acquire a true belief, I have just said that my trying was, by definition, sufficient. Hence my being finally 177

For the sake of simplicity, I leave aside the possibility of my being responsible for my unintentional acquisition of a true belief.

150 epistemically praiseworthy for having acquired a true belief entails my being epistemically praiseworthy for having acquired an epistemically commendable belief. But my being epistemically praiseworthy for having acquired an epistemically commendable belief does not entail my being finally epistemically praiseworthy for having acquired a true belief. It might be that I failed to acquire a true belief while having obviously tried hard enough to acquire one of them. Conversely, my being finally epistemically blameworthy for having acquired a false belief entails my being epistemically blameworthy for having acquired an epistemically non-commendable belief. But my being epistemically blameworthy for having acquired an epistemically non-commendable belief does not entail my being finally epistemically blameworthy for having acquired a false belief. It might be that I acquired a true belief while having obviously tried insufficiently.

151

CHAPTER 6: BEYOND EPISTEMIC JUSTIFIEDNESS The standards of final or instrumental value, of rationality and of commendability represent distinct ways of evaluating the performances of the agents. These standards —let me call them “basic standards of evaluation”— ground some fundamental legal distinctions.178 The suggestion that I would like to defend in this chapter is that they are also at the origin of the divergence between various accounts of justifiedness.179 I would like to start this discussion by quoting William Alston: “There does not seem to be enough commonality in their [the supporters of the various conceptions of justification] pretheoretical understanding of the nature of epistemic justification to warrant us in supposing that there is some uniquely identifiable item about which they hold different views. It seems, rather, that they are highlighting, emphasizing, ‘pushing’ different concepts, all called 'justification'. If that is the case, the persistent disputes over what justification really is have been misdirected, and it is time to take a fresh start under a more appropriate aegis”.180 The issue pointed out by Alston is close to my heart. I share the intuition that externalism and internalism bear upon two different properties of

178

It is certainly interesting to confront the basic evaluative standards presented below with the various ways of being legally at fault. The crucial distinction between intentional wrongdoing and negligence is the manifestation, in the legal realm, of the distinction between the standard of final/instrumental value and the standard of commendability. For a treatment of the legal notions, see Feinberg (1974), pp. 192 ff. 179 I prefer the term “justifiedness” to the term “justification” to make clear that what I am discussing is a property of beliefs, the property of being justified. By contrast, I make use of the term “unjustifiedness” to refer to the property of being unjustified and speak of “the justification of beliefs” when I want to refer to the general feature of being either justified or unjustified. 180 Alston (1993), p. 534. The idea is discussed already but not as explicitly in Alston (1985). See also Alston (2006).

152 beliefs that they unhappily both call “justifiedness”181 and I think, therefore, that the externalist account and the internalist account are not inevitably incompatible accounts of justifiedness. Nowadays, even Laurence Bonjour, who certainly counts among the most zealous supporter of internalism, seems to have adopted this point of view.182 Here I am exclusively concerned with epistemic justifiedness of beliefs, that is to say, with a property the possession of which is determined by the promotion of the epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. Nonepistemic justifiedness —the sort of justifiedness the possession of which is determined by the promotion of non-epistemic goals, like the goal of acquiring pleasant, useful, or morally good beliefs— is the topic of the following chapter. Note also that I will arbitrarily speak either of justified beliefs or of justified belief acquisitions. To avoid any confusion, justifiedness is a property of beliefs but acquisitions of justified beliefs are justified belief acquisitions. Alston’s line of defence First, I would like to consider briefly how Alston defends the view according to which some of the epistemologists who disagree about the conditions of justifiedness do not have a common pre-theoretical conception of what they are debating. He begins by emphasizing that the discussion of justifiedness is a longcontinued dispute.183 “If so many brilliant philosophers disagree so radically as to what it is and what it takes to have, why should we supposed 181

I believe that twofold accounts of knowledge like the one defended by Sosa (2007) or by Weatherson (2008) are manifestations of the multifaceted aspect of justification. For instance, Sosa’s distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge might be considered the consequence of his desire to account for two distinct features of beliefs, which correspond to the allegedly opposed conceptions of externalist and internalist justifiedness respectively. I suspect that the two notions of justifiedness are also implicit in Plantinga’s distinction between warrant and justification. See Plantinga (1993). Interestingly, here is what Plantinga claims about his distinction: “What we need to see clearly is the vast difference between justification and warrant. The lesson to be learned is that these two are not merely uneasy bedfellows; they are worlds apart.” Plantinga (1990), p. 71. 182 See Bonjour (2003), pp. 24-41. 183 See Alston (2006), pp. 21-26.

153 that there is any objective property of beliefs picked out by ‘justified’?”184 As Alston also notes, persistent disagreement about a topic is not sufficient to conclude to the nonexistence of a common object of disagreement. However, it is certainly a feature of the discussion of justifiedness which it is legitimate to consider fishy. According to Alston, the main reason to think that epistemologists do not point at one single notion of justifiedness is that they do not agree on paradigm cases of justified belief. When debating about the necessary conditions under which a thing counts as being Ω, we need to agree, at least, on paradigm cases in which a thing is Ω. This is the manifestation of our having at least a common pre-theoretical conception of what it is to be Ω, and thus, of the fact that we have a single object of discussion in mind. But, Alston claims, this is not the case in the debate about justifiedness. For instance, when a subject’s faculties are always misleading as a result of the completely unnoticeable intervention of a Cartesian demon, he is fully justified in believing what his unreliable faculties drive him to believe according to the supporters of internalism. By contrast a belief resulting from such an unreliable faculty is paradigmatically unjustified according to the defenders of a reliabilist conception of justifiedness. Conversely, Bonjour’s cases of clairvoyance in which the reliability of a faculty is unknown to the believer are supposed to constitute paradigmatic examples in which someone’s beliefs are unjustified while resulting from a reliable faculty. But, as Alston observes, it is not certain that the supporters of reliabilism will agree with this description. I would like to provide some further support for the view defended by Alston, according to which some of the epistemologists discussing the necessary conditions for justifiedness do not have a common pretheoretical conception of what they are looking for. My idea is to bring support to this view by showing that the various conceptions of justifiedness are actually reflecting the different sorts of evaluation manifested by the three standards of evaluation presented above.185 If some of the main conceptions of justifiedness can be considered as reflecting these three different ways of assessing performances, we have 184

Alston (2006), p. 21. The fact that these are notions that fundamentally structure the way in which we assess actions certainly explain their intrusion in the epistemological domain.

185

154 a supplementary reason to think that these conceptions of justifiedness are actually bearing on three distinct evaluative features of belief. The interrelation between the three standards of evaluation might help us to understand why such confusion can emerge. Thus, my strategy in the next pages is the following: I will start by providing a threefold classification of the main conceptions of justifiedness. Then I will try to show that each of them is accounting for a distinct kind of goodness*, and thus reflects one of the basic standards of evaluation presented above. ACCESSIBILISM, MENTALISM, AND EXTERNALISM As it is well known, the epistemological literature offers many accounts of justifiedness: reliabilism, evidentialism, the deontological conception, virtue epistemology, etc. A traditional and coarse-grained way of classifying these various conceptions consists in distinguishing between externalist and internalist conceptions of justifiedness. Let me begin with internalism. It is notoriously difficult to state clearly what the common feature of the internalist conceptions of justifiedness is. Following Conee and Feldman, I suggest distinguishing between two sorts of internalism: accessibilism and mentalism.186 This leaves us with a threefold categorization between accessibilism, mentalism and externalism. Accessibilism The distinctive claim of accessibilism is that the justifiedness of a subject S’s belief that p “is determined by things to which S has some special sort of access”.187 That is to say, the property of S’s belief which determines whether it is justified or unjustified, does not consist in any property of his belief other than a property to which S has reflective or cognitive access. Now the property in question can vary. It might be the relational property of

186

See Conee and Feldman (2004), pp. 54-8. For a similar distinction between two sorts of internalism, see Plantinga (1990). Conee and Feldman’s evidentialism is a form of mentalism. According to them, the superiority of mentalism lies in its greater ability to reply to the objections of externalism. See Conee and Feldman (2004), pp. 64-80. 187 Conee and Feldman (2004), p. 55.

155 being supported by evidence188, or less plausibly, the relational property of being coherent with S’s other beliefs189, etc. Mentalism Mentalism is the conception of justifiedness according to which the justifiedness of S’s belief depends on its relation to states of affairs which are internal to S’s mind. More accurately, according to Conee and Feldman, mentalism is committed to the following two theses: “S The justificatory status of a person's doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person's occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions”; M If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent”.190 The following evidentialist claim is consonant with a mentalist account of justifiedness: “Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t”.191 Thus, evidentialism, i.e. the general idea that justifiedness depends on the belief’s being supported by the evidence, can take either an accessibilist or a mentalist form. According to mentalist evidentialism (ME), the justifiedness of a belief, at some time t, only requires that the

188

See for instance Conee (1988), p. 398. I am tempted to classify Zagzebski’s account of justifiedness among the accessibilist conceptions for the reason that justifiedness requires, according to her, “an understanding of our cognitive situation”. Roughly, according to the virtue account of Zagzebski, justifiedness is not merely the function of the relations that a belief holds with the world or other mental states. It also requires reflective access to these relations. This distinguishes her account from externalist virtue accounts like Greco’s. See Zagzebski (1996), Greco (1999, 2010). 190 Conee and Feldman (2004), p. 56. 191 Ibid., p. 83. 189

156 belief fits the evidence that a subject possesses at time t.192 Accessibilist evidentialism (AE) requires, furthermore, that the subject displays a cognitive access to the justifier, i.e. the fact that his belief fits the evidence that he possesses. For instance, AE might require that the subject be conscious of this fact. Externalism By contrast, “externalists characteristically hold that differences in justification can result from contingent non-mental differences, such as differing causal connections or reliability”.193 The distinctive statement of externalist accounts is the claim that the justifiedness of a belief might depend on its possessing a relation with entities external to the mind. Of course, not every kind of relational property will do. They must be probably truth-conducive properties, i.e. properties that generally induce the acquisition of true beliefs. The property of having been caused by a reliable process, and the property of resulting from the exercise of a cognitive competence or aptitude, are such probably truth-conducive properties. Note that ME makes justifiedness of beliefs depend on their possession of truth-conductive relational properties as well. Fitting the evidence of the believer is certainly a truth-tracking property. But, contrary to externalism, the determinant truth-conductive properties are relations with entities which are internal to the mind. According to externalism, and contrary to mentalism, two mental duplicates in two different worlds can vary regarding the justifiedness of their beliefs. Reliabilism constitutes the classical example194 of an externalist conception of justifiedness: “The justificational status of a belief is a function of the reliability of the process or processes that cause it, where (as a

192

Besides mentalist evidentialism, it is certainly possible to conceive something like a mentalist version of coherentism. Such a form of coherentism will not require from the believer that he have any access to the coherence of the mental states which justify his belief. It will merely necessitate that the believer’s belief coheres with the rest of his occurrent and dispositional beliefs. 193 Ibid,. p. 56. 194 Other comparable conceptions of justifiedness are the accounts of the so-called virtue epistemology like Sosa’s and Greco’s. See Sosa (2007), Greco (1999, 2010).

157 first approximation) reliability consists in the tendency of a process to produce beliefs that are true rather than false”.195 Accessibilism and perceptual disjunctivism I would like to focus now on the distinction between accessibilism and mentalism. The reason why epistemologists do not traditionally distinguish these two kinds of theories certainly lies in the temptation to think that only purely internal justifiers are justifiers to which we can have the specific access necessitated by accessibilism. If this were so, accessibilism and mentalism would be co-extensional —accessibilism being simply stronger than mentalism.196 But, this is not so. The justifiers to which we have access are not inevitably purely internal. For instance, AE requires for the subject S to have a cognitive access to the fact that his belief fits the evidence that he possesses. Now this evidence can take two different forms: 1. It can consist in other beliefs of S. That is, S’s belief that p is justified in virtue of the fact that S is conscious that his belief that p fits his other beliefs. 2. It can consist in perceptual experiences of S. That is, S’s belief that p is justified in virtue of the fact that S is conscious that his belief that p fits his perceptual experiences. My goal here is not to provide an argument in favour of one or the other of these options. I only take for granted that they are both conceivable options at first sight and, more specifically, that there is no obvious reason to rule out the second one without providing further philosophical arguments. John Pollock has defended the idea that perceptual experiences count among the states which might ground the justification of beliefs. Now, briefly, according to Pollock’s perceptual disjunctivism, a veridical perceptual experience is not a purely internal mental state. It consists in a relation between a perceptual act — which is well and truly internal to the mind— and an external object.197 My veridical perceptual experience that the flowers on this table are wilted consists in a complex state of affairs, which consists in an internal act of perceiving and in an external object: the wilted flowers. 195

Goldman (1979), p. 10. Ibid., p. 55. 197 See Pollock (1986). 196

158 Hence, if Pollock is right, the justifier to which I have access when I have the justified belief that these flowers are wilted is not purely internal. It involves an external component as well. I would like to avoid taking a stance in the debate surrounding perceptual disjunctivism as well. My point is rather the following: the mere fact that Pollock’s theory is not a priori implausible leaves the door open to the eventuality that the justifier of a belief is something cognitively accessible without being purely internal.198 To say it differently, the extension of accessibilism and mentalism might diverge. Suppose that I believe that there is an oil-puddle on the road as a result of an illusory perception. Now compare this to a case in which my belief that there is an oil-puddle on the road is grounded on a veridical perception. According to perceptual disjunctivism, the state of affairs which grounds the justification of my belief, i.e. the perceptual experience, is not similar in the two cases. In the former case, it consists in a mere perceptual and internal, act. In the latter case, it consists in a complex relational state of affairs involving a perceptual and internal act and an external object. Supporters of mentalism will certainly claim that my belief is equally justified in both cases since what is internal to my mind, my perceptual act, is exactly alike. By contrast, accessibilism —when it is combined with direct realism— is able to differentiate these two cases. Note that this presupposes that I have a complete access to the justifier of my belief, that is to say, that my access is not limited to the internal components of my belief fitting my veridical perceptual experience. I am not sure that this is a plausible suggestion. But, more importantly, most philosophers, externalists included, certainly prefer preserving the intuition that our beliefs are, most often, justified even when we are the victims of a perceptual illusion. A conception of justifiedness which would allow a difference in the case of an illusion-grounded belief, is

198

Bonjour suggests something similar: “It shoud be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed in this way [in terms of cognitive accessibility], it is neither necessary nor sufficient by itself for internalism that the justifying factors literally be internal mental states of the person in question. Not necessary, because on at least some views, e.g. a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible” in Bonjour (1992). I owe this quotation to Olivier Massin whom I also have to thank for having helped me see this point.

159 not really desirable. Thus, even if a “non-mentalist accessibilism” is theoretically conceivable, it is not an attractive thesis. Three conceptions of justifiedness Whatever the exact extension of accessibilism compared to mentalism, accessibilism, mentalism and externalism certainly reflect three fundamentally distinct conceptions of justifiedness. It is, I believe, appropriate to classify the various accounts of justifiedness with regard to these three sorts of conceptions. 1. Mentalist accessibilist accounts (i.e. simply called accessibilist accounts below) are accounts of justifiedness requiring that the believer have cognitive or reflective access to the supposedly justifying (relational) property of his belief, for instance, the property of being supported by the evidence; 2. Mentalist accounts are accounts of justifiedness to the effect that the justifiedness of a belief is function of this belief being suitably related to states of affairs internal to the mind, for instance, evidence; 3. Externalist accounts are accounts of justifiedness to the effect that the justifiedness of a belief is function of the belief being connected in a truth-conducive way to states of affairs which are not inevitably internal to the mind. Beyond their discrepancy, I think there is at least one feature that the supporters of externalism, mentalism and accessibilism, jointly attribute to justifiedness. They consider that justifiedness is a positive normative property, a property which positively modifies the status of the belief possessing it. This is why most of them wish to provide an account of justifiedness which could explain the intuition that we find ourselves in a better situation when we possess a justified true belief than a mere true

160 belief.199 In the rest of this chapter, I will assume that Externalists, Mentalists and Accessibilists pre-theoretically agree, at least, on the idea that being justified consists in possessing a positive normative property.200 Normative properties Since a lot of what I am going to say below is grounded on the idea that justifiedness is a normative property, it is worth making clear what I take to be a normative property. Normative properties can take various forms. 201 They are: 1. Value properties. Remember that a value property might be a final value property or an instrumental value property. A state of affairs possessing a final value property is desirable for itself while a state of affairs possessing an instrumental value property is desirable for what it causes. 199

More accurately, the problem that they desire to solve bears upon the additional value of knowledge compared to true beliefs. This precision plays no role however. Indeed, philosophers interested in the so-called “problem of the value of knowledge” identify a piece of knowledge as a justified, true belief (plus some feature which prevents its Gettierisation) and they consider that justifiedness is the component which makes the whole, i.e. knowledge, better than mere true belief. To say it differently, trying to solve the problem of the value of knowledge amounts to trying to solve the problem of the positive value of justifiedness. I prefer speaking about the problem of the value of justifiedness because this does not imply anything regarding the exact nature of knowledge. 200 The view that justifiedness is a normative notion is very common in the epistemological literature. My assumption here is also that “being justified” has a non-eliminable normative connotation. Speaking of the “justifiedness of beliefs” presuppose the acceptance that some sort of normativity rules our believing such or such a thing. For this reason, I think that an extreme form of naturalism —a form of naturalism, which would refuse to consider that the activity of believing displays any form of normativity— should be seen as a form of eliminativism regarding justifiedness. There is no such thing as justifiedness of beliefs according to them. Eliminativism needs to be distinguished from reductionism: the position to the effect that the activity of believing displays a form of normativity, which is reducible to nonnormative properties. As Engel indicated me in one of his written comments on an earlier version of this chapter, Williamson and Drestke can certainly be classified among the eliminativists. 201 See Mulligan (2009a, 2009b).

161 Value properties are also usually divided between thin and thick. Thin value properties are the property of being good, bad, and neutral, i.e. neither good nor bad. Thick value properties are, for instance, the property of being sad, true, pleasant, ugly, etc. 2. Or deontic properties like the property of being obligatory, being permitted, etc. 3. Or the property of being right and the property of being wrong. 4. Or aretic properties, i.e. properties referring to virtues or vices, which might, I suppose, be divided into thin aretic properties —the property of being virtuous, vicious— and thick aretic properties — the property of being courageous, wise, credulous, etc. If being justified is possessing a positive normative property and unjustifiedness consists in possessing a negative normative property, the issue emerging immediately is: which kind of normative property? Since it is not my goal in this study to defend a specific account of justifiedness among others, I do not propose to answer this question. Note simply that it is also possible to classify the accounts of justifiedness according to the reply they offer to this question.202 Now even when a philosopher seems to claim that justifiedness of beliefs consists in possessing, let me say, a value property, this does not preclude a justified belief from possessing another normative property, for instance, a deontic one. Believing that p might be, at the same time, good and obligatory. The claim that justifiedness consists in the possession of a positive value property means only that value properties are more fundamental. If believing that p is obligatory, besides being good, its being obligatory is grounded on its being good.

202

Accounts appealing to epistemic virtues explicitly identify justifiedness with an aretic property. It is also clear that epistemologists defending the idea that justifiedness is a matter of duty, permission, etc. consider justifiedness a deontic property. As we are going to see below, even if it is less obvious, reliabilists identify justifiedness with a value property, more accurately, to an instrumental one.

162 Regarding the kind of metaphysical entities possessing normative properties, I will take for granted that, at least203, states of affairs — exemplifications by substances of properties at some time— can possess normative properties. I do not need to say anything more about this topic since what I am interested in evaluating —the acquisition of a belief by a subject S at some time— is precisely a state of affairs. More importantly, asserting that a justified belief consists in a belief possessing a positive normative property is not saying anything regarding the non-normative properties that the belief has to exemplify in order to count as justified. Analogously, the claim that the property of being ugly is a normative property does not teach us anything regarding the non-normative properties that a painting has to exemplify in order to count as ugly. Therefore, you might be tempted to consider the claim that justifiedness consists in the possession of a normative property to be worthless. It is true that it does not indicate anything substantial regarding what you should concretely do in order to acquire a good belief. As will appear below, the crucial interest of the claim is that it offers a comprehensive account of the various conceptions of justifiedness and will, in turn, allow us to understand what really constitutes their the pre-theoretical divergence. Finally, the claim that a justified belief consists in a belief possessing a positive normative property is neutral regarding the nature of the connection between normative and non-normative properties. Determining how non-normative properties are related to normative ones is a very complicated issue, which would lead me too far from my objectives in the present inquiry. I will presume the truth of a nonreductionist view according to which normative properties supervene on the non-normative ones. I do not believe that my taking this stance has any significant importance for my conclusions but I would like to develop it briefly for the sake of clarity. Roughly, the non-reductionist view appealing to supervenience is made of two main claims. According to the first, normative properties are second-order properties, that is to 203

Persons and objects are other plausible candidates of positive or negative evaluation. The argument for including them among the bearers of normative properties is the following. Think about a painting which exemplifies the normative property of being ugly. Let’s say that what makes the painting ugly is the way it juxtaposes certain colours. In this case, the state of affairs consisting in the painting juxtaposing certain colours is not what is ugly. It is not the bearer of the normative property. It is the painting itself which is ugly. See Mulligan (2009b).

163 say, properties of non-normative properties. The goodness of a state of affairs is a property that the state of affairs possesses “indirectly” in virtue of its exemplification of a first-order non-normative property. The second claim is that two states of affairs cannot differ regarding their normative properties if they do not differ regarding their non-normative properties. As I said already, the epistemological literature contains innumerable attempts to specify on which non-normative properties of belief the normative property of being epistemically justified supervenes. “Being the result of a reliable process”, “being supported by the evidence” are potential bearers of the normative property of being justified. VALUABLE,

RATIONAL, COMMENDABLE BELIEF ACQUISITIONS AND THE THREEFOLD CLASSIFICATION OF JUSTIFIEDNESS

At this point, a terminological adjustment is necessary. As I have just said, for a belief to be justified is for it to possess one or another positive normative property. To help connect this issue to what has been said in the previous chapter regarding the variety of goodness* which might characterize a single performance, I will refer to the positive normative property of beliefs with the term: “goodness*”. As I said already, the addition of the star denotes generality. That is to say, even if I am about to express myself by making use of the term “goodness*” rather than the less convenient expression “the property of possessing a positive normative property”, this should not be interpreted as meaning that a justified belief is a belief possessing a positive value property rather than a deontic or an aretic one. “Goodness*” refers to the property of possessing a positive normative property of whichever kind, while “goodness” refers to the more specific property of possessing a positive value property. Thus, the assumption of this chapter is that Externalists, Mentalists and Accessibilists agree, at least, on the idea that being justified consists in being good*. Identifying justifiedness with goodness* obviously leaves the door open to quite diverging points of view. More specifically, remember the basic standards of evaluation formulated in the previous chapter. Being instrumentally valuable, being rational and being commendable constitute natural and distinct ways of positively assessing a performance.

164 Hence, if someone were informing me of his intention to offer an account of justifiedness of beliefs, no matter that we share the view that being justified is being good*, it is still legitimate to ask him: which kind of goodness* do you have in mind? What I would like to show below is that Externalists, Mentalists and Accessibilists do not provide the same answer to this question. Externalism: the goodness* of instrumental goodness According to the externalist accounts, the justifiedness of beliefs is function of the probable truth-conducivity of a relation that connects beliefs with state of affairs, which are not inevitably internal. That is to say, the goal of the externalist accounts of justifiedness is to indicate which relation, possibly held by beliefs, is such that a belief holding this relation is probably true. The reason why a belief holding such a relation is probably true is that this is a property the exemplification of which generally causes the acquisition of true beliefs. Being the result of a reliable process is a property the exemplification of which generally causes the acquisition of true beliefs. Now, being the probable cause of the achievement of a valuable end, like the epistemic end of acquiring a true belief, constitutes a specific way of being good*. When a state of affairs is such that it probably causes the achievement of a valuable end, it is, more specifically, instrumentally good. Therefore, it seems that the sort of goodness* for which externalism tries to account is instrumental goodness. Indeed, formulating the conditions under which a belief will probably cause the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs amounts to providing a description of the conditions under which a belief is epistemically instrumentally valuable. Externalists share with Mentalists and Accessibilists the idea that being justified is being good* in a way and they more specifically think of justifiedness as instrumental goodness. As we will see below, this is also noticeable in the solution that supporters of reliabilism give to the problem of the superior value of justified true beliefs compared to mere true beliefs. Mentalism: the goodness* of rationality The bringing together of mentalism with one of the basic standards of evaluation is less obvious. Interestingly, supporters of mentalism, more accurately defenders of mentalist evidentialism, do not seem to be as

165 involved as Externalists and Accessibilists in the debate bearing upon the greater value of justified true belief compared to true belief. The mentalist accounts of justifiedness are close to the externalist accounts in the sense that they both consider that the justifiedness of a belief is exclusively determined by a relational property of that belief. No reflective access on the part of the believer is needed. At first sight then, it might seem right to reiterate what I have just said about the externalist account and to conclude that mentalist accounts of justifiedness are accounts of instrumental goodness. If this was correct, I would have failed in my attempt to show that Externalists and Mentalists do not have a common pre-theoretical conception of justifiedness by showing that they try to account for distinct kinds of goodness*. But I do not think that this conclusion bears upon what looks like the soundest form of mentalist evidentialism (ME). Remember that ME is the sort of mentalism according to which: S’s belief that p is justified at t if and only if S’s belief that p fits the evidence S has at t. For the purpose of telling the mentalist pre-theoretical conception of justifiedness apart from the externalist one, it is important to distinguish various forms of ME by addressing the following question: what does it mean for a subject to have evidence p (available) at t, where p is a proposition? 204 Inclusive mentalist evidentialism The more inclusive way of answering this question is the following: “S has p available as evidence at t iff p is included in S’s total possible evidence”205 A person’s total possible evidence at a time is a set which: “includes all and only the information the person has ‘stored in his mind’ at the time. This is intended to be a very broad notion. It includes everything that one has actively believed and could recall with some prompting. It thus includes past

204

For a careful examination of this question, see Conee and Feldman (2004), pp. 219-41. Feldman distinguishes between various accounts of the conditions which have to be satisfied in order for a subject S to have a proposition p available as evidence at some time t. 205 Conee and Feldman (2004), p. 228.

166 beliefs that were adopted for no good reason. It includes things that could be recalled only with great difficulty”.206 Here is a the formulation of ME when “the evidence a subject S has at t” is understood in this inclusive way: S’s belief that p is justified at t if and only if S’s belief that p fits with one among the total possible pieces of evidence of S at t, that is, with one among all the pieces of information that S has stored in his mind until t. According to the inclusive form of ME, I am justified in believing that I was sitting in the third row during my first year of school since this is something that I believed at that time and it is a piece of information that I have stored in my mind since then. Roughly, the way to delineate current justified beliefs from current unjustified beliefs according to the inclusive form of ME consists in confronting the present belief of a subject with the collection of all the pieces of evidence stored in his mind until then in order to consider whether this belief concords or fits with at least one of these pieces of evidence. But, the inclusive form of ME has counterintuitive implications. It implies, for instance, that the suspension of judgement about the truth of p is unjustified every time when I actually stored a piece of information regarding the truth of p and even if I am currently unable to recall this piece of information. This leads the supporters of ME to reject the inclusive form in favour of a less inclusive one.207 Restrictive mentalist evidentialim Feldman’s favourite account of the conditions under which a subject has a proposition available as evidence is the following: “S has p available as evidence at t iff S is currently thinking of p”.208 If we process as with the inclusive form of ME and substitute this account in the general claim of ME, we get: 206

Ibid. p. 226. See Conee and Feldman (2004), p. 228. 208 Conee and Feldman (2004), p. 232. 207

167 S’s belief that p is justified at t if and only if S’s belief that p fits what S is currently thinking. According to the restrictive form of ME, the justifiedness of a belief is determined by the relations between the belief and the current thoughts of the subject. If being justified is being good*, what if anything is good* in fitting the current thoughts of the subject? Remember the standard of epistemic rationality: A subject S’s acquisition of a belief is epistemically rational at t, if it is such that if S was pursuing the goal of acquiring true beliefs, this belief acquisition would contribute to the achievement of G according to what S thinks at t. The suggestion that comes immediately to mind is that S’s belief that p fitting what S currently takes as being the case— S’s evidence— manifests the fact that S’s acquisition of the belief that p is rational in this sense. That is, the sort of goodness* captured by the restrictive form of ME is the goodness* inherent in the rational acquisition of a belief. When your goal consists in acquiring true rather than false beliefs209, the rational belief to acquire, indeed, is the one, which fits what you consider as being the case.210 Accessibilism: the goodness* of commendability The following example constitutes a helpful starting point for the purpose of showing that the accessibilist and the restrictive form of ME are accounts of distinctive sorts of goodness*: A civil war has just broken up in Suffragette City, the city in which Stuart lives. For his own security, Stuart makes the decision to close himself up in his basement until the hostilities end. Once the conflict is finished, some malevolent relatives take malicious pleasure in providing him with evidence of the contrary. They play recordings of rifle shots very loudly. On 209

Remember that such an epistemic goal is not necessarily entertained consciously. This obviously recalls a position advocated by Feldman. In Feldman (2000), he defends the claim according to which a subject S epistemically ought to have the doxastic attitude toward proposition p supported by S’s evidence at t by appealing to the following value claim: “When adopting (or maintaining) an attitude toward a proposition p, a person maximizes epistemic value by adopting (or maintaining) a rational attitude toward p”.

210

168 the basis of these perceptual experiences, Stuart chooses to stay in his basement. Therefore, he still believes that the conflict is not finished two weeks after it actually ended. According to restrictive evidentialism, the false belief held by Stuart is justified. Indeed, Stuart’s thoughts, at this time, fit the belief that the hostilities are not over. Stuart thinks that a civil war broke up a couple of weeks ago and also thinks that there are still people fighting with rifles outside. Considering Stuart’s behaviour, we might, however, be tempted to state that Stuart is wrong to ground his belief on such pieces of evidence during such a long time and to think that Stuart should be brave enough to check by himself what is happening outside. The crucial thing to note is that this sort of consideration does not have any influence when beliefs are appraised according to the restrictive form of ME or according to mentalist evidentialism, more generally. The determinant factor is the current thoughts or evidence that Stuart possesses at the time of his belief acquisition, no matter that Stuart could have had better or more pieces of evidence. Of course, it would certainly be a good* thing regarding the achievement of his goal to acquire a true belief about the hostilities that Stuart checks by himself. But this is a different sort of evaluative judgement to the one the supporter of ME has in mind when he accounts for justifiedness. According to ME, even if Stuart had stayed for 10 years in his basement and had been duped the whole period, he would be justified in believing that the civil war is not over if this belief fits his thoughts at this time. This can be considered a rather counterintuitive conclusion, and, therefore, as a spoke in the wheels of mentalist evidentialism.211 The adversaries of ME might object that Stuart is clearly not justified in believing that the conflict is not finished after having spent 10 years in his basement without checking what is really happening outside. My suggestion is that ME is not threatened by the alleged objection. This objection only shows that the accessibilist and the mentalist evidentialist conception of justifiedness do not have a common pretheoretical conception of the sort of goodness* which is justifiedness. I previously suggested that restrictive evidentialism pre-theoretically conceives of justifiedness as the sort of goodness* we commonly ascribe 211

For various replies to this kind of objection, see the end of Feldman (2000).

169 to rational performances. Which sort of goodness* is accessibilist justifiedness? As we saw, the general claim of the accessibilist accounts is that justifiedness of beliefs requires the subject to have a cognitive or reflective access to what justifies them. It is not sufficient that the belief that p, acquired by a subject S at some time t, fits the current evidence of S, the thoughts of S, at this time. Let us try to understand better the accessibilist requirement. First, the explanation why accessibilism requires cognitive or reflective access to what justifies a belief is that such access provides the subject, not only with some evidence that a certain proposition is true, but with good evidence that a certain proposition is true. According to Bonjour, for instance: “One’s cognitive endeavours are epistemically justified only if and to the extent that they are aimed at this goal [the epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs, n.a.], which means very roughly that one accepts all and only those beliefs which one has good reason to think are true”.212 The mere possession of evidence supporting the truth of the proposition p already amounts to having an indication that p is true. It is only when I consider with sufficient care what is supposed to justify my belief — for instance, the way it fits my evidence or the quality of my evidence— that I have a good indication that p is true.213 If a believer does not or does poorly consider, whether the pieces of evidence which are supposed to justify his belief that p are indicative of the truth of p, then, no matter that he acquires a true belief which fits his current evidence, he is not justified in believing that p. Let me consider Stuart’s example once again.

212

Bonjour (1985), p. 7. Accessibilism is threatened by a regress. One might claim that it is not sufficient that I merely consider that my belief that p is truth-conducively grounded in order to possess a good indication that p is true. It is also required that I am justified in considering that my belief that p is truth-conducive. That is to say, I need a further indication that my consideration that my belief that p is truth-conducive is truthconducive itself. I will leave this difficulty aside since my goal is not to defend accessibilism but simply to show that the accessibilist pre-theoretical conception of justifiedness focuses on a another sort of goodness*. 213

170 Remember that Stuart believes the rationally good* thing to believe from his own perspective, at t, given that his goal is to acquire a true belief about the suspension of the hostilities and given that his perceptual evidence, at t, supports the proposition that the conflict is not over. Stuart’s belief is rational as, in Foley’s example, Smith’s decision to take the eastern road is rational, given that his goal is to go to the shore and given that he believes that the eastern road is the road to the shore. We just saw that according to accessibilism merely believing what is supported by the evidence is not always good* enough. What is required is that I have a good indication that a certain proposition is true, for instance that I have considered with sufficient awareness whether the pieces of evidence supporting the proposition p are reliable. Therefore, according to accessibilism, Stuart’s belief that the conflict is not over is not justified. It is not justified since Stuart does not consider whether the pieces of evidence, on which he grounds his belief, are good indications of the truth of the proposition that he believes. What accessibilism reproaches to Stuart’s maintenance of the belief that p is not to be irrational, it is that Stuart did not question the pieces of evidence on which he grounds his belief. Now an action of considering with sufficient awareness whether your pieces of evidence are sufficiently indicative of the truth of the proposition you are about to believe can also be described as an action of putting sufficient effort into the acquisition of a true belief or as an action of trying hard enough to acquire a true belief.214 This clearly brings us back to the standard of epistemic commendability: A subject S’s acquisition of a belief is epistemically commendable if it is such that if S was pursuing the goal of acquiring true beliefs, this would be the belief that S would acquire as a result of his trying hard enough to achieve the goal of acquiring true beliefs. Hence, my suggestion is the following: like the externalist or the mentalist accounts, accessibilist accounts of justifiedness are accounts of the conditions under which a belief acquisition is good*. But 214

Remember that an action of trying to acquire a true belief is an action of modifying your evidence with the goal of acquiring a true belief about a topic. See chapter 3.

171 accessibilist goodness* is neither instrumental goodness nor does it consist in the goodness* we commonly attribute to rational performances. Accessibilist goodness* consists in the sort of goodness which is commonly attributed to performances constituting sufficiently careful tryings to achieve a goal. Supporters of accessibilism wants to account for conditions under which a belief acquisition is good* because commendable.215 To sum up, the rationale of this suggestion is the following: (i) The distinctive statement of accessibilism is the claim that cognitive or reflective access to what justifies my belief that p is necessary for its being justified; (ii) The reason why cognitive or reflective access is necessary is that such access is necessary to have a good reason to believe that p and because justifiedness is a matter of having good reasons to believe that p; (iii) To have good reasons to believe that p is to have previously considered with sufficient awareness whether the pieces of evidence which are supposed to justify one’s belief that p, are indicative of the truth of p; (iv) Considering with sufficient awareness whether the pieces of evidence, which are supposed to justify one’s belief that p, are indicative of the truth of p amounts to trying hard enough to acquire a true belief about p; (v) A belief acquisition resulting from my trying hard enough to acquire a true belief is a commendable belief acquisition; (vi) A justified belief acquisition is a commendable belief acquisition.

215

This is more clearly perceptible in Chisholm’s way of formulating his accessibilism. Roughly, Chisholm’s theory of justification is grounded on the idea that some propositions are preferable to others. Roughly, if proposition p is preferable to proposition q, then, it is more justified to believe that p than to believe that q. Now Chisholm claims: “We might paraphrase the locution ‘p is epistemically preferable to q’ by refernce to an intellectual requirement. I assume that every person is subject to a certain purely intellectual requirement that of trying his best to bring it about, that for every proposition h he considers, he accepts h if and only if h is true”, my emphasis. Chisholm (1976), p. 176.

172 THE

RELIABILIST AND THE ACCESSIBILIST EXPLANATION OF THE GOODNESS* OF JUSTIFIEDNESS

Until now, I tried to offer some further support to the idea that epistemologists have different notions in mind when they account for the justifiedness of beliefs. Most of what I wrote was devoted to showing that supporters of externalism, of mentalism and of accessibilism are actually accounting for distinct sorts of goodness*. They concur on the idea that being justified is being good*, in a way, but they do not think of the same kind of goodness*. Thus, the assumption at work is that epistemologists have, at least, in common the idea that a justified belief acquisition is a good* belief acquisition. This assumption is supported by the fact that epistemologists, mainly supporters of externalism and of accessibilism, deem it crucial to explain why the property of justifiedness is a positive normative property. More accurately, they try to explain why the possession, by a belief acquisition, of the “natural” property, on which the property of being justified supervenes, is a good-making property, i.e. a property which makes the belief acquisition a good* thing. For the sake of simplicity, I will consider that providing such an explanation consists in offering an explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness. However, the last expression is misleading since to be justified is to be good*. It is not exemplifying the property of being good*. In the following pages, I would like to consider two major explanations of the goodness* of justifiedness: the reliabilist explanation and the socalled credit explanation.216 More accurately, my objectives in the remaining of this chapter are twofold. My first goal is to consolidate the previous suggestion according to which there are distinct and independent ways for a belief acquisition to be good*, which correspond to the externalist and the accessibilist way 216

I am not going to discuss restrictive evidentialism’s explanation of the goodness of justifiedness. My motive to discard it is twofold. First, to my knowledge, supporters of restrictive evidentialism do not provide such an explanation. As I already said, they do not seem to be as much involved as Externalists and Accessibilists in the debate concerning the additional value of justified true beliefs compared to mere true beliefs. Second, if I am right, if being justified consists in being rational according the restrictive evidentialist conception of justifiedness, there is no need for explanation. A rational performance seems to be a good* in a way. There is no point in explaining further why it is good*.

173 of being justified. For this purpose, I am going to present an example in which the reliabilist explanation does not seem to be sufficient to account for an intuitive difference of goodness* between two acquisitions of belief. Second, and more importantly, I would like to show how an accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness, i.e. an explanation grounded on what I previously described as the accessibilist conception of the goodness* of justifiedness, can avoid the main problem faced by the “credit explanation” of the goodness* of justifiedness. The reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness As I briefly mentioned already, the reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness follows quite directly from the reliabilist conception of justifiedness. According to reliabilism, the acquisition of a belief is justified if and only if it is the causal result of a reliable process, i.e. a process generally producing true beliefs. The property of being the result of a reliable process is good* in virtue of its contributing to the achievement of an intrinsically valuable end. That is, the goodness* of justifiedness is instrumental goodness. To say it differently: 1. The acquisition of a true rather than a false belief is a finally valuable end; 2. Being the result of a process which generally produces true beliefs, is, therefore, an instrumentally valuable property to possess. The reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness encounters a difficulty when it tries to account for the intuition to the effect that the acquisition of a justified true belief displays a more valuable epistemic status than the acquisition of a mere true belief. The problem is the following: the additional value that the instrumental goodness is supposed to add to the state of affairs consisting in the acquisition of a justified true belief is swamped by the fact that the belief involved in this state of affairs is already true.217 The instrumental goodness, which supervenes on the property of being the result of a reliable process, cannot be taken into account when one evaluates the 217

In the contemporary debate, the initial formulation of the swamping objection is very often attributed to Zagzebski’s paper of 2003. As Goldman and Olsson point out, Richard Swinburne had already raised this objection in Swinburne (1999). See Goldman & Olsson (2009).

174 summative value of the acquisition of a justified true belief. The property of being the result of a reliable process is deprived of its instrumental goodness when it is exemplified by a belief acquisition, which is already true. The swamping problem is not a conclusive objection to a reliabilist explanation appealing to instrumental value. A way out is to appeal to the truth of the future beliefs that a reliably produced true belief is more likely to bring about. The reason why a subject’s epistemic situation is instrumentally more valuable when he possesses a reliably produced true belief than when he possesses a mere true one is that, in the former case, the subject is more likely to acquire further true beliefs.218 This explanation avoids the swamping problem. When a reliable process produces a true belief, the additional value comes from the fact that the possession of the property of being reliably produced makes it more probable that I acquire other true beliefs. I do not intend to consider the swamping problem further nor the reliabilist reply.219 Even if the second reliabilist explanation, or something close to it, is plausible, my suggestion is that it is not sufficient to account for an intuitive divergence of evaluation. Here is the kind of case I have in mind: Jeannie and Nicky are two scientists working for the same pharmaceutics lab. Jeannie is a passionate researcher. She spends days and nights studying the influence of the temperature on protein synthesis in Rainbow Trout while Nicky, who is really bored by her new job, plays patience on her computer. In the lab in which Jeannie and Nicky work, every discovery reliably produced by a researcher is immediately passed on, by transmission of thoughts, to the other researcher. Hence, at the end of a day of work, Jeannie and Nicky always hold the same reliably produced beliefs. At the end of a day of work, Jeannie and Nicky’s epistemic situations display exactly the same instrumental value. They are in exactly the same position regarding the probability of acquiring further true beliefs. 218

This is one of the two solutions offered by Goldman and Olsson (2009). For a more detailed discussion of the reliabilist reply to the swamping argument, see Goldman & Olsson (2009), Greco (2003), Olsson (2007, 2011), Pritchard (2007, 2009, 2011), Riggs (2002).

219

175 Nicky’s epistemic situation inherits all the reliability of the beliefs patiently acquired by Jeannie. If Jeannie’s true beliefs are reliable, so are Nicky’s. However, many of us are tempted to think that Jeannie’s epistemic situation is better* than Nicky’s. The fact that the reliabilist explanation cannot account for this intuition points to the result defended previously according to which “justifiedness” actually refers to distinct sorts of goodness*. Jeannie’s situation is not instrumentally better than Nicky’s. Her situation displays another sort of betterness*. Which sort? My own idea is to appeal to the accessibilist sort of goodness*. I will suggest that Jeannie’s situation is better* in virtue of the fact that she tried to acquire true beliefs about the topic. As we will see, the main motivation of this suggestion is that an appeal to the accessibilist sort of goodness* avoids some difficulties encountered by the credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness. Before developing this idea, I obviously need to say more about the credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness. The credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness The credit explanation is traditionally considered as the main alternative to the reliabilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness.220 The credit explanation says the following: 1. When certain conditions are satisfied, the believer deserves credit for his acquisition of a true belief; 2. A valuable performance is even better* when the agent deserves credit for it; 3. The acquisition of a true belief is even better* when it satisfies the conditions under which the believer deserves credit for it. Supporters of the credit explanation defend the second premise by presenting examples. Suppose two athletes, Manfred and Colin, are engaged in a 100-metre race and both run the distance in exactly the same very impressive time. Colin’s assiduous training explains why 220

To my knowledge, the most fervent supporters of the credit explanation are Greco (1999, 2003) and Sosa (2007). Unsurprisingly, they are both externalists and supporters of a form of virtue epistemology.

176 he is so quick at running 100 metres. By contrast, the salient causal factor explaining the timing of Manfred is not his having great running competence but his having taken drugs. Manfred’s valuable performance is much less admirable than Colin’s. According to the credit explanation, this is because, unlike Colin, Manfred does not deserve credit for his valuable performance. The same thing is true regarding belief acquisitions. If Manfred’s own cognitive abilities do not causally explain his acquisition of the true belief that p, his believing that p is not as good as Colin’s whose acquisition of the belief that p is causally explained by his cognitive competences. Note that the credit explanation is perfectly able to account for the intuition at work in Jeannie and Nicky’s example above. Jeannie’s acquisitions of reliably produced beliefs are better* than Nicky’s in virtue of the fact that Jeannie, unlike Nicky, deserves credit for them. Obviously, the exact nature of the credit explanation crucially depends on the formulation of the conditions under which the agent deserves credit for the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs. Supporters of the credit explanation generally consider as necessary and sufficient that an explanatory causal relation holds between the exercise of one of the agent’s competences, abilities, etc. and the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs. That is to say: An agent deserves credit for the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs if and only if the exercise of one of the agent’s competences constitutes the salient explanation of the occurrence of the valuable state of affairs.221 Since what constitutes the salient explanation of the occurrence of a state of affairs seems to depend on the context of explanation, attribution of credit seems to be context-dependent as well. This is an implication of his theory with which the supporter of the credit explanation has to deal.222 However, the delicate issue that I would like to consider is not this one. If: 1. Deserving credit for a performance is a good* thing; 221

This is what Lackey considers the most plausible credit account. See Lackey (2007) pp. 353ff. See also Greco (2003). 222 For a critical study of the relation between the credit explanation and contextualism see Pritchard (2008).

177 2. Deserving credit for a performance consists in this performance holding a specific causal relationship with an agent’s competence; Then 3. Holding a specific causal relationship with an agent’s competence is a good* thing. To say it differently, the credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness justifies the attribution of some goodness* to the causal and explanatory relation which connects the exercise of a competence and the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs. In the specific case of the acquisition of a true belief, it ascribes some goodness* to the causal explanatory relation which connects the exercise of an epistemic competence and the occurrence of a true belief. Despite its undeniable intuitive appeal, the credit explanation is not as instructive as the reliabilist explanation. The credit explanation owes us some further clarifications, analogous to how Reliabilists tell us that the goodness* of justifiedness is derived from the probable acquisition of future true beliefs. What kind of goodness* is credit goodness*, i.e. the goodness* characterizing situations in which the exercise of a competence plays the salient causal role in the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs? My purpose is not to consider which is the most promising way of answering this question.223 I merely want to indicate which option is clearly inappropriate. Quite obviously, credit goodness* cannot be conceived as instrumental 223

The most promising suggestion is that credit value is final value. See Pritchard (2007, 2009). Note that “final” has a specific technical meaning here which diverges from the meaning that I gave to this adjective in this study. It is also possible to appeal to the final —in the “desirable for its own sake” sense I favoured in this study— value of virtues and to say that credit value is drawn from the final value of the epistemic virtue, the exercise of which constitutes the salient cause of the acquisition of a true belief. The worry is to show that there really are such finally valuable virtues, that is, virtues the desirability of which does not depend on what they are likely to bring about. Note that the latter solution fits better the adoption of a form of virtue epistemology, in which the “virtues” are not mere cognitive competences, or abilities but are more akin to Aristotelian virtues. That is to say, with the adoption of a virtue epistemology which is akin to Zagzebski’s virtue epistemology, but which is quite distinct from Greco’s and Sosa’s views. See Zagzebski (1996).

178 goodness. If credit goodness* is instrumental goodness, the credit explanation will turn out to be very similar to the first reliabilist explanation and will also be threatened by the swamping problem. More accurately, if credit goodness* is considered as instrumental goodness, then: 1. The possession of the property of being caused by the exercise of an epistemic competence is good* in virtue of the finally valuable end it helps to achieve; 2. An epistemic competence is a faculty the exercise of which is likely to lead to the acquisition of a true belief. 3. The possession of the property of being caused by the exercise of an epistemic competence is actually good* in virtue of the fact that such an exercise is likely to lead to the acquisition of a true belief. 4. Then, the credit goodness* will be swamped when the belief possessing the property of being caused by the exercise of an epistemic competence is also a true belief. To conclude this short presentation of the credit explanation, I need to say that it forces me to amend one of the claims previously defended in this chapter. The credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness is grounded on the following externalist account of justifiedness: Credit account of justifiedness: The acquisition by S of a belief is justified if and only if it is causally explained by the exercise of one of S’s epistemic competences. This implies that what I previously said about the externalist account of justifiedness was inexact. Not every externalist account of justifiedness considers that the goodness* of justifiedness is instrumental goodness*. Interestingly, supporters of the credit explanation seem to occupy an intermediate position. They are externalists but the intuition supporting the credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness —the intuition that the occurrence of a valuable state of affairs is even better* when the agent deserves credit for it— has, as I would like to show now, an accessibilist flavour.

179 Accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness I suggested above that the accessibilist accounts of justifiedness spell out the conditions under which a subject puts sufficient effort into the acquisition of a true belief, under which a subject tries hard enough to acquire a true belief. If this is so, asking what the accessibilist explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness is amounts to asking what makes the fact that I tried hard enough to achieve the end of acquiring a true belief a good* thing. Remember Manfred and Colin, the two athletes mentioned before, who both run 100 metres in the exact same time. Manfred’s valuable performance is saliently explained by the fact that he takes drugs while Colin’s achievement is saliently explained by the fact that he trains assiduously. We could be tempted to think that Manfred’s performance is not as admirable as Colin’s in virtue of the fact that he did not try hard enough to perform this action while Colin did. Even if misleading, this way of accounting for the intuitive divergence of value characterizing the performances of Manfred and Colin deserves various comments. First, the claim that Colin’s action is better because Colin puts sufficient effort into its performance presupposes that there is something finally good in trying sufficiently hard, which is what explains why Colin’s valuable action seems better than Manfred’s. This sounds like a quite protestant assumption. My goal is not to discuss the appropriateness of such an assumption. I would like simply to emphasize that such an assumption is not needed in order to account for the lesser value which seems to characterise Manfred’s performance. Taking drugs to win is not only making less effort to be a quick runner, it is also cheating, that is, breaking the rules to which Manfred seems to conform, betraying people. This might very well explain our reluctance to find his finally valuable performance really admirable. Second, the claim that Colin’s action is better because Colin puts sufficient effort into its performance sounds quite similar to the claim of the credit explanation according to which Colin’s performance is better because he deserves credit for it while Manfred does not. The two explanations seem to be grounded on a similar intuition, according to which there is something better in performing valuable actions by ourselves, by counting on our own skills and abilities. This is where the externalist credit explanation seems to display an accessibilist hint.

180 However that may be, the more important thing to notice is that this explanation is misleading. Even if Manfred and Colin try with different means, they both try hard enough to perform the action of running 100 metres very quickly since they both succeed in running 100 metres very quickly as a result of their trying. The intuitive divergence of value characterizing their performances cannot be explained by appealing to the sufficiency of the effort they put into achieving their goals since they both succeed.224 To start understanding what is good* in putting sufficient effort into the achievement of an end, let me modify Manfred and Colin’s example. Manfred and Colin are young athletes. For the first time, they have been selected to take part in the Olympic games. With the prospect of this event, they intensively desire to run 100 metres as quickly as possible. Manfred and Colin are both trained by an ex-champion of athletics, who gives them technical advices. The day of the race, while Colin scrupulously follows the technical advice of his trainer, Manfred does not care about the recommendations of his own coach and runs just as he always did. Both finally run the distance in the same quite good but not really impressive timing. Now, suppose you are a sport journalist and you successively interview Colin then Manfred about their performance. Colin tells you that he is surprised that he did not run quicker since, for the first time in his career, he was properly trained and since he carefully put into practice the advice of his coach during the race. Knowing this, you ask Manfred if he benefited from such training and if he is not disappointed not to have run quicker. Manfred answers that, yes, a professional coach, who provided him with some technical advice to improve his timing, trained him. However, Manfred adds, he did not have the advice of his coach in mind during the race and ran as his father taught him when he was a teenager. Now if you learn also that Manfred is responsible for not having put the advice of his coach into practice, you will probably write a quite critical comment about Manfred’s 224

The same thing is true about Jeannie and Nicky. That is to say, to explain why Jeannie’s situation seems better than Nicky, we need to appeal to something else than the fact that Jeannie tried harder than Nicky. Since they both succeed in acquiring true beliefs, they both tried sufficiently.

181 performance, claiming, for instance, that Manfred wasted his chance to run the distance quicker and possibly to win the race, etc. This is, I believe, a very common negative assessment. When people set themselves objectives, we expect from them that they take advantage of the means that are at hand225. If they do not benefit at all from what looks like a very accessible means to achieve their purpose or, at least, to increase their chance of achieving it, we reproach them not to have tried hard enough. To say it differently, my hypothesis is that non-commendable actions, like Manfred’s action of running the distance without putting into practice the technical advice of his coach, are bad* because they are non-synchronically irrational. I say “non-synchronically” in order to distinguish the present mention of the notion of rationality from the previous mention of the notion, in what I called the standard of rationality. Even if Manfred’s action is non-synchronically irrational, it might be true that the action of running as his father taught him is synchronically rational. It is synchronically rational if the action of running as his father taught him constitutes the best means to achieve the end of winning the race according to what Manfred believes at every instant t during which he is engaged in this race. My suggestion is that the fact that we commonly consider noncommendable actions as non-synchronically irrational explains why we are tempted to assess them negatively. Conversely, we assess positively commendable actions because they seem to constitute nonsynchronically rational actions. When an agent performs a commendable action, he takes advantage of the means at hand in order to achieve the goal he is pursuing and in this sense he behaves (non-synchronically) rationally. Something analogous is true regarding belief acquisitions. Noncommendable belief acquisitions —that is, acquisitions of belief which are grounded on an insufficient set of evidence— display a sort of badness* in virtue of the fact that it seems (non-synchronically) irrational to acquire a belief on an insufficient set of evidence when your goal is to acquire true beliefs. This seems to me a plausible suggestion. 225

The harder the agent tries, the less immediate the means are. It seems that determining the threshold at which an agent tried sufficiently amounts to determining the threshold at which a means does not qualify anymore as a means at his disposal.

182 Remember the case of Stuart who believes that the war is not over because he closed himself in his basement and never checks by himself what is happening outside. Stuart’s belief is synchronically rational. Taking into account Stuart’s desire to acquire a true belief about the evolution of the conflict and his perceptual evidence at every instant t during which Stuart stays in his basement, believing that the conflict is not over is the rational thing to believe at every instant t. But it seems also absurd to content oneself with such a set of perceptual evidence during such a long time. When one’s goal is to acquire a true belief about the evolution of the conflict and one is in position to have a quick look outside —that is to say, when one has at one’s disposal a means to achieve this goal— believing, during a long time, that the conflict is not over on the mere ground of what you can hear is (non-synchronically) irrational. To sum up, the suggestion I put forward is the following: the acquisition of a commendable true belief, i.e. the acquisition of a justified true belief according to the accessibilist conception of justifiedness, is better* than the acquisition of a mere true belief because the former is (nonsynchronically) rational.226 A performance is (non-synchronically) rational when it results from the agent taking advantage of the means that he has at his disposal in order to achieve the goal he is pursuing. As we are going to see now, the accessibilist conception of justifiedness has the great advantage of avoiding one of the most famous objections raised against the credit account of justifiedness.

Accessibilist goodness* and testimony cases Jennifer Lackey has raised a much-debated objection against the credit account of justifiedness and, therefore, the credit explanation of the goodness* of justifiedness.227 It consists in showing that the aforementioned credit account of justifiedness cannot account for the justifiedness of beliefs acquired through the testimony of others. 226

This solution would be threatened by the swamping problem if acquiring recommendable beliefs were instrumentally valuable. But, as I have just tried to show, recommendable belief acquisitions are not good* in virtue of the good effect they will probably have. Recommendable belief acquisitions are good* in virtue of being non-synchronically rational belief acquisitions. 227 See Lackey (2007).

183 Lackey’s example is the following: “Having just arrived at the train station in Chicago, Morris wishes to obtain directions to the Sears Tower. He looks around, approaches the first adult passer-by that he sees, and asks how to get to his desired destination. The passer-by, who happens to be a Chicago resident who knows the city extraordinarily well, provides Morris with impeccable directions to the Sears Tower by telling him that it is located two blocks east of the train station. Morris unhesitatingly forms the corresponding true belief”.228 The problem encountered by the credit account of justifiedness is that Morris’s true belief is certainly justified but the exercise of one of Morris’s competences is not what causally explains why Morris acquires a true belief. That is to say, in this case Morris does not deserves credit for the true belief he acquires. The factor explaining why Morris acquires a true belief true rather than a false one seems to be located on the side of the passer-by. It is because the latter displays competences regarding the locations of the buildings of Chicago that Morris acquires a true belief about the Sears Tower. However, it is undeniable that Morris tries to acquire a true belief and that he tries hard enough since, as a matter of fact, his acquiring a true belief about the location of the Sears Tower is the causal consequence of his trying, his asking a passer-by about it. Even if the passer-by had been providing Morris with wrong information, the acquisition of a belief about the location of a building by asking a passer-by in the street looks like a perfectly commendable belief acquisition. When you desire to acquire a true belief about the location of the Sears Tower, to ask someone in the street is to take advantage of the means you have at hand to achieve this goal. When you really desire to acquire a true belief about the location of the Sears Tower, a non-commendable belief acquisition would result from your having tried to remember your last visit in Chicago when you were 6 years old, while being surrounded by passers-by who look like inhabitants of Chicago and who could easily offer you the information you need.

228

Lackey (2007), p. 10.

184 This tends to show that the accessibilist conception of justifiedness* — according to which the acquisition of the belief that p is justified only if the believer tried hard enough to acquire a true belief about p— finds itself in a better position to deal with the important number of cases in which we are justified in believing what we believe thanks to the testimony of others.

185

CHAPTER 7: EPISTEMIC AND NON-EPISTEMIC JUSTIFIEDNESS In the two previous chapters, I focussed on the various ways for a belief acquisition to be epistemically good* or justified, leaving aside the opposite possibility of a belief acquisition's being non-epistemically good* or justified. But, as I said already, our motivating reasons for acquiring a belief might be epistemic or non-epistemic and this reflects the fact that belief acquisitions might be epistemically good* and/or non-epistemically good*. The general problem that I would like to consider in this chapter bears upon the possibility of belief acquisitions' being, simultaneously, nonepistemically good* and epistemically bad*, and conversely. Remember that a non-epistemically good* performance —no matter whether it is a belief acquisition or the action of driving to the shore— might consist in a non-epistemically and finally valuable performance and/or a non-epistemically and instrumentally valuable performance and/or a non-epistemically rational performance and/or a nonepistemically commendable performance. THE DIVERGENCE THESIS There are plenty of distinct formulations of the problem just mentioned in the philosophical literature. Some philosophers ask whether it is possible for belief acquisitions to be epistemically reasonable and nonepistemically unreasonable229 (and conversely), others question the possibility of belief acquisitions being epistemically rational and nonepistemically irrational230 (and conversely) or permissible and nonepistemically non-permissible231 (and conversely), etc. As we will see still more clearly below, the confusion surrounding the notion of justifiedness plays a role in the debate regarding the possibility of assessing belief acquisitions in two independent ways, according to epistemic and non-epistemic standards and of these ways giving in some sense “opposite results”.

229

See Heil (1983) and (1992). See Foley (1987) and (2002), Kelly (2003). 231 See Jordan (1996). In Meiland (1980), Meiland prefers speaking about the possibility of one and the same belief acquisition satisfying an epistemic and a nonepistemic “ought”. 230

186 To avoid facing this complexity prematurely, before it presents real interest, I will make use of the general vocabulary of justifiedness and unjustifiedness, when starting to consider the problem That is to say, I will discuss the possibility of belief acquisitions being epistemically justified and non-epistemically unjustified (and conversely).232 Epistemically justified belief acquisitions are simply belief acquisitions which satisfy one of the standards of epistemic goodness* previously presented, while non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions are simply belief acquisitions which satisfy one of the aforementioned standards of non-epistemic goodness*. To complete these terminological remarks, I need to say that I will call the thesis to the effect that the epistemic and the non-epistemic justification of belief acquisitions can diverge: the divergence thesis.233 Note that the possibility of divergence has to be twofold. The divergence thesis is the thesis to the effect that belief acquisitions can be: 1. epistemically justified and non-epistemically unjustified and; 2. epistemically unjustified and non-epistemically justified. Note also that the divergence thesis is a thesis according to which it is impossible to provide an evaluation all things considered of a belief acquisition when it is, for instance, epistemically justified and nonepistemically unjustified. To say it differently, the divergence thesis implies that the epistemic and the non-epistemic evaluation of belief acquisitions are incommensurable. The truth of the divergence thesis is supported by examples in which one and the same belief acquisition seems to be epistemically justified and non-epistemically unjustified and cases in which one and the same belief acquisition seems to be epistemically unjustified and non-epistemically justified. Epistemically unjustified and non-epistemically justified belief acquisition Suppose Bertie just starts feeling sick. Bertie has evidence at hand, which support the proposition that he caught the very same illness as his children, a serious flu. This really annoys Bertie since he has an important professional interview the day 232 233

This is the way Pollock (1986) and Mills (1998) formulate the question,. This is Mills’ (1998) expression.

187 after. Motivated by his desire to find a new job, Bertie manages to avoid considering the pieces of evidence at hand and gets convinced that he caught a small chill and that he will feel better very quickly. Thanks to this conviction, Bertie feels strong enough to go to the interview and obtains the job. Bertie’s acquisition of the belief that he just caught a small chill seems to be a bad* thing regarding the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs and a good* thing regarding non-epistemic ends, like the welfare of Bertie’s family, Bertie’s happiness, etc. Epistemically justified and non-epistemically unjustified belief acquisition234 Helen has overwhelming evidence at hand that her father is Jack the Ripper. Nevertheless, it would be better for her not to believe this since this would be psychologically devastating. Helen’s acquisition of the belief that her father is Jack the Ripper seems to be a good* thing regarding the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs and a bad* thing regarding the promotion of Helen’s happiness. The diagrams below are schematic representations of the various ways of conceiving the relation between the set of the epistemically

234

See Pollock (1986), p. 8.

188 justified235 belief acquisitions and the set of the non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions.236 The divergence thesis is compatible with the following two ways of conceiving this relation:

235

For the sake of brevity I content myself with considering the relation between sets of belief acquisitions, which are justified. Everything that I say below is true mutatis mutandis of belief acquisitions that are unjustified. 236 One could be tempted to compare the following classification to Haack’s categorization, see Haack (2001). My classification however diverges in various respects, besides the fact that Haack speaks of the relation between ethical and epistemic appraisal and not between nonepistemic and non-epistemic appraisal. Haack’s categorization suffers from a certain lack of clarity regarding the nature of the sets to which she seems to refer when she speaks of “the epistemic appraisal being a special case of the ethical appraisal” or overlapping it. It is not clear whether she speaks about a relation between particular evaluations of beliefs or about the way the epistemic and the ethical kinds of evaluation are connected. I believe that the only fruitful way of employing extensional devices, in this context, is to relate sets of particular belief acquisitions, which are justified either epistemically or non-epistemically. This has some impact on the number and the forms of relations I distinguish in my classification compared to Haack’s. I do mention neither what she calls the correlation thesis, nor the analogue thesis. Indeed, if they imply that the epistemically justified belief acquisitions are non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions and conversely, they merely constitute two specific forms of the identity relation. But Haack does not pay attention to the identity relation and the non-epistemic special-case relation while my classification takes them into account. See Haack (2001), p. 21.

189 Partial overlap Some of the epistemically justified belief acquisitions are nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions. When this is so, the acquisition of a belief is simultaneously epistemically justified and nonepistemically justified. In other cases, the epistemic and the nonepistemic justifiedness of belief acquisitions differ as postulated by the divergence thesis. Set of epistemicall y justified beliefacquisitions

Set of nonepistemically justified beliefacquisitions

Exclusion No epistemically justified belief acquisition is a non-epistemically justified belief acquisition. An epistemically justified acquisition of belief is never a non-epistemically justified acquisition of belief. The epistemic and the non-epistemic justifiedness evaluation always diverge. Set of nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions Set of epistemically justified belief acquisitions

190 There are three ways of conceiving the relation between the set of the epistemically justified belief acquisitions and the set of the nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions, which are incompatible with the divergence thesis. Epistemic inclusion The set of the epistemically justified belief acquisitions is included in the set of the non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions: Every epistemically justified belief acquisition is a non-epistemically justified belief acquisition but some non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions are epistemically unjustified belief acquisitions. Set of epistemically justified belief Set of nonepistemically justified belief

Non-epistemic inclusion The set of the non-epistemically justified belief acquisitions is included in the set of the epistemically justified belief acquisitions. Every nonepistemically justified belief acquisition is an epistemically justified belief acquisition but some epistemically justified belief acquisitions are non-epistemically unjustified belief acquisitions.

Set of nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions Set of epistemically justified belief acquisitions

191 Identity Every epistemically justified belief acquisition is a non-epistemically justified belief acquisition and conversely.

Set of epistemically and nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions

THE “PRAGMATIC” REFUTATION OF THE DIVERGENCE THESIS: CLIFFORD AND JAMES As I tried to show with the Bertie and Helen’s examples, the divergence thesis benefits from intuitive support. Clearly, the most immediate way of defeating the divergence thesis is to conflate epistemic and non-epistemic ends. It is sufficient to claim that the end of acquiring true beliefs is actually a non-epistemic end to block every possibility of divergence. If you consider that the end of acquiring true beliefs is a non-epistemic end, you lose not only the possibility of assessing belief acquisitions as finally and epistemically valuable. You also deprive yourself of the possibility of assessing belief acquisitions as instrumentally and epistemically valuable and of the possibility of assessing belief acquisitions as epistemically rational or commendable.237 As I said, a state of affairs is instrumentally and epistemically valuable only if it causes the achievement of an epistemic end. If there is no epistemic end, there is no instrumentally and epistemically valuable state of affairs. The conflation of epistemic and non-epistemic ends can, theoretically, be achieved in two directions: 1. Either by identifying what seems to be an epistemic end with a non-epistemic end; 237

This is the consequence of the already mentioned minimally realist assumption of this work to the effect that the distinctions between the various kinds of ends does not depend on the attitudes of the subjects but are “real” or “objective” distinctions.

192 2. Or by identifying what seems to be a non-epistemic end with an epistemic end. Now I would like to show that, beyond their discrepancies, Clifford and James’ ethics of belief both constitute attempts to convert the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs into a non-epistemic end. Clifford’s ethics of belief Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1877) and James’ reply “The Will to Believe” (1897) are considered as the loci classici regarding the topic of the ethics of belief. Clifford’s essay begins with the description of a case in which a shipowner is just about to decide whether he should send his ship to sea. His boat is to carry immigrants to a country where they will be able to start a more prosperous life. The shipowner is tormented by doubts regarding the ability of his boat to cross the sea. He is conscious that his ship certainly requires some repairs in order to be completely safe. These doubts bother him since he cannot afford any renovation and really needs the money that the transport will bring him. Also, he is not heartless enough to decide to send his ship while believing that the immigrants will not survive. Therefore, the shipowner gets rid out of his doubts by focussing his attention on the instances in which his ship has proven its robustness. He acquires the “sincere and comfortable conviction that this vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy”.238 On the ground of this conviction, he decides to send his ship to sea. The boat finally sinks in the middle of the journey causing the death of all the immigrants and crew on board. According to Clifford, the shipowner “was verily guilty of the death of those men… because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him”.239 This results from the application of what Clifford considers to be the main principle ruling the assessment of belief acquisitions: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”.240 238

Clifford (1947), p. 70. Ibid. Note that Clifford’s ethics of belief is perfectly compatible with the account of responsibility for belief acquisitions elaborated above. As Clifford contends himself: the shipowner acquires his belief by “suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation”. The acquisition, by the shipowner, of the belief that his boat is safe is the consequence of the manipulative modification of his evidence. 239

193 Now, Clifford identifies the failure to acquire a belief on the ground of sufficient evidence with a failure to proceed to an investigation before acquiring a belief.241 For instance, he claims regarding the examples illustrating his ethics of belief: “In the two supposed cases which have been considered, it has been judged wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation”. What Clifford concretely reproaches to the shipowner is his failure to inquire, his failure to try to acquire a true belief about his vessel.242 Clifford’s non-epistemic evidentialism Now, I would like to call attention to the non-epistemic nature of Clifford’s principle, to make clear that “believing anything upon insufficient evidence” is not epistemically wrong, e.g. wrong regarding the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs. According to Clifford, “believing anything upon insufficient evidence” is morally wrong and, more precisely, instrumentally and morally wrong. Clifford does not make any overt distinction between an epistemic and a non-epistemic domain of evaluation. Clifford states that the shipowner is guilty, tout court. Clifford does not specify whether his fault is epistemic or non-epistemic.243 However, Clifford’s formulations244 clearly show that he considers the belief acquisition of the shipowner as morally wrong. To say it differently, even if Clifford does not explicitly distinguish between the epistemic and non-epistemic kind of evaluation, he expresses his ideas in 240

Clifford (1947), p. 77. Clifford (1947), p. 74, my emphasis. About the beliefs of some public prosecutors, Clifford claims as well: “For although they had sincerely and conscientiously believed in the charges they had made, yet they had no right to believe on such evidence as was before them. Their sincere convictions, instead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion”. Clifford (1947), p. 72. 242 That is to say, the acquisition, by the shipowner, of the belief that his vessel is safe is not non-commendable. The shipowner is not blameworthy for not having tried hard enough. He is guilty for not having tried at all. 243 For the same idea, see Haack (2001), p. 26. 244 For instance, when he claims that a belief accepted on insufficient evidence is sinful. See Clifford (1947), p. 75. 241

194 a way which suggests that the kind of evaluation he has in mind is nonepistemic and, more precisely, moral. At this point, it is still possible to offer two understandings of Clifford’s principle: 1. The property of being supported by an insufficient set of evidence might be finally and morally disvaluable; 2. The property of being supported by an insufficient of evidence might be instrumentally and morally disvaluable. Clifford offers us a reason to think that he prefers the second alternative when he anticipates a potential objection to his theory. Here is a reformulation of the objection: The real reason why we are tempted to blame the shipowner for his unjustified belief is that it had significant disvaluable consequences for other human beings. If his belief had not had dramatic consequences, if, for instance, the shipowner’s deceptively induced belief had been true and if his vessel had crossed the sea without incident, then we would not have any reason to blame the shipowner for his belief. Hence, it is incorrect to claim that it is always wrong to acquire a belief on the ground of an insufficient set of evidence. In more general terms: 1. The property of being supported by an insufficient set of evidence is instrumentally and morally disvaluable; 2. Hence, the acquisition of a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence is only instrumentally disvaluable. That is to say, the acquisition of a belief possessing a negative value property depends on the acquisition of this belief having disvaluable consequences. 3. The acquisition of a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence does not always have disvaluable consequences. It might have either no consequence at all, or neutral consequences, or even valuable consequences. 4. Then, the acquisition of a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence is not always disvaluable. Now, Clifford agrees with statements 1 and 2. He claims, for instance, regarding his condemnation of the shipowner and some public prosecutors:

195 “The reason of this judgement is not far to seek: it is that in both these cases the belief held by one man was of great importance to other men”.245 Clifford argues rather against statement 3 and tries to convince the reader that the acquisition of a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence always has disvaluable consequences. The details of Clifford’s argumentation are not all important for my purpose here. He tries to show, first, that a mental state qualifies as a belief only of it has consequences and, second, that these consequences are always disvaluable. According to Clifford, when someone acquires a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence, he spoils other people’s good dispositions to proceed to inquiries before acquiring beliefs; that is to say, he spreads credulity and increases the risk of causing harm to others. 246 Whatever the credibility of this reply,247 the important thing to emphasize is that Clifford himself recognizes that the property of being supported by an insufficient set of evidence is only instrumentally disvaluable. The genuine reason why the acquisition of a belief supported by an insufficient set of evidence is morally wrong is that it always has morally disvaluable consequences. To sum up, Clifford’s ethics of belief constitutes an attempt to convert what seems to be an epistemically disvaluable property into a nonepistemic (moral) one. Remember that the evidentialist conception of justifiedness is a conception according to which the justifiedness of belief acquisitions is determined by the way they are supported by the evidence. Clifford’s ethics of belief is undeniably representative of a form of evidentialism. 245

Clifford (1947), p. 74. Clifford (1947), pp. 86-7 247 According to Haack, Clifford’s responses depend on the false assumption: “that mere potential for harm, however remote, is sufficient for unfavourable moral appraisal (provided the subject is responsible for the unjustified belief)... But remote potential for harm is not sufficient; if it were, not only drunken driving, but owning a car, would be morally culpable.” Haack (2001), p. 27. I do not think that Haack’s objection is sound. Indeed, Clifford considers the harm caused by the acquisition of a belief on insufficient evidence as a very probable consequence not as a remote possibility. Now as we saw in chapter 4 of this work, consciously taking the risk of performing an action, which will very probably have disvaluable consequences, is already blameworthy. 246

196 Among the evidentialist conceptions of justifiedness, we already distinguished between a mentalist and an accessibilist form. Now it is possible to expand this classification. Clifford’s evidentialism constitutes a form of non-epistemic evidentialism, which needs to be distinguished from the mentalist form and the accessibilist form, for the mere reason that Clifford’s evidentialism is an account of the conditions under which a belief acquisition is morally justified while the mentalist and the accessibilist form of evidentialism are accounts of the conditions under which a belief acquisition is epistemically justified. James’ ethics of belief James’ ethics of belief presented in “The Will to Believe”248 is directly opposed to Clifford’s since its central thesis is that it is sometimes correct to acquire a belief even if your evidence is insufficient. James begins his essay by distinguishing between two faculties playing a role in belief acquisitions: the acquisition of the belief that p is the result either of the intellectual nature or of the “passional”, the “willing” or the “non-intellectual nature”. By “intellectual nature”, James seems to mean roughly our natural propensity to believe that p rather than ~p when confronted with pieces of evidence supporting p. “Willing nature” refers to the components of our nature which drive us to believe that p rather than ~p independently of our evidence supporting p. “When I say ‘willing nature’… I mean all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship”.249 Typically, the acquisition, by the shipowner, of the belief that his ship is seaworthy is the result of his willing nature. James’ main claim On the basis of the distinction between our intellectual nature and our passional nature, James’ main claim is that: 248

The title of James’ essay is misleading as it encourages the thought that James’ main goal is to spell out the conditions under which it is possible to “believe at will”, the conditions under which it is possible to acquire a belief quite independently of our evidence. However, James’ aim is to contest Clifford’s main claim and to determine the conditions under which we are allowed to acquire a belief independently of the evidence we have. Incidentally, it seems that James was originally planning to call his essay “The Right to Believe”, see Perry (1935). 249 James (1905), p. 9.

197 “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual ground.”250 That is to say, it is occasionally legitimate, or even obligatory, to acquire a belief on the ground of non-evidential considerations. Preferences, desires, and interests sometimes provide legitimate, or even mandatory, bases for belief.251 Genuine options The next pressing question regards the conditions under which we are allowed or required to acquire beliefs on the basis of our interests. James’ answer to this question is quite sophisticated. He starts by emphasizing that our willing nature plays a quite common role in our belief acquisitions and that the major flaw of Clifford’s ethics of belief is that it underestimates this role. More accurately, James considers that our willing nature frequently influences our belief acquisitions in two ways. First, there are propositions that we consider believable or unbelievable. According to James, this is the consequence of the influence of our willing nature, more specifically, of the part of this nature, which manifests the intellectual climate surrounding us. The willing nature is what makes “hypotheses possible or impossible for us dead or alive”.252 For instance, James considers that the hypotheses253 concerning molecules and the conservation of energy, necessary progress and, on a more general level, the hypothesis “that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other” are the “passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up”.254 Second, and more interestingly, James claims that the influence of our willing nature on the acquisition of a belief is manifest when we give the priority to one or the other of the two goals, which is susceptible to motivate our intellectual activities. We may prefer increasing our chance

250

Ibid., p. 11. For a detailed presentation of James’ views, see Nathanson (1981), Feldman (2004). 252 James (1905), p. 9. 253 According to James, a hypothesis is “anything that may be proposed to our belief”, see James (1905), p. 2. 254 James (1905), p. 9. 251

198 to acquire true beliefs or we may prefer diminishing our chance to acquire false ones. “We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance…We must remember that these feelings or our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions or our passional life”.255 According to James, Clifford’s exhortation is the result of his own horror of becoming a dupe. His predilection for the avoidance of error rather than for the pursuit of truth is not itself supported by the evidence and it is the consequence of the influence of his own willing nature. Even if James is right and our favouring either the avoidance of error or the pursuit of truth is a matter of interests, fears, desires, etc., this does not indicate under which conditions the acquisition of a belief for nonevidential reasons is permitted. James’ suggestion is that we are permitted to choose between believing that p and believing that ~p when the option is genuine. Now, a genuine option “is of the forced, living, and momentous kind”.256 Let us consider these three predicates separately. 1. Forced option “Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind”.257 According to James, “consider my theory as true or regard it as false” is not a forced option since it leaves the possibility open of doing something else: suspending my judgment. But if I say: “accept this truth or do not accept it”, I put you on a forced option, for there is no standing place outside the alternative. To understand accurately what James means by “a forced option”, it is necessary to pay attention to what he asserts about the religious option, which he explicitly considers as a forced option. The religious option considered by James is the following: 255

Ibid., p. 18. James (1905), p. 3. 257 Ibid. 256

199 “Believe that perfection is eternal or disbelieve that perfection is eternal.”258 In this case, it seems possible to circumvent the dilemma by suspending my judgment. The reason why the option qualifies as forced, however, is the following: “We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and wanting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve… Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error”.259 The religious option is forced in the sense that suspending judgment amounts to disbelieving with regard to the respective consequences of both doxastic attitudes. Whether I suspend my judgement or I disbelieve, I will lose all the benefits of believing that perfection is eternal if this is true. The option between believing that p and believing that ~p is forced, when suspending your judgement amounts to adopting one of these two doxastic attitudes with regard to their consequences. 2. Living option A living option between believing that p and disbelieving p is one, in which the hypotheses p and ~p are both believable260, in which each proposition appeals “as a real possibility to whom it is proposed”.261 As we just saw, what makes a hypothesis living or dead might be the previous influence of my willing nature. But also, propositions supported by many pieces of evidence or by a very strong one, for instance, the proposition that I have two hands, are such that their negations constitute dead hypotheses.

258

Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. 260 In his claims, James does not distinguish strictly between the descriptive question concerning the conditions under which it is possible to acquire a belief as a result of our willing nature and the normative question regarding the conditions under which this is legitimate. When he states that the option has to be a living one, James is clearly trying to answer the descriptive question and not the normative one. 261 James (1905), p. 2. 259

200 In this case, it seems possible to circumvent the dilemma by suspending my judgment. The reason why the option qualifies as forced, however, is the following: 3. Momentous option An option between believing that p and disbelieving p is momentous, as opposed to trivial, either when the opportunity to choose between these two doxastic attitudes is unique or when the consequences of choosing one of them are important or when the decision is irreversible, e.g. once one has decided to opt for one of the doxastic attitudes, one cannot simply change one’s mind. Finally, when confronted with the option of believing p or of disbelieving p, a subject S is allowed to choose to believe either p or to disbelieve p, only if: 1. The consequences of suspending his judgment regarding the hypothesis p amount to the consequences of opting for believing p or for disbelieving p; 2. Both p and ~p are believable hypotheses for S;262 3. The choice between believing p and disbelieving p matters either because the choice will be unique or because it has important consequence for the believer and/or other people or because it is irreversible. James believes that the conditions are mostly satisfied when we are facing moral options, options concerning human feelings and religious options. 263

262

James claims that, besides being genuine, the option between believing p and disbelieving p needs to be undecidable on intellectual grounds, that is to say, the evidence supporting the truth of p has to be counterbalanced by the evidence supporting the truth of ~p. I do not mention this constraint since it seems to repeat the requirement according to which the option has to be living. Cases in which p and ~p are believable hypotheses are cases in which the evidence supporting the truth of p and the evidence supporting the truth of ~p are counterbalanced.

201 James considers an example in which a person, let me call her Mary, has counterbalanced evidence about the feeling of friendship of another person, let me say Paul. Mary is facing the option of believing that Paul likes her or disbelieving that Paul likes her. In the circumstances, it is a living and momentous option but also a forced one. According to James, indeed, it is necessary that Mary start trusting Paul in order to get his friendship in return. Now trusting someone is something that Mary cannot do if she does not previously believe that this person is her friend. That is to say, the consequences of Mary suspending her judgement regarding Paul’s friendship towards her are equivalent to her disbelieving that Paul considers her his friend. In both cases, she will not obtain Paul’s friendship. The important thing to notice is that James seems to have a slightly different idea in mind when he presents examples in which a subject is allowed to adopt a doxastic attitude for non-evidential reasons. The examples provided are not merely examples of options which satisfy the aforementioned necessary conditions. They are examples in which believing that p rather than disbelieving that p or suspending my judgment towards p is responsible for the proposition p being true. Mary’s belief that Paul considers her a friend makes it to be the case that Paul considers her a friend. Hence, the following is, I believe, a more accurate formulation of the conditions under which a subject S is allowed to choose to believe p or to disbelieve p when confronted with the option of believing p or of disbelieving p: 1. The consequences of suspending his judgment regarding the hypothesis p amount to the consequences of opting for believing p or for disbelieving p; 2. Both p and ~p are believable hypotheses for S; 3. The choice between believing p and disbelieving p matters in the sense that believing that p will make it to be the case that 263

See James (1905), pp. 23ff. By contrast, James claims that these necessary conditions are not satisfied when amateurs face scientific options. In these cases, the questions “are always trivial, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not for us spectators), the choice between believing truth and falsity is seldom forced”. What is required from amateurs is not recommended for researchers: “such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game”, see James (1905), p. 21

202 p is true and disbelieving that p will make it to be the case that p is false. Note that this interpretation is clearly supported by the following claim of James: “In truth dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing”.264 The wrong way of understanding the latter claim would be to interpret it as manifesting James’ predilection for the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs. By allowing Mary to acquire the belief that Paul considers her a friend on the ground of non-evidential considerations, James wants to promote the occurrence of a non-epistemically desirable state of affairs consisting in the friendship of Paul. The fact that such an occurrence turns Mary’s belief into a true belief is secondary. The primarily pursued end is non-epistemic. The point of agreement Remember that what makes the acquisition of a belief grounded on an insufficient set of evidence something undesirable, according to Clifford’s ethics of belief, is the non-epistemically disvaluable consequences of such an acquisition. What makes permissible the acquisition by Mary of the belief that Paul considers her a friend, according to James’ theory, is its nonepistemically valuable consequence as well, i.e. Paul’s friendship. Clifford and James both defend an ethics of belief in which the desirability or the undesirability of belief acquisitions is non-epistemic and instrumental.265 Clifford’s view and James’ view both entail the rejection of the divergence thesis for the reason that they deny that there is something independently desirable in promoting the achievement of the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs. The acquisition of true beliefs —or the acquisition of beliefs on the ground of a sufficient set of evidence— is only desirable in virtue of its non-epistemically desirable consequences. Hence, there is no separate epistemic assessment of belief acquisitions and it is always at least theoretically possible to offer all things 264 265

James (1905), p. 25. For a similar conclusion, see Haack (2001), p. 28.

203 considered assessments of belief acquisitions. To go back to the diagrams presented above, Clifford’s and James’ theories identify the set of epistemically justified belief acquisitions and the set of nonepistemically justified belief acquisitions. Of course, this does not prevent Clifford and James from diverging radically when they proceed to particular non-epistemic assessments of belief acquisitions. According to Clifford, the consequences of our acquiring beliefs on the ground of an insufficient set of evidence are always so damaging that our acquiring beliefs in this way is always undesirable. By contrast, according to James, there are circumstances in which the consequences of our acquiring a belief on the ground of nonevidential considerations are so advantageous that we are allowed to acquire a belief in this way.266 But James’ and Clifford’s ethics of belief commonly display a sort of “pragmatic” hint, which is, nowadays, advocated by Richard Foley when he argues against what he calls epistemic chauvinism, i.e., the idea that the evidence or our epistemic reasons for believing something are by their very nature superior to non-epistemic reasons for believing.267 THE DIVERGENCE OF RATIONALITY As I have just said, it is possible to challenge the divergence thesis by denying that the end of acquiring true belief displays any independent epistemic desirability. Perhaps this is correct and the end of acquiring true rather than false beliefs draws its desirability from the non-epistemic desirability of the consequences of holding true rather than false beliefs. Perhaps there is nothing independently valuable in acquiring true beliefs. Perhaps epistemic justifiedness is a non-epistemic property, as the normative property of being beautiful might be considered as a hedonic normative property. My intention in this work is not to settle this controversial axiological issue. Hence, my next goal is not to provide a positive defence of the divergence thesis by arguing against the view that the epistemic end constitutes a specific kind of non-epistemic end. This would, for instance, necessitate that I provide some reason to think that 266

Jordan (1996) and Meiland (1980) offer conceptions of justification, which are quite close to James’ ethics of belief in the sense that they consider that belief acquisitions are sometimes justified in virtue of their promoting the achievement of non-epistemic goals regardless of their evidential support. 267 See Foley (1987) and (2002).

204 the epistemic and the non-epistemic evaluation at work in the example of sick Bertie above are not commensurable. My next purpose is much more modest. I would like to show that an alternative objection to the divergence thesis presupposes the adoption of one of the conceptions of justifiedness discussed above.268 I would like to conclude this chapter by emphasizing that the divergence thesis is, at least, clearly wrong if a justified belief acquisition is nothing other than a rational belief acquisition.269 The objection against the divergence of rationality The alternative objection to the divergence thesis presupposes that justified belief acquisitions have to be exclusively conceived as rational belief acquisitions at the expense of a conception according to which a justified belief acquisition amounts to a finally or an instrumentally valuable belief acquisition. In short, it presupposes the adoption of a “rational conception of justifiedness” at the expense of a “value conception of justifiedness”. 268

See for instance Mills (1998) By contrast, if you do not consider that the epistemic end of acquiring true beliefs is a non-epistemic end, nothing prevents the epistemic and the non-epistemic commendability of belief acquisitions from diverging. It is possible, for a belief acquisition to be epistemically commendable and non-epistemically noncommendable, and it is possible for a belief acquisition, to be epistemically noncommendable and non-epistemically commendable. Suppose that my hope is to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. I want to acquire a true belief about my skills in tennis and also consider that acquiring a belief about this topic will be pleasant. I am already guessing that the belief that I am going to acquire will be pleasant. Now suppose that I acquire the true but unpleasant belief that I am a quite poor tennis player as a result of my trying to acquire a true and supposedly pleasant belief about this topic. In this case, I tried hard enough to acquire a true belief but not hard enough to acquire a pleasant one (suppose that I gave a clear priority to the pursuit of truth with the risk of being unpleased). Thus, the acquisition of the belief that I am a quite poor tennis player qualifies as an epistemically commendable belief acquisition but also as a non-epistemically non-commendable one. On the other hand, suppose I acquire the false but pleasant belief that I am a quite gifted tennis player, as a result of my trying to acquire a true and supposedly pleasant belief about this topic. This time, I did not take the risk of being displeased and did not put so much effort into the acquisition of a true belief. Hence, the acquisition of the belief that I am a gifted tennis player qualifies as an epistemically non-commendable belief acquisition but also as a non-epistemically commendable one.

269

205 Of course, ideally, such a presupposition should be defended by an argument to the effect that the former conception of justifiedness is more relevant.270 As I said already, my opinion is rather that being instrumentally valuable and being rational constitute two equally significant ways of being justified. Note in passing that rejecting the value conception of justifiedness is problematic for the comprehension of certain sentences. For instance, when I assert: “Lying is not justified in this situation”. This sounds like a perfectly understandable assertion but it seems meaningful only if you suppose that I do not have the rational conception of justifiedness in mind when I assert it. Roughly, lying consists in saying something wrong with the goal of deceiving. People affirming wrong things without pursuing this goal do not lie. They merely say wrong things while taking them to be correct. It seems that the action of lying is essentially rational and the assertion: “Lying is unjustified in this specific situation” would be unintelligible if I was implicitly referring to the rational conception of justifiedness. What I clearly mean is that lying would have been a disvaluable thing to do in this situation. In this assertion, “justified” implicitly refers to the value conception of justifiedness. However that may be, I shall take for granted, for the sake of argument, that the rational conception is the only acceptable way of understanding the notion of justifiedness. If this is so, the general divergence thesis will turn out to be a more specific thesis regarding the divergence of rationality according to which: It is possible for belief acquisitions to be simultaneously epistemically rational and non-epistemically irrational and conversely. This thesis encounters a difficulty which is sufficient to establish the incorrectness of one of its conjuncts. It is indeed impossible to acquire an epistemically irrational belief. Remember that a subject S’s acquisition of the belief that p is epistemically rational if it is a performance, which contributes to the achievement of acquiring true beliefs, according to what S thinks. Hence, an epistemically irrational 270

To my understanding, however, Mills does not provide a convincing argument of this sort. Mills’ argument for favouring a conception of justifiedness in terms of rationality is flawed in that it is precisely grounded on an arbitrary predilection for this conception at the expense of a conception in terms of instrumental goodness, see Mills (1998), p. 46.

206 acquisition of belief would be an acquisition of belief, which does not contribute to the achievement of the end of acquiring true beliefs according to what S thinks. But, according to the conclusion of the second chapter of this work, it is precisely impossible to acquire a belief without simultaneously thinking that its content is true. That is to say, it is impossible to acquire a belief, without simultaneously considering that it contributes to the achievement of the end of acquiring true beliefs.271 By contrast it is possible for a subject S to acquire a non-epistemically irrational belief, that is to say, a belief which does not contribute to the achievement of one of S’s non-epistemic ends according to what S thinks. For instance, Helen’s acquisition of a belief about her father is non-epistemically irrational if her general goal in life is to make herself happy, e.g. if Helen does not suffer from any form of depression, and if she was thinking that acquiring a belief about her father will probably be devastating for her life. On the contrary, Bertie’s acquisition of the belief that he caught a small chill is non-epistemically rational if one of Bertie’s goals is to improve the welfare of his family and if he was thinking that the acquisition of the belief that he is not sick is the only way of being impressive during his job interview It is very important to repeat that, even if Bertie’s acquisition of the belief that he caught a chill is non-epistemically rational —i.e. even if the acquisition of such a belief constitutes an appropriate way to achieve one of Bertie’s goals in life regarding what Bertie thinks to be the case— this does not imply that Bertie is able to acquire this belief, directly, for this reason. As I tried to show in the second chapter of this study, we necessarily lack this ability.272 To sum up, there are two efficient ways of raising objections against the divergence thesis. The first one is to deny that the end of acquiring true belief displays any independent epistemic desirability. The second one is to support the restrictive claim according to which epistemically justified belief acquisitions are epistemically rational belief acquisitions. 271

This is also what previously explained why it is meaningless to praise someone for his epistemically rational belief acquisition. See the chapter 5 above. 272 If it is impossible for belief acquisitions to be epistemically irrational, and if it is, on the contrary, possible, for belief acquisitions to be either non-epistemically rational or irrational, then the relation between the set of epistemically rational belief acquisitions and the set of non-epistemically rational belief acquisitions is better illustrated with the diagram representing the non-epistemic inclusion.

207

CONCLUSION Recall the introductory example of this study: the case of Henry, the mountain guide, whose main mistake seems to be his acquisition of the false belief that the Italian tourists are sufficiently good skiers to take the first route. The goal of this work, I said, is to provide a theoretical framework in which Henry can be considered blameworthy for his belief acquisition. I take for granted that someone is blameworthy for Ω-ing if and only if 1. he is responsible for Ω-ing and 2. Ω-ing is something wrong to do. Accordingly, there are two main points to clarify in order for Henry’s blameworthiness to be conceivable. The first thing to clarify is whether it is possible to hold Henry responsible for his belief acquisition. The main lesson of the first part of this work is that, if Henry is responsible for his belief acquisition, he is responsible for it in the way he is sometimes responsible for the consequences of his actions. This is so because belief acquisitions are inevitably non-basic actions, i.e. actions that we perform by performing basic actions. When a subject S acquires a belief for a reason, what happens is that he successfully tries to induce the resultant acquisition of a belief. A trying to induce the acquisition of a belief always consists in a modification of one's current set of evidence, no matter whether S is epistemically or nonepistemically motivated. The second point to clarify is whether there is something wrong in believing that the Italian tourists are sufficiently good skiers. That is to say, one needs to identify one or several properties which could plausibly turn Henry’s belief acquisition into something for which Henry might deserve to be blamed. We saw that Henry’s acquisition of the belief that the Italian tourists are sufficiently good skiers exemplifies various properties which are plausible bearers of a negative normative property. More briefly put: it exemplifies more than one plausible bad*-making property. Above all, it is false. But it also seems to be grounded on an insufficient set of evidence and has relatively dramatic consequences as well. These are all negative normative properties.

208 From then, the solution to the initial problem is quite immediate, once it is determined that Henry is responsible for his acquiring a false belief,273 for instance, then it is possible to say that Henry is blameworthy for having acquired a false belief about the competences of the Italian tourists. In this study, I distinguished between two sorts of normative properties which characterize belief acquisitions: the epistemic and the nonepistemic normative properties. The ground of the distinction is that the end of acquiring true beliefs displays a form of desirability, which might be considered independent from the non-epistemic ends of having pleasant experiences, of being happy in life, etc. The distinction between the epistemic and the non-epistemic realm of evaluation persuaded me to connect the topic of the ethics of belief to the much more discussed question of the nature and the value of (epistemic) justifiedness. Part of the originality of this work certainly lies in the bridge it builds between these two topics. More specifically, I tried to shed new light on the very rich debate surrounding the justification of beliefs by giving a complete priority to the normative component of the notion of justification. Epistemologists speak of the value-turn in epistemology. This is where my work contributes most clearly to the revival of such a value-turn. The last chapter of the present work is one you could expect to open a study devoted to the ethics of belief. I did postpone the discussion of Clifford’s and James’ ethics of belief mainly because their two theories presuppose that we have solved the so-called problem of control and responsibility. But, as I tried to show, their two theories also presuppose that the epistemic evaluation of belief acquisitions depends on the achievement of certain non-epistemic goals. That is to say, they presuppose that the epistemic end of acquiring true belief does not display any final, 273

Note that Henry does not, stricto sensu, control his acquisition of a false belief. If he is responsible for his false belief acquisition, this is because he exercised what I called indirect doxastic influence over his false belief acquisition. Indeed, Henry acquires the belief that the Italian tourists were sufficiently good skiers as a result of his desire to acquire a true belief about a topic. He does not intentionally acquire a false belief about their competences. If Henry is responsible for his false belief acquisition, this is because he could have predicted that a belief acquisition which is grounded on such a poor evidential ground is probably the acquisition of a false belief.

209 independent form of desirability and is desirable in virtue of its contributing to the achievement of a non-epistemic end. In this study, I explicitly avoided taking a stance regarding such an assimilation of the epistemic realm of evaluation to the non-epistemic realm of evaluation. My goal in the last chapter was to improve our understanding of the conditions under which the epistemic and the nonepistemic evaluation of belief acquisition might diverge but I did not want to pronounce myself for or against the thesis of divergence. I also tried to circumvent the difficult task of identifying the kind of normative property fundamentally at work in the evaluation of belief acquisitions by speaking of “bad*” belief acquisitions. For instance, I did not settle whether acquiring a belief on an insufficient set of evidence is bad* because it is disvaluable, because it violates an epistemic duty or because it is a vicious form of belief acquisition. Finally, I did not enter the debate concerning the ranking of these various bad*-making properties either. That is to say, I intentionally did not suggest what is worst* between the acquisition of an ill grounded belief, of a false one, of a belief with dramatic consequences, etc. The upshot of this ge neral restraint is that the present study does not allow us to determine in each specific case of belief acquisition whether the believer is to be blamed or praised for his belief acquisition. As I repeatedly said, the goal of this study is essentially metaethical. It is to provide the formal framework in which an ethics of belief might be adequately elaborated. To my knowledge, this is a necessary preliminary task that had never been achieved in detail until now. If you share the opinion that people are not always forgivable for what they believe, I hope I have provided you with the starting means to defend your judgment.

211

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