Foundations of an Ethics of Belief

226 Pages·2013·0.889 MB·English

by  Anne Meylan

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
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in meta-ethics, normative ethics and "applied" ethics,
as well as in political philosophy, philosophy of law
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to facilitate discussion between
English- and Germanspeaking
practical philosophers.
Anne Meylan

Foundations of an
Ethics of Belief
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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.