Abstract
Epistemic obligations are constraints on belief stemming from epistemic considerations alone. Booth (Synthese 187: 509–517, 2012) is one of the many philosophers who deny that there are epistemic obligations. Any obligation pertaining to belief is an all things considered obligation, according to him—a strictly generic, rather than specifically epistemic, requirement. Though Booth’s argument is valid, I will try to show that it is unsound. There are two central premises: (1) S is justified in believing that P iff S is blameless in believing that P; (2) S is blameless in believing that P iff S has not violated an all things considered duty in believing that P. Both premises are false. My argument against (1) depends on my own theory of epistemic obligations. My argument against (2) does not. This paper is part of a larger project—defending epistemic requirements in general against a series of objections and advancing a particular theory that solves various problems.
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Notes
One would normally call the view ‘epistemic deontologism’ (or ‘deontology’), but since Booth denies that there are distinctively epistemic requirements he must have thought that the neutral term ‘doxastic’ was preferable.
Booth uses ‘duty’, ‘obligation’ and ‘requirement’ interchangeably. I follow suit for now.
At first, Booth formulates the clause following the ‘iff’ in (2) and (3) as I have it here: ‘S has not violated an all things considered duty in believing that P’. But then in the formal statement of his argument he replaces the ‘in’ with a ‘to’: ‘S has not violated an all things considered duty to believe that P’. This confuses things. Booth plainly wants the biconditionals to come out true. But they’re too easy to refute on the latter formulation. Suppose I’m S and ‘P’ is the proposition ‘My sister is a reptile’. I am definitely not justified in believing this, so the left side of the biconditional in (3) will be false on this interpretation of the variables. But I obviously haven’t violated any sort of duty to believe it (a deontologist would probably say that I have a duty not to believe it since my evidence is overwhelmingly against it). That makes the right side of the biconditional in (3) true. So the biconditional claim itself is false (‘F \(\equiv \) T’ is F). And thus we have a counterexample. However, a deontologist would likely claim that I have violated a duty in believing that my sister is a reptile, viz., the duty not to believe it, since my evidence is against it. That makes the right side of the biconditional false and the biconditional itself true, at least if Booth’s argument holds up in other respects. Take the reformulation as a friendly amendment, since it’s clearly what Booth has in mind. Otherwise, the argument hasn’t got a prayer.
That the name fits might not be obvious until later.
It’s odd that Booth adds “or blameworthy for phi-ing even though we were obliged to phi” here. Feldman denies that we are blameworthy for holding or not holding various beliefs. But the first part of the claim is on point.
I should probably clarify that this is the argument Booth apparently wants to give. He doesn’t actually formulate an argument for (2). I’m offering a charitable interpretation of his words, though Booth might turn it down since it isn’t going to work. As we’ll see in Sect. 3, the weightiest obligation is not all that counts, and it’s far from clear that the weightiest obligation is generic rather than type-specific. On the positive side, Booth is driving at something genuinely interesting and new. I’m just questioning its tenability.
This is a summary of the scenario that Booth describes on page 512. ‘Innocent’ is quoted directly.
Though it’s not quite the line I will take in Sect. 3 below.
Booth doesn’t call his theory ‘type-free deontologism’. He speaks of ‘all things considered duties’ and ‘just plain oughts’. But ‘type-free’ fits, since he denies that the normative constraints on belief are of any specific type. They are neither epistemic nor moral, neither prudential nor legal—they are requirements tout court. Likewise, I don’t call my theory ‘intermediate epistemic deontologism’, but it makes the contrasts in this section sharper.
Most of these occur in Feldman (2008, pp. 339–340).
My original argument for (b) is more involved. For the full defence, see Stapleford (2012).
A referee questions this. Does every needy person have a moral claim on me? I’m really not sure, but I suppose that helping a needy person is a morally good thing to do and I think this implies that in some very weak sense of ‘ought’ I ought to help her, even though I can’t be criticized if I don’t. But I’m not going to insist on this. I have no argument to offer against someone who wants to say that we have an imperfect moral duty to help some needy people some of the time and that hitting the minimum threshold makes any further claims on our charity void. (I am not attributing this position to the referee and I don’t have enough confidence in my own view to rule it out.)
This example occurs in Feldman (2004, p. 173).
The most eminent proponent is Locke. See Locke (1975, p. 656).
Perhaps there’s an inductive argument to be made based on the success of reflection in bringing about proportion. I’m unsure, though, how to get such an argument off the ground.
There’s a heap of relevant literature on the topic of doxastic voluntarism that I pass over here. A good place to start is Alston (1988). My two assumptions, or close variations of them, should be acceptable to advocates of both strong and modest epistemic deontologism.
Nelson’s example involves birds flying overhead (2010, p. 87).
Nelson missed this point.
There are infinitely many propositions about which withholding, or suspension of judgement, is the fitting doxastic attitude—all those regarding which my evidence is silent. Since suspending judgement on P is not the same thing as having no doxastic attitude about P, it is in principle impossible for me to withhold on every proposition the evidence doesn’t decide. So Nelson should infer not just that we have no duty to believe any particular propositions, but that we have no duty to adopt any doxastic attitude towards any proposition. The task of responding appropriately to evidence is open-ended for all doxastic attitudes.
The fact that the notion of an imperfect duty has its origin in moral philosophy does not imply that the duty to proportion belief to evidence is moral. Some epistemologists argue that all ostensibly epistemic duties are really just moral duties in disguise. I respond to one such argument (Wrenn 2007) in Stapleford (2015). Also relevant here are Dougherty (2011, 2014), and Axtell (2011).
A referee wonders whether I really need to make such a strong claim here. Probably I don’t (for present purposes), but it should be noted that I equate ‘S epistemically ought to believe P on the basis of her evidence’ with ‘P is supported by the balance of evidence available to S’. This is a deflationary approach to epistemic oughts that allows us to make judgements about what a person ought to believe on the basis of the evidence they have even when they fail to understand its implications. I defend the view in Stapleford (2012) and Stapleford (2014). I discuss apprehension-independent relations of evidential support in Stapleford (2014) as well.
So I hesitate to use the term ‘duty’ here, since failure to fulfill a duty might seem to imply blame. ‘S ought to believe that P on the basis of her evidence’ articulates a role ought, not a duty, if duty is tied to blame.
See Stapleford (2013) for additional comments on the role of blame in our epistemic practice.
We may also be morally or prudentially obligated to aim for rationality in our beliefs (rationality of action is something different). My point is just that epistemic considerations make it necessary without reference to anything else.
I attribute this principle to Booth on the basis of the passage just quoted. It’s a simple generalization on (2).
I want to note as well that the central point of Sect. 4 in Booth’s paper appears to be that the sort of irresolvable conflict the referee mentions is impossible. (See especially page 515.) I’m not quite certain, though, since I find Booth’s presentation somewhat murky in parts.
Suppose that the strongest duty in the case is to save the child. Booth construes this as a just plain ought. It’s not a moral requirement, but an all things considered requirement. What gives the duty its normative force, according to one referee, is that it encompasses more than merely the moral point of view. As the referee observes, it does not follow from the fact that there can be different grounds of blame that there are different kinds of blame and so different kinds of duties. I agree that this is Booth’s position. In response, I have pointed out that it doesn’t follow from the fact that there is only one kind of blame that there is only one kind of duty. Different grounds of blame may give rise to different kinds of duties, even though blame is always the same (just as shame and guilt are always the same). Also, I don’t see how encompassing more than one perspective gives a duty normative force. In this scenario, I am more inclined to say that the duty to save the child draws its normative force from the weight of the moral considerations involved. Since the moral considerations here are weightiest, the duty to save the child is a moral obligation that one must prioritize. I’m only putting this forward as a line that Booth will want to invalidate—and noting that he hasn’t. This is part of my main strategy in the paper—to defuse an argument purporting to show that there are no purely epistemic duties. I am not trying to establish that there are. For my attempt to do that, see Stapleford (2012).
Another possibility is that Booth’s premises are ill formed because incomplete. There is no such thing as ‘blameless tout court’. A person is only blameless or blameworthy with reference to considerations of a certain type. In that case, premise (2) should read: ‘S is blameless from an epistemic perspective in believing that P iff S has not violated an all things considered duty in believing that P’. This makes the counterexample even clearer.
The very fact that we weigh obligations against each other when considering what to do implies that there are degrees of obligation. In my politeness versus preserving life example, we’re not trying to figure out which of x and y is an obligation. We’re trying to determine which obligation is stronger. Think about the phrase all things considered obligation. What are we considering, if not our obligations? What are we weighing if not their relative strengths?
The mortgage example comes from Feldman, but Ryan has several compelling examples of her own. There is no space here to evaluate her arguments.
Add whatever details you need to make it impossible for us to stay elsewhere.
A referee alerts me to a passage from W. D. Ross that supports my take on this: “When we think ourselves justified in breaking, and indeed morally obliged to break, a promise in order to relieve some one’s distress, we do not for a moment cease to recognize a prima facie duty to keep our promise, and this leads us to feel, not indeed shame or repentance, but certainly compunction, for behaving as we do; we recognize, further, that it is our duty to make up somehow to the promisee for the breaking of the promise” (Ross 1930, p. 28).
I’m undecided about the blame. I was trying to keep it in the background with this second set of cases.
See again Booth’s remarks on pp. 510–511.
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Stapleford, S. Epistemic versus all things considered requirements. Synthese 192, 1861–1881 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0660-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0660-1