Is reliabilism a form of consequentialism?

American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):183-194 (2017)
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Abstract

Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs.

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Author Profiles

Jeff Dunn
DePauw University
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij
Birkbeck, University of London

References found in this work

Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - New York: Basic Books.
Justification and the Truth-Connection.Clayton Littlejohn - 2012 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
On What Matters: Two-Volume Set.Derek Parfit - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge in a social world.Alvin I. Goldman - 1991 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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