Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About

Philosophical Papers 33 (3):353-377 (2004)
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Abstract

Abstract In this paper I argue that to understand the ethics of belief we need to put it in a context of what we care about. Epistemic values always arise from something we care about and they arise only from something we care about. It is caring that gives rise to the demand to be epistemically conscientious. The reason morality puts epistemic demands on us is that we care about morality. But there may be a (small) class of beliefs which it is not wrong to hold unconscientiously. I also argue that epistemic values enjoy a privileged place in the panorama of what we care about because they are entailed by anything we care about. That means that when there is a conflict between caring about knowledge or true belief and caring about something else, that conflict cannot be resolved simply by following the one we care about the most because caring about knowledge in any domain is entailed by caring about that domain. Finally, I argue that whereas caring demands different degrees of conscientiousness in different contexts, contextualism about knowledge is less plausible

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Linda Zagzebski
University of Oklahoma

Citations of this work

The ethics of belief.Andrew Chignell - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Understanding and Structure.Allan Hazlett - 2017 - In Stephen Robert Grimm, Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
Non‐Moral Evil.Allan Hazlett - 2012 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 36 (1):18-34.
Motivated reasoning and the ethics of belief.Jon Ellis - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6):e12828.

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References found in this work

Contextualism and knowledge attributions.Keith DeRose - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4):913-929.
The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good.Linda Zagzebski - 2003 - Metaphilosophy 34 (1-2):12-28.
The Place of Truth in Epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 2003 - In Michael Raymond DePaul & Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Intellectual virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 155-180.
Epistemic normativity.Hilary Kornblith - 1993 - Synthese 94 (3):357 - 376.

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