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  1.  50
    Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment.John Pittard - 2019 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Every known religious or explicitly irreligious outlook is contested by large contingents of informed and reasonable people. Many philosophers have argued that reflection on this fact should lead us to abandon confident religious or irreligious belief and to embrace religious skepticism. John Pittard critically assesses the case for such disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. While the book focuses on religious disagreement, it makes a number of significant contributions to the more general discussion of the rational significance of disagreement as well.
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  2. Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty.John Pittard & Alex Worsnip - 2017 - Mind 126 (501):155-193.
    We offer a new argument in favour of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘ S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centred on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty regarding certain descriptive facts. Contextualists, relativists, and invariantists all (...)
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  3. Resolute conciliationism.John Pittard - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260):442-463.
    ‘Conciliationism’ is the view that disagreement with qualified disputants gives us a powerful reason for doubting our disputed views, a reason that will often be sufficient to defeat what would otherwise be strong evidential justification for our position. Conciliationism is disputed by many qualified philosophers, a fact that has led many to conclude that conciliationism is self-defeating. After examining one prominent response to this challenge and finding it wanting, I develop a fresh approach to the problem. I identify two levels (...)
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  4. Conciliationism and Religious Disagreement.John Pittard - 2014 - In Michael Bergmann & Patrick Kain (eds.), Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution. Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 80-97.
    Many have maintained that the nature and extent of religious disagreement ought to shake our confidence in our religious or explicitly irreligious beliefs, leading us to be religious skeptics. This chapter argues that the most plausible ‘conciliatory’ view of disagreement does not lend support to religious skepticism. ‘Strong’ conciliatory views that say that one’s response to a disagreement should always be entirely determined by dispute-independent reasons are implausible. The only plausible conciliationism is a moderate version that holds that one’s partisan (...)
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  5. The many ‘oughts’ of deliberation.John Pittard - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2617-2637.
    It is commonly recognized that ‘ought’ is a semantically flexible word admitting of more “objective” and more “subjective” senses. Which of these senses (if any) is the one that is of central concern in normative ethics? According to some philosophers, the sense ‘ought’ that is centrally at issue in normative ethics is the sense of ‘ought’ that features in the various ‘ought’ questions that rational subjects aim to answer when deliberating about what to do. An assumption of this proposal is (...)
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  6. Religious Disagreement.John Pittard - 2015 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  7. Deceptive worlds, skepticism, and axiarchism.John Pittard - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1367-1402.
    Axiarchism holds that fundamental concrete reality is necessarily ordered toward goodness. I argue that it is not fully rational to reject axiarchism while also rejecting radical skepticism. A key premise in the argument is that among conceivable worlds that contain one’s internal duplicate, ‘epistemically inhospitable’ worlds (i.e. worlds where all or most of one’s internal duplicates are radically deceived) are predominant. This predominance of inhospitable worlds provides a prima facie reason for thinking that the actual world is probably inhospitable. To (...)
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  8.  92
    Fundamental disagreements and the limits of instrumentalism.John Pittard - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):5009-5038.
    I argue that the skeptical force of a disagreement is mitigated to the extent that it is fundamental, where a fundamental disagreement is one that is driven by differences in epistemic starting points. My argument has three steps. First, I argue that proponents of conciliatory policies have good reason to affirm a view that I call “instrumentalism,” a view that commends treating our doxastic inclinations like instrumental readouts. Second, I show that instrumentalism supplies a basis for demanding conciliatory requirements in (...)
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  9.  92
    Disagreement, reliability, and resilience.John Pittard - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11):4389-4409.
    Alex Worsnip has recently argued against conciliatory views that say that the degree of doxastic revision required in light of disagreement is a function of one’s antecedent reliability estimates for oneself and one’s disputant. According to Worsnip, the degree of doxastic revision is also sensitive to the resilience of these estimates; in particular, when one has positive “net resilience,” meaning that one is more confident in one’s estimate of one’s own reliability than in one’s estimate of the disputant’s reliability, less (...)
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  10. Evil and God's Toxin Puzzle.John Pittard - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):88-108.
    I show that Kavka's toxin puzzle raises a problem for the “Responsibility Theodicy,” which holds that the reason God typically does not intervene to stop the evil effects of our actions is that such intervention would undermine the possibility of our being significantly responsible for overcoming and averting evil. This prominent theodicy seems to require that God be able to do what the agent in Kavka's toxin story cannot do: stick by a plan to do some action at a future (...)
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  11.  88
    When Beauties Disagree: Why Halfers Should Affirm Robust Perspectivalism.John Pittard - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5.
    In this paper I present a variant of the “Sleeping Beauty” case that shows that the “halfer” approach to the original Sleeping Beauty problem is incompatible with an extremely plausible principle pertaining to cases of disagreement. This principle says that, in “nonpermissive” contexts, the weight you give to a disputant’s view ought to be proportional to your estimation of the strength of the disputant’s epistemic position with respect to the disputed proposition. In requiring such proportionality, the principle denies the possibility (...)
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  12.  82
    The defeat of evil and the norms of hope.John Pittard - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (4):317-335.
    Does God bring good out of evil? More specifically, does God defeat the suffering experienced by the victims of horrendous evils by making it the case that each victim's suffering contributes to some great good—a good that could not be obtained without such suffering, and that results in the victim enjoying greater total well-being than would be expected had no such evil occurred? Call the thesis that God does defeat evils in this way the defeat thesis. A commitment to the (...)
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  13. Worship and the Problem of Divine Achievement.John Pittard - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (1):65-90.
    Gwen Bradford has plausibly argued that one attains achievement only if one does something one finds difficult. It is also plausible that one must attain achievement to be worthy of “agential” praise, praise that is appropriately directed to someone on the basis of things that redound to their credit. These claims pose a challenge to classical theists who direct agential praise to God, since classical theism arguably entails that none of God’s actions are difficult for God. I consider responses to (...)
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  14.  17
    Précis of Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment.John Pittard - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 13 (4):269-279.
    This paper summarizes Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment. The book’s central question is whether confident (ir)religious commitment can be rationally maintained in the face of systematic religious disagreement. Part i develops an account of the epistemic significance of disagreement and considers the implications of this account for religious belief. This part argues against the commitment of “strong conciliationists” to a rigorous form of epistemic impartiality, a commitment that underlies the strongest argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. Part ii considers the implications (...)
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  15.  15
    Rational Insight and Partisan Justification: Responding to Bogardus and Burton, Thurow, and Kvanvig.John Pittard - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 13 (4):325-360.
    This paper discusses responses to Disagreement, Deference, and Rational Commitment from Bogardus and Burton, Thurow, and Kvanvig. Each of these responses objects to the rationalist account of “partisan justification” defended in the book. After explaining partisan justification and its significance, I first take up Bogardus and Burton’s argument for a more restrictive account of partisan justification which says that partisan justification requires certainty. I argue that this account yields implausible discontinuities in the verdicts given to nearly identical cases. Next, I (...)
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  16.  35
    The Skeptical Challenge of the Theistic Multiverse.John Pittard - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    The multiverse theodicy says that because God can without cost create an infinite number of universes, the standards of acceptability that a conceivable universe must meet to be worthy of divine creation are significantly laxer than is typically supposed in discussions of the problem of evil. While the prospect of a theistic multiverse arguably helps the theist to explain suffering, I argue that it also poses a serious skeptical worry. Given the alleged laxity of the standards that a universe must (...)
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  17.  39
    Rationalist Resistance to Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism.John Pittard - 2021 - In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 180-216.
    Many epistemologists argue that responses to disagreement should exhibit a certain kind of epistemic impartiality. “Strong conciliationists” claim that we ought to give equal weight to the views of those who, judged from a dispute-neutral perspective, appear to be our “epistemic peers” with respect to some disputed matter. Using a Bayesian framework, Chapter 8 considers whether there is a plausible epistemic impartiality principle that would require us to give up confident religious (or irreligious) belief in favor of religious skepticism. It (...)
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  18. Disagreement, Religious.John Pittard - 2015 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Religious Disagreement The domain of religious inquiry is characterized by pervasive and seemingly intractable disagreement. Whatever stance one takes on central religious questions—for example, whether God exists, what the nature of God might be, whether the world has a purpose, whether there is life beyond death—one will stand opposed to a large contingent of highly … Continue reading Disagreement, Religious →.
     
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  19.  12
    The Epistemic Challenge of Religious Disagreement: Responding to Matheson.John Pittard - 2020 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9 (9):55-64.
    In this paper, I respond to Jonathan Matheson's discussion of "Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment.".
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