Abstract
To be a doxastic deontologist is to claim that there is such a thing as an ethics of belief (or of our doxastic attitudes in general). In other words, that we are subject to certain duties with respect to our doxastic attitudes, the non-compliance with which makes us blameworthy and that we should understand doxastic justification in terms of these duties. In this paper, I argue that these duties are our all things considered duties, and not our epistemic or moral duties, for example. I show how this has the surprising result that, if deontologism is a thesis about doxastic justification, it entails that there is no such thing as epistemic or moral justification for a belief that p. I then suggest why this result, though controversial, may have some salutary consequences: primarily that it helps us make some sense of an otherwise puzzling situation regarding doxastic dilemmas.
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I Would like to thank Conor McHugh, Rik Peels, Herman Philipse, an audience at the 2nd Dutch Annual Practical Philosophy Conference, Groningen, The Netherlands, and an anonymous reviewer at Synthese, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Booth, A.R. All things considered duties to believe. Synthese 187, 509–517 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9857-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9857-5