Abstract
Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial.
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Notes
Throughout, I treat the phrase “normatively required to \(\upvarphi \)” as roughly synonymous with “should \(\upvarphi \)” or “ought to \(\upvarphi \).”
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this helpful label.
To be sure, presumably not all of our friendships characteristically involve partiality (either doxastic or practical), and so it might not be the case that all friendships normatively require certain forms of behavior. The patterns of action and motivation involved in casual friendships, pragmatic alliances, and the like, may bear little resemblance to those patterns of action and motivation characteristic of our close friendships. The focus of this paper is squarely on the forms of partiality distinctive of being a good friend to someone. Throughout the paper, talk of what “friendship” involves or requires should be understood to refer only to what being a good friend to someone involves or requires.
This case is adapted from one of the central cases in Stroud (2006), p. 504.
Stroud (2006), p. 505.
Keller (2004), p. 335.
There are other defenses of this move in the literature. Hazlett (2013) suggests that this split between one’s outward behavior and one’s beliefs “seems to require an unappealing kind of insincerity... If we reject the idea that friendship ever requires this kind of insincerity, then we should conclude that (some) friendships really do require (a disposition towards) partiality bias.” (p. 92) Piller (2016), who is sympathetic to Stroud and Keller on this point, makes a similar claim: “Social relationships and, in general, our evaluative commitments, shape our lives. Thus, it would be a surprise if the epistemic sphere were completely isolated from such influence. Such isolation would not even be plausible as an ideal for people like us who cannot but engage whole-heartedly with the world.” (p. 335)
Stroud (2006), p. 518.
ibid.
ibid.
For a fuller examination of this line of response, see Stroud (2006), pp. 515–18.
Marušić (2015), p. 189.
Consider also the distinctive reactive attitudes that would seem appropriate for Alex to have toward his spouse, but not toward the bookie. Suppose that Alex’s spouse fails to believe that he will run the Berlin marathon, as he’s promised. She’s been secretly consulting with the bookie and becomes convinced that the chances that Alex will run the marathon, given all the evidence of Alex’s checkered history, are not high enough to justify believing that he will run the marathon. It seems in such a case that Alex could reasonably resent his spouse (though, intuitively, not the bookie) for not having more faith in him. And he could reasonably resent her even while recognizing that the evidence of his past behavior is indeed discouraging. In this case, she has believed as she epistemically ought to believe, but she has still somehow let him down. But his resentment toward her would not make sense unless he thought that she somehow owed it to him, as his spouse, to take his word.
For my purposes here, I intend to remain agnostic on “whose” reasons these are, and what it would mean for an agent to “have” reasons. Those who disagree about what it means exactly to “have” reasons, and whose set of reasons we ought to privilege in particular puzzle cases, can agree that talk of what agents “ought” to do, at least under one reading of “ought,” are conceptually tied to the presence of some reason(s) or other.
See, e.g., Schroeder (2011) on the characteristic role that the deliberative “ought” plays in reasoning.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to make this premise more explicit.
See also Shah and Velleman (2005).
Shah (2006), pp. 481–2.
Shah (2006), pp. 482–3.
Foley (1993), p. 16.
This sort of deliberative constraint on reasons is often credited to Williams (1981) discussion of internal and external reasons.
For a related criticism of the evidentialist’s emphasis on directness, see Rinard (2015), pp. 212–14.
Kelly (2002), p. 174.
Kelly (2002), p. 176.
In passing, Kelly (2002) himself raises the possibility that one could be disposed to engage in a de-conversion process if one’s practical reasons for having a belief have changed (p. 176). Curiously, he does not indicate why this wouldn’t count as being disposed to abandon one’s belief in the right way. Given that he thinks that the directness of forming or abandoning a belief for reasons is not the right way to ground the relevant basing relation, it’s unclear why the disposition to de-convert is ruled out.
Shah (2006), p. 481. Emphases added.
Stroud (2006), p. 511. (Emphasis added.)
The “object-given” and “state-given” terminology here originates from Parfit (2001).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing for elaboration on this point.
I canvassed some of these considerations in Sect. 2.
Stroud (2006), p. 501.
I flagged this in Sect. 3 as the “‘ought’ entails reasons” premise.
An agent need not have the specific thought that being a good friend constitutively involves doxastic partiality, or take that specific formulation as her reason. This state-given reason can appear in somewhat different guises and still face the same problem I raise here: they would still be reasons to be in the state of being doxastically partial. For example, the thought that a good friend would believe p, or that I would be a bad friend if I didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt, appear to express the same basic idea: roughly, that there are certain doxastic attitudes or dispositions distinctive of being a good friend to which I should live up. What I claim in this section is that even if that basic idea is true, it can’t be taken as a reason to be doxastically partial.
Note, too, that there is an independent worry we might raise about the claim that friendship gives us reasons to realize the attitudes constitutive of being a good friend. It is not obviously the case, more generally, that the fact that X is constitutive of Y (and Y is valuable) is a reason to bring about X. Suppose that it is partly constitutive of my having a valuable, mutually enriching relationship with my partner that there be an element of spontaneity in our shared activities. Does that give us reason to see to it that spontaneity in our shared activities is realized? One worries that responding to such a reason would undermine the possibility of realizing genuine spontaneity. Or, to take a different kind of example, suppose that it is partly constitutive of living a healthy life that I be able to breathe oxygen unintentionally. This does not give me reason to breathe oxygen unintentionally, since responding to such reasons to do it would make it no longer unintentional. If the general schema into which the normative assumption we’ve identified fits is itself dubious, that normative assumption should give us pause.
It’s also worth noting here that our friendships and other personal relationships often come with other reasons and obligations that may easily distort our intuitions about whether there are reasons or obligations to be doxastically partial. In the case involving Alex and his spouse, perhaps the reason it might seem to some that Alex is “entitled to expect” his spouse’s trust is not that the spouse has reason to be doxastically partial to Alex, to which she is failing to respond. Rather, perhaps it’s the fact that Alex made a promiseto her, but not the bookie, that explains the difference between the sense that Alex is entitled to expect his spouse’s trust, but not the bookie’s. In other words, I want to suggest that we might try to appeal to whatever distinctive commitments or expectations promissory obligation puts into place to explain the sense in which the promisor feels entitled to expect the trust of the promisee.
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For helpful conversations and comments on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Simon Feldman, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Niko Kolodny, Kathryn Lindeman, Andrew Reisner, Nishi Shah, Keshav Singh, Justin Snedegar, Derek Turner, Katia Vavova, and two anonymous referees. I am also grateful for questions and feedback I received from participants at the 2017 Midsummer Philosophy Workshop at the University of Leeds; the Humboldt-Southampton Normativity Conference at the University of Southampton; and the 2017 Vancouver Summer Philosophy Conference.
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Crawford, L. Believing the best: on doxastic partiality in friendship. Synthese 196, 1575–1593 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1521-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1521-x