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Case Study: Access and the Shirker Problem

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Infinite Regress Arguments

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Philosophy ((BRIEFSPHILOSOPH))

Abstract

It is often controversial what conclusion should be drawn from an infinite regress. In this chapter, I will present a case study to illustrate this kind of controversy in some detail: a regress concerning the so-called Access principle, which places an epistemic restriction on our obligations. Restrictions like Access fall prey to the Shirker Problem, namely the problem that shirkers could evade their obligations by evading certain epistemic circumstances. To block this problem, it has been suggested that shirkers have the obligation to learn their obligations. This solution yields a regress, yet it is controversial what the moral of the regress actually is. There will be two, related questions throughout this chapter: first, what possible conclusions can regresses have? And second: how can those conclusions be defended on the basis of a regress, and how might those conclusions be resisted?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The material of this chapter derives from Wieland (2014).

  2. 2.

    Arguably, in certain cases (namely, when the moral stakes are high) one should take more than a few inquisitive steps (cf. Guerrero 2007).

  3. 3.

    Cf. Sider (1995, p. 274). My formulation is slightly different, yet the idea is the same. This distinction traces back to at least Moore (1912, p. 100), cf. Graham (2010), Driver (2012) for recent defenses.

  4. 4.

    Main recent contributions in this debate on the interplay between obligations and/or responsibility on the one hand and the epistemic condition on the other (or: the extent to which obligations and/or responsibility are ‘subjective’) include Zimmerman (2008), Sher (2009), Smith (2010).

  5. 5.

    Among a few other considerations. In this chapter, I focus exclusively on this main problem.

  6. 6.

    See Sect. 5.3 for more on this distinction.

  7. 7.

    Do Weak Block and Strong Block fall within their own scope? For the moment, we do not need to settle this. See Sect. 5.4.

  8. 8.

    Note that we are switching from the first-person perspective of the agent to the third-person perspective of an advisor for reasons that will become clear below.

  9. 9.

    For this kind of response to work, we assume that the new laws apply retrospectively.

  10. 10.

    See Sect. 5.2 for the distinction between two kinds of shirkers.

  11. 11.

    Is this solution ad hoc? It seems not: we do not assume O2 for the sole purpose of blocking the regress; rather, we assume it in order to solve the Shirker Problem in a plausible way.

  12. 12.

    In terms of the Failure B reconstruction above, this means that the regress is generated with the help of premise (2), but without the term ‘first’.

  13. 13.

    This is what I labelled as ‘O2’. O2 immune to epistemic restrictions in the sense that it cannot be abused by shirkers. Note that it is not immune to restrictions in the sense that it is subject to itself.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jan Willem Wieland

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  1. Jan Willem Wieland
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Correspondence to Jan Willem Wieland .

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Wieland, J.W. (2014). Case Study: Access and the Shirker Problem. In: Infinite Regress Arguments. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06206-8_5

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