Abstract
While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interesting role in our normative theories. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, a value that’s notoriously difficult to understand if we think of justification as but a fallible means to a desired end. We will argue that these bridge-principles will be incredibly difficult to defend. While we do not think that normative facts necessarily stand in any interesting relationship to our justified beliefs about them, there might well be a way of defending the idea that our justified beliefs about what to do won’t lead us astray. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, but this way of thinking about justification and its value comes with costs few would be willing to pay.
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Notes
For defenses of principles in the neighborhood of DOWN, see Gibbons (2013), Greco (2014), Kiesewetter (2016), Littlejohn (2012), Titelbaum Michael (2015), and Way and Whiting (2016). Some writers see these principles as trivial consequences of the factivity of justification (e.g., Littlejohn 2012), but some see them as revealing something surprising about the normative domain.
Kiesewetter (2016) offers the most careful defense of UP we have seen in the literature. Smithies (2012) offers a careful defense of a more limited principle, one that links the justificatory status of a belief with higher-order beliefs about justificatory status. For important criticisms of UP, see Srinivasan (2015).
Smithies (2012) calls a fact or condition “lustrous” iff necessarily, if that condition obtains one has justification to believe that it obtains.
We are reading ’\(\hbox {O}\upphi \)’ as saying that Agnes ought to \(\upphi \) and ’\(\diamondsuit \hbox {BO}\upphi \)’ and ’\(\diamondsuit \upphi \)’ as saying that Agnes is justified or permitted to believe she ought to \(\upphi \) and Agnes is justified or permitted to \(\upphi \) respectively. We shall assume Duality, namely that Agnes ought to \(\upphi \) iff Agnes is not permitted not to \(\upphi \). One may want to restrict Duality in the light of the idea that nothing is either permitted or obligatory for rocks and other non-rational creatures. Restricting Duality in such a way complicates the discussion without affecting our results.
In addition to its crucial premise (if one ought to \(\upphi \), then it is not logically impossible that they \(\upphi \) while they believe they ought to \(\upphi )\), Kiesewetter’s argument further assumes that oughts aggregate (if one ought to \(\upphi _{1 }\) and one ought to \(\upphi _{2 }\) then one ought to \( \upphi _{1 }\, \& \upphi _{2})\) and that justified belief in conjunctive oughts distributes (if one has justification to believe that they ought to \( \upphi _{1}\, \& \upphi _{2}\) then they have justification to believe that they ought to \(\upphi _{1})\). The assumptions are not unassailable but fairly standard. As we don’t think they are the problematic step in the argument we grant them without further ado.
The argument uses the assumption that oughts aggregate with mays (if it’s permitted to \(\upphi _{1}\) and obligatory to \(\upphi _{2}\) then it’s permitted to \( \upphi _{1}\, \& \upphi _{2})\) and the assumption that justified belief about conjunctive mays distribute (if one has justification to believe that they may \( \upphi _{1}\, \& \upphi _{2}\) then they have justification to believe that they may \(\upphi )\).
This claim about lotteries is not uncontroversial, but see Nelkin (2000) for an important defense for our claims about knowledge and justification.
For an interesting discussion of the different ways that these kinds of preface cases create defeating pressure, see Moeller Emil (2015). For a general discussion about the assumptions that let us generate preface-like situations, see Worsnip (2016). Some writers (e.g., Smith 2016) try to block the preface by saying that the statistical nature of the grounds for the preface belief prevent that belief from being justified, but we think that these kinds of testimony cases get around that problem. While some writers (e.g., Ryan 1991) think that the presence of the justification for believing the preface assertion indicates an absence of justification for believing some of the claims in the body of the book, some of us writing this paper side with Easwaran Kenny and Branden Fitelson (2014) in thinking that the author could be rational in believing all the claims in the book even if they know what all the claims are and know them to be inconsistent.
We’ll assume that Agnes has sufficiently strong evidence to believe p if she has just the evidence of someone who is in a position to know that p. While being in a position to know p requires the truth of p, having the evidence of someone in this position arguably does not. We’re supposing that Agnes has the evidence of some possible subject who could come to know the relevant propositions given the evidence that they had (and further factors) and this wouldn’t require entailing evidence if we assume E=K (although it’s a consequence of E=K that the subject who came to know p would thereby have evidence that entailed p and evidence that they could only have if p.)
For arguments against KK, see Williamson (2000).
Even the philosophers who would argue that evidence of evidence is evidence seem to agree that someone can have sufficient evidence that they have sufficient evidence for p even when they don’t have this evidence and think that they can have sufficient evidence for p without having strong evidence for thinking that they have it.
While Way and Whiting (2016) like the idea that justified beliefs about oughts are infallible, they suggest that they might want to restrict the factivity of justification to normative propositions. This kind of argument, offered in Littlejohn (2012), was designed to show that such restrictions are difficult to defend. Kiesewetter (2016) anticipates this kind of worry and suggests restricting DOWN to actions that the agent ought to perform, but the difficulty with this maneuver is that we’ve shown that DOWN (in its unrestricted form) can be vindicated using his (forthcoming) argument for UP.
See Zimmerman (2010) for a defense of this kind of view, a view according to which what Agnes ought to do depends upon both her evaluative evidence and her empirical evidence.
We’re assuming, of course, that we shouldn’t pull sleeping drunks into the paths of trolleys to try to save others but appreciate that this is controversial and hope the reader appreciates the irrelevance of that controversy to the point we’re making.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful discussion of the issues discussed here we would like to thank the attendees of the Normativity and Rationality Seminar at King’s College London.
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Dutant, J., Littlejohn, C. Just do it? When to do what you judge you ought to do. Synthese 195, 3755–3772 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1220-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1220-z