Abstract
In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this (unorthodox) view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are (mistakenly) classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that indicate that something should be excused. Brown thinks that previous attempts to make this case have been unsuccessful. While the difficulties Brown points to are genuine, I think they show that attempts to explain a classificatory judgment haven't been successful. Still, I would argue that the classification is correct. We need a better explanation of this classificatory judgment. (The situation is similar to the one in which we correctly distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge but then embarrass ourselves trying to explain what this difference consists in.) I will try to clarify the justification-excuse distinction and explain why it's a mistake to insist that beliefs that violate epistemic norms might be justified. Just as it's possible for a rational agent to act without justification in spite of her best intentions (e.g., by using force or violence in trying to defend another from a merely apparent threat), it's possible that a rational thinker who follows the evidence and meets our expectations might nevertheless believe without sufficient justification. If our justified beliefs are supposed to guide us in deciding what to do, we probably should draw on discussions from morality and the law about the justification/excuse distinction to inform our understanding of the epistemic case.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
To be sure, there might be other more ‘subjective’ senses of justification just as we might distinguish between different readings of ‘ought’. My impression is that most critics of J = K think that the view isn’t true of any notion of justification. If they were pluralists who were content to admit that there were different readings of ‘justified’ that, say, connected to different readings of ‘ought’, they might acknowledge that there is some legitimate notion of justification that is identified with knowledge and say that they choose to discuss some other notion. Their attitude instead seems to be that we can see the view is false without considering different readings of the normative language.
Suppose I concede that I don’t know whether it was you who spoiled the surprise party I’ve been planning. Having conceded this, I cannot reasonably continue to be upset with you for doing that. Why not? It’s not because doing such a thing wouldn’t be upsetting, but precisely because I cannot reasonably continue to take you to be responsible for this. Acknowledged ignorance enjoins suspension.
This fits with Fletcher’s take on the case when he says, ‘Whether a wrongful actor is excused does not affect the rights of other persons to resist or to assist the wrongful actor. But claims of justification do’ (2000: 760). This is, of course, controversial. Baron (2007), for example, takes the view that objective features of the situation don’t have any bearing on justification. To my mind, this comes with a cost. As Zimmerman (2008) notes, if you take this line, you probably have to deny that the innocent person Bertrand assaults, shoots, stabs, etc. didn’t have any right not to be assaulted, shot, stabbed, etc. Rights have correlative duties. On the view that Baron and Zimmerman defend, since there’s no duty not to shoot the person who has the misfortune of looking like a dangerous person, there’s no right here to violate. Explaining intuitions about justified interference and reparative duties gets tricky. This, in my view, is the clear sign that they’ve made a mistake. I don’t think people critical of J = K typically think that they’re embracing this kind of view. Most of them would probably complain that being shot by someone who mistakes them for a threat isn’t just one of those bad things that happened. They’d probably think that, at the very least, they are owed something by the shooter and it’s hard to see how such a rich normative relation could obtain just because someone out there permissibly did something that was bad in some way.
I understand that this assumes that, say, the Kantian view that the normative is only concerned with the quality of the agent’s will, but short of defending this sweeping philosophical view, it’s going to be hard to deny that Bertrand’s behaviour couldn’t have violated any norm (e.g., Battery).
As Gardner puts it, ‘The gist of an excuse … is precisely that the person with the excuse lived up to our expectations’ (2008: 124).
I’ll assume that Arpaly (2002) is right that the kind of responsiveness that matters is de re responsiveness, not de dicto.
In some cases, norms can conflict. Think of the clash between non-maleficence and justice. K- and K + aren’t like this. There’s no situation in which they both apply to an agent and, say, pressure her to believe and to suspend. Nevertheless, they pull in different directions and given uncertainty about which one applies, it still makes sense to approach this case in the way we might approach norms that can conflict in the same situation provided that we can compare the degree of wrongdoing that results from violating these norms.
With sufficient patience, we might run through preface cases of varying sizes to get a sense of when we think it’s reasonable for someone with n beliefs who is highly certain that some subset of those beliefs constitute knowledge to retain belief in each of the n-propositions. We won’t ever locate the threshold, but the situation doesn’t seem different from that of trying to determine the force of reasons to keep promises and refrain from killing strangers in deciding when it’s irresponsible to drive somewhere (and thus increasing the chance of killing a stranger) to ensure that the promise is kept.
See Dorst (2019) for a discussion of how the threshold can be set that focuses on a veritist value theory. If the above is right, there might be a further problem with the dispositional account. On Williamson’s (2014) description of his unmarked clock cases, a thinker could know even when it’s nearly certain on her evidence that she doesn’t. If showing sensitivity to risk is part of meeting expectations, a thinker might believe what she knows (i.e., conforming to K + and K-), have the disposition to conform to K- and K + (if risk-sensitivity isn’t part of the disposition), and respond in the way that someone disposed to conform to K- and K + would. Intuitively, however, it seems unreasonable to believe in this case given the risk of violating K-. The problem is easily addressed by building risk-sensitivity into the relevant dispositions, but it’s worth noting that the risk-sensitivity condition seems important for addressing a number of objections to the dispositional account.
References
Arpaly, N. (2002). Unprincipled virtue. Oxford University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1956). A plea for excuses. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57, 1–30.
Bach, K. (1985). A rationale for reliabilism. The Monist, 68, 246–263.
Baron, M. (2007). Excuses, excuses. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 1, 21–39.
Bird, A. (2007). Justified judging. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74, 81–110.
Boult, C. (2017). Epistemic normativity and the justification-excuse distinction. Synthese, 194, 4065–4081.
Brown, J. 2018. Fallibilism: Evidence and knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Cohen, S. (1984). Justification and truth. Philosophical Studies, 46, 279–295.
Dorst, K. (2019). Lockeans maximize expected accuracy. Mind, 128, 175–211.
Dutant, J., & Littlejohn, C. (2021). Defeaters as indicators of ignorance. In J. Brown & M. Simion (Eds.), Reasons, justification, and defeat. Oxford University Press.
Engel, M. (1992). Personal and doxastic justification in epistemology. Philosophical Studies, 67, 133–150.
Fletcher, G. (2000). Rethinking Criminal Law. Oxford University Press.
Gardner, J. (2008). Offences and defences. Oxford University Press.
Hursthouse, R. (2016). Virtue ethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Ichikawa, J. (2017). Contextualising knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2018). Virtuous failure and victims of deceit. In J. Dutant & F. Dorsch (Eds.), The new evil demon. Oxford University Press.
Lazar, S. (2020). Duty and doubt. Journal of Practical Ethics, 8, 28–55.
Littlejohn, C. (2009). The externalist’s demon. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39, 399–434.
Littlejohn, C. (2012). Justification and the truth-connection. Cambridge University Press.
Littlejohn, C. (2014). The unity of reason. In C. Littlejohn & J. Turri (Eds.), Epistemic norms. Oxford University Press.
Lowy, C. (1978). gettier’s notion of justification. Mind, 87, 105–108.
Moore, M. (1997). Placing blame. Oxford University Press.
Olsen, K. (2018). Subjective rightness and minimizing expected objective wrongness. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 99, 417–441.
Sutton, J. (2007). Without Justification. MIT University Press.
Williamson, T. (2014). very improbable knowing. Erkenntnis, 79, 971–999.
Williamson, T. (2016). Justifications, excuses, and skeptical scenarios. In F. Dorsch & F. Dutant (Eds.), The new evil demon. Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, M. (2008). Living with Uncertainty. Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Littlejohn, C. A justification for excuses: Brown’s discussion of the knowledge view of justification and the excuse manoeuvre. Philos Stud 179, 2683–2696 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01786-6
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01786-6