Abstract
In The Norm of Belief, John Gibbons claims that there is a “natural reaction” to the general idea that one can be normatively required to Ø when that requirement is in some sense outside of one’s first person perspective or inaccessible to one. The reaction amounts to the claim that this is not possible. Whether this is a natural or intuitive idea or not, it is difficult to articulate exactly why we might think it is correct. To do so, we need a view about the relationship between agents’ capacities to accord with normative requirements and the conditions under which those normative requirements obtain. I offer an account of the epistemic dimension of this relationship. The goal is to provide enough of a story about the natural reaction to make accounting for it look like an important desideratum for any theory of the nature of normative requirements—whether these are moral or epistemic. To focus the discussion, I use Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first view of evidence as an example of a view in epistemology that generates the natural reaction. One upshot of the discussion, then, is a detailed account of what is troubling about Williamson’s influential but controversial view of evidence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Gibbons’ main concern is with what he calls “the ethicists’ notion of objective reasons” (Gibbons 2013, Ch.1).
We also need a clear statement of what normative requirements are. I explain what I mean in Sect. 1.
As opposed to, say, the psychological or metaphysical dimensions of this relationship.
I am referring to Williamson’s “anti-luminosity” argument (Williamson 2000).
See Chrisman 2015.
The example is borrowed from Chrisman (2015), who borrows it from Wedgwood (2007), but it comes from Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802”.
It is important to keep the stipulated senses of these terms in mind.
According to Williamson, the requirements of rationality tell you to proportion your beliefs to the evidence. “If rationality requires one to respect one’s evidence, then it is irrational not to respect one’s evidence” (Williamson 2000, Ch.8). This is a normative requirement. Although the details are complex, the basic idea is that your degree of confidence that p ought to be proportioned to the probability that p given your evidence. If the probability that p given your evidence is 1, then you ought, for example, simply outright believe that p (believe to a degree of confidence of 1). If the probability that p given your evidence is less than 1, then you ought to have something less than outright believe that p. Perhaps you ought to believe that p is probable to n degrees, or perhaps you ought to have some distinct propositional attitude that is in some sense less committal about the fact that p—the details are unimportant here.
This is inspired by an unpublished manuscript of Srinivasan. See also Srinivasan (2015, p.277).
One might insist that a fuller version of this sort of response provides a principled answer to the question: “how often is often enough?” I will not pursue this here.
Another potential issue is that the deliberation-guidance worry seems to presuppose that our practical and cognitive lives, when they go well, are a rule-governed affair. That is, it seems to presuppose that well-lived practical and cognitive lives involve actively applying general rules to specific cases. Srinivasan notes that there are anti-intellectualist reasons to think that is implausible (Srinivasan 2015, fn. 29).
See footnote 14 for brief further discussion on why this is plausible.
To make this even more plausible, imagine that Susan was very cautious in checking all the allergens and that she asked Jill about her allergies.
There is wide agreement about the epistemic dimension of blame, though this is of course a complicated issue. I touch on one dimension of this complexity in Sect. 8. In any case, one reason we might think that blameworthiness gives rise to general considerations about access has to do with the intuitive incompatibility of judgments of blameworthiness with what Williams (1976, 1981) and Nagel (1979) call “moral luck” or “resultant luck” (respectively). The Susan and Jill case is an example of “bad resultant luck.” Susan is not blameworthy for what she has done to Jill, and an issue about luck, which is perhaps best understood in terms of an issue about epistemic access, seems like precisely the relevant feature of the case. That is, the best explanation for why she is not to blame is that she was not in a position to know that the soup contains the allergen. Such reflections on resultant luck highlight the plausibility of an accessibility condition on blameworthiness.
However, the details are complicated. For example, it is important to keep some things in mind about blameworthiness before doing away with (H). It is important to note, first, that (H) does not imply that violation of normative requirements goes hand in hand with the appropriateness of blame. There are important differences between the conditions of the appropriateness of blaming someone and the conditions blameworthiness. For one thing, blaming is highly positional in nature—for example, being implicated in the wrongdoing of some other agent can place constraints on the appropriateness of one blaming that agent. Meanwhile, while blameworthiness is also considered by some to be to a certain degree positional in nature, it is arguably less so (Kelly 2013). And we might think that since violating normative requirements is not a positional matter, the idea that there is some essential connection between blameworthiness and norm violation is at least more plausible than the idea that there is some essential connection between the appropriateness of actual blame responses and norm violation.
Srinivasan does not herself formulate the desire to align the deontological and hypological perspectives in terms of the (H) principle. That is something I have taken the liberty of doing here.
In what follows I speak of the “Scanlon/Smith view”, but I do not mean to suggest by this terminology that Scanlon and Smith have collaborated or explicitly endorse each other’s views on responsibility (though this happens to be true of Smith, at least). I use this terminology simply to engage with Shoemaker, who groups the two together as representatives of broadly the same sort of view about responsibility (for my purposes, the relevant thing shared between them is understanding responsibility in terms of an agent’s being open to a certain range of moral responses).
See Watson (2011).
As Smith notes, the “volitional” view is a loose cluster of views with important differences. Roughly, they share a commitment to the idea that choice, decision, or voluntary control is central to responsibility. Smith briefly points out differences between “prior choice” views, “endorsement” views, and “voluntary control” views. See Smith (2005), p. 240).
Shoemaker appeals to cases of arational caring, such as a mother’s continuing care for her son who has turned into a serial killer (to take an extreme example), or a person’s pining for their abusive ex-lover. He suggests that this sort of caring is something the agent has, merely in virtue of standing in a sort of “mine-ness” relation to something or someone, and that requesting reasons in justification for one’s care would be pointless. The sort of moral responses that Shoemaker thinks justifies referring to mere attributability as a genuine kind of responsibility are what he calls aretaic assessments. For example, we think of the mother as loyal, or “generous to a fault,” in caring for her son. Aretaic assessments are genuinely moral responses, Shoemaker argues, insofar as they have significant practical upshots when deciding who to make plans with, associate with, “who to work on loving more,” and so on (Shoemaker 2011, p.615).
This is my terminology, not Shoemaker’s.
I rely on Watson’s (2011) characterization of the psychopathic profile: “Psychopaths (as such) suffer no psychoses or notable neuroses, or general deficits of intelligence. Their condition is characterized by callous interpersonal relations, lack of significant attachment to other people or institutions (shallow and fleeting “friendships,” amorous relations, and loyalties), lack of a sense of shame and guilt, lack of self-criticism, refusal to take responsibility for the troubles caused to others or oneself, and lack of sincere commitment to long-term goals. Psychopathy is present from childhood and, by all indications, endures a lifetime. As this description implies, this condition has proven unamenable to psychopharmacological or psychological therapies and treatments” (Watson 2011, p. 308).
Shoemaker’s key point is that psychopaths are incapable of recognizing moral relationship-defining standards, recognition of which is necessary (according to Shoemaker) for an agent to be held morally accountable.
The point is not that the psychopath cannot understand that some moral relationship-defining demand applies to him. The point is that the psychopath is incapable of seeing that the demand is reason-giving. “Let me be clear: the psychopath may well understand that there is a demand being made of him; what he cannot understand is that the demand is reason-giving.” There are facts being presented to him that he judges irrelevant—“Yes, I understand that when I do this you will be in pain and you won’t like it,” he says, “but so what?”—so they simply fail to constitute any sort of constraint on his deliberations or motivations (Shoemaker 2011, p.629).
Talbert (2008) makes this distinction.
To be sure, I would not be able to say much if someone put pressure on me to explain exactly what the difference is. My first response would be to say that the avalanche does not express any evaluative commitments or manifest an agential self in destroying the village. It does not have any evaluative commitments or an agential self. Of course, in the context of someone pressing me on this issue, these sorts of notions are exactly what we will want to know a lot more about. See Gibbons (2013, Ch.6) for an interesting discussion of some of the difficulties in this area.
More on this point about the description shortly.
Thanks to Duncan Pritchard for this example.
As I noted earlier, this is because he argues there are no (non-trivial) luminous conditions (Williamson 2000).
References
Chrisman, M. (2015). The meaning of ‘ought’: beyond expressivism and descriptivism in metaethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gibbons, J. (2013). The norm of belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greco, J. (2010). Achieving knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, E. (2013). What is an excuse? In N. Tognazzini & J. Coates (Eds.), Blame: new essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Littlejohn, C. (2014). The unity of reason. In C. Littlejohn & J. Turri (Eds.), Epistemic norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal questions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, T.M. (2008). Moral dimensions: permissibility, meaning, blame. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shoemaker, D. (2011). Attributability, answerability, and accountability: toward a wider theory of moral responsibility. Ethics, 121, 602–632.
Smith, A. (2005). Responsibility for attitudes. Ethics, 115, 236–271.
Smith, A. (2012). Attributability, answerability, and accountability: in defense of a unified account. Ethics, 122, 575–589.
Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, vol.1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2011). Knowing full well. Princeton University Press.
Srinivasan, A. (2015). Normativity without Cartesian privilege. Philosophical Issues, 25, 273–299.
Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1–25.
Talbert, M. (2008). Blame and responsiveness to moral reasons: are psychopaths blameworthy? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 89, 516–535.
Watson, G. (2011). The trouble with psychopaths. In R. J. Wallace, R. Kumar, & S. Freeman (Eds.), Reasons and recognition: essays on the philosophy of T.M. Scanlon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, B. (1976). Moral luck. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 50, 115–135.
Williams, B. (1981). Philosophy. In M. I. Finley (Ed.), The legacy of Greece: a new appraisal. Oxford: Clarendon.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, M. (2008). Living with uncertainty: the moral significance of ignorance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Allan Hazlett, Chris Kelp, Sebastian Köhler, Aidan McGlynn, Ram Neta, Duncan Pritchard, and Mona Simion for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Boult, C. Epistemic Conditions on “Ought”: E=K as a Case Study. Acta Anal 32, 223–244 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0301-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0301-4