The possibility conditions of an ethics of belief

Religious Studies Archives, 2021

On some religious traditions, there are obligations to believe certain things. However, this leads to a puzzle, since many philosophers think that we cannot voluntarily control our beliefs, and, plausibly, ought implies can. How do we make sense of religious doxastic obligations? The papers in this issue present four responses to this puzzle. The first response denies that we have doxastic obligations at all; the second denies that ought implies can. The third and fourth responses maintain that we have either indirect or direct control over our beliefs. This paper summarizes each response to the puzzle and argues that there are plausible ways out of this paradox.

The central purpose of this essay is to discuss some important implications of any credible ethics of belief for the nature of belief. By an ‘ethics of belief’, we mean an account of what it is to form and hold one’s beliefs responsibly, praiseworthily, or blameworthily. Thus, the aim is to lay out some implications of such an ethics of belief for the metaphysics of belief.

Philosophical Explorations, 2009

Research on moral responsibility and the related problem of free will is among the liveliest areas in contemporary analytical philosophy. Traditionally, these problems have been dealt with in connection with actions and decisions. More recently, they also have been extended to beliefs, and this extension has thrown some more light on the more traditional concerns. These problems were the central subject of a recent philosophical meeting, the International Workshop on Belief, Responsibility, and Action, which took place in Valencia (Spain) in November 2008. This special issue of Philosophical Explorations takes its origin in this meeting. It was a complementary activity of the research project Belief, Responsibility, and Action (HUM2006-04907), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (in collaboration with the European Regional Development fund of the European Community), the Autonomous Government of the Valencian Community, and the University of Valencia. Some of the papers included in this special issue were actually presented and discussed during that meeting, while others have been written especially for the occasion. All the authors and S.E. Cuypers, associate editor of Philosophical Explorations-whose paper does not appear here, owing to the journal's deontological code-were invited speakers to the workshop in Valencia. The main contenders in the debate on free action, free will, and moral responsibility are the following. Compatibilism is the view that free will, free action, and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Incompatibilism is the denial of compatibilism. Libertarians are incompatibilists who believe that at least some of us, at times, perform free decisions and actions for which we are responsible. Therefore, they deny determinism. Hard determinists are incompatibilists who accept determinism and, consequently, hold that there are no free decisions or actions, and no moral responsibility, either. Although incompatibilists may also remain agnostic about determinism, they hold that, if it is true, then hard determinists are right in denying free will and moral responsibility. Hard incompatibilists concur with hard determinists about the contention that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism, but add that these properties are also incompatible with indeterminism. Hard incompatibilists are, then, sceptical about the reality of free will and moral responsibility at whatever world.

2010

My dissertation attempts to establish the plausibility of a thesis that I call moderate direct control over belief. This thesis tells us that a significant percentage our beliefs, or more specifically their formation, retention and elimination, are subject to our direct control. Moderate direct control is in direct conflict with the dominant view in philosophy, which claims that we lack direct control over belief. I make my argument first by appealing to common sense, including our standard responsibility-attributing

2013

Recent years have seen increasing attacks on the "deontological" conception (or as we call it, the guidance conception) of epistemic justification, the view that epistemology offers advice to knowers in forming beliefs responsibly. Critics challenge an important presupposition of the guidance conception, doxastic voluntarism, the view that we choose our beliefs. We assume that epistemic guidance is indispensable, and seek to answer objections to doxastic voluntarism, most prominently William Alston's. We contend that Alston falsely assumes that choice of belief requires the assent to a specific propositional content. We argue that beliefs can be chosen under descriptions which do not specify their propositional content, and that these descriptions—which concern the method of inquiry whereby a belief is to be formed—nonetheless specify the features of the belief that make it epistemically responsible to adopt. More generally, we urge that the identity of a belief is not exhausted by its content.

Religious Studies, 2010

In this paper I evaluate Brian Zamulinski's recent attempt to rebut an argument to the conclusion that having any kind of religious faith violates a moral duty. I agree with Zamulinski that the argument is unsound, but I disagree on where it goes wrong. I criticize Zamulinski's alternative construal of Christian faith as existential commitment to fundamental assumptions. It does not follow that we should accept the moral argument against religious faith, for at least two reasons. First, Zamulinski's Cliffordian ethics of belief is defective in several regards. Second, the truth of doxastic involuntarism and the possibility of doxastic excuse conditions can be used to demonstrate that the argument is unconvincing.

Let me start by saying that I am honored and thrilled that the edito-rial board of Teorema has been so kind as to devote a large part of this is-sue of this journal to my book Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). I’m glad to see that the last few years show an increasing philosophical attention for the ethics of belief [e.g. Booth (2017); Goldberg (2018); Matheson and Vitz (2014); Meylan (2013)] and I hope that the articles in this issue will con-tribute to that. The criticisms that I received from the four authors in this issue are challenging, thought provoking, and illuminating. I have thoroughly en-joyed the process of carefully reading each of them and replying to them. Before responding to these criticisms, though, let me give a brief intro-duction to the issue of responsible belief by explaining, first, why I think it matters (a great deal!) what responsible belief is, and, second, by laying out how I develop my account of responsible belief in the book.

2021

This paper provides a new theory of belief. Belief is judgment hypostasized. Its essential feature is its privileged relationship to judgment about what is so, which no other mental state has. The state of belief serves to mark what the believer judges, has judged, or would, in certain relevant circumstances, judge to be true. The new view neatly explains some of the state's distinctive epistemic features, a virtue that its closest cousin, the dispositionalist view of belief, struggles to duplicate in a principled way. It accords with intuitions about who believes what and when. It properly distinguishes belief from 'near-belief' phenomena, like mere preintentional 'stances' (Searle 1983), traditionally difficult for similar views to distinguish from beliefs, and 'aliefs', automatic attitude-like states that involve belief-like dispositions (Gendler 2008a & b). It also provides a straightforward, satisfying answer to Kripke's "puzzle about belief" (1979) that makes sense of contradictory beliefs more generally.