Description
Doxastic responsibility—or more colloquially, “the ethics of belief”—is simultaneously a modest and an ambitious project. Its modest analysandum is not the prized epistemological notions of justification or knowledge. Belief, however, is largely viewed as being entailed by knowledge. Its ambitious aim begins with the observation that not all beliefs satisfy the conditions of knowledge. Though we often fail to know what we knowingly believe, what we believe is believed to be true. It is from this cognitive condition of belief that our choices and decisions, our desires and goals, our actions and omissions, are guided. Doxastic responsibility involves much more than what we believe to be true; it also involves mistaken beliefs and our frequent failures to have formed any belief whatsoever towards an important proposition. Moreover, it involves one’s entitlement to true beliefs. Beliefs’ influence on our lives, and the lives of others, requires an ambitious project of not only epistemic responsibility but also of prudential and moral responsibility. In many cases, whether an agent acts responsibly or culpably depends on whether she believes responsibly or culpably. But is belief something for which one can be responsible? While many philosophers argue that it is wrong to separate the notions of responsibility and control, and thus, that it is wrong to separate the notions of doxastic responsibility and doxastic control, I will argue against this latter position. There is reason to believe that no such doxastic control is required for doxastic responsibility. Nevertheless, control somewhere seems to be required. Being doxastically responsible, I will argue, is intimately linked to acting responsibly. Beliefs are tied to action in a surprising way. It is what we do, or fail to do, that ends up making the difference to what we believe. The reliance on belief-influencing actions, however, is complicated by skeptical worries of causal determinism. Does our acting responsibly entail the possibility to do otherwise? Does believing responsibly entail the ability to believe otherwise? In a sense to be explained, I will argue that the answer to both questions is a resounding yes.
