Some philosophers have attempted to utilize the conceptual tools of ethics in order to understand epistemology. One instantiation of this understands justification in terms of having a certain kind of epistemic right, namely, a right to believe. In variations of this theme, some hold that justification involves having the authority to believe, or being entitled to believe. But by examining the putative analogies between different versions of rights and justification, I demonstrate that justification should not be understood as having a (...) right to believe. (shrink)

The current debate on recreational drug policy is roughly a contest between prohibition advocates and legalization advocates. This paper offers a third alternative that is a compromise between those two. The centralized-use compromise can secure the autonomy interests that are important to defenders of legalization, and it can prevent harms to others that are the focus of prohibition arguments. The centralized-use compromise also offers a possible way to reduce the black market while also reducing the rate of addiction and the (...) associated debasing harms to self. (shrink)

A traditional line of inquiry in epistemology tried to analyze the concept of knowledge into its constituent components. In virtue of understanding these alleged more basic concepts, such as truth, justification, and belief, it was hoped that a complete and informative theory of knowledge would emerge. According to the revolutionary approach advocated here, one which originates in Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits, better success can be achieved by reversing this conceptual analysis structure by taking knowledge as the fundamental explanatory (...) tool in epistemological theorizing. I defend the view that this knowledge-theoretic approach exceeds the explanatory value of its conceptual analysis competitor in the sense that the best explanations of epistemologically significant phenomena are appropriately expressed in terms of knowledge per se. (shrink)