It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when (...) we deserve epistemic blame. First, I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

This article discusses the arguments against associating epistemic responsibility with the ordinary notion of agency. I examine the various 'Kantian' views which lead to a distinctive conception of epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility. I try to explain why we can be held responsible for our beliefs in the sense of obeying norms which regulate them without being epistemic agents.

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach (...) to the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of (...) class='Hi'>responsibility for belief by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a concern for the truth. (shrink)

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant (...) agent who knows when to engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

Given the hundreds of articles and books that have been written in epistemology over the span of just the past few decades, relatively little has been written specifically on epistemic responsibility. What has been written rarely considers the nature of epistemic responsibility and its possible role in epistemic justification or knowledge. Instead, such work concerns philosophical analyses and arguments about related concepts such as epistemic virtues or duties, rather than epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.2 (...) It is epistemic responsibility in the blameworthiness and praiseworthiness senses that is the primary concern of this paper, though the duty sense of epistemic responsibility is explored in terms of its pertinence to epistemic virtue. What is epistemic responsibility? And what, if anything, is its relationship to justification and knowledge? (shrink)

A topic of special importance when it comes to responsibility and implicit bias is responsibility for knowledge. Are there strategies for becoming more responsible and respectful knowers? How might we work together, not just as individuals but members of collectives, to reduce the negative effects of bias on what we see and believe, as well as the wrongs associated with epistemic injustice? To explore these questions, Chapter 9 introduces the concept of epistemic responsibility, a set (...) of practices developed through the cultivation of basic epistemic virtues, such as open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and diligence that help knowers seek information about themselves, others, and the world. (shrink)

Should we always engage in critical thinking about issues of public policy, such as health care, gun control, and LGBT rights? Michael Huemer (2005) has argued for the claim that in some cases it is not epistemically responsible to engage in critical thinking on these issues. His argument is based on a reliabilist conception of the value of critical thinking. This article analyzes Huemer's argument against the epistemic responsibility of critical thinking by engaging it critically. It presents an (...) alternative account of the value of critical thinking that is tied to the notion of forming and deploying a critical identity. And it develops an account of our epistemic responsibility to engage in critical thinking that is not dependent on reliability considerations alone. The primary purpose of the article is to provide critical thinking students, or those that wish to reflect on the value of critical thinking, with an opportunity to think metacritically about critical thinking by examining an argument that engages the question of whether it is epistemically responsible for one to engage in critical thinking. (shrink)

Might epistemic justification be, to some substantive extent, a function of epistemic responsibility—a belief's being formed, or its being maintained, in an epistemically responsible way? I will call any analysis of epistemic justification endorsing that kind of idea epistemic responsibilism—or, for short, responsibilism. Many epistemic internalists are responsibilists, because they think that what makes a belief justified is its being appropriately related to one's good evidence for it, and because many of them regard this (...) appropriate relation as somehow involving one's being epistemically responsible. Alvin Goldman describes internalism as relying upon a guidance-deontological conception of epistemic justification, at the heart of which is a concept of epistemic responsibility. Alvin Plantinga, too, characterises internalism in deontological terms, epistemic responsibility being one of the most prominent such terms. And the concept of epistemic responsibility might feature in attempts to develop a virtue epistemology. Epistemic responsibility would be an epistemic virtue, and epistemic justification would be present partly due to one's being epistemically virtuous. (shrink)

Epistemic Responsibility and Democratic Justification Content Type Journal Article Pages 297-302 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9147-1 Authors Andrew F. Smith, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765 Journal Volume Volume 17 Journal Issue Volume 17, Number 3.

This monograph provides a novel reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment. The author presents unique arguments for the epistemic significance of belief-influencing actions and omissions. She grounds her proposal in indirect doxastic control. The book consists of four chapters. The first two chapters look at the different ways in which an agent might control the revision, retention, or rejection of her beliefs. They provide a systematic overview of the different approaches to doxastic control and contain a thorough (...) study of reasons-responsive approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. The third chapter provides a reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment which is based on indirect doxastic control. In the fourth chapter, the author examines epistemic peer disagreement and applies her reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment to this debate. She argues that the epistemic significance of peer disagreement does not only rely on the way in which an agent should revise her belief in the face of disagreement, it also relies on the way in which an agent should act. This book deals with questions of meliorative epistemology in general and with questions concerning doxastic responsibility and epistemic responsibility assessment in particular. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in epistemology. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a politico-philosophical perspective to reassess the much-contested role of truth in politics to put forth a principle of political action that will make sense of a “right to unmanipulated factual information,” which Hannah Arendt understands as crucial for establishing freedom of opinion. In developing a principle of epistemic responsibility, I will show that “factual truth” plays a key role in Arendt’s account of political action and provides a normative order that can extricate her (...) account from charges of immoralism. The article will be divided into three sections: section 1 deals with the distinction between rational truths and factual truths, and the question of their validity, section 2 deals with what a principle of political action is, and lastly, section 3 proposes a principle of “epistemic responsibility” that becomes action-guiding in the political sphere, in order to shed new light on the 2013 Gezi Park protest, one of the recent democratic uprisings of our century. (shrink)

This paper argues for a coherentist theory of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law, according to which a hypothesis about the events being litigated is justified if and only if it is such that an epistemically responsible fact-finder might have accepted it as justified by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. It claims that this version of coherentism has the resources to address a main problem facing coherence theories of evidence and legal proof, namely, the problem of the (...) coherence bias. The paper then develops an aretaic approach to the standards of epistemic responsibility which govern legal fact-finding. It concludes by exploring some implications of the proposed account of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law for the epistemology of legal proof. (shrink)

How can we make businesspeople more concerned about the truth of the information they spread or allow to circulate? In this age of ‘fake news’, ‘business bullshit’ and ‘post-truth,’ the issue is of the utmost importance, especially for business trustworthiness in the internet economy. The issue is related to a kind of epistemic responsibility, that consists in accounting for one’s own epistemic wrongdoings, such as making a third party believe something false. Despite growing interest in epistemic (...) misbehavior in the literature of business ethics, the question of epistemic responsibility has been neglected. The aim of this paper is therefore to address this gap, by proposing a notion of epistemic responsibility for business, that may help regulate undesirable epistemic behavior, such as the spreading of false information. To define this notion of epistemic responsibility, I have introduced the concept of epistemic fault. Being epistemically responsible consists in being disposed to account for alleged epistemic faults. This notion of epistemic fault relies on a theoretical framework which combines a typology of eight ‘epistemic values’, a normative stance regarding these values, and a dispositional approach to epistemic virtues and vices. I use this theoretical framework to integrate the various accounts of epistemic virtues and vices found in the literature into a single explanatory scheme. Combined with the notion of epistemic responsibility itself, such an integrative framework should facilitate the practical application of an operational epistemic ethics in business, i.e., the development of virtuous epistemic practices. (shrink)

Michael Huemer () argues that following the epistemic strategy of Critical Thinking—that is, thinking things through for oneself—leaves the agent epistemically either worse off or no better off than an alternative strategy of Credulity—that is, trusting the authorities. Therefore, Critical Thinking is not epistemically responsible. This article argues that Reasonable Credulity entails Critical Thinking, and since Reasonable Credulity is epistemically responsible, the Critical Thinking that it entails is epistemically responsible too.

In section one the deontological (or responsibilist) conception of justification is discussed and explained. In section two, arguments are put forward in order to derive the most plausible version of perspectival internalism, or the position that epistemic justification is a function of factors internal to the believer's cognitive perspective. The two most common considerations put forward in favor of perspectival internalism are discussed. These are the responsibilist conception of justification, and the intuition that two believers with like beliefs and (...) experiences are equally justified in their like beliefs. In section three it is argued that perspectival internalism is false, and that in fact the position is not supported by a responsibilist conception of justification. Section four explicates two other forms of internalism, which are rejected for reasons similar to those presented against perspectival internalism. In section five, an internalist theory of justification is defended which is supported by a responsibilist conception of justification. Roughly stated, the position is that justified belief is belief which arises from the use of correct rules of reasoning. The idea of correctness is explicated, and the position is distinguished from others which are similar to it. (shrink)

We are often, as agents, responsible for the things we do and say. This responsibility can come in a number of different forms: here I propose and defend a view of how we are epistemically responsible for our actions and assertions. In other normative areas, we can be responsible for our actions when those actions violate a norm (for example, we can be morally responsible when we violate some moral norm). I argue that we can similarly be epistemically responsible (...) when we violate a norm of assertion or action, norms that tell us how epistemically well-positioned we need to be towards a proposition in order to assert it or treat it as a reason for acting. I first defend a structure of epistemic norms that allows for the possibility of epistemic responsibility, and then propose a notion of epistemic responsibility itself. -/- We can, and do, evaluate actions and assertions in a specifically epistemic way: we judge that someone should not have acted on the basis of unreliable information, that someone should not have asserted something they knew was false, etc. These kinds of evaluations lead us to believe that proper action and assertion have some basic epistemic requirements, what are called norms of assertion and action. In order to defend a notion of epistemic responsibility, I first establish a general claim about the ways that we make epistemic evaluations in relation to these norms. Many who argue for a particular epistemic norm of action or assertion endorse what I call epistemic monism, the view that all epistemic evaluations of actions or assertions must be explained solely in terms of whether they have adhered to their respective norm. I argue that epistemic monism is false. Instead, I defend epistemic separability, the view that we make two different kinds of epistemic evaluations: one that pertains to whether one has adhered to an epistemic norm, and one that pertains to whether one has reason to think they are adhering to or violating the relevant norm. In my defense of epistemic separability I appeal to arguments from luminosity failure – the claim that for any given epistemic relationship we can have with a proposition we can have good reason to believe that we fail to be in it – and empirical arguments that show that we only have fallible access to our own mental states. These arguments show that we can violate an epistemic norm while having good reason to think otherwise and, in turn, shows that we can be evaluated not only in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated that norm, but also in terms of whether we are responsible for doing so. I argue that whether one’s action is epistemically responsible depends on whether one fulfils the epistemic commitments one makes in performing that action. These commitments consist in being able to provide reasons to believe that one has adhered to the norm governing the action one performs, according to a standard imposed by the situation in which one acts. Thus in more epistemically demanding situations – those in which there are high expectations that we be able to show that we have adhered to the relevant epistemic norm – it will be more difficult to act in an epistemically responsible way. Accepting a notion of epistemic responsibility (and, with it, rejecting epistemic monism) has significant consequences for a number of current debates in epistemology. The first pertains to the debate concerning the correct epistemic norm of assertion and practical reasoning. Many proposed norms are argued to be inadequate on the basis of an inability to explain intuitive epistemic evaluations solely in terms of the conditions set forth in the norms. Epistemic separability, however, implies that the structure of this dialectic is misguided, as we can perhaps accommodate problematic judgments in terms of evaluations of responsibility. The second consequence pertains to arguments for contemporary theories of knowledge. Again, such theories are judged by their ability to accommodate intuitive attributions of knowledge. However, I argue that many of the evaluations that serve as the basis for such theories are better interpreted not as judgments about whether one has knowledge, but as judgments about whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. Recognizing a notion of epistemically responsible action thus calls into question both the plausibility of a number of contemporary theories of knowledge, as well as the way in which we go about doing epistemology in general. (shrink)

Any theory of perceptual experience should elucidate the way humans exploit it in activities proper to responsible agents, like justifying and revising their beliefs. In this paper I examine the hypothesis that this capacity requires the positing of a perceptual awareness involving a pre-doxastic actualization of concepts. I conclude that this hypothesis is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for empirical rationality. This leaves open the possibility to introduce a doxastic account, according to which the epistemic function of perception (...) is fulfilled by perceptual beliefs. I develop this claim by showing that the doxastic account satisfies a series of intuitive requirements of justification and belief revision. (shrink)

One prominent argument for pragmatic encroachment (PE) is that PE is entailed by a combination of a principle that states that knowledge warrants proper practical reasoning, and judgments that it is more difficult to reason well when the stakes go up. I argue here that this argument is unsuccessful. One problem is that empirical tests concerning knowledge judgments in high-stakes situations only sometimes exhibit the result predicted by PE. I argue here that those judgments that appear to support PE are (...) better interpreted not as judgments that the epistemic demands for knowing increase as one’s practical situation becomes more demanding, but instead as judgments reflecting a different kind of normative epistemic evaluation, namely whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. The general idea is that when someone treats a proposition as a reason for acting we can evaluate them epistemically both in terms of whether they know that proposition, as well as in terms of whether they are acting on their knowledge in the right kind of way. My charge against the PE proponent, then, is that she is interpreting judgments that are indicative of whether we are adhering to certain normative epistemic requirements generally as being indicative of whether we have knowledge specifically. There are, however, normative epistemic requirements that make demands of us that are indicative of something other than our possession of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the epistemology of trust and testimony should take into account the pragmatics of communication in order to gain insight about the responsibilities speakers and hearers share in the epistemic access they gain through communication. Communication is a rich process of information exchangein which epistemic standards are negotiated by interlocutors. I discuss examples which show the contextual adjustment of these standards as the conversation goes on. Our sensitivity to the contextual dimension of (...) class='Hi'>epistemic standards make us more responsible communicators. (shrink)

Epistemic trust is an unacknowledged feature of medical knowledge. Claims of medical knowledge made by physicians, patients, and others require epistemic trust. And yet, it would be foolish to define all epistemic trust as epistemically responsible. Accordingly, I use a routine example in medical practice to illustrate how epistemically responsible trust in medicine is trust in epistemically responsible individuals. I go on to illustrate how certain areas of current medical practice of medicine fall short of adequately distinguishing (...) reliable and unreliable processes because of a failure to systematically evaluate health outcomes. I conclude by articulating the devastating obstacles to the consilience assumption, which takes intellectual character as the standard for epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

In a review of the recent Heidegger controversy, Richard Rorty maintains that "as a human being Heidegger was a rather nasty piece of work--a coward and a liar, pretty much from first to last" but, nevertheless, that "Heidegger was as original a philosopher as we have had in this century." According to Rorty, "being an original philosopher is like being an original mathematician or an original microbiologist or a consummate chess master: it is the result of some neural kink that (...) occurs independently of other kinks." Lorraine Code, who takes issue with Rorty's dismissal of epistemology by writing a book expounding it, would certainly disagree with this as well. Code holds that in any knowledge claim a "person's intellectual integrity counts as a significant part of the evidence in much the same way as in moral matters a person's moral integrity is a determining factor in decisions as to whether he or she should be trusted". So she is hardly likely to accept Rorty's contradictory assessment of Heidegger, and perhaps not even his view of originality in microbiology and mathematics, far less personal forms of knowledge. The great virtue of her book is to show that diverse kinds of epistemic responsibility, involved in various forms of knowledge, are not to be divorced from considerations of character. She claims that her epistemic approach, "by basing judgement on facts about a knowledge claimant's character, would allow justification to have sources that neither strict foundationalists nor coherentists can, ex hypothesi, acknowledge". (shrink)

Three ways of approaching controversial issues are: (i) To accept the conclusions of experts on their authority; (ii) to evaluate the relevant evidence/arguments for ourselves; and (iii) to simply withhold judgement. The received view recommends strategy (ii). But (ii) is normally epistemically inferior to (i) and (iii), since we are justified in believing that it is less reliable at producing true beliefs and avoiding false ones.

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s (...) commitment to immediate epistemic warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

It has been suggested, by Michael Bishop, that empirical evidence on human reasoning poses a threat to the internalist account of epistemic responsibility, which he takes to associate being epistemically responsible with coherence, evidence-fitting and reasons-responsiveness. Bishop claims that the empirical data challenges the importance of meeting these criteria by emphasising how it is possible to obtain true beliefs by diverging from them. He suggests that the internalist conception of responsibility should be replaced by one that properly (...) reflects how we can reliably obtain true beliefs. In this paper I defend the internalist account by arguing that Bishop has misinterpreted the relevance of the empirical evidence to the philosophical theory. I argue that the empirical data actually provides support for the idea that, if we want to obtain true beliefs by being responsible, we should aim to meet the criteria that internalists associate with epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that critical thinking is the preferred mode of inquiry in all situations. However, Michael Huemer, in 2005, has presented an interesting and powerful challenge to this received view. He aims to establish the claim that in some contexts of inquiry, engaging in critical thinking is not epistemically responsible. If true, this implies that critical thinking should not be adopted uncritically. Several writers have objected to this counterintuitive view. In this paper, I show that those objections do (...) not stand on close scrutiny. Secondly and more importantly, I argue that Huemer’s results, even though correct, do not undermine the significance of critical thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I try to challenge some received views about the role and the function of the traditional academic practice of publishing papers in peer?reviewed journals. I argue that our publishing practices today are rather based on passively accepted social norms and humdrum work habits than on actual needs for communicating the advancements of our research. By analysing some examples of devices and practices that are based on tacitly accepted norms, such as the Citation Index and the new role (...) of DOI attributions in digital publishing, I advocate an epistemically vigilant stance not only towards our ways of acquiring knowledge, but also towards the implicit norms we accept when we produce research. (shrink)

Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks' (2019) account (...) of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry. (shrink)

In this peer commentary on L. Syd M. Johnson’s “Inference and Inductive Risk in Disorders of Consciousness,” I argue for the necessity of disability education as an integral component of decision-making processes concerning patients with DOC and, mutatis mutandis, all patients with disabilities. The sole qualification Johnson places on such decision-making is that stakeholders are educated about and “understand the uncertainties of diagnosis and prognosis.” Drawing upon research in philosophy of disability, social epistemology, and health psychology, I argue that this (...) educational qualification is insufficient to address systemic ableism and other forms of epistemic bias in quality of life judgments. (shrink)

Nowadays the argument for the existence of God based on the common consent of mankind is taken to be so bad that contemporary atheists do not even bother to mention it. And it seems very few theists think that the argument is worth defending. In this paper I shall argue to the contrary: not only is the argument better than usually thought, but widespread belief in God constitutes a prima facie defeater for every reasonable atheist.

In this paper, I propose a principle of doxastic rationality based on Bernard Williams's argument against doxastic voluntarism. This principle, I go on to show, undermines a number of notions of epistemic duty which have been put forth within the framework of virtue theory. I then suggest an alternative formulation which remains within the bounds of rationality allowed for by my principle. In the end, I suggest that the failure of the earlier formulations and the adoption of the latter (...) tend to vindicate the initial grounding of virtue epistemology in reliabilist intuitions. (edited). (shrink)

Departing from an epistemological tradition for which knowledge properly achieved must be objective, especially in eschewing affect and/or special interests; and against a backdrop of my thinking about epistemic responsibility, I focus on two situations where care informs and enables good knowing. The implicit purpose of this reclamation of care as epistemically vital is to show emphatically that standard alignments of care with femininity—the female—are simply misguided. Proposing that the efficacy of epistemic practices is often enhanced when (...) would-be knowers care about the outcomes of investigation, I suggest that epistemic responsibility need not be compromised when caring motivates and animates research. Indeed, the background inspiration comes from the thought, integral to feminist and post-colonial theory and practice that, despite often-justified condemnations of research that serves "special interests," particularities do matter, epistemically. Such thoughts, variously articulated, are integral to enacting a shift in epistemology away from formal abstraction and toward engaging with the specificities of real-world, situated knowledge projects. They are not unequivocally benign, for villains too care about the outcomes of their projects. Hence multi-faceted engagements with epistemic practices and processes are urgently required across the social-political world. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is, first, that ecological thinking—which takes its point of departure from specifically located, multifaceted analyses of knowledge production and circulation in diverse demographic and geographic locations—can generate more responsible knowings than the reductivism of the positivist post-Enlightenment legacy allows; and second, that ecological thinking can spark a revolution comparable to Kant’s Copernican revolution, which recentered western thought by moving “man” to the center of the philosophical-conceptual universe. Kantian philosophy was parochial in the conception of “man” (...) on which it turned: a recognition central to feminist, Marxist, post-colonial and critical race theory. It promoted a picture of a physical and human world centered on and subservient to a small class and race of men who were uniformly capable of achieving a narrowly-conceived standard of reason, citizenship, and morality. As humanism vied with theism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so ecological thinking vies with capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I outline its promise. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology construes intellectual virtue as a reliable ability to form true beliefs. Responsibilist versions seek to substitute for the passive, reliabilist model of the knower, that of an active subject who deliberately and purposefully exercises traits of character which tend to result in true beliefs. On these views, the disposition to exercise these epistemic virtues gives rise to notions of epistemic duty.In this paper, I propose a principle of doxastic rationality based on Bernard Williams’argument against doxastic voluntarism. (...) This principle, I go on to show, undermines a number of notions of epistemic duty which have been put forth within the framework of virtue theory. I then suggest an alternative formulation which remains within the bounds of rationality allowed for by my principle. In the end, I suggest that the failure of the earlier formulations and the adoption of the latter tend to vindicate the initial grounding of virtue epistemology in reliabilist intuitions. (shrink)

On the one hand, there seem to be compelling parallels to moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness in domains other than the moral. For example, we often praise people for their aesthetic and epistemic achievements and blame them for their failures. On the other hand, it has been argued that there is something special about the moral domain, so that at least one robust kind of responsibility can only be found there. In this paper, I argue that we (...) can adopt a unifying framework for locating responsible agency across domains, thereby capturing and explaining more of our actual practices. The key, I argue, is to identify the right conditions for being morally accountable, which I take to be a matter of having an opportunity of a good enough quality to act well. With this account in hand, I argue that we can adopt a unifying framework that allows us to recognize parallels across domains, even as it points the way to important differences among them. (shrink)