Giulia Luvisotto

The conception of responsibility for beliefs typically assumed in the literature mirrors the practices ofaccountabilityfor actions. In this paper, I argue that this trend leaves a part of what it is to be responsible unduly neglected, namely the practices ofattributability.After offering a diagnosis for this neglect, I bring these practices into focus and develop a virtue-theoretic framework to vindicate them. I then investigate the specificity of the belief case and conclude by resisting two challenges, namely that attributability cannot amount to genuine responsibility and that it can be reduced to a sort of accountability.

On what I will call the standard view, the distinction between the moral and the epistemic realms is both psychologically and conceptually prior to the distinction between any two given virtues. This widespread view supports the claim that there are moral and intellectual (or epistemic) virtues. Call this the fundamental distinction. In this paper, I raise some questions for both the standard view and the fundamental distinction, and I propose an alternative view on which virtues regain priority over the moral/epistemic divide. I suggest understanding them as normatively complex, distinctive sensitivities to both theoretical and practical reasons.

This thesis argues that the practices of attributability for beliefs constitutes the core of the phenomenon of ‘responsibility for beliefs’, against a strong tendency in the debate to focus exclusively on the practices of accountability for beliefs. The overarching aim of this thesis then is to offer an alternative account to the dominant theory of responsibility for beliefs, the accountability view, which is modelled on the practices of accountability for actions and is thus unsuitable to explain the practices of attributability for beliefs. In particular, being control- and norm-based, the accountability view neglects cases in which we are criticisable in responsibility involving ways for our beliefs even when no breach of norms can be detected. I develop the aretaic model as an alternative virtue-centred account. On the aretaic model, someone is responsible for a belief insofar as it expresses their evaluative orientation, which is their sensitivity to both practical and theoretical reasons, oriented by their values. To explain the normativity of aretaic appraisals, I articulate the notion of evaluative orientation in aretaic terms: someone is open to commendation if their belief expresses a virtue, to criticism if it expresses a vice and to either commendation or criticism if it displays a value that is neither a virtue nor a vice. I develop several implications of my view: I resist the reduction of doxastic responsibility onto epistemic responsibility, I reject the distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘epistemic’ virtues and vices, and I deny the cogency of the control requirement. Finally, where the accountability view is unable to make sense of the practices of attributability, I suggest that the aretaic model can offer a satisfactory explanation of both the practices of attributability and accountability for beliefs.