Ivan Catanzaro

Pascal’s Wager seems to derive its force from the simple asymmetry that salvation offers infinite happiness, while the alternatives do not. Dante’s Inferno III complicates that picture. The ignavi occupy an eternal condition whose badness is not exhausted by suffering; their punishment is also bound up with failed agency, lack of commitment, shame and the loss of moral standing. This suggests the striking possibility that even in Hell, value may not reduce to welfare alone. Once non-welfare dimensions are allowed to structure eternal outcomes, the move from infinite happiness to the all-things-considered dominance of salvation becomes less straightforward. Thus, Dante far from supplying a mere illustration provides a distinctive objection to the axiological assumptions built into familiar versions of Pascal’s Wager.

David Benatar's earlier writings, and several reconstructions of them, suggest that the absence of cosmic meaning adds a consideration against procreation. His 2022 reply instead places meaninglessness 'on the back of life's poor quality': substantial meaning might mitigate life's burdens or justify procreation despite them. This article argues that the clarification is sound but limited. Benatar has not shown that cosmic meaninglessness introduces a distinct bad within a created life or supplies a pro tanto reason against creation independent of the burdens to which meaning was offered as a response. Missing compensation and missing justification can nevertheless be verdict-changing because they leave those burdens unanswered. A separate norm might also make cosmic meaning a necessary condition of permissible creation, but Benatar's discussion does not establish such a norm. Cosmic nihilism can therefore close a defence without itself adding a further burden.

The Belief-Relative Value account, or BRV, evaluates the rationality of belief by expected practical value relative to the agent’s actual beliefs and ends. One attraction of BRV is that it seems to capture what makes sense “from the inside”, from the agent’s own perspective. I argue that this motivation is unstable. Cases of alienated belief show that a belief can guide an agent’s attention, inference, and action while the standpoint from which it guides her remains intrusive, imposed, or estranged. BRV can preserve its austerity by identifying the agent’s perspective with the operative standpoint fixed by her actual beliefs and ends. But then belief-relativity secures only instrumental intelligibility, not deliberative self-guidance from a standpoint the agent can inhabit as her own. Alternatively, BRV can enrich the relevant perspective with an ownership condition, but only by giving up some of the austerity that makes the view distinctive.

Democratic deliberation presupposes citizens who can treat their judgement as entitled to enter public reasoning as the judgement of an equal. This paper asks whether evidentialism, or anti-pragmatism about reasons for belief more broadly, can account for that requirement. Consider a woman deliberating in a sexist environment. Her evidence may suggest that speaking will be costly and that deference is relatively safer. Yet sustaining belief in her entitlement to judge may partly constitute the civic self-trust needed to participate as an equal. Post hoc usefulness is not enough, since it can amount to a rationalisation of favourable outcomes. The paper asks whether practical considerations can count ex ante as reasons for belief, by reference to the role of agential standing-beliefs in keeping agency available under disempowering conditions. Building on Fricker’s (2007) account of epistemic injustice and Li’s (2025) account of doxastic injustice, the paper treats epistemic empowerment as one species of doxastic empowerment. A subject may understand her situation accurately while still losing the standing-beliefs through which agency remains available. I argue that at least some empowerment-based considerations have normative weight as reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs. This claim is selective. I call the corresponding disposition EMPOWER, a form of doxastic faith in oneself that can make belief virtuous where the evidence is permissive. The relevant belief must still empower in the right way, i.e. by supporting agency without gradually eroding the agent’s capacities or flourishing. A further issue concerns beliefs that empower one agent by undermining the standing of others. In democratic deliberation, the anti-disempowerment constraint is internal to the kind of standing at issue. A standing-belief counts as democratically empowering only if it preserves the equal standing of other participants. Beliefs that make one’s standing depend on superior status therefore fall outside the scope of civic self-trust. The result is a more discriminating form of pragmatism, limited to empowerment-based reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs.

This MA thesis examines the normativity of belief at the intersection of contemporary epistemology, pragmatism, Nietzsche studies, and the philosophy of nihilism. It argues that neither evidentialism nor austere forms of pragmatism provide an adequate account of rational belief. Against belief-relative pragmatism, the thesis develops an objection based on the distinction between thin instrumental intelligibility and thicker forms of agential ownership. It then explores more selective, value-shaped forms of pragmatism, arguing that empowerment cannot serve as a sufficient condition for rational belief, while an anti-disempowerment constraint appears more promising. The later chapters interpret Nietzsche as an axiologically oriented pragmatist about belief and argue that the most corrosive form of nihilism depends not on meaning nihilism alone, but on its conjunction with an unconditional sovereignty of truth over belief-like attitudes.