Laura Soter

Various philosophers authors have argued—on the basis of powerful examples—that we can have compelling moral or practical reasons to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. This paper explores an alternative story, which still aims to respect widely shared intuitions about the motivating examples. Specifically, the paper proposes that what is at stake in these cases is not belief, but rather acceptance—an attitude classically characterized as taking a proposition as a premise in practical deliberation and action. I suggest that acceptance’s theoretical usefulness in the ethics of belief has been hidden by its psychological obscurity. I thus aim to develop an empirically adequate and mechanistically specific psychological profile of acceptance. I characterize acceptance as centrally involving a cognitive gating function, in which we prevent a target belief state from having its characteristic downstream effects on reasoning, cognition, and action, and restructure those downstream processes. I then argue that there is substantial empirical support for the existence of the cognitive mechanisms needed to instantiate this view, coming from the science of emotion regulation. I argue that acceptance involves deploying the same mechanisms used in emotional response modulation to belief states: acceptance is doxastic response modulation. I then propose that having a better understanding of the psychological profile of acceptance leaves us better positioned to appreciate its potential usefulness for making progress on various puzzles within the ethics of belief.

This dissertation contains a philosophical project and a psychological project. Together, they explore two central themes, and the relation between them: (1) doxastic control and the ethics of belief, and (2) the moral and epistemic import of close personal relationships. The philosophical project (Chapters 1 and 2) concerns a central puzzle in the ethics of belief: how can we make sense of apparent obligations to believe for moral or practical reasons, if we lack the ability to form beliefs in response to such reasons? I draw on empirical work in emotion regulation to make progress on this problem of doxastic control. The psychological project (Chapters 3 and 4) concerns the role of relational closeness in moral judgment: though empirical moral psychology has traditionally focused on judgments about anonymous strangers, I contribute to a growing body of work showing how personal relationships can dramatically affect moral reasoning. Chapter 1, “Acceptance and the Ethics of Belief,” develops an empirically plausible and mechanistically detailed account of acceptance, the attitude classically characterized as “taking a proposition as a premise in practical reasoning and action.” I argue that acceptance centrally involves preventing a belief from playing its characteristic role in guiding cognition, reasoning, and action, that this centrally involves a “cognitive gating” operation, and that this view gains empirically plausibility by its analogy to well-studied strategies in emotion regulation. Ultimately, I defend acceptance as doxastic response modulation. I propose that this account holds promise for addressing puzzles in the ethics of belief—a domain plagued by the central theoretical challenge of our inability to believe for non-evidential reasons. Chapter 2, “Reframing Epistemic Partiality,” applies my account of acceptance to a specific debate in the ethics of belief: the epistemic partiality debate, which asks whether we sometimes ought to believe against the evidence regarding our friends. Though compelling, the partialist view has been plagued by serious objections. I argue that the debate has been focused on the wrong doxastic attitude: recasting our duties of friendship as duties of acceptance, rather than belief, satisfies the partialist intuitions, without falling prey to the varied objections against the view. Chapter 3, “What We Would (but Shouldn’t) Do for Those We Love” builds on prior work demonstrating that people say they are far more likely to report a distant other, compared to a close other, who commits a serious moral transgression. Across four studies, I demonstrate that people not only say they would protect close others more than distant others, but also that they say it is morally right to show such partiality towards close others. Furthermore, I show that people say that they would protect close others more than they think they should—suggesting that moral decisions involving those closest to us may be a context in which people are particularly likely to fail to do what they think is right. Chapter 4, “How Relationship Affects Adolescents’ Decisions to Report Moral Transgressions,” investigates how 6th-9th graders respond to the transgressions of close versus distant others. Given the social importance of peer relationships in adolescence, the role of relationship is central to understanding this stage of moral development. I show that adolescents—like adults—are more likely to report distant others who transgress than close others, and more likely to report serious moral transgressions than minor ones.

Cultural schemas are a central cognitive mechanism through which culture affects action. In this article, we develop a theoretical model of cultural schemas that is better able to support empirical work, including inferential, sensitizing, and operational uses. We propose a multilevel framework centered on a high-level definition of cultural schemas that is sufficiently broad to capture its major sociological applications but still sufficiently narrow to identify a set of cognitive phenomena with key functional properties in common: cultural schemas are socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition. We use this conception to elaborate the main theoretical properties of cultural schemas, and to provide clear criteria that distinguish them from other cultural or cognitive elements. We then propose a series of concrete tests empirical scholarship can use to determine if these properties apply. We also demonstrate how this approach can identify potentially faulty theoretical inferences present in existing work. Moving to a lower level of analysis, we elaborate how cultural schemas can be algorithmically conceptualized in terms of their building blocks. This leads us to recommend improvements to methods for measuring cultural schemas. We conclude by outlining questions for a broader research program.

Doxastic involuntarism—the thesis that we lack direct voluntary control (in response to non-evidential reasons) over our belief states—is often touted as philosophical orthodoxy. I here offer a novel defense of doxastic voluntarism, centered around three key moves. First, I point out that belief has two central functional roles, but that discussions of voluntarism have largely ignored questions of control over belief's guidance function. Second, I propose that we can learn much about doxastic control by looking to cognitive scientific research on control over other relevantly similar mental states. I draw on a mechanistic account of control of the guidance function for “emotion-type states,” and argue that these same cognitive control mechanisms can used to block doxastic guidance. This gives us an account of “back-end” doxastic control which can be deployed for reasons which are not the right kinds of reasons to support “front-end” belief formation—i.e., non-evidential reasons. Third, I argue that comprehensive, self-directed exercises of this kind of control can amount to an underappreciated kind of voluntarism. This form of voluntarism is available to any account of belief that takes guidance-instantiation to be at least partly constitutive of believing. Finally, I discuss objections to, and upshots of, the view.