Leo Eisenbach

On a widely held view, we ought to perform an action just in case and because it is the one most strongly supported by reasons. When coupled with the thought that normativity is unified, this view commits us to the claim that we ought to adopt a doxastic attitude just in case and because it is the one most strongly supported by reasons. The problem, it has been said, is that this has implausible implications: that if one ought to believe p, one ought to believe any of the countless trivialities entailed by p. I argue that existing approaches to solving this problem fail and propose my own solution. It consists in arguing that, on said view of the epistemic ought, we ought to believe trivialities only once we have considered them. More broadly, the paper explains why we generally ought not clutter our minds with trivialities while nonetheless sometimes being required to believe them. It thereby highlights an underappreciated connection between norms of inquiry and norms of belief, as well as a way in which evidence for p can fail to constitute a reason to believe p.

On a popular philosophical view, moral and epistemic normativity are two species of the same genus: we can give unified accounts of normative properties pertaining to both domains. The case of praiseworthiness poses a challenge. Under a compelling theory, what makes us morally praiseworthy is that our action has manifested morally good will. However, I argue that an explanation of epistemic praiseworthiness in terms of the manifestation of epistemically good will fails. Nonetheless, as I then go on to show, the correct explanation of what makes us praiseworthy is unified on a more structural level: the manifestation of morally good will is the manifestation of moral sensitivity. And there is a structurally analogous notion of epistemic sensitivity, which I make the core of a view about epistemic praiseworthiness. In both domains, then, what makes an agent praiseworthy for her response is that it manifests a sufficient degree of sensitivity – moral sensitivity in the moral domain and epistemic sensitivity in the epistemic one. This novel view of the still underexplored property of epistemic praiseworthiness elucidates important aspects of our beliefs’ evaluation: how difficulty bears on the degree of praise we merit for our knowledge, and under which conditions we merit praise for knowledge acquired via testimony.