Neil Levy

An epistemic trespasser is someone who lacks expertise in a domain yet expresses an opinion about its subject matter based on their own assessment of the evidence. Epistemic trespassing is prima facie problematic, but philosophers have argued that it is appropriate when the trespasser possesses relevant skills and evidence. We argue that this defence is available to epistemic trespassers more often than most philosophers have recognized, but it does not vindicate trespassing. The justified trespasser must also possess an appropriately refined sense of how and to whom they ought to defer, with ‘deference’ understood as taking opinions and the shape of debates very seriously in deliberation, and as appropriate caution in dissent. This sense of what we call the guardrails is constituted largely by a kind of know-how, which arises from long experience in a domain: the epistemic trespasser almost always lacks this know-how.

People report believing weird things: that the Earth is flat, that senior Democrats are subjecting kidnapped children to abuse, and so on. How can people possibly believe things like this? Some philosophers have recently argued for a surprising answer: people don’t believe these things at all. Rather, they mistake their imaginings for beliefs. They are shmelievers, not believers. In this paper, I consider the prospects for this kind of explanation. I argue that some belief reports are simply insincere, and that much of the evidence for shmeliefs can be explained by the content of the beliefs reported, rather than by the attitude people take to them. But some reported beliefs are good candidates for being shmeliefs. I consider how shmeliefs are acquired and sustained, and why they might be harmful despite not being seriously believed.

Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness underlies, or at any rate makes a large contribution, to moral considerability. This paper argues that many such accounts invoke question-begging arguments. Moreover, they’re unable to explain apparent differences in moral status across and within different species. In the light of these problems, I argue that we ought to take very seriously a view according to which moral considerability is grounded in functional properties. Phenomenal consciousness may be sufficient for having a moral value, but it may not be necessary, and it may contribute relatively little to our overall considerability.

McKenna’s critique (rather than criticisms) of idealized approaches to epistemology is an important contribution to the literature. In this brief discussion, I set out his main concerns about more idealized approaches, within and beyond social epistemology, before turning to some issues I think he neglects. I suggest that it’s important to pay attention to the prestige hierarchy in philosophy, and to how that hierarchy can serve ideological purposes. The greater prestige of more abstract approaches plays a role in determining what issues and what voices we attend to.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the various ways that responsibility may be relevant to health care, in order to situate the chapters in this volume in their broader context. The chapter begins by outlining relevant concepts, and explaining why it is worth considering the role of responsibility in health care. The chapter then turns to various ways in which patients might be held responsible in a health care system, before considering objections to these practices. Finally, the chapter considers the role of responsibility in health care beyond holding patients responsible, by considering the responsibility of medical professionals, and of institutions.

Whether agents are morally responsible for their need for scarce resources is a difficult and fraught issue. In this chapter, I aim to explore some unappreciated difficulties for the attribution of moral responsibility for needs that arise from the fact that in typical cases, ill-health arises from lifestyle: not, that is, from one bad decision, but from a long-term pattern of actions. First, I hope to build on Brown and Savulescu’s (2019) programmatic exploration of what they call the diachronic condition on moral responsibility for ill-health. I will show that the diachronic condition fractionates in multiple ways, depending on how ill-health is caused as well as on the theory of moral responsibility at issue. Second, I aim to show that it is much harder to satisfy the diachronic condition on moral responsibility for ill-health than is widely assumed. I will argue that we usually cannot be confident that a particular agent (or a class of agents: say alcoholics) is responsible for their ill-health, and that—I will suggest—should make us hesitant to ascribe responsibility to them. Finally, I turn to an assessment of responsibility as a tie-breaker between patients. We might think that we need something far short of a reasonable doubt standard for responsibility to serve in this role. Perhaps a balance of probabilities standard can justify our using it. I will argue that even if we have the right to confidence on this standard, this may not be enough for responsibility to serve as a tie-breaker between agents in the context of the allocation of scarce resources.

It’s widely held that a lack of intellectual humility is part of the reason why flagrantly unjustified beliefs proliferate. In this paper, I argue that an excess of humility also plays a role in allowing for the spread of misinformation. Citing experimental evidence, I show that inducing intellectual humility causes people inappropriately to lower their confidence in beliefs that are actually justified for them. In these cases, they manifest epistemic humility in ways that make them epistemically worse off. I argue that epistemic humility may fail to promote better beliefs because it functions for us against the background of our individualistic theory of responsible epistemic agency: until we reject such theories, intellectual humility is as much a problem as a solution to epistemic ills. Virtue epistemology is inadequate as a response to unjustified beliefs if it does not look beyond the virtues to our background beliefs.

Some people argue that the distribution of medical resources should be sensitive to agents’ responsibility for their ill-health. In contrast, others point to the social determinants of health to argue that the collective agents that control the conditions in which agents act should bear responsibility. To a large degree, this is a debate in which those who hold individuals responsible currently have the upper hand: warranted appeals to individual responsibility effectively block allocation of any significant degree of responsibility to collective agents. We suggest that a different understanding of individual responsibility might lead to a fairer allocation of blame. Scaffolded agency is individual agency exercised in a context in which opportunities and affordances are structured by others. Appeals to scaffolded agency at once recognize the role of the individual and of the collective agents who have put the scaffolds in place.

In the wake of the spectacular success of Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice, philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when recipients of testimony discount it in virtue of its source: usually, their social identity. The remedy for epistemic injustice is almost always listening better and giving greater weight to the testimony we hear, on most philosophers' implicit or explicit view. But Fricker identifies another kind of epistemic injustice: hermeneutical injustice. This kind of injustice occurs when someone can't articulate their own experience or understand their situation for lack of the hermeneutical tools. There is a possible tension between these kinds of injustice, we suggest: sincere testimony may be misleading (may fail to identify significant harms the testfier is subject, or may fail to register its magnitude, or to categorize it as the kind of harm it is) in virtue of a lack of hermeneutical resources. This tension raises the possibility that there are situations in which experts - those who possess hermeneutical tools - may be able to correct the testimony of those who experience harms in virtue of their identity. In this paper, we identify possible cases in which epistemic injustice might be reduced through such correction: in which an increase in testimonial injustice might serve to decrease it in the longer run, for example. We also suggest how the obvious dangers of a too great readiness to see testimony as in need of expert correction might be mitigated, and how the expert might suggest corrections without ceasing to listen.

Discussions of virtue signaling to date have focused exclusively on the signaling of the moral virtues. This article focuses on intellectual virtue signaling: the status-seeking advertising of supposed intellectual virtues. Intellectual virtue signaling takes distinctive forms. It is also far more likely to be harmful than moral virtue signaling, because it distracts attention from genuine expertise and gives contrarian opinions an undue prominence in public debate. The article provides a heuristic by which to identify possible instances of intellectual virtue signaling. When people with no relevant expertise rapidly move to offer their opinions on a wide range of topics as soon as these topics become fashionable or newsworthy, and especially when these opinions are contrarian, we should suspect them of intellectual virtue signaling.

It is very widely held that Frankfurt‐style cases—in which a counterfactual intervener stands by to bring it about that an agent performs an action but never actually acts because the agent performs that action on her own—show that free will does not require alternative possibilities. This essay argues that that conclusion is unjustified, because merely counterfactual interven‐ers may make a difference to normative properties. It presents a modified version of a fake barn case to show how a counterfactual intervener can make the difference between an agent knowing a fact or merely truly believing that fact, by eliminating veretic epistemic luck. If counterfactual interveners can make this kind of difference to the epistemic status of agents, the essay argues, there is no reason why they can't make an analogous difference to agents' moral responsibility. It concludes that reflection on these cases reveals that despite the mountains of words spilled on the topic, we still don't fully understand what role access to alternative possibilities plays in whether or not agents are morally responsible for their actions.

Neuroethics has two focuses: ethical issues arising from the sciences of the mind, and the ways in which these same sciences can help us to understand normative questions. In this chapter, I pursue a question in the second kind of neuroethics, exploring how the sciences of the mind help us to understand when agents are responsible for their actions. First, I examine the case of the psychopath, and argue that the relevant data suggests that psychopaths do not act with the kind of quality of will that is plausibly taken to underwrite blameworthiness. I then turn to evidence concerning how we attribute quality of will to other agents, and suggest that it predicts a disposition to overattribute a blameworthy quality of will under certain conditions. If these claims are correct, then we are apt to blame some agents, under some conditions, more than they deserve. Attention to the data can therefore enable us to better calibrate our responsibility judgments.

Most of the philosophers engaged in the free will debate accept some kind of naturalism constraint. In this chapter, I distinguish three different kinds of naturalism. Strong naturalists hold that philosophical theorizing should be actually guided by current science, whereas weak naturalists avoid postulating any entities or processes that conflict with science (but may take bets on how science will evolve). Mid‐strength naturalism is agnostic about how future science will evolve, but is not actually guided by the science. I argue that though compatibilism tends to fare better on this scale when we consider its relationship to physics, consideration of neuroscience and psychology complicates the picture: major compatibilists engage in as much speculation and scientifically unmotivated postulation of entities and processes as major libertarians. I end by asking whether philosophers engaged in this debate ought to accept that the stronger a view's naturalist credentials, the better warranted it is.

The widespread conviction that we are living in a post-truth era rests on two claims: that a large number of people believe things that are clearly false, and that their believing these things reflects a lack of respect for truth. In reality, however, fewer people believe clearly false things than surveys or social media suggest. In particular, relatively few people believe things that are widely held to be bizarre. Moreover, accepting false beliefs does not reflect a lack of respect for truth. Almost everyone’s beliefs are explained by rationally warranted trust in some sources rather than others. This allows us to explain why people have false beliefs.

We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an excessively individualistic conception of good thinking, both within and outside philosophy. I propose replacing ‘intellectual autonomy’ with ‘intellectual interdependence’, which properly emphasises the depth of our reliance on one another, without suggesting we ought ever to be epistemically servile.

Self-control is a fundamental part of what it is to be a human being. It poses important philosophical and psychological questions about the nature of belief, motivation, judgment, and decision making. More immediately, failures of self-control can have high costs, resulting in ill-health, loss of relationships, and even violence and death, whereas strong self-control is also often associated with having a virtuous character. What exactly is self-control? If we lose control can we still be free? Can we be held responsible for loss of self-control? In this thorough and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of self-control, the authors examine and assess the following topics and questions: • The importance of self-control • What is self-control? • Self-control and the law of desire • Mechanisms of self-control • How is it possible to lose self-control? • Blameworthiness and (the loss of) self-control • Externalist self-control • Pathologies of self-control. Combining philosophical analysis with surveys of the latest psychological research, and including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary of key terms, Self-Control is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, moral psychology, free will, and ethics. It will also be of interest to those in related fields such as psychology and cognitive science.

Seasonal influenza kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year. We argue that the current pandemic has lessons we should learn concerning how we should respond to it. Our response to the COVID-19 not only provides us with tools for confronting influenza; it also changes our sense of what is possible. The recognition of how dramatic policy responses to COVID-19 were and how widespread their general acceptance has been allowed us to imagine new and more sweeping responses to influenza. In fact, we not only can grasp how we can reduce its toll; this new knowledge entails new responsibilities to do so. We outline a range of potential interventions to alter social norms and to change structures to reduce influenza transmission, and consider ethical objections to our proposals.

Philosophical tradition and conspiracy theorists converge in suggesting that ordinary people ought to do their own research, rather than accept the word of others. In this paper, I argue that it’s no accident that conspiracy theorists value lay research on expert topics: such research is likely to undermine knowledge, via its effects on truth and justification. Accepting expert testimony is a far more reliable route to truth. Nevertheless, lay research has a range of benefits; in particular, it is likely to lead to greater understanding, even when it does not lead to knowledge. I argue that we can reap most of the genuine benefits of lay research while minimizing the risks by engaging in exploratory, rather than truth-directed, inquiry. To engage in exploratory inquiry is to engage dogmatically, expecting to be unable to confirm the expert view or to disconfirm rivals.

The Cognitive Reflection Test is a widely used measure of the degree to which individuals override an intuitive response and engage in reflection. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is widely taken to assess an important component of rational thought. In this paper, I will argue that while doing well on the CRT requires valuable cognitive capacities and dispositions, doing badly does not always indicate a lack of such capacities and dispositions. The CRT, I argue, offers respondents implicit (but misleading) testimony: some of those who do badly do so due to a stronger disposition to defer to testimony. Since deference is not irrational, those who do badly need not be irrational, not even in part.