Ninni Suni

When moral and epistemic norms pull in different directions, what should one believe? Moral encroachment is the view that there is an ought simpliciter that is determined by both moral and epistemic norms. Others, on the other hand, hold that norms of different domains cannot be combined and can therefore give conflicting verdicts. This view, however, may run into Moorean paradoxes. This paper argues for a view in which moral and epistemic norms remain distinct, but in a way that does not run into paradoxes, by adopting and expanding Angela Smith’s view of a three-tiered structure of responsibility attributions (Smith, 2007) and arguing for a view of responsibility for beliefs according to which background attitudes play a pivotal role in belief-forming processes. These background attitudes affect how evidence is gathered and weighed, and thus they not only determine what beliefs the agent rationally ought to form (Nelson, 2010) but also indirectly influence the content of the belief. A belief may thus reveal a morally problematic attitude, for instance, but there is rarely a point at which an agent is conscious of different norms pulling in different directions.

The aim of this thesis is to establish a unified conception of responsibility that captures both epistemic and moral responsibility while holding that the normative domains are independent of one another. This is to accomplish two tasks: first, to address skepticism about doxastic responsibility by providing conditions of responsibility that apply to all reason-responsive attitudes, and second, to explain certain philosophical puzzles surrounding doxastic states by carefully distinguishing between moral and epistemic norms. Skepticism about doxastic responsibility begins from the observation that beliefs, unlike actions, are not under voluntary control. This argument can be resisted in several ways: for instance, by denying that beliefs are different from actions, or by denying that voluntary control is necessary for responsibility. The last 20 years have brought us an abundance of responses to the skeptical challenge. My aim is to study the strengths and weaknesses of these solutions by relating them to the conceptions of responsibility operating in the background and by discussing moral and epistemic responsibility side by side. I assume, rather than argue, that the ability to give a unified treatment of both is a theoretical virtue. The thesis consists of three parts. Part I studies the existing accounts of doxastic responsibility and doxastic agency, grouped according to the notions of responsibility they endorse. The first of these is volitionism, which holds that voluntary control is necessary to responsibility. I argue that accounts of doxastic responsibility that are based on volitionism all fail, either because they fail to appreciate the difference between beliefs and actions, or because they fail to account for a genuinely epistemic notion of prescriptive ought. Conceptions of responsibility that deny the necessity of voluntary control can be further usefully divided into those that endorse some other notion of control, and those that reject the necessity of any kind of control. The former group consists of many prominent theories of doxastic agency and responsibility, which model these as parallel to practical agency and responsibility but argue for a distinctively epistemic form of control. While these views are initially attractive, I argue that they face several problems: they misconstrue the relationship between doxastic and practical agency, fail to distinguish between delusion and biased beliefs, and have difficulties accommodating transparency of belief. In the last chapter of Part I, I argue that these problems can be averted by denying the necessity of control and holding that agency is intrinsic to all reason-responsive mental states by virtue of their being partially constituted by the reasons they are responses to. Part II establishes the conditions of responsibility based on the notion of mental agency argued for in Part I. The discussion starts from the debate on moral responsibility for lack of awareness or failures to notice or remember morally relevant details. I then turn to studies in empirical psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive science to establish how attention is shaped by an agent’s pre-existing beliefs, other attitudes, goals, and values—and with attention, most of what we find salient in our situation. This means that most of the doxastic states we form are shaped by our own agency, not merely our objective circumstances: for instance, what evidence is recognized and how that evidence is weighted. Importantly, perceptual beliefs also can be agentive in this sense: background attitudes direct attention to those features of the world that are important to certain goals, or which serve to confirm pre-existing attitudes, at the cost of other available information. I thus argue that it is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of responsibility for a reason-responsive attitude, be it belief, intention, perceptual seeming, or emotional reaction, that it is a manifestation of the dispositions that are constitutive of the agent’s underlying attitudes, goals, values, or personal significance. Part III turns to the question of distinguishing between different kinds of norms. First, I elaborate on how the proposed solution to the puzzle of doxastic agency solves the problems that beset other contenders. Then, offering criteria to distinguish between moral and epistemic norms, I show how the proposed solution can be used to offer new insight into philosophical puzzles that feature the interplay of various normative domains: culpable circumstantial ignorance, pragmatic encroachment on belief, moral encroachment and doxastic wronging, and finally, responsibility for moral beliefs. I argue that the proposed solution can give a more nuanced treatment of these problems because the conditions of basic responsibility are neutral with respect to normative domains, allowing us to agree when an agent is responsible for some failure, even if we find it difficult to establish whether the mistake is epistemic or moral. Furthermore, because the agent’s goals and values can influence belief-formation on many different levels, the resultant belief may reflect the agent’s values to a greater or a lesser degree. Thus, a morally dubious belief may be the result of a moral failure, epistemic failure, or a combination of both.

This chapter argues that moral ignorance implies lack of care of morally relevant considerations as predicted by quality-of-will theories of responsibility, and thus moral ignorance, as opposed to circumstantial ignorance, does not excuse wrongdoing. A new attributionist framework for responsibility for attitudes is presented and supplemented with empirical studies on selective attention to explain the connection between caring and belief formation. The framework is then used to shed light on putative counterexamples to culpable moral ignorance by introducing attentional priority structures that help to distinguish between genuine lack of care as a moral mistake, and nonculpable carelessness that undermines something the agent actually cares about. The chapter ends with a definition of adequate caring and a response to the objection from moral heroism.