Sophia Dandelet

It is a piece of common sense that we can be mean-spirited, cruel, and unfair in the ways that we form beliefs. That is, we can wrong others through our doxastic activity. This fact shows that, contrary to an increasingly widespread view in the ethics of belief literature, morality has a role to play in guiding doxastic deliberation, and evidence is therefore not the only ‘right kind of reason’ for belief. But the mere existence of doxastic wronging does not tell us anything about how, exactly, morality enters into doxastic deliberation. These two lessons are crucial for getting debates in the ethics of belief back on the right track.

This essay is about a special kind of transformative choice that plays a key role in debates about permissivism, the view that some bodies of evidence permit more than one rational response. A prominent objection to this view contends that its defender cannot vindicate our aversion to arbitrarily switching between belief states in the absence of any new evidence. A prominent response to that objection tries to provide the desired vindication by appealing to the idea that arbitrary switching would involve a special kind of transformative choice: the choice to change one’s epistemic standards, i.e., one’s commitments regarding the relative importance of achieving true belief and avoiding false belief. My first aims here are to argue that this response is unsuccessful and propose an alternative. My secondary aim is to consider how this discussion might bear on more general debates about transformative choice.