![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Many meta-ethicists are alethists: they claim that practical considerations can constitute normative reasons for action, but not for belief. But the alethist owes us an account of the relevant difference between action and belief, which thereby explains this normative difference. Here, I argue that two salient strategies for discharging this burden fail. According to the first strategy, the relevant difference between action and belief is that truth is the constitutive standard of correctness for belief, but not for action, while according to the second strategy, it is that practical considerations can constitute motivating reasons for action, but not for belief. But the former claim only shifts the alethist's explanatory burden, and the latter claim is wrong—we can believe for practical reasons. Until the alethist can offer a better account, then, I argue that we should accept that there are practical reasons for belief.
Notes
1 The alethist camp includes, but is not limited to, evidentialists (i.e. those who claim that all normative reasons for believing p are considerations that bear on the truth of p). An alethist may deny evidentialism, since there may be some epistemic reasons for or against believing p that do not bear on the truth of p, as Schroeder [Citation2012] argues.
2 A third position that I set aside here is nihilism, the view that practical considerations are not normative reasons for belief because there are no normative reasons for belief at all—not even epistemic ones.
3 Thomson [Citation2008: chs 7, 8] endorses something like this strategy, although her argument is more complicated.
4 For example, Hieronymi [Citation2005], Markovits [Citation2014], and Olson [Citation2004] take there to be an important difference between right-kind and wrong-kind reasons, but claim that both kinds are genuine normative reasons, whereas Parfit [Citation2011] and Skorupski [Citation2010] claim that only right kind reasons are really normative reasons. See Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen [Citation2004] and Schroeder [Citation2010] for further discussion of the right-kind vs wrong-kind reason distinction.
5 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this example.
6 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this response.
7 I assume that the relevant kind of possibility here is a general psychological possibility relativized to a normal human psychology because, if the motivational strategy involved a more local psychological possibility that is relativized to the agent's particular psychological features, POSSIBLY MOTIVATING would rule out too many reasons. For example, suppose that I have been brainwashed to believe that all scientists are frauds, so that I am psychologically incapable of believing anything on the basis of testimony from scientists. If POSSIBLY MOTIVATING involved a more local psychological possibility, it would imply that the fact that the majority of scientists claim that global warming is being caused by humans is not an epistemic reason for me to believe that global warming is being caused by humans. On the other hand, if the motivational strategy involved a broader sense of psychological possibility that is not relativized to creatures like us, then MOTIVATIONAL DIFFERENCE would not be very plausible, since we can at least imagine creatures unlike us whose psychological features are such that they can believe for practical considerations. Reisner [Citation2009] makes similar points.
8 Shah [Citation2003, Citation2006] actually gives a fuller explanation for transparency, which I discuss in section 6.
9 These distinctions originate in Smith [Citation1994] and Schroeder [Citation2007]. I assume here that normative, motivating, and explanatory reasons are all facts (that may or may not obtain), along the lines of Dancy [Citation2000]. But everything that I say here is also compatible with taking them to be propositions, as Schroeder [Citation2007] does.
10 On this account, S must conceive of R as a reason to ϕ up until the time at which S ϕs. So, if S conceived of R as a reason to ϕ at some point in the past, which caused S to be disposed to ϕ, but then S forgets that R is a reason to ϕ, even if S's disposition to ϕ lingers and causes S to ϕ, then R is not a motivating reason for S's ϕing.
11 Rinard [Citation2015] argues that cases like these show that motivating reasons for belief need not directly cause one to have that belief, and that this undermines Shah's [Citation2006] argument for alethism. But, unlike Rinard, I take Shah's requirement on normative reasons not to be that normative reasons must be capable of directly causing one to have some belief, but instead to be that normative reasons must be capable of directly motivating one to have some belief. And these cases do not show that normative reasons for ϕing need not be capable of directly motivating one to ϕ.
12 This assumes an admittedly naïve account of dispositions. But none of the problems for this account of dispositions bears on anything that I say here.
13 Both Scully's case and the Oxfam case involve over-determination of motivating reasons. In the Oxfam case, though, my conceiving of the fact that donating to Oxfam would increase my happiness as a reason to donate does not causally influence how strongly I respond to my other reason to donate (i.e. that it would save lives). But, in Scully's case, her conceiving of the old X-file report as a reason to believe that the suspect is not human does causally influence how strongly she responds to the other reason to believe that the suspect is not human (i.e. the new test result).
14 Thanks to Jonathan Schaffer for bringing this objection to my attention.
15 This leaves open the possibility that we can believe for practical reasons alone in unconscious, non-deliberative contexts. I do not take a stand here on whether this is a genuine psychological possibility.
16 For feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to Bob Beddor, Ruth Chang, Andy Egan, Megan Feeney, William Fleisher, Michael Townsen Hicks, David Anton Johnson, Martin Lin, Lisa Miracchi, Robert Planer, David Plunkett, Pamela Robinson, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Jonathan Schaffer, Kurt Sylvan, Christopher Weaver, and participants of the 2014 Southern Normativity Conference at the University of Kent and the 2016 Dartmouth Ethics and Practical Reason Workshop.