The Ethics of Belief and Beyond

Understanding Mental Normativity

Sebastian Schmidt, Gerhard Ernst, Sebastian Schmidt, Gerhard Ernst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000062007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This volume provides a framework for approaching and understanding mental normativity. It presents cutting-edge research on the ethics of belief as well as innovative research beyond the normativity of belief—and towards an ethics of mind. By moving beyond traditional issues of epistemology the contributors discuss the most current ideas revolving around rationality, responsibility, and normativity.

The book's chapters are divided into two main parts. Part I discusses contemporary issues surrounding the normativity of belief. The essays here cover topics such as control over belief and its implication for the ethics of belief, the role of the epistemic community for the possibility of epistemic normativity, responsibility for believing, doxastic partiality in friendship, the structure and content of epistemic norms, and the norms for suspension of judgment. In Part II the focus shifts from the practical dimensions of belief to the normativity and rationality of other mental states—especially blame, passing thoughts, fantasies, decisions, and emotions. These essays illustrate how we might approach an ethics of mind by focusing not only on belief, but also more generally on debates about responsibility and rationality, as well as on normative questions concerning other mental states or attitudes.

The Ethics of Belief and Beyond paves the way towards an ethics of mind by building on and contributing to recent philosophical discussions in the ethics of belief and the normativity of other mental phenomena. It will be of interest to upper-level students and researchers working in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology.

1
Introduction

Towards an Ethics of Mind

Sebastian Schmidt

1. The Problem of Mental Normativity

Our attitudes – our beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions – are not actions. They are conceived of as mental states we are in, rather than as things we actively perform. Intuitively, we are not responsible merely for being in a state – at most, we are responsible for causing a state or for failing to avoid it. And yet we respond to and evaluate our attitudes in ways which are similar to the ways in which we respond to and evaluate our actions. We think that we ought to believe in human-induced climate change, and we even consider it to be appropriate to criticize others if they fail to believe in it. A malicious desire, like the desire for another’s suffering, can rightly provoke not only disapproval, but also resentment or indignation. An emotion like anger might turn out to be unjustified, and we might owe an apology to the person who was the target of our hostile emotion. And merely intending to become a better person is often already worthy of praise or credit.¹

Indeed, it is a widely shared assumption also in contemporary epistemology and metaethics that not only our actions but also our attitudes are governed by norms, and that we are, in some sense, responsible for whether we comply with these norms. In epistemology, there is a long tradition that aims at providing a justification for our beliefs about an external world. Skeptical challenges – as posed by the thought experiments of the Cartesian Demon (Descartes 1641) or the Brain in a Vat (Putnam 1981) – call into doubt that we have reasons for our everyday beliefs (like your belief that you are reading this text right now). Replying to such skeptical challenges – justifying our everyday beliefs – is sometimes viewed as the central motivation for engaging in epistemology.² It is thus not farfetched at all to conceive of epistemology as a normative discipline analogous, somehow, to ethics. How far we can take this analogy is, of course, a question open to reasonable dispute. Especially Clifford (1877) and James (1896) took the analogy so far as to speak of an ethics of belief: they discussed how moral and prudential considerations bear on the norms of belief, thereby motivating contemporary discussions about what kinds of reasons determine what we ought to believe.³

In metaethics (broadly construed), an extensive and specialized discussion about the norms of rationality arose within the last decades. John Broome (2013) argued that being rational consists in having coherent attitudes, rather than in responding correctly to (apparent) reasons.⁴

According to Broome, we are, for example, rationally required to (roughly) intend those means that we believe are necessary to achieve our ends.⁵ This is a requirement to adjust our intentions and beliefs to each other. It is not presented as a requirement to perform certain actions in order to intentionally ensure by indirect means that we are coherent (for example, by meditation). Rather, rational requirements are meant to govern our attitudes directly. This also holds for accounts that conceive of rationality as the capacity to respond correctly to one’s reasons. For insofar as these accounts are concerned with responding to reasons for attitudes, they do not take themselves to be concerned with prudential or moral reasons for managing our attitudes.⁶

It seems that we do not (or cannot) weigh rational requirements governing our attitudes against, say, prudential considerations that seem to favour an attitude. Take, for example, the consideration that an eccentric billionaire promises you a lot of money as a reward for causing yourself to believe something that is unsupported by your evidence. A common view holds that in such cases, there are two normative requirements in place: a rational requirement not to have the unsupported belief, and a practical requirement to cause yourself to have it.⁷ Such cases are currently debated, and some of our contributions will question the picture according to which epistemic reasons, or other object-given reasons for attitudes, constitute their own normative domain that is independent from the practical realms of prudence and morality.⁸ Yet the general framework in which philosophers currently conceive of rational requirements is to treat them as separate from, and quite unrelated to, practical requirements: prudence and morality govern our voluntary conduct; rationality governs our attitudes. Morality and prudence concern action; rationality concerns the mind.⁹

However, philosophers have also recently discussed a line of thought that calls into doubt that our attitudes are the proper object of any normative evaluation whatsoever.¹⁰ Roughly, the line of thought goes as follows. Our beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions are not subject to the will in the way our actions are. We cannot decide to believe in the way we can decide to act.¹¹ When someone offers me a huge reward for believing, in the absence of adequate evidence, that there is an even number of stars in the universe, I will not be able to believe it. This is true even if I want to believe it because I want to have the reward. Similarly, it does not seem possible to desire, feel, or intend something merely because someone offers me a reward for doing so. It seems that we cannot believe that p for just any reason that shows it worth believing that p. It seems that we cannot adopt a mental state or an attitude for just any reason that shows it worth being adopted.¹²

By contrast, if someone offered me a reward for performing an action for which I have no reward-independent reason, like the action of raising my arm right now, I could just do it and collect the reward. We usually can perform an action for any reason that shows the action worth doing: our actions are, as I would like to put it, exercises of voluntary control. We exercise voluntary control when we act: being able to act for reasons is a fundamental kind of freedom. Arguably, the fact that actions are free in this way is what explains why it can be true that we sometimes ought to do one thing rather than another: if raising my arm was not an exercise of voluntary control, it would not make sense to say that I ought to raise it. The rising of my arm would be a mere natural event outside the space of reasons that could not be evaluated in normative terms. In the absence of voluntary control, there would be no obligations to act, and no reasons to act in a certain way rather than in another. Maybe there would not even be such a thing as an action.¹³ Furthermore, it seems that we could not appropriately be blamed and praised for what we do if what we do was not an exercise of voluntary control. At least in this sense, Ought implies Can.

This raises a philosophical puzzle. If being subject to norms and reasons requires voluntary control, then it becomes mysterious how anything can be subject to norms that is not under our voluntary control. How can epistemology then be concerned with the justification of our beliefs? And how can metaethics be concerned with normative requirements governing our beliefs and intentions? While contemporary philosophy assumes that there is mental normativity, we at the same time seem to lack an explanation of how there can be such a thing. So, how can it be that we ought to believe, desire, feel, or intend something, that we have reasons for mental states, and that we can be praised and blamed for them? Call this the problem of mental normativity.^14,15

2. Locating Our Approach: How the Ethics of Belief Motivates an Ethics of Mind

I take the following two questions as providing a helpful framework for joining the debates that I just sketched:

1. How can we be responsible for our attitudes?
2. What attitudes should we have?

These are the fundamental questions of an ethics of mind.¹⁶ The first question is concerned with explaining how there can be such a thing as an ethics of mind – how our practice of holding each other accountable for our beliefs, emotions, desires, and intentions can be justified given that these attitudes are not under our voluntary control. Proponents in this debate either argue that attitudes are, contrary to first impression, controlled in a similar way as actions are controlled (“voluntarily”);¹⁷ or they argue that we can exercise a form of direct but non-voluntary control over our attitudes, i.e. a form of direct control that is different from the control that we exercise when we act;¹⁸ or they deny that they are directly controlled in any way, and thus either deny some sense of “Ought implies Can,”¹⁹ or say that we are never directly responsible for our attitudes, but only indirectly insofar as we control our attitudes through our actions.²⁰ By providing an explanation of our mental responsibility in this way, such accounts aim at providing a foundation for understanding the norms that underlie our practice of holding one another accountable for our attitudes.²¹

The second question is central to the debates about reasons for belief and about attitudinal rationality. It is concerned with the precise nature of the norms that govern our attitudes. If we can make sense of mental normativity and responsibility, then what are the standards or requirements that govern our attitudes, and what are the kinds of reasons for which we can hold attitudes, and how do we distinguish them? Are all reasons for attitudes object-given (or “of the right kind”), or are there state-given reasons (that is, “of the wrong kind”) as well?²² How do these reasons determine what we ought to believe, desire, feel, intend, etc.?²³ And what is the normative force of these “mental Oughts,” which include the standards of epistemic rationality?²⁴

This overall framework for discussing mental normativity, provided by our two main questions, is mainly inspired by contemporary debates in the ethics of belief. The philosophical debate about whether we can be responsible for what we believe and what we ought to believe is flourishing like never before. Questions which preoccupied Clifford and James are discussed by contemporary scholars under the headings “Ethics of Belief” (Feldman 2000; Matheson/Vitz 2014), “Reasons for Belief” (Reisner/Steglich-Petersen 2011), “The Aim of Belief” (Chan 2013), and “Epistemic Norms” (Littlejohn/Turri 2014). Central questions include:

• Is only evidence for or against p relevant for whether one ought to believe that p, or are there state-given reasons which favour having a belief, e.g., facts about how valuable it would be to believe that p?²⁵
• If only evidence is relevant to this question – can this fact be explained by conceptual features of belief, like belief’s “aim of truth”?²⁶
• Can we weigh epistemic and practical reasons against each other so as to determine what we ought to believe, all things considered?²⁷
• Is it even possible to ...