What conditions on a person’s knowledge must be satisfied in order for them to be morally responsible for something they have done? The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a surge of interest in this question. Must an agent, for example, be aware that their conduct is all-things-considered … Continue reading Epistemic Conditions of Moral Responsibility →.

I consider three challenges to the traditional view according to which moral responsibility involves an epistemic condition in addition to a freedom condition. The first challenge holds that if a person performs an action A freely, then she thereby knows that she is doing A. The epistemic condition is thus built into the freedom condition. The second challenge contends that no epistemic condition is required for moral responsibility, since a person (...) may be blameworthy for an action that she did not know was wrong. The third challenge invokes the quality of will view. On this view, a person is blameworthy for a wrong action just in case the action manifests a bad quality of will. The blameworthy person need not satisfy an additional epistemic condition. I will argue that contrary to appearances, none of these challenges succeeds. Hence, moral responsibility does require a non-superfluous epistemic condition. (shrink)

Philosophers have long agreed that moral responsibility might not only have a freedom condition, but also an epistemic condition. Moral responsibility and knowledge interact, but the question is exactly how. Ignorance might constitute an excuse, but the question is exactly when. Surprisingly enough, the epistemic condition has only recently attracted the attention of scholars, and it is high time for a full volume on the topic. The chapters in this volume address the following (...) central questions. Does the epistemic condition require akrasia? Why does blameless ignorance excuse? Does moral ignorance sustained by one’s culture excuse? Does the epistemic condition involve knowledge of the wrongness or wrongmaking features of one’s action? Is the epistemic condition an independent condition, or is it derivative from one’s quality of will or intentions? Is the epistemic condition sensitive to degrees of difficulty? Are there different kinds of moral responsibility and thus multiple epistemic conditions? Is the epistemic condition revisionary? What is the basic structure of the epistemic condition? (shrink)

An encyclopedia article on the epistemic or knowledge condition for moral responsibility, written for the SEP.

If responsibility for character requires (among other things) having knowledge of the quality of one’s character, and this knowledge requires having at least some good aspects of character, we seem to come to startling conclusions. First, as Neil Levy argues, the worse one is morally speaking, the less one is responsible for being morally bad. Second, the truly bad are excused for their bad characters. I present several arguments against Levy’s view. First, I argue that the initial conclusion does (...) not follow. It is not the case that the worse a person is, the less responsible she is for her character. A person may still have other aspects of character that enable her to fulfill this part of the epistemic condition. Further, both Aristotle and empirical research on character indicate that most people have such aspects. Second, I consider the truly morally bad. I show that most people voluntarily develop their characters and so – aside from rare cases of abuse, neglect, or congenital disorders – the vicious become so voluntarily. In this vein, I thirdly show that partial moral understanding is sufficient to meet the epistemic condition for character responsibility and most people have this. (shrink)

It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known (...) better”, but it is unclear how to spell out this normative condition. -/- This chapter combines (a) an independently motivated account of responsibility, blame, and credit as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility with (b) the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will. The resulting explanatory quality of will condition on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, as well as of excuses and undermined control in cases not involving ignorance. -/- The explanatory quality of will condition is finally applied to cases involving various degrees of lack of awareness. Though this condition itself involves no awareness requirement, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse. It is also explained how lack of awareness fails as an excuse exactly when the agent should have known better and can be blamed for not doing so. (shrink)

What epistemic conditions must one satisfy to be morally responsible for an action or attitude? A common worry is that robust epistemic requirements would have disastrous implications for our responsibility attributing practices: we would be unable to make epistemically justified responsibility attributions, or we would be licensed to disrespectfully excuse agents for their sincerely held beliefs. Those more optimistic about robust epistemic requirements inadvertently make them too demanding to explain the moral successes of ordinary agents. (...) The present project shows how both the pessimists and optimists rely on instructively mistaken assumptions in epistemology, ethics, and action theory, and it culminates in a theoretical framework for responsibility for right action (or moral worth) from which well-motivated and unproblematic epistemic requirements fall out. A right action is morally worthy, I argue, just to the extent that it is explained by a reliable tie to the right that is secured through the influence one’s values have (perhaps unreflectively) on one’s informational access and processing. This Value-Secured Reliability framework has wide-reaching import and readily extends to a further variety of moral success: respect. (shrink)

In “The Trouble with Tracing,” Manuel Vargas argues that tracing-based approaches to moral responsibility are considerably more problematic than previously acknowledged. Vargas argues that many initially plausible tracing-based cases of moral responsibility turn out to be ones in which the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is not satisfied, thus suggesting that contrary to initial appearances the agent isn’t morally responsible for the action in question. In the present paper, I outline two different strategies for responding (...) to Vargas’s trouble with tracing. I then show how further consideration of the epistemic condition for moral responsibility renders tracing significantly less problematic than Vargas claims. (shrink)

This introduction provides an overview of the current state of the debate on the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. In sect. 1, we discuss the main concepts ‘ignorance’ and ‘responsibility’. In sect. 2, we ask why agents should inform themselves. In sect. 3, we describe what we take to be the core agreement among main participants in the debate. In sect. 4, we explain how this agreement invites a regress argument with a revisionist implication. In sect. (...) 5, we provide an overview of the main responses to the regress argument. In sect. 6, we address the question why blameless ignorance excuses. In sect. 7, we describe further issues that are addressed in the book. In sect. 8, we conclude with some discussion of future directions the debate might take. (shrink)

A plausible view in the literature on the epistemic condition of blameworthiness is the Reasonable Expectation View (RE). According to RE, whether ignorance excuses an agent from deserving blame is a matter of whether the agent could have reasonably been expected to have avoided or corrected the ignorance. This paper does not take up the task of defending this view, but instead examines what it implies for an interesting type of ignorance: moral or political ignorance rooted in myside (...) bias. With the prevalence of increasing political polarization, it is worth examining what a plausible view like RE implies about when, if ever, myside bias-based ignorance excuses the agent from blame—from deserving resentment or indignation. To assess this issue, the paper examines the empirical literature on what it takes to mitigate myside bias and then takes the United States as a case study to examine what RE implies for the actual non-ideal circumstances many agents are in. The paper argues that RE has two revisionary implications for our practice of blame. First, the paper argues that RE implies that political or moral ignorance rooted in myside bias is currently an excuse in a surprising number of cases. Second, our epistemic position to know whether a given instance of political or moral ignorance is excusing is often inadequate. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.

While the contemporary philosophical literature is replete with discussion of the control or freedom required for moral responsibility, only more recently has substantial attention been devoted to the knowledge or awareness required, otherwise called the epistemic condition. This area of inquiry is rapidly expanding, as are the various positions within it. This chapter introduces two major positions: the reasonable expectation view and the quality of will view. The chapter then explores two dimensions of the epistemic (...) class='Hi'>condition that serve as fault lines along which these two views diverge. The first dimension concerns different kinds of ignorance. The second concerns what agents can be directly blameworthy for. The chapter closes by sketching a novel approach that incorporates advantages of opposing positions on this topic. (shrink)

Agents are morally responsible for their actions only if they understand what they are doing. This much seems clear, but it is unclear exactly what agents must understand in order to be morally responsible; in other words, the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is difficult to discover. In this paper, I will investigate Aquinas’s discussion of knowledge, voluntariness, and moral responsibility in order to discover his views on this condition. Although he never provides a formal (...) expression of such a condition, I will use his discussions of related issues to construct a three-part epistemic condition for moral responsibility. In the process I will raise and discuss several interpretative difficulties, arguing that while some can be resolved, others, despite recent claims to the contrary, resist resolution. Finally, I will draw out several consequences of his account, noteworthy for a variety of reasons. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by the need to respond to the spread of influential misinformation and manufactured ignorance, which places pressure on the work of experts in various sectors. To meet this need, the paper discusses the conditions required for expert testimony to evolve a reconceptualisation of negative capability as a new form of epistemic humility. In this regard, professional knowledge formation is not considered to be separate from the institutional and social processes and values that uphold its production. (...) Drawing attention to the structural and relational aspects of ignorance, as opposed to the individualistic and internal aspects, we rely on the sociology of knowledge, the social epistemologies and the feminist epistemologies that have played a fundamental role in the development of the investigation of ignorance. First, we analyse the criteria for epistemic humility based on prior theoretical discussions concerning negative knowledge as a form of reflective practice. Then, we seek to determine what kinds of strategies, virtues and skills experts need to have so as to ‘manage ignorance’ in socially complex situations. Finally, we suggest the reformulation of negative expertise as a phronetic skill for navigating through situations of ignorance and uncertainty in an epistemically and socially responsible manner. (shrink)

In The Norm of Belief, John Gibbons claims that there is a “natural reaction” to the general idea that one can be normatively required to Ø when that requirement is in some sense outside of one’s first person perspective or inaccessible to one. The reaction amounts to the claim that this is not possible. Whether this is a natural or intuitive idea or not, it is difficult to articulate exactly why we might think it is correct. To do so, we (...) need a view about the relationship between agents’ capacities to accord with normative requirements and the conditions under which those normative requirements obtain. I offer an account of the epistemic dimension of this relationship. The goal is to provide enough of a story about the natural reaction to make accounting for it look like an important desideratum for any theory of the nature of normative requirements—whether these are moral or epistemic. To focus the discussion, I use Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first view of evidence as an example of a view in epistemology that generates the natural reaction. One upshot of the discussion, then, is a detailed account of what is troubling about Williamson’s influential but controversial view of evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Rebecca Taylor examine the responsibilities of college educators to resist conditions of epistemic injustice within their institutions. Pedagogy alone cannot bring about epistemic justice in higher education, for no individual epistemic agent can single-handedly transform their epistemic environment. The roots of such injustices are structural and thus require structural interventions. However, college educators do retain some agency to engage in epistemic resistance. Brust and Taylor argue that they can (...) and should take steps to foster just relations within the epistemic communities of their classrooms — calling for pedagogy that both recognizes the unjust features of the broader epistemic environment and responds to the unique forms of epistemic injustice that manifest in the classroom, with particular attention to seminar-style courses. (shrink)

The gist of modal epistemology is expressed in the idea that you fail to know if you do believe truly but it is seriously possible for you to believe falsely. According to subjunctivism, this idea is captured by certain subjunctive conditionals. One formulation invokes a safety condition—“If S had believed P, then P would have been the case,” while the other invokes a sensitivity condition—“If P had been false, S would not have believed that P.” According to simple (...) subjunctivism, such conditionals do not contrapose and Sosa derives important epistemological consequences which favor safety from this difference. However, simple subjunctivism is inadequate. I return to Goodman and his analysis of factuals and propose modal stability, which is restricted sensitivity or enhanced safety as a proper epistemic condition for the non-accidental connection between the basis for the belief and the relevant facts of the matter. The idea of modal stability combines robustness (benefi ts of safety) with responsiveness to facts (benefi ts of sensitivity) and recovers the original motivation for the relevant alternatives theory—when testing for claims of knowledge that p we ask what might be the case if not-p, but we ignore irrelevant possibilities. Epistemic modal conditions should be expressed in terms of conditionals of connection which contrapose within the limits of relevance. (shrink)

In the epistemology of testimony it is often assumed that audiences are able to reliably recover asserted contents. In the philosophy of language this claim is contentious. This paper outlines one problem concerning the recovery of asserted contents, and argues that it prevents audiences from gaining testimonial knowledge in a range of cases. The recovery problem, in essence, is simply that due to the collective epistemic limitations of the speaker and audience speakers will, in certain cases, be insensitive to (...) the ways in which they may be misinterpreted. As a result audiences’ beliefs will often fail the safety and sensitivity conditions on knowledge. Once the problem has been outlined and distinguished from several related problems in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of testimony, a series of responses are considered. The first response holds that audiences possess defeaters in recovery problem cases, and thus wouldn’t form beliefs. The second response holds that the beliefs audiences form are very coarse grained, meaning they are not very vulnerable to failures of safety and sensitivity. The final response holds that the objects of speaker meaning are not propositional. All three responses are found to be unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Intellectual knowledge is omnipresent in human lives and decisions. We are constantly trying to make good and correct decisions. However, responsible decision-making is characterised by rather difficult epistemic conditions. It applies all the more during the pandemic when decisions require not only specialised knowledge in a number of disciplines, scientific consensus, and participants from different fields, but also responsibility and respect for moral principles in order to ensure that the human rights of all groups are observed. Pandemic measures (...) are created by politicians, healthcare policy-makers, and epidemiologists. However, what is the role of ethics as a moral philosophy and experts in ethics? Experts in ethics and philosophy are carefully scrutinising political decisions. Levy and Savulescu have claimed that Ethicists and philosophers are not epistemically arrogant if they question policy responses. They played an important role in the creation of a reliable consensus. This study analyses epistemic and moral responsibility, their similarities, analogies, and differences. Are they interconnected? What is their relationship and how can they be filled with actual content during the pandemic? (shrink)

Outlaw emotions are emotions that stand in tension with one’s wider belief system, often allowing epistemic insight one may have otherwise lacked. Outlaw emotions are thought to play crucial epistemic roles under conditions of oppression. Although the crucial epistemic value of these emotions is widely acknowledged, specific accounts of their epistemic role(s) remain largely programmatic. There are two dominant accounts of the epistemic role of emotions: The Motivational View and the Justificatory View. Philosophers of emotion (...) assume that these dominant ways of accounting for the epistemic role(s) of emotions in general are equipped to account for the epistemic role(s) of outlaw emotions. I argue that this is not the case. I consider and dismiss two responses that could be made on behalf of the most promising account, the Justificatory View, in light of my argument, before sketching an alternative account that should be favoured. (shrink)

The degree of doxastic revision required in response to evidence of disagreement is typically thought to be a function of our beliefs about (1) our interlocutor’s familiarity with the relevant evidence and arguments, and their intellectual capacities and virtues, relative to our own, or (2) the expected probability of our interlocutor being correct, conditional on our disagreeing. While these two factors are typically used interchangeably, I show that they have an inverse correlation in cases of disagreement about politically divisive propositions. (...) This presents us with a puzzle about the epistemic impact of disagreement in these cases. The most significant disagreements on (1) are the least significant disagreements on (2), and vice versa. I show that assessing the epistemic status of an interlocutor by reference to either (1) or (2) has uncomfortable consequences in these cases. I then argue that this puzzle cannot be escaped by claiming that we usually have dispute-independent reason to reject the significance of politically charged disagreement altogether. (shrink)

A paper by Schulz (Philos Stud 149:367–386, 2010) describes how the suppositional view of indicative conditionals can be supplemented with a derived view of epistemic modals. In a recent criticism of this paper, Willer (Philos Stud 153:365–375, 2011) argues that the resulting account of conditionals and epistemic modals cannot do justice to the validity of certain inference patterns involving modalised conditionals. In the present response, I analyse Willer’s argument, identify an implicit presupposition which can plausibly be denied and (...) show that accepting it would blur the difference between plain assumptions and their epistemic necessitations. (shrink)

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own (...) or otherwise) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course. (shrink)

Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibility, I argue, requires (...) regulation of this environment. I describe some proposals for such regulation and show that we cannot reject all regulation in the name of individual responsibility. We must either regulate individuals’ healthy choices or regulate the epistemic environment. (shrink)

Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of (...) scientific knowledge can lead toward representations that are more truth-approximating or more efficient at solving science-related problems under a broad range of circumstances, even under conditions where human cognitive faculties would be further off the mark than they actually are. (shrink)

In this article, we take the case of racism in contemporary Italy as a starting point for a discussion about moral responsibility for racism in cases where ignorance is involved. We focus on the issue of the normalization of racism and its contribution to different forms of ignorance to assess the extent to which these might potentially mitigate judgments of responsibility for racism, thereby grounding an Exculpatory Stance. After illustrating the phenomenon of the normalization of racism and offering (...) an outline of how the normalization of racism contributes to ignorance, we argue against the Exculpatory Stance by appealing to a socially situated variety of capacitarian approach to the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. This approach provides us with the tools to claim that the moral ignorance favored by the normalization of racism does not mitigate judgments of individual responsibility. Finally, we point out that the interdependence of individual responsibility and the social environment is such that, in addition to backward-looking individual responsibilities for racism, there are also forward-looking, both individual and shared, responsibilities to counter racism in its various manifestations and the increased risk of moral ignorance connected to its normalization. (shrink)

The article analyzes an epistemic condition for moral responsibility. The condition is taken in a dispositional form: the attribution of responsibility is appropriate only if the agent was in an epistemic position suitable for obtaining knowledge relevant to moral re­sponsibility. The choice of a dispositional interpretation of the epistemic condition is jus­tified with the help of four thought experiments showing that the actualist understanding of this condition is unacceptable. The main question (...) of the article concerns this epistemic position. The article presents N. Levy’s criticism of the concept of responsibility that rests on the thesis that we never find ourselves in the epistemic position required for moral responsibility. Two lines of response to Levy’s criticism are briefly considered: the Reasonable Expectation Approach and the Attributionist Approach. With the help of the analysis of a thought experiment, the condition of basic knowledge of a morally significant situation is revealed. Further analysis of this condition exposes the condition of attention for moral responsibility. Attention refers to the ability to redirect one’s cogni­tive resources to different tasks. The moral significance of attention is demonstrated: inat­tention as an excusing factor is investigated, the connection between attention and such phenomena of moral life as care and respect is shown. The article shows that the require­ment of attention implies certain control over attention. The condition of attention pro­vides an answer to Levy’s criticism, according to which we have no control over the psy­chological states leading to actions. This is not the case since control of attention plays this role. In conclusion, the prospects for further research are discussed: the study of the concept of control over attention, the connection of moral responsibility and conscious­ness, and examination of the condition of attention in the context of virtue epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be (...) found in Klein’s works to this argument, and my aim is to show that none of those responses can be plausibly held without infinitism losing its title to being a genuine non-skeptical alternative. (shrink)

For decades, philosophers have displayed an interest in what it is to have an epistemically justified belief. Recently, we also find among philosophers a renewed interest in the so-called ethics of belief: what is it to believe responsibly and when is one’s belief blameworthy? This paper explores how epistemically justified belief and responsible belief are related to each other. On the so-called ‘deontological conception of epistemic justification’, they are identical: to believe epistemically responsibly is to believe epistemically justifiedly. I (...) argue that William Alston’s criticism of a deontological conception of epistemic justification in terms of our influence on our beliefs is unconvincing. Moreover, such a conception meets three criteria that one might put forward in order for an account of epistemic justification to be plausible: it shows a concern with the Jamesian goal of having true rather than false beliefs, it is relevantly similar to accounts of justification in non-doxastic realms, such as action, and there is good reason to think that, if spelled out in sufficient detail, it may well provide a necessary condition for knowledge. I conclude that the deontological conception of epistemic justification is stronger than is often thought: it is worth exploring whether epistemically justified belief is epistemically responsible belief. (shrink)

This chapter argues for deregulation of the credit-rating market. Credit-rating agencies are supposed to contribute to the informational needs of investors trading bonds. They provide ratings of debt issued by corporations and governments, as well as of structured debt instruments (e.g. mortgage-backed securities). As many academics, regulators, and commentators have pointed out, the ratings of structured instruments turned out to be highly inaccurate, and, as a result, they have argued for tighter regulation of the industry. This chapter shows, however, that (...) the role of credit-rating agencies in achieving justice in finance is not as great as these commentators believe. It therefore argues instead for deregulation. Since the 1930s, lawgivers have unjustifiably elevated the rating agencies into official, legally binding sources of information concerning credit risk, thereby unjustifiably causing many institutional investors to outsource their epistemic responsibilities, that is, their responsibility to investigate credit risk themselves. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that blameworthiness is epistemically constrained. If one lacks sufficient epistemic access to the fact that some action harms another, then one cannot be blamed for harming. Acceptance of an epistemic condition for blameworthiness can give rise to a worry, however: could agents ever successfully evade blameworthiness by deliberately stunting their epistemic position? I discuss a particularly worrisome version of such epistemic shirking, in which agents pre-emptively seek to avoid access to potentially (...) morally relevant facts. As Roy Sorensen and Jan Willem Wieland have argued, we seem to be faced with a potentially troubling regress when trying to explain what goes wrong in such situations. I argue that the solution to this so-called Shirker Problem is not to be found in complicated and demanding anti-shirking-principles with universal scope and potentially self-reflexive content. Instead, careful consideration of the necessary motivational make-up of genuine shirkers reveals their ignorance to lack the necessary depth to be exculpatory. Since shirkers by definition react to the possibility of the revelation of morally relevant facts with acts of epistemic self-limitation, they necessarily prove guilty of a form of culpable moral recklessness. Epistemic shirking thus does not pose a worrisome problem for ethical theory. (shrink)

This thesis mounts an attack against accounts of perceptual justification that attempt to analyze it in terms of evidential justifiers, and has defended the view that perceptual justification should rather be analyzed in terms of non-evidential justification. What matters most to perceptual justification is not a specific sort of evidence, be it experiential evidence or factive evidence, what matters is that the perceptual process from sensory input to belief output is reliable. I argue for this conclusion in the following way. (...) Chapter 1: The Arguments from HallucinationChapter 1 presents a skeptical argument from hallucination that starts from a premise about the alleged introspective indistinguishability of perception and hallucination, and concludes that perceptual knowledge is impossible. Underlying this argument are certain assumptions about the nature of perceptual justification, and different responses to the argument portray different views of perceptual justification. Evidentialism and dogmatism both reject the premise that appearances do not provide evidence sufficient for perceptual knowledge, although they disagree about the precise nature of the appearances. Epistemological disjunctivism rejects the premise that introspectively indistinguishable experiences provide the same evidence, while upholding the idea that some sort of evidence, namely factive evidence, is necessary for perceptual justification and knowledge. Process reliabilism rejects the premise that evidence is necessary for perceptual knowledge on the grounds that even perceptual justification can be obtained without evidence, as long as the cognitive process producing the belief is reliable.Chapter 2: EvidentialismChapter 2 starts by introducing some motivations for experientialist views of perceptual justification, such as evidentialism and dogmatism, which hold that conscious experiences evidentially justify perceptual beliefs. These motivations have to do with their ability to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition that demon-deceived subjects have justified perceptual beliefs and the Blindsight Intuition that blindsighters do not have justified perceptual beliefs. However, experientialist views are also faced with a Sellarsian dilemma: either experience is construed as non-propositional, but then the proposed evidential relation is unclear, or experience is construed as propositional, but then it is ad hoc to hold that they can evidentially justify without being justified themselves.Chapter 2 continues with a discussion of evidentialism, which grasps the first horn of this dilemma. I argue that evidentialism cannot adequately explain why a non-propositional experience constitutes evidence for this rather than that belief, and also does not provide any account of how to determine which belief fits an evidence-set which partly consists out of non-propositional experiences. Although a reliabilist version of evidentialism can provide a better account of these matters, it suffers from counter-intuitive predictions about justification and a conception of evidence that is so liberal that it could even include blindsighters and clairvoyants as having such evidence.Chapter 3: DogmatismChapter 3 focuses on variants of dogmatism, a theory of perceptual justification that grasps the second horn of the Sellarsian dilemma by holding that a perceptual experience with the content that p is sufficient for immediate prima facie justification of the belief that p. I first argue that dogmatism should identify perceptual experiences with high-level conscious states to accommodate the problem of novice vs. expert identification and the problem of the speckled hen. I then argue that this version of dogmatism still fails to meet a certain explanatory challenge which I dub the `Distinctiveness Problem'. Dogmatism should explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it, in contrast with desire and imagination, to evidentially justify the belief that p without, in contrast with belief, being justified itself.Phenomenalist answers to this problem fail because they either do not provide a distinctive property of perceptual experience, or else provide a property that is reducible to or possibly caused by beliefs. In both cases, dogmatism would have the result that intuitively unjustifying experiences, such as imaginations, nevertheless become capable of justifying beliefs. Moreover, phenomenalists still need some explanation of why phenomenology is epistemically relevant at all.A new variant of the problem of the speckled hen is an intuitive illustration of this point against dogmatists. If a perceptual experience that p is not reliably connected to the fact that p or the belief that p, then beliefs based on this experience simply will not be intuitively justified. One possible response to this problem incorporates reliability into the content of experience in the sense that an experience cannot have the content that p if it is not reliably connected to both the fact that p and the belief that p. However, this will lose the motivation from the New Evil Demon Scenario, and will make large concessions towards reliabilism.Chapter 4: Epistemological DisjunctivismGiven these problems for experientialist views of perceptual justification, chapter 4 focuses on a different evidential account of justification: epistemological disjunctivism. According to the Justified True Belief version of Epistemological Disjunctivism, the fact that I see that p is the factive and reflectively accessible evidence in virtue of which I know that p. I argue that JTBED faces formidable problems: first, it cannot adequately deal with the basis problem, second, it cannot accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition, third,it faces the problem of hyper-intellectualization, and fourth, it has no good account of reflective access.Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism, in contrast, holds that seeing that p just is a way of knowing that p. The fact that I see that p constitutes my justification for believing that p, even though it is not necessary for my knowledge that p. Although this view solves most of the above problems, I argue that KFED still faces a challenge of its own: its notion of justification is so strong that justification entails knowledge but is not itself entailed by it. This means that it too faces a hyper-intellectualization objection because it cannot accommodate animal justification, and that it too will struggle to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition.Nevertheless, there is something to the epistemological disjunctivist idea that higher-order capabilities are important to perceptual justification. Specifically, higher-order capabilities provide one with a way of accommodating the Blindsight Intuition without appealing to the notion of experiential evidence: blindsighters are epistemically worse off than normal human perceivers because they lack higher-order beliefs about how they are gaining their information. If one holds that these higher-order beliefs provide a special sort of justification for perceptual beliefs, then blindsighters lack this type of justification. Chapter 5: Process ReliabilismAfter displaying the problems of several evidential accounts of perceptual justification, chapter 5 introduces a non-evidential account: process reliabilism. The classic version of this view holds that the reliability of a belief-forming process is necessary and sufficient for the prima facie justification of a specific set of beliefs, namely, those that arise out of belief-independent processes. Two classic major problems for this view consist of counterexamples to both the necessity and sufficiency of reliability for justification. Although the Generality Problem raises some difficulties for reliabilism, they do not appear to be insurmountable.The second part of chapter 5 focuses on a variety of process reliabilism, inferentialist reliabilism, that is explicitly aimed at responding to clairvoyance cases. According to inferentialist reliabilism, one should distinguish between basic and non-basic beliefs, where basic beliefs are those that result out of the non-inferential operation of an inferentially opaque cognitive system that developed in a natural way. Reliability is only sufficient for the justification of basic beliefs, while non-basic beliefs also require conditional reliability and justification of the beliefs on which they are based.This distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs is meant to answer the challenge arising out of clairvoyance cases because these are all supposedly cases in which the resulting beliefs arenon-basic. However, I argue that the beliefs in these cases come out as non-basic primarily because of the etiological constraint on cognitive systems, a constraint that is unfortunately undermotivated. It seems that beliefs can be justified even if they are produced by a cognitive system that developed by accident, or by a system that was artificially designed to produce those beliefs. So even though the inferentialist reliabilist might have a point in distinguishing between basic and non-basic beliefs, it is still in need of a different response to clairvoyance cases. Chapter 6: Rejoinders for ReliabilismChapter 6 improves on the inferentialist reliabilist account of justification by presenting a different way of dealing with the clairvoyance cases and New Evil Demon Scenario. I start from the empirically plausible idea that we know that we are perceiving when we are perceiving, not because of the use of experiential evidence, but rather, because of an unconscious source-monitoring mechanism. I then argue that the existence of such a source-monitoring mechanism could be used to explain why clairvoyance cases actually have to do with defeat rather than absence of prima facie justification: beliefs that pop up in our head should be recognized as stemming from untrustworthy sources, and so we acquire defeating higher-order beliefs about the first-order beliefs. I also argue that this defeat should be able to occur even if the higher-order beliefs are themselves unjustified. This defeater-account of clairvoyance is preferable to several externalist alternatives. Making reliability relative to a specific world seems rather ad hoc, and further requirements on justification, such as evidence-based belief, cognitively integrated belief, or properly produced belief, all appear unnecessary and are susceptible to adapted versions of the clairvoyance case.I further argue for an alternative inferentialist reliablist response to the New Evil Demon Intuition which treats it as mistaken rather than correct. The New Evil Demon Intuition might arise because of a mistaken view of actual perceptual justification as having to do with experiential evidence. This mistaken view could be explained by the fact that experience is actually reliably connected to belief and is often cited in response to a knowledge-challenge. If this is a correct analysis of the New Evil Demon Intuition, then there is an element of question-begging involved when this scenario is still pressed against inferentialist reliabilists who do not adhere to the experientialist assumption it presupposes.With the inferentialist reliabilist account in hand,we are able to see that many of the premises of the epistemological argument from hallucination are problematic. Evidence does not appear to be required for perceptual knowledge, as perceptual justification does not even require such evidence. Moreover, if we accept a reliabilist model of introspection, then we are often able to know on the basis of introspection that we are perceiving rather than hallucinating. Once one gets clear about the alternatives, it becomes apparent that the argument thrives on internalist assumptions about justification and knowledge that one need not accept. (shrink)

To answer whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, two different methods for justifying compatibilist conditions of responsibility have emerged in recent literature. First-person approaches, such as Hilary Bok's, appeal to the first-person experience of human agency to justify our practices of holding agents responsible. In contrast, T. M. Scanlon and Jay Wallace, following P. F. Strawson, begin with an account of the interpersonal significance of holding each other responsible in order to discern the conditions under which it (...) is appropriate to assign that significance to an agent's actions. In this dissertation, I evaluate these different methodologies, and I examine the details of each view in order to find a proper understanding of the conditions of responsibility and of the significance of responsibility judgments within our interpersonal lives. ;I argue that the backward-looking significance we attach to responsibility judgments, including those of blame and praise, can be captured only by an interpersonal approach. Specifically, I argue that the significance of responsibility is not found in the negative consequences or emotions that we associate with holding agents responsible. Rather, ascribing to an agent the status of being responsible is a form a deep respect, which has practical implications. I argue that our intuitions concerning victims of severely deprived childhoods are best accounted for if we recognize that ascription as a form of respect and we separate the question of whether an agent is responsible from considerations of appropriate punishments. ;With regard to the conditions of responsibility, I argue that practical reasoners should be considered responsible not only for their choices, but also for negligent omissions, moral beliefs, and certain emotional reactions, even if such phenomena are not based on their choices. In addition, I argue that compatibilists do not need to add the capacity to grasp distinctly moral reasons to the requirements of responsible agency because that capacity is entailed by the basic capacity to reason practically. I examine the psychological literature on psychopaths---agents who supposedly are practical reasoners without moral understanding---to counter an objection to my view. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued that, in order for S to be appropriately held morally responsible for some action or attitude (say, via moral blame), that action or attitude must somehow reflect or express a negative aspect of S’s (“true”, “deep”, or “real”) self. Recently, theorists of “epistemic blame” and “epistemic accountability” have also incorporated certain “self-disclosure” conditions into their accounts of these phenomena. In this paper, I will argue that accounts of epistemic responsibility which (...) require disclosure of an objectionable feature of a person’s self neglect central aspects of our responsibility practices. Specifically, I will argue that we can appropriately hold individuals epistemically responsible for things which do not reflect or express negative aspects of “who they are” in any way. While disclosure of an objectionable feature of (what I will call) a person’s “doxastic self” isn’t altogether irrelevant when it comes to holding that person epistemically responsible, it also isn’t necessary. One lesson I wish to draw is that, insofar as our epistemic responsibility practices are capable of shedding light on the nature of epistemic normativity itself, theorists interested in the latter should be focused on more than just accountability responses which track objectionable features of a person’s self. (shrink)

We are often, as agents, responsible for the things we do and say. This responsibility can come in a number of different forms: here I propose and defend a view of how we are epistemically responsible for our actions and assertions. In other normative areas, we can be responsible for our actions when those actions violate a norm (for example, we can be morally responsible when we violate some moral norm). I argue that we can similarly be epistemically responsible (...) when we violate a norm of assertion or action, norms that tell us how epistemically well-positioned we need to be towards a proposition in order to assert it or treat it as a reason for acting. I first defend a structure of epistemic norms that allows for the possibility of epistemic responsibility, and then propose a notion of epistemic responsibility itself. -/- We can, and do, evaluate actions and assertions in a specifically epistemic way: we judge that someone should not have acted on the basis of unreliable information, that someone should not have asserted something they knew was false, etc. These kinds of evaluations lead us to believe that proper action and assertion have some basic epistemic requirements, what are called norms of assertion and action. In order to defend a notion of epistemic responsibility, I first establish a general claim about the ways that we make epistemic evaluations in relation to these norms. Many who argue for a particular epistemic norm of action or assertion endorse what I call epistemic monism, the view that all epistemic evaluations of actions or assertions must be explained solely in terms of whether they have adhered to their respective norm. I argue that epistemic monism is false. Instead, I defend epistemic separability, the view that we make two different kinds of epistemic evaluations: one that pertains to whether one has adhered to an epistemic norm, and one that pertains to whether one has reason to think they are adhering to or violating the relevant norm. In my defense of epistemic separability I appeal to arguments from luminosity failure – the claim that for any given epistemic relationship we can have with a proposition we can have good reason to believe that we fail to be in it – and empirical arguments that show that we only have fallible access to our own mental states. These arguments show that we can violate an epistemic norm while having good reason to think otherwise and, in turn, shows that we can be evaluated not only in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated that norm, but also in terms of whether we are responsible for doing so. I argue that whether one’s action is epistemically responsible depends on whether one fulfils the epistemic commitments one makes in performing that action. These commitments consist in being able to provide reasons to believe that one has adhered to the norm governing the action one performs, according to a standard imposed by the situation in which one acts. Thus in more epistemically demanding situations – those in which there are high expectations that we be able to show that we have adhered to the relevant epistemic norm – it will be more difficult to act in an epistemically responsible way. Accepting a notion of epistemic responsibility (and, with it, rejecting epistemic monism) has significant consequences for a number of current debates in epistemology. The first pertains to the debate concerning the correct epistemic norm of assertion and practical reasoning. Many proposed norms are argued to be inadequate on the basis of an inability to explain intuitive epistemic evaluations solely in terms of the conditions set forth in the norms. Epistemic separability, however, implies that the structure of this dialectic is misguided, as we can perhaps accommodate problematic judgments in terms of evaluations of responsibility. The second consequence pertains to arguments for contemporary theories of knowledge. Again, such theories are judged by their ability to accommodate intuitive attributions of knowledge. However, I argue that many of the evaluations that serve as the basis for such theories are better interpreted not as judgments about whether one has knowledge, but as judgments about whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. Recognizing a notion of epistemically responsible action thus calls into question both the plausibility of a number of contemporary theories of knowledge, as well as the way in which we go about doing epistemology in general. (shrink)

The knowledge and attendant justification norms of belief and assertion serve to regulate our doxastic attitudes towards, and practices of asserting, various propositions. I argue that conforming to these norms under conditions of religious ignorance promotes responsible acts of assertion, epistemic humility, and non–dogmatic doxastic attitudes towards the content of one’s own faith. Such conformity also facilitates the formation of the religious personality in a healthy direction in other ways. I explore these ideas in relation to the Christian faith (...) tradition, but my reflections generalize. (shrink)

The concept of innovation defines our age. It fuels the global economy, promises a sustainable future, and stands at the heart of our interconnected society. On the one hand, the concept of innovation is widely presupposed in terms of the commercial value it generates. As claimed in the tradition of economic analysis, innovation is characterized by its competitive dynamics and primarily directed at developing marketable products and services. On the other hand, the reality of today’s global issues, such as climate (...) change and food security, urges innovation to generate societal value beyond mainstream economic incentive. To this end, the EU policy discourse has paved the way for Responsible Innovation. The core idea here is to steer innovation processes towards societally desirable outcomes, specifically in response to the ‘grand challenges’ of our time. Under the sway of ‘science with and for society’, the hypothesis is that innovation can only respond to the needs and ambitions of society by including all its actors throughout the process. However, while much effort is dedicated to governing innovation, little thought goes to what innovation itself means conceptually. What understanding of innovation underpins the framework of RI? What implications, if any, does this have for the ambition to achieve RI? These are important questions to raise as they enable critical reflection on the relation between responsibility and innovation, broadly speaking. Does the ‘R’ in RI entail an application of ethical keys to an already existing concept of innovation, or does it require us to rethink the concept of innovation altogether? After providing a general introduction in chapter 1 on the context of the dissertation and its main research objectives, chapter 2 shows how RI emerged from a longer history of efforts to incorporate ethical dimensions in new and emerging technologies, such as Technology Assessment and Science and Technology Studies. While similar to its precursors in prioritizing ethical concerns, RI clearly distinguishes itself by shifting from an ethics of constraints to an ethics of construction. The chapter continues to show that such an approach comes with an epistemic challenge, a political challenge, and a conceptual challenge. Through an extensive analysis of policy documents and academic literature, chapter 3 breaks open the concept of innovation in the RI discourse. Firstly, it demonstrates that the RI discourse tends to presuppose a techno-economic concept of innovation, as coined by the terms ‘technological innovation’ and ‘commercialized innovation’. Secondly, it provides a historical analysis to show that the concept of innovation was originally politically oriented and had little to do with the way in which it is commonly understood today. Thirdly, it discusses the implications of a techno-economic concept of innovation for achieving the ideal of RI and brings into question whether the political origins of innovation may inspire an alternative route. Chapter 4 engages with the philosophy of technology to assess the feasibility of RI at both an ontic and ontological level. While innovation at the ontic level refers to concrete innovative artefacts, innovation at the ontological level refers to the mode through which these artefacts are seen, understood, and created. At the ontic level, RI is shown to play a significant role in steering emerging technologies towards societally desirable outcomes. Even so, at the ontological level, the question is whether the ideal of RI is feasible insofar its scope is limited to governing a techno-economic concept of innovation. Parallel to Martin Heidegger’s view of technology as Enframing, this chapter denotes that in trying to govern a techno-economic concept of innovation, the RI discourse remains subject to its dominance. This in turn explains why, at the operational level, RI is often employed for mere strategic and instrumental purposes, while falling short on its promoted ambitions. Chapter 5 articulates an orientation shift from a techno-economic concept of innovation towards a political concept of innovation in the RI discourse. To this end, the chapter distinguishes between weak RI, which seeks to govern a techno-economic concept of innovation through an applied set of ethical dimensions; and strong RI, which seeks to conceive a political concept of innovation beyond techno-economic ideology and practice. Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, the chapter establishes a political concept of innovation that actualizes the human capacity for speech and action, inspires radical novelty, and empowers the public sphere. In doing so, the chapter concludes that strong RI is principally a plural undertaking which guards individual opinion from collective opinion; enables a physical and symbolic openness that genuinely activates citizenry; and stimulates performative speech. The final chapter, chapter 6, briefly recaps the main research objectives and takes stock of the insights gained. It concludes that the contribution of this dissertation does not reside in the concern with the techno-economic ideology of innovation as such – a concern which RI in fact already expressed when it first emerged – but more so in the ontological critique to the idea that this ideology can somehow be overpowered through governance and regulation. The rehabilitation of an ontological dimension in RI in turn provides a new perspective to the philosophy of technology, which over the years has taken a course away from ontological viewpoints. Moreover, the chapter elaborates on how a political concept of innovation adds depth to the foundational claims of RI. Based on these conclusions, the chapter reflects on a range of broader insights, particularly in relation to the philosophy of innovation and the ethics of socially disruptive technologies. In sum, this dissertation politicizes the RI discourse precisely in the way it was originally envisioned, that is, through conceptualizing innovation as a fundamentally political matter. In this view, politics is not merely an extension of RI but is itself the condition of RI; it is what enables innovation to genuinely serve the public good. (shrink)

What does it mean to be responsible for structural injustice? According to Iris Marion Young, the ongoing and socially embedded character of structural injustice imposes a future-oriented obligation to work with others toward creating remedial, institutional change. Young explains, ‘Political responsibility seeks less to reckon debts than to bring about results’ (Young, 2003, p. 13). This paper conceptually develops how the goal of remediation bears on responsibility in relation to structural injustice. Does the attribution of responsibility in (...) this context call upon individuals to simply do anything in efforts to affect progressive change? If not, then to what extent are these attributions of responsibility action guiding? On what basis do they direct agents to effectively intervene on relevant conditions and processes rather than act in ways that exacerbate the injustice? I explore the role of etiological explanation in the attribution and acceptance of corrective responsibility, which refers to diagnosis of the operative causation of unjust outcomes. After probing tensions within prominent models of corrective responsibility, I offer my own model attempting to resolve those issues. I argue the forward-looking nature of the call to participate in remedying social problems includes a demand for agents to do so in a way that is itself responsible. I theorize a framework of taking responsibility responsibly. This framework accounts for the moral difference between a conscientiously formulated program of remedial action and a quixotic exercise in reckless delusion. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic (...) norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

This is the fourth paper in the invited collection. Shotwell examines the work of direct-action activists as forms of medical activism that express a non-reductionist and complex intersectional science and technology practice, bridging lay and professional medical contexts. Shotwell draws on Lorraine Code’s generative theory of the importance of “ecological thinking” as one way to practice what she calls “epistemic responsibility,” and to think about the varied and complex early responses of activists in Canada to AIDS. Activists made (...) wide-ranging, theoretically sophisticated, and socially significant interventions in how AIDS manifested in Canada; their interventions manifested a kind of political work welcoming to unpredictable and emergent medical and social situations. Three preliminary insights are offered, from an ongoing research project investigating the history of AIDS activism in the Canadian context: the usefulness of Code’s conception of the social imaginary for understanding how calcified social relations shape and limit the conditions for responsible knowing; the importance of recognizing the communal and social nature of knowledge as a key piece of epistemic responsibility, articulated in terms of collective epistemic privilege; and the possibility for practices of epistemic responsibility to create virtuous epistemic effects beyond what is known or intended by particular agents. (shrink)

This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. David Elohim examines the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of (...) large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, and abstraction principles in the philosophy of mathematics; to the modal and hyperintensional profiles of the logic of rational intuition; and to the types of intention, when the latter is interpreted as a hyperintensional mental state. Chapter \textbf{2} argues for a novel type of expressivism based on the duality between the categories of coalgebras and algebras, and argues that the duality permits of the reconciliation between modal and hyperintensional cognitivism and modal and hyperintensional expressivism. Elohim develops a novel, topic-sensitive truthmaker semantics for dynamic epistemic logic, and develops a novel, dynamic two-dimensional semantics grounded in two-dimensional hyperintensional Turing machines. Chapter \textbf{3} provides an abstraction principle for two-dimensional (hyper-)intensions. Chapter \textbf{4} advances a topic-sensitive two-dimensional truthmaker semantics, and provides three novel interpretations of the framework along with the epistemic and metasemantic. Chapter \textbf{5} applies the fixed points of the modal $\mu$-calculus in order to account for the iteration of epistemic states in a single agent, by contrast to availing of modal axiom 4 (i.e. the KK principle). The fixed point operators in the modal $\mu$-calculus are rendered hyperintensional, which yields the first hyperintensional construal of the modal $\mu$-calculus in the literature and the first application of the calculus to the iteration of epistemic states in a single agent instead of the common knowledge of a group of agents. Chapter \textbf{6} advances a solution to the Julius Caesar problem based on Fine's `criterial' identity conditions which incorporate conditions on essentiality and grounding. Chapter \textbf{7} provides a ground-theoretic regimentation of the proposals in the metaphysics of consciousness and examines its bearing on the two-dimensional conceivability argument against physicalism. The topic-sensitive epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics developed in chapters \textbf{2} and \textbf{4} is availed of in order for epistemic states to be a guide to metaphysical states in the hyperintensional setting. -/- Chapters \textbf{8-12} provide cases demonstrating how the two-dimensional hyperintensions of hyperintensional, i.e. topic-sensitive epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker, semantics, solve the access problem in the epistemology of mathematics. Chapter \textbf{8} examines the interaction between Elohim's hyperintensional semantics and the axioms of epistemic set theory, large cardinal axioms, the Epistemic Church-Turing Thesis, the modal axioms governing the modal profile of $\Omega$-logic, Orey sentences such as the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis, and absolute decidability. These results yield inter alia the first hyperintensional Epistemic Church-Turing Thesis and hyperintensional epistemic set theories in the literature. Chapter \textbf{9} examines the modal and hyperintensional commitments of abstractionism, in particular necessitism, and epistemic hyperintensionality, epistemic utility theory, and the epistemology of abstraction. Elohim countenances a hyperintensional semantics for novel epistemic abstractionist modalities. Elohim suggests, too, that higher observational type theory can be applied to first-order abstraction principles in order to make first-order abstraction principles recursively enumerable, i.e. Turing machine computable, and that the truth of the first-order abstraction principle for two-dimensional hyperintensions is grounded in its being possibly recursively enumerable and the machine being physically implementable. Chapter \textbf{10} examines the philosophical significance of hyperintensional $\Omega$-logic in set theory and discusses the hyperintensionality of metamathematics. Chapter \textbf{11} provides a modal logic for rational intuition and provides a hyperintensional semantics. Chapter \textbf{12} avails of modal coalgebras to interpret the defining properties of indefinite extensibility, and avails of hyperintensional epistemic two-dimensional semantics in order to account for the interaction between interpretational and objective modalities and the truthmakers thereof. This yields the first hyperintensional category theory in the literature. Elohim invents a new mathematical trick in which first-order structures are treated as categories, and Vopenka's principle can be satisfied because of the elementary embeddings between the categories and generate Vopenka cardinals in the category of Set in category theory. Chapter \textbf{13} examines modal responses to the alethic paradoxes. Elohim provides a counter-example to epistemic closure for logical deduction. Chapter \textbf{14} examines, finally, the modal and hyperintensional semantics for the different types of intention and the relation of the latter to evidential decision theory. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

This paper discusses the problem of responsibility attribution raised by the use of artificial intelligence technologies. It is assumed that only humans can be responsible agents; yet this alone already raises many issues, which are discussed starting from two Aristotelian conditions for responsibility. Next to the well-known problem of many hands, the issue of “many things” is identified and the temporal dimension is emphasized when it comes to the control condition. Special attention is given to the (...) class='Hi'>epistemic condition, which draws attention to the issues of transparency and explainability. In contrast to standard discussions, however, it is then argued that this knowledge problem regarding agents of responsibility is linked to the other side of the responsibility relation: the addressees or “patients” of responsibility, who may demand reasons for actions and decisions made by using AI. Inspired by a relational approach, responsibility as answerability thus offers an important additional, if not primary, justification for explainability based, not on agency, but on patiency. (shrink)

When confronted with especially complex ecological and social problems such as climate change, how are we to think about responsibility for collective inaction? Social and political philosophers have begun to consider the complexities of acting collectively with a view to creating more just and sustainable societies. Some have recently turned their attention to the question of whether more or less formally organized groups can ever be held morally responsible for not acting collectively, or else for not organizing themselves into (...) groups capable of so doing. In this paper I argue that several questionable assumptions have shaped the character and scope of inquiry to this point, precluding us from grappling with a range of important questions concerning the epistemic dimensions of collective inaction. I offer an overview of recent conversation concerning collective inaction, advance a critique of the picture of responsibility that has emerged from this conversation, and propose an alternative approach to th... (shrink)

My dissertation is a systematic defense of the moral relevance of alternative possibilities. As such, it constitutes an attack on semi-compatibilism. ;To begin, then, I defend alternative possibilities against three related but independent lines of criticism. The most prominent of these is Harry Frankfurt's now famous counterexample strategy in which cases are constructed that purport to show that a person can, in fact, be responsible even when he cannot do otherwise. Another line of criticism is John Fischer's "flicker of freedom" (...) argument, which builds on Frankfurt-type argumentation by challenging the "robustness" of alternative possibilities. Finally, some recent critics of alternative possibilities have developed "reasons-responsiveness" accounts of moral responsibility that seem further to invalidate the importance of the power to do otherwise. By extending traditional concerns and developing new objections, I argue that room remains for the possible relevance of an alternative possibilities condition on moral responsibility. ;I try to make a positive case for the plausibility of relevance by offering reasons to think that the ability to do otherwise plays an important role in our moral life. Alternatives are important, I argue, because giving up a "freedom to do otherwise" condition would put us in an epistemic bind with respect to our responsibility. That is, the kind of confidence we ordinarily have in our own moral responsibility would be unjustified if it turned out that we do not have alternatives. A second consideration in favor of the relevance of alternatives is distinctively moral. I explore and exploit the relationship between the ability to do otherwise and the putatively Kantian idea that "ought" implies "can," concluding that the semi-compatibilist must either reject both alternative possibilities and the Kantian thesis, or accept that people would not be blameworthy for their moral failures under determinism. Neither option is attractive. ;I conclude, then, that there is good reason to believe that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility and that semi-compatibilism should be rejected. Our intuitions about the importance of being able to do otherwise can still factor into the traditional arguments to the conclusion that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

On the one hand, there seem to be compelling parallels to moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness in domains other than the moral. For example, we often praise people for their aesthetic and epistemic achievements and blame them for their failures. On the other hand, it has been argued that there is something special about the moral domain, so that at least one robust kind of responsibility can only be found there. In this paper, I argue that we (...) can adopt a unifying framework for locating responsible agency across domains, thereby capturing and explaining more of our actual practices. The key, I argue, is to identify the right conditions for being morally accountable, which I take to be a matter of having an opportunity of a good enough quality to act well. With this account in hand, I argue that we can adopt a unifying framework that allows us to recognize parallels across domains, even as it points the way to important differences among them. (shrink)

We present evidence for the existence of `responsibility voids' in committee decision-making, that is, the existence of situations where no member of a committee can individually be held morally responsible for the outcome. We analyse three types of reasons (causal, normative and epistemic) for the emergence of responsibility voids, and show that each of them can occur in committees. But the conditions for these voids are so restrictive as to reduce the philosophical or institutional significance they might (...) be thought to possess. (shrink)

We standardly believe that people are morally responsible for at least some of their conduct. We think, for example, that we are praiseworthy for some of our deeds and blameworthy for others. Traditionally it has been thought that at least two conditions must be satisfied for a person to be responsible for her intentional actions: a control condition which says, loosely, that the person acts voluntarily; and an epistemic one which requires, roughly, that the person not be relevantly (...) ignorant of what she is doing. -/- In this paper, I shall confine attention to a core element of the epistemic condition. After clarifying this element, I’ll motivate the suggestion that specifically moral goals, concerns, or ideals in the everyday lives of very many of us do not take pride of place. This simple fact, in association with the core epistemic element of responsibility, I believe, reveals that the ‘scope’ of moral responsibility is restricted. Next, I propose and attempt to defend the view that though people are not morally responsible for much of their behaviour in the day-to-day business of living, they are responsible — not just causally — but ‘normatively’ as I shall say, for a good deal of what they do. I shall end by producing a sketch of the concept of ‘normative responsibility’. (shrink)

The problem of subjectivity, based on the generalizing substantification of the predicate subiective occurs first in the discussions of the postulates of Kant’s theory of knowledge. At issue is that a human being has focused on a matter, and that his subjectivity has the responsibility of isolating a determinate domain.In fact, it is up to the human subject to focus on objects and to thematize them according to his operative conditions, which is how it expresses different epistemic standpoints. (...) Kant’s philosophy provides the most adequate answers to the question about the anthropological conditioning of philosophy. My thesis is thattranscendental subjectivity includes an epistemic approach, which does not imply any kind of subjective conceptualism as opposed to forms of realism supported and structured by categories, it implies instead that without considering the epistemic standpoint, the question of the supposed primacy of transcendental over general logic or vice versa is irresoluble. (shrink)