JUSTIFIED NORMATIVE JUDGMENT

Should your conscience be your guide? I really can’t say because we’ve never met. If you areconscientious, you will often make the move from a belief about what ought to be done to an actionrationalized (in part) by the belief:(The Move) SBSO

’sI can’t say that you should have made The Move if I don’t know the specifics. It’s not obviouslyirrational to make The Move. Indeed, it seems often that it would be irrational not to. Still, I thinkthis principle can’t be true:(Con) SBSO

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The best people make The Move, but so do the worst. For counterexamples to Con, see anymovie about Nazis.

If you think there must be some sort of normative relation between practical judgmentsand the actions and intentions those judgments rationalize, perhaps it is captured by something likethis:(W-Con) SO(SBO

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)

While all kinds of people make The Move, only those who act rightly conform to W-Con.Conscientious Hitlers are no threat to W-Con, only Con.W-Con seems trivial. Gibbons (2009: 172) seems to agree. Note that W-Con permitswhat he calls ‘strengthened detachment’. With W-Con, we can infer (2) from (1):(1) SOBSO

(2) SO

When should someone believe they ought to

? He suggests that someone who considers whetherto

, gives the matter serious attention, has the intellectual skills to knowingly deduce that sheought to

, and has sufficient evidence ought to judge that she ought to

. It’s hard to say whatsufficient evidence amounts to, but two claims are intuitively plausible:

In addition to counterexamples to Con, Zimmerman (2008) notes that you cannot accept Con andthat ‘ought’ implies ‘can’.

In other words, S ought to see to it that S believes S ought to

only if S ought to

(SE1) S has sufficient evidence for her belief that

if S hasprecisely the same evidence as someone who knows

.(SE2) S ought to believe

if S has given the matter sufficientattention and has sufficient evidence to believe

Rather than bicker about whether evidence consists of knowledge or something else, I’ll just saynow that nothing here turns on whether we opt for the right view of evidence or some alternativeto E=K. Evidence can be pretty much whatever you want it to be, provided that you agree thateven if

is part of S’s evidence,

isn’t the evidence that justifies S’s believing

when that belief isan inferential belief. Combine (SE1), (SE2), and W-Con, and the result is that you are permittedto do whatever it is that your epistemic counterparts are permitted to do.

Indeed, you and yourepistemic counterpart often ought to do the same things, provided that you ought to believe thatyou ought to do the same things.This seems to be the view defended by Fantl and McGrath (forthcoming: 85). They saythat if you have knowledge-level justification for believing

, it is permissible to treat

as a reasonfor action as well as belief.

Suppose you have knowledge-level justification for believing that youought to

. It would then be proper for you to treat

that you ought to

as a reason for action, say,when you judge that you should

because you know that

-ing is the only means by which youcould

. Suppose you have knowledge-level justification for believing

where you kow or justifiably believe you ought to

. It would then be proper for you to treat

as a reason for

Personally, I think that epistemic obligations tend to be obligations to refrain from believingrather than obligations to believe. Since Gibbons thinks that we ought to believe what we cannotrationally refrain from believing when we give the matter sufficient attention and have theintellectual skills to reason in such a way to gain knowledge concerning the relevant subject matter,the criticisms apply to his version of The View. Maybe my other targets think that sufficientevidence permits believing but does not obligate believing. That’s okay. The cases below willcause trouble for a weakened version of (SE2) that merely gives a permission to believe onsufficient evidence.

For the purposes of this discussion, S’s epistemic counterparts have all the same evidence for their beliefs and do not differ in terms of their non-factive mental states from S.

Whereas Fantl and McGrath (forthcoming) and Gibbons (forthcoming) seem to think that there’spractical justification for

-ing whenever there’s adequate epistemic justification for believing thatyou should

, Gerken (forthcoming), and Neta (forthcoming) seem to defend only the morecautious view that there’s nothing epistemically wrong with treating

as a reason for action even if ~

, provided that your belief that

is the case is justified. It seems that they can avoid thedifficulties that arise for The View, but only if they give up W-Con. Much of this work is writtenin response to Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) who argue that it is proper to act only on what youknow.

action and, arguably, proper to

accordingly. Like Fantl, McGrath, and Gibbons, I have a hardtime seeing how W-Con could be false. Whatever it is that neutralizes the threats to the normativestanding of the normative judgment should take care of whatever normative obstacles stand in theway of plowing ahead and acting on the normative judgment. In spite of the view’s intuitiveplausibility, there is something wrong with:(The View) W-Con, (SE1), and (SE2)

Those who defend The View believe that someone can have sufficient evidence to believe

even if ~

. Here is what Fantl and McGrath say on the matter:… it is highly plausible that if two subjects have all the same verystrong evidence for

my glass contains gin

, believe that propositionon the basis of this evidence, and then act on the belief in reachingto take a drink, those two subjects are equally justified in theiractions and equally justified in treating what they each did as areason, even if one of them, the unlucky one, has cleverlydisguised petrol in his glass rather than gin. Notice that if we askedthe unlucky fellow why he did such a thing, he might reply withindignation: ‘well, it was the perfectly rational thing to do; I hadevery reason to think the glass contained gin; why in the worldshould I think that someone would be going around putting petrolin cocktail glasses!?’ Here the unlucky subject is not providing anexcuse for his action or treating what he did as a reason; he is

defending it

as the action that made the most sense for him to doand the proposition that made most sense to treat as a reason(forthcoming: 141).It seems Fantl and McGrath are moved by a kind of anti-luck intuition. If someone shouldn’t

,there have to be reasons in light of which the subject shouldn’t

and should do something elseinstead, but they cannot be reasons that are inaccessible to the subject. Why? Perhaps it’s becausethe best that you can ever do is to do what the rational or reasonable person would do in yourshoes. While there’s something to be said for the view that says (i) you should do the best you can

Fantl and McGrath (2002: 77) say that S justifiably believes

only if S is rational to act as if

. Itmight seem that they reject (SE1) and (SE2). They do. But, they do so on the grounds that it ispossible for subjects with the same evidence for believing

to face practical situations where thestakes of acting on

differ. These differences are differences that their subjects are aware of. In mycases, the differences between the situations Coop and his epistemic counterparts face are notdifferences that they are aware of. Fantl and McGrath’s remarks concerning cases of facts that thesubject is not cognizant of that have some practical significance make it pretty clear that they thinkthat such facts do not affect the normative standing of the agent’s actions, attitudes, or thereasoning that connects them.