E J O P 4 2 2

Journal Name Manuscript No. B Dispatch: 25.6.10

Author Received:
Journal: EJOP

No. of pages: 15
CE: Bindu

PE: Nasreen/Jay

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00422.x

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Reducing Responsibility: An Evidentialist
4 Account of Epistemic Blame
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Trent Dougherty
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9 Abstract: This paper argues that instances of what are typically
10 called ‘epistemic irresponsibility’ are better understood as instances
11 of moral or prudenial failure. This hypothesis covers the data and is
12 simpler than postulating a new sui generis form of normativitiy.
13 The irresponsibility alleged is that embeded in charges of ‘You
14 should have known better!’ However, I argue, either there is some
15 interest at stake in knowing or there is not. If there is not, then there
16 is no irresponsibility. If there is, it is either the inquirer’s interests—
17 in which case it is a prudential shortcoming—or someone else’s
18 interests are at stake—in which case it is a moral shortcoming. In no
19 case, I argue, is there any need to postulate a form of normativity in
20 epistemology other than the traditional epistemological norm that
21 one’s attitudes should fit the evidence one has.
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23
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25 Introduction
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27 It is not uncommon for epistemologists to seek greater unity between their
28 discipline and ethics. A common way to accomplish this goal is via analogy. The
29 most radical is via reduction. In this paper, I will be arguing for unification via
30 reduction of a certain sort.1 I aim to validate Feldman’s claim that any
31 normativity concerning belief that goes beyond fitting the evidence, and in
32 particular epistemic responsibility, is either moral or instrumental (Feldman 2004:
33 189). The vast majority of those who have written on the subject of epistemic
34 responsibility have disagreed with this thesis. Theorists like Code (1987: 12) and
35 Montmarquet (1993: 5–6) have argued at length that epistemic responsibility is
36 central to epistemology, and their treatments imply that its nature goes beyond
37 evidential, instrumental, or moral considerations to identify a unique, distinc-
38 tively epistemic normativity. Kornblith (1980, 1983), DeRose (2000), and Baehr
39 (2009) have also defended the thesis that epistemic normativity is not limited to
40 evidential fit or practical considerations. More recently Nottelmann (2007) has
41 championed this position, as has, most recently, Axtell (Axtell and Carter (2008),
42 Axtell and Olson (MS), Axtell (forthcoming)). If my reductionist program is
43 successful, this will require a serious redirection of much thinking on the subject
44 of epistemic responsibility. Also at stake is whether one very plausible traditional
45 view of epistemology is correct, namely evidentialism. For if the standard

European Journal of Philosophy ]]]:]] ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–15 r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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 2 Trent Dougherty

1 responsibilists are right, evidentialism is false: the ethics of belief goes well
2 beyond consideration of the evidence. I will begin with a brief review of the
3 literature to set my thesis in proper context and throw into relief its contrast with
4 extant views.
5 Concerning the normative disciplines of ethics and epistemology, Dancy notes
6 that ‘[t]he analogies between these two areas are many and various, and
7 increasingly explored’ (Dancy and Sosa 1992: 119). Axtell points out that there is a
8 natural basis for the analogical use of ethical concepts by epistemologists: ‘The
9 availability of useful analogies between ethics and epistemology has never . . .
10 been sharply divided from a substantial thesis of the structural parity or
11 symmetry between these two fields as the primary normative sub-disciplines of
12 philosophy’ (Axtell 1997: 20). This naturally raises the question whether they can
13 be unified in some way. Montmarquet is explicit about what he finds an
14 ‘intriguing goal—a unification of the two main normative disciplines of
15 philosophy: ethics and epistemology’ (Montmarquet 1993: 108). Dancy also
16 speaks of unification. In considering the more responsibilist parts of Sosa’s virtue
17 theory he says ‘It is raising in our mind analogies with the supposed advantages
18 of virtue ethics, and even the prospect of a unification of epistemology and ethics,
19 built around the common notion of a virtue’ (Dancy 2000: 78/1995: 195).
20 Nevertheless, the envisioned unification falls short of reduction in most cases.
21 Hookway notes that there are many ‘parallel issues’ but still avows that ‘[e]thics
22 and epistemology deal with different parts of our normative practice’ (Hookway
23 2000: 149). Axtell, after rehearsing the now commonplace notion than many
24 terms of current usage ‘entered epistemology through analogy with the long-
25 standing use of those terms in ethics’ points out that ‘[t]he method for this carry-
over is analogical and not reductive. The concern that it not be reductive is evident
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27 . . .’ (Axtell 1997: 1, emphasis added). One place in which this is evident is in
28 Montmarquet. For though he says that normative notions in epistemology
29 ‘closely mirror their moral counterparts’ and entertains a certain ‘normative
30 level’ which is ‘at once and equally, ethical and epistemic’, he ultimately rejects
31 this hypothesis concluding that ‘on a somewhat fuller analysis . . . they do carry a
32 tag as more ethical than epistemic, or the reverse’ so that the distinction between
33 moral virtue and epistemic virtue ‘is ultimate and irreducible’ (Montmarquet 1993:
34 108, 109, 110, emphasis added). Thus Montmarquet says ‘I want to treat the
35 epistemic virtues as . . . the counterparts of the moral virtues’ (1993: x, emphasis
36 added).
37 This is very different from the sort of approach taken by Linda Zagzebski. She
38 admits that her account ‘subsumes the intellectual virtues under the general
39 category of the moral virtues’ so that ‘[e]pistemic evaluation just is a form of
40 moral evaluation . . . it follows that normative epistemology is a branch of ethics’
41 (Zagzebski 1996: 255, 256, 258, emphasis in original). This is the fulfilment of the
42 promise made at the beginning of the book: ‘I will argue that the intellectual
43 virtues are so similar to the moral virtues . . . that they ought not to be treated as
44 two different kinds of virtue. Intellectual virtues are, in fact, forms of moral
45 virtue. It follows that intellectual virtue is properly the object of study of moral

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 Reducing Responsibility 3

1 philosophy . . . It will take most of this book to demonstrate that epistemic

2 evaluation is a form of moral evaluation . . .’ (Zagzebski 1996, xiv, 6). That
3 ‘epistemic evaluation just is a form of moral evaluation’ just is an identity thesis,
4 which I take to be a form of reductionism.
5 Though she protests ‘I think of this move as expansionist rather than
6 reductionist’, the fact is that in her view we ‘begin with a certain complex of
7 concepts that uncontroversially belong to the sphere of the moral, and we may
8 then argue that these concepts are most naturally understood as having a wider
9 scope than previously accepted’ (Zagzebski 1996: 255, 256). Thus, in the end, the
10 moral persists as a distinctive category and the epistemic does not. So I doubt there
11 is a substantive difference between reduction and ‘expansion’ here. It is, after all,
12 the distinctive nature of epistemic evaluation which is being done away with.
13 At any rate, even if Zagzebski’s ‘expansion’ is indeed non-reductive in some
14 sense, my intention is not to insist on the term ‘reduction’ but rather to bring
15 epistemic responsibility under very different forms of non-epistemic evaluation
16 than Zagzebski does for knowledge. I too want to make an expansionist move
17 and bring epistemic responsibility under ethics and instrumental rationality (if
18 the latter two are different). My position is that all instances of epistemic
19 irresponsibility are in fact either forms of instrumental irrationality or moral
20 irresponsibility insofar as there is anything amiss that goes beyond one’s beliefs
21 not fitting the evidence one has at the time (merely having a belief not fit one’s
22 evidence can’t be sufficient for irresponsibility, of course, because that might be
23 completely beyond one’s control). Thus my position regarding epistemic
24 irresponsibility (though not necessarily all so-called internal intellectual virtues2)
25 is what Roberts and Wood call the ‘more traditional’ view (which they reject) of a
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26 so-called epistemic virtue as being ‘a moral virtue applied to an intellectual

27 context’ (Roberts and Wood 2007: 60). Or as Feldman puts it, our judgments
28 about intellectual responsibility are ‘moral and prudential evaluations of
29 behavior related to the formation of beliefs’ (2004: 190). Thus there is nothing
30 distinctively epistemic about epistemic responsibility. I therefore reject the view
31 of those responsibilists mentioned above who assert that epistemic responsibility
32 and moral responsibility are only analogically related distinct notions, where
33 both are equally fundamental.
34 Recently, Nikolaj Nottelmann has presented a monograph on epistemic
35 responsibility that fits squarely in the camp which affirms the independence of
36 epistemic responsibility. In his Blameworthy Belief he speaks positively of ‘setting
37 moral and epistemic evaluations on an equal [but separate] footing’ (Nottelmann
38 2007: 9). He begins with the locus classicus of Clifford’s ‘Ethics of Belief’ arguing
39 that ‘the text suggests that he simply took epistemic and moral evaluation to be
40 equally basic dimensions of normative evaluation’ (Nottelmann 2007: 8).
41 Nottelmann takes this to heart and makes it a goal in his treatise ‘[t]o keep it
42 absolutely clear that the basis of epistemic blameworthiness is epistemic, not moral . . .’
43 (Nottelmann 2007: 10, emphasis added). This is just the sort of picture I’m
44 opposing. After briefly considering Nottelmann’s rationale for this separation, I
45 will commence my positive argument for my position.

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1 Nottelmann’s line of reasoning for the independence of moral and epistemic

2 blameworthiness—which he notes is very similar to that of Montmarquet—is that
3 moral culpability presupposes epistemic culpability. The reason this is so, he
4 says, is that if one were fully reasonable in believing that the purportedly
5 blameworthy act were in fact licit, then there would be no moral culpability at all.
6 He draws heavily on the distinction in law between actus reus and mens rea.
7 Roughly, the former refers to the objective gravity of the act while the latter refers
8 to the psychological states like intent and forethought which go into making
9 someone culpable for a harmful act. According to the ancient dictum actus non
10 facit reum nisi mens sit rea there is no guilt for the act without certain psychological
11 conditions met. One is that it couldn’t have been reasonable for the agent to think
12 the act was licit. Ignorance can be an excuse or it can be culpable. What I will
13 argue is that culpable ignorance is not a distinctively epistemic shortcoming. That
14 is, being in a state of ignorance is, when irresponsible, morally irresponsible or
15 instrumentally irrational. To the argument for that thesis I now turn.
16
17
18 The Thesis in Greater Detail
19
20 As I said, I’ll be arguing for an identity claim. This has consequences for the
21 method of my argument. Reductionistic theories are to be preferred over non-
reductionistic theories due to their parsimony. I take this attitude to be a hallmark
22
of contemporary analytic philosophy. I’m not suggesting that any particular form
23
of reductionism should claim favour, only that, in general, the commitment to
24
25 conceptual parsimony is a general commitment of contemporary analytic
philosophy. Thus all that is required to make the reductionist thesis more
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27 choiceworthy in this context is to show that it can explain the same data as the
28 non-reductionist theory. There is no question of a tie if my explanations are
29 sufficient, for if there are two theories equally capable of accounting for the data,
we ought to choose the simpler of the two. And it is clearly simpler to posit fewer
30
basic normative categories. Here is my identity thesis.
31
32 Identity Each instance of epistemic irresponsibility is just an instance of
33 purely non-epistemic irresponsibility/irrationality (either moral or
34 instrumental).
35
36 This is a tacit conditional: If X is an instance of epistemic irresponsibility, then X is
37 just an instance of either moral irresponsibility or instrumental irrationality.
38 There are two ways in which we might come to see that there is no epistemic
39 irresponsibility in a given case when at first we thought there was, and in such a
40 case Identity will be trivially satisfied. First, a case might just be a case of a
41 dysfunctional agent. This is regrettable and, as Feldman has pointed out
42 (Feldman 2001) we tend to use normative language in such cases: The teacher Q1
43 who just can’t teach his kids can be fired because a teacher ought to be able to do
44 that. However, Kornblith points out that these ‘role oughts’ are very different
45 from the sort of normativity involved in the kinds of cases that motivate

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1 responsibilists (Kornblith 2001). There is no genuine form of blame that can be

2 levelled in cases of dysfunction (unless the dysfunction is self-inflicted, in which
3 case the blame should be laid on the particular acts which led to the dysfunction).
4 So we might be misled into initially characterizing a case as a case of genuine
5 epistemic irresponsibility by focusing on this other sort of normative failing, which
6 is essentially a failure to achieve one’s telos. Another way we might be misled into
7 thinking there is blameworthiness when in fact there is none is in cases where a
8 subject’s belief doesn’t fit their current evidence. This is a purely epistemic
9 evaluation and can result from irresponsible behaviour or from dysfunction, but,
10 again, it is the behaviour that’s properly blameworthy. So there is a small
11 eliminative element to my case as well, for I shall suggest that at least some of our
12 ascriptions of intellectual irresponsibility are simply misguided in the two ways
13 I’ve just mentioned. However, this is consistent with my central thesis in Identity.
14 Another way to state my thesis is that to be epistemically irresponsible consists
15 in being either instrumentally irrational or morally irresponsible.3 Like Feldman,
16 my position is that when one’s belief fits the evidence, all other forms of
17 evaluation concerning the belief are either moral or instrumental. What there is
18 not in my view is a purely epistemic category of evaluation which does not
19 concern fit with one’s evidence. Only the latter are central for responsibilists (for
20 reasons stated by Code (1987: 50)). I’m not aware of anyone who denies that
21 epistemic fit, considered abstractly, is purely epistemic.
22
23
24 The Case of Craig the Creationist
25
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26 It will be helpful to have a case before us to illustrate the dynamics of the

27 reduction, and fortunately I have an anecdote that will work well. I will first
28 introduce the case informally, then formalize the threat it poses to evidentialism
29 in the form of a valid deductive argument. I have a friend—let’s call him
30 ‘Craig’—who is a ‘special creationist’. That is, he thinks that the major species of
31 animals were created separately—as opposed to their having a common
32 ancestor—and that this occurred 6,000 to at most 8,000 years before present
33 (YBP is a common metric in sciences that deal with the distant past). I was
34 frustrated with the persistence of this unfortunate belief. The problem, though,
35 didn’t seem to be that his beliefs didn’t fit his evidence—they did seem to fit his
36 evidence, for he had read very narrowly on the subject and had been raised and
37 schooled all his life in an apparently reliable community which sustained this
38 belief in the usual social ways, and which had reasonable-sounding stories for
39 why people deny their views. Rather, the problem seemed to be precisely that he
40 only had the very limited evidence he had, since I’d often recommended books
41 challenging his views. In language that is becoming more common, his belief
42 seemed to satisfy the standards of synchronic rationality: it seemed to fit the
43 evidence he had at the time; but it didn’t appear to meet the standards of
44 diachronic rationality, which is a cross-temporal assessment of rationality.4
45 Feldman has claimed that ‘diachronic considerations are moral or prudential’.5

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1 But the core responsibilists mentioned above avow that there is a purely epistemic
2 evaluation of such cases over and above synchronic irrationality. In what follows,
3 I will use the above case as a study in which to suggest a way of substantiating a
4 claim similar to Feldman’s against those responsibilists who take epistemic
5 responsibility to be a basic epistemic normative category.
6 In order to assess the diachronic justification of Craig’s belief we need to
7 introduce a dynamic element and look at Craig’s belief over some specific
8 interval of time. So focus on a time at which I suggest to Craig that he read a
9 couple of books which I say show that the arguments of young-Earth creationists
10 are seriously flawed. And suppose he refuses to do so.6 This seems epistemically
11 irresponsible (they are shortish books, within his ken, he really wants to know,
12 and he has lots of free time, and, we may suppose, it would not violate any moral
13 obligations he has). And it seems that he has no new evidence, for he has refused
14 to read the books. But evidentialism requires that a change in epistemic status of
15 belief issue from a change in evidential status. The challenge may be put clearly in
16 this simple argument I’ll call the Craig Argument.
17
18
The Craig Argument
19
20
21
(1) In the case of Craig the creationist, there is a change (a drop) in
22
epistemic status of his belief.
23
(2) However, there is no change in his evidential status.
24
(3) If 1 and 2, then Identity is false, unless the negative evaluation can
25
be explained by instrumental irrationality or moral irresponsibility.
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(4) The negative evaluation can’t be explained in terms of practical
27
irrationality.
28
(5) The negative evaluation can’t be explained in terms of moral
29
irresponsibility.
30
(6) So Identity is false.
31
32
33 Thus, it seems on first inspection as though this case is a consideration in favour
34 of the irreducibility thesis against the reductionist. It’s worth a closer look
35 though. In what follows, I’ll give evidentialist readings of the Case of Craig the
36 Creationist on which I challenge both 4 and 5, since my thesis is disjunctive: all
37 so-called epistemic irresponsibility is either a case of practical irrationality or
38 moral irresponsibility. But of course an instance might be both, so my primary
39 target is (  4 v  5).
40 But first, a word about 2 is in order. It is controversial whether the
41 disagreement of an epistemic peer constitutes evidence against one’s own
42 position. Feldman’s (2006) and Christensen’s (2007) generalization of it suggest it
43 does. Foley (2001a) and Kelly (2005) argue that it does not. I am inclined to agree
44 with Feldman and Christensen, so I am inclined to think that premise 2 is false.
45 I’ll discuss that shortly, but first let me note that we can easily tell the story so that

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1 his belief does fit his evidence and yet there is still irresponsibility (such cases are
2 discussed very briefly in Conee and Feldman (2004) and presented in several
3 versions in Axtell (forthcoming) and Baehr (forthcoming)). So, though I think 2 is
4 false, that’s not my central concern, as (i) it involves a separate controversy in
5 epistemology, and (ii) the case could be modified so as to make it true. (So why
6 did I pick a case where it is false? Because I think a lot of natural cases where we
7 attribute irresponsibility are in fact of this variety, where what’s really going on is
8 that one’s belief lacks evidential fit, then the question becomes: Was this the result
9 of morally or practically irresponsible action?)
10 We can make the idealizing assumption that I was the first person to question
11 Craig’s belief. Thus we can safely assume, given the further assumptions above,
12 that my friend was not intellectually irresponsible prior to my suggesting that he
13 read the books.7 But his refusal to read the books I’ve mentioned seems
14 irresponsible. The epistemological status of his belief has fallen. Why? First, in
15 Craig’s experience, we may assume, I have been a reliable source of true
16 information about a wide variety of matters philosophical, theological, historical,
17 and scientific. In light of this, it seems the epistemically responsible thing to do is
18 to at least take a look at the books I’ve suggested.
19 But notice that this is perfectly explicable in terms of synchronic justification
20 (this is where I consider the version of the case where I argue premise 2 is false).
21 At the time at which Craig became aware that he had testimony from a known
22 reliable source that some of his beliefs were false, at that moment he had evidence
23 that his beliefs were false.8 How much justification this robs him of depends on
24 how reliable I’ve been in his experience. The diachronic picture is that he has
25 synchronic (evidential) justification at t, then at t11 he gets partially defeating
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26 evidence from my testimony which was embedded in the challenge to read the
27 books. However, he doesn’t change his view at all so that he is no longer
28 evidentially justified. So the move from his belief having positive epistemic status
29 at t to lacking it at later times seems to be explained by considerations pertaining
30 to a change in synchronic evidential justification over two times. This would
31 reduce diachronic justification to synchronic justification. So in this kind of case,
32 the appearance of irresponsibility can be at least partly explained by supposing
33 that what we are really picking up on is that in such a case epistemic agents have
34 not been sensitive to their evidence. This can either be the result of cognitive
35 dysfunction or through some discrete act which I argue is a case of instrumental
36 irrationality or purely moral irresponsibility. There is either something at stake in
37 the matter or there is not. If there is nothing at stake, then, if he is anything like us
38 and has many other pressing concerns, there’s nothing irresponsible in not being
39 overly scrupulous (indeed, it would be irrational). If there is something at stake,
40 then it pertains either to one’s own interests or the interests of others. If it pertains
41 to one’s own interests, then the irresponsibility at hand is easily explained in
42 terms of practical irrationality. If it concerns the interests of others, then either I
43 have a duty to promote their interests or I don’t. If I don’t, then I’m doing nothing
44 irresponsible in not being scrupulous. If I do, then the irresponsibility is clearly
45 moral. In no case is there irresponsibility that cannot be explained in one of these

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1 two ways, and if that is the case, then parsimony directs us to disregard the
2 multiplication of further normative categories.
3 The last paragraph has been concerned with the version of the story in which
4 premise 2 is false (though the dilemma in the last few sentences applies more
5 broadly). But we can modify the story so that 2 is true. The way I prefer to do this
6 is to baptize Craig in the waters of Christensen (2007) and have him lower his
7 credences to just the right degree that his degree of belief perfectly fits his
8 evidence, which now includes the fact that I disagree with him and think some
9 books back up my position. (We’re assuming with Feldman and Christensen that
10 my disagreement is evidence against Craig’s view, but with Christensen and
11 against Feldman that this does not always require suspension of judgment. But
12 we are assuming that the remaining credence is still fairly high.) With 2 set to
13 true, Craig now represents for responsibilists a potential counter-example to the
14 following evidentialist thesis.
15
16 NEC S’s belief B at t is subject to negative epistemic evaluation only if B
17 fails to fit S’s evidence at t.9
18
19 Craig’s case now seems to constitute an additional threat to evidentialism, for his
20 case seems to provide a counter-example to NEC.
21 So Craig hears my apparently reliable testimony that these books contain
22 information that undercuts his belief about a matter avowedly of great
23 importance to him. Craig’s thoughts should go something like this, it seems,
24 ‘My reliable friend has just told me that these books contain new information
25 relevant to my belief that I want very much to believe truly regarding p, and I
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26 have the time to do so and no moral obligation not to do so, so I should read the
27 books’. That’s roughly the reasoning we’d expect from what we’re inclined to call
28 an epistemically responsible agent regarding the significance of new information.
29 So to the extent that Craig is aware of the deliberative significance of his new
30 evidence but fails to act on it, it seems that he is irrational. However, this kind of
31 irrationality is clearly instrumental rationality. He is failing to attempt to achieve
32 his goal by what is—by his own lights—an effective means. So Premise 4 above is
33 false.10
34 Can the friend of the irreducibility of responsibilist virtue reply that what’s
35 really at bottom in this apparent case of means-end irrationality is that Craig
36 doesn’t value the truth enough, and that this is a truly epistemic shortcoming?
37 This is a plausible suggestion that is worth investigating.
38 First, we must correctly describe the criticism. The criticism can’t be that Craig
39 doesn’t care enough about the truth because of the instrumental value of the truth, for
40 that would just be instrumental irrationality again. So the criticism must be that
41 Craig doesn’t care enough about the truth simply because of its non-instrumental
42 (intrinsic, final, what have you) value. There’s one objection to this that I will not
43 pursue. Some have argued for the existence of ‘junk truth’ which allegedly
44 indicates that useless knowledge is without any value at all.11 But we needn’t go
45 so far. The intrinsic or final value of truth is compatible with all that I’m saying,

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1 for even as defenders of the unrestricted value of truth have admitted, ‘there are
2 truths that are not worth knowing and which do not deserve our attention’, for
3 they admit that the value of truth is defeasible, perhaps easily so (Kvanvig 2008:
4 211). What, then, determines whether some truth is worth our attention, in light
5 of this admission? Clearly, personal/practical interests or moral obligations are
6 great candidates. If there were absolutely no costs to doing so, I should memorize
7 the phone book: that seems to follow from the intrinsic value of truth. However,
8 there are costs to doing so (great costs for one such as me!), so no one can say I’m
9 epistemically irresponsible for not trying to do it. This fits quite nicely with my
10 reduction of epistemic irresponsibility to practical or moral irresponsibility.
11 There’s another kind of concern. If I were to consider someone who didn’t
12 value, say, the environment or animal welfare for their own sake, my temptation
13 to tell them they ought to do so looks to me like a temptation to form a moral
14 evaluation. Not to care about such things is to be a bad kind of person; likewise
15 with the lack of ‘sufficient’ desire for truth. This may be something for which I
16 can be morally blameworthy: I might have an ethical duty to my community to seek
17 the truth about matters which might affect its well-being. This is a rich source of
18 responsibility, though wholly moral. In a connected society, what I believe is
19 likely to affect others. So I will often have duties to them to be knowledgeable
20 about various things. This includes, perhaps, giving an accurate account of the
21 nature of the world to offspring. Another form of negative normative evaluation
22 for lack of sufficient desire for truth, assuming there is a human telos for truth in
23 general, is that the agent is just dysfunctional. But in this case, we are unable to
24 discern our sorry state and are, as Aristotle says, to be pitied, not blamed
25 (Nicomachean Ethics III, esp. III.5, see Aristotle/Ross 1998). So there are two
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26 dimensions of moral evaluation which can explain epistemic irresponsibility

27 ascriptions, but in either case, it is moral evaluation if it is not a matter of
28 instrumental rationality. (And even if failure to fulfil one’s telos for truth is
29 considered an epistemic failing, it is not necessarily one for which we can be
30 blamed; that would depend on whether the dysfunction was a result of a vicious
31 act.) So it looks like Premises 4 and 5 above are false.
32
33
34 Summary & Conclusion
35
36 So let’s review the case of Craig the creationist. The datum is that in not reading
37 the books I gave him, Craig is liable to some kind of criticism regarding his belief:
38 it’s irresponsible. It can’t be part of the datum that the criticism is from an
39 irreducibly epistemic point of view, for that’s precisely what’s being questioned.
40 So the datum includes only that Craig is liable to some kind of criticism regarding
41 his epistemic state. But that does not entail that the problem is irreducibly
42 epistemic in nature. And it can’t be sufficient to count as epistemic that it makes a
43 potential impact on one’s doxastic states, for one’s diet can have that effect. It is
44 said that too many carbohydrates will dull one’s thoughts. Anyone returning to
45 the afternoon sessions of a conference after a big lunch can attest to this fact.

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 10 Trent Dougherty

1 Ignoring a recommendation to eat more ‘brain food’ is not, ipso facto, an epistemic
2 shortcoming. It is, rather, a dietary shortcoming with epistemic consequences. No
3 epistemology text should overlap with a cookbook.
4 We set up the case in such a way that it didn’t originally seem to be a problem
5 with Craig’s synchronic justification—his belief seemed to fit the evidence he in
6 fact had to begin with. However, we saw that my testimony changes Craig’s
7 evidence set and that at the time the evidence set changes, what’s synchronically
8 justified for him at that new time changes. Thus if his beliefs don’t change at all
9 we have something to explain our inclination to condemn his belief in the lack of
10 synchronic justification. And though this is purely epistemic, if it were all there
11 were to epistemic irresponsibility judgments then my arguments would have
12 carried the day, for the core responsibilists all say there is more to epistemic
13 responsibility than evidential fit, and this more is something which is modeled on
14 and analogous to but not identical with moral virtue. So one class of cases can be
15 handled in this way. But can we tell the story–as many responsibilists have–so
16 that it is stipulated that Craig’s attitude fits his evidence at the time.
17 If we make this assumption, there is still a sufficient explanation of
18 irresponsibility: it is instrumentally irrational for Craig not to read the books,
19 since if he wants to get the truth, and we supposed he did, he ought to read the
20 books, since he has evidence that reading the books will get him to the truth. The
21 cost is low, the potential payoff, we may assume, is high. And if it’s not a matter
22 of fairly great significance, then of course there’s nothing irresponsible in
23 ignoring it. As Richard Foley points out, ‘the more important the issue, the more
24 time and effort it is reasonable to devote to having accurate and comprehensive
25 beliefs about it. . . . the standards of responsible belief vary with the importance of
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26 the issue under consideration. . . . More precisely, responsible believing does not
27 require extraordinary care unless the issue itself is extraordinarily important’
28 (Foley 2001b: 226).
29 A third explanation is suggested by the second: maybe the problem is that we
30 think Craig doesn’t care enough about the truth. But this also is either a matter of
31 instrumental irrationality if he has a sufficiently strong desire to believe truly on
32 this matter or a purely moral one if he does not have such a desire. But this
33 criticism adverts only to traditionally paradigmatic moral issues whether we
34 characterize it as ‘internal’ in the sense of bad moral character or ‘external’ in the
35 sense of a dysfunctional agent. And the most apt kind of negative moral
36 evaluation here is an ‘externalist’ one, a matter of teleological dysfunction, not a
37 moral one of the sort responsibilists look to for inspiration. There may be a
38 human telos to seek truth, and there might be particular other-regarding moral
39 duties to seek truth on matters of practical importance, but not a general,
40 impersonal duty to seek truth as such (even the arch deontologist Locke held that
41 our duty to seek truth was a duty to another person: God, the architect of our
42 cognitive faculties (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, xvii, 24), see
43 Locke/Nidditch 1979). (And, again, even if the truth has value whether anyone
44 desires it, this value is not necessarily sufficient to trump practical interests, as
45 Kvanvig notes.)

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 Reducing Responsibility 11

1 Importantly, these three explanations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I’m
2 inclined to think they all apply in many relevant cases. Certainly they are
3 compatible, and their overlapping application to one degree or another
4 adequately explains what’s wrong in Craig’s situation and situations relevantly
5 like Craig’s. It seems to me that the case study has the essential features to
6 represent evaluations of epistemic responsibility generally, so I doubt that anti-
7 reductionist virtue responsibilists will be able to find cases that cannot be
8 explained in at least one of the ways I have indicated. And as long as this is so,
9 the imperative to reduce normative categories will push us toward reductionism.
10 That there is such an imperative is a nearly universal assumption among
11 contemporary analytic philosophers, and I am certainly assuming it for the
12 purposes of this argument. I would be very much surprised of the responsibilists
13 I have cited would not accept it as well. This thought can be made more precise in
14 the following simple argument:
15
16
Core Argument
17
18
19
(1) The responsibilist is already committed to the existence of
20
synchronic justification, moral rectitude, and instrumental ration-
21
ality.
22
(2) We ought not multiply types of norms without necessity.
23
(3) So if epistemic responsibility can be explained in terms of
24
synchronic justification, moral rectitude, or instrumental rationality,
25
then the reduction ought to be accepted.
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26
27
28 This paper has been an attempt to affirm the antecedent of the conclusion of the
29 Core Argument establishing the reduction and defeating the Craig Argument
30 against evidentialism above. What the friend of irreducible irresponsibility
31 needs—since (1) is clearly true and (2) is a common assumption—is a case that
32 meets the following criteria: (i) S’s belief that p is irresponsible, but either (ii) S is
33 not synchronically unjustified or morally blameworthy for believing that p or
34 imprudent in accepting p, or (iii) some of these negative epistemic appraisals
35 hold but it is quite clear that these shortcomings have nothing to do with what’s
36 wrong with believing p. For unless such a case can be given, it will always remain
37 plausible that the other forms of negative evaluation are what is behind our
38 judgments. I doubt any sufficiently clear case can be constructed, and so I am
39 confident that Identity will prevail.12
40
41 Trent Dougherty
42 Department of Philosophy
43 Baylor University
44 USA
45 Trent_Dougherty@baylor.edu

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 12 Trent Dougherty

1 NOTES
2
1
3 It is notoriously hard to distinguish between reduction and elimination, but it is not
4 of importance to me how my thesis is seen in this regard.
2
5 There is a classificatory problem here since the list of intellectual virtues is
6 puzzlingly heterogeneous. My target here is certainly not Aristotle’s ‘chief intellectual
virtues’ (Nicomachean Ethics VI.B) (and note that his notion of ‘Practical Wisdom’
7
(Nicomachean Ethics VI.5) is quite different from the notion of instrumental rationality I’ve
8
been using, which is simply decision theoretic), but rather the list one finds common in the
9 responsibilists I’ve been focusing on: conscientiousness, open-mindedness, intellectual
10 courage, intellectual humility, et al. I think all of these could probably be reduced to
11 instrumental rationality. Note that Montmarquet 1993, especially Chapter Two draws a
12 strong connection between the concept of epistemic virtue and love of truth (and he notes
13 a similar connection in Kornblith 1985) which is also at the core of Zagzebski’s view. This
14 provides a basis for a reduction to instrumental rationality. Unfortunately, there is
15 currently no standard taxonomy of the internal virtues, nor is there a very stable definition
16 of ‘responsibility’. This is why I’ve used ostensive definition, pointing to the sorts of
17 irresponsibility judgments expressed in ‘You should have known better’. It is this notion
which has been the traditional focus of responsibilists even if some have departed from it.
18
Hookway also notes this classificatory problem (Hookway 2003: 188).
19 3
After finishing this MS I remembered that Code 1987 features a description of
20 nineteenth-century prominent biologist Philip Gosse’s rejection of evolution on biblical
21 grounds as a prime example of things going wrong intellectually.
22 4
Swinburne 2001, passim. and Conee and Feldman 2004, 189 use this term.
23 5
‘The Ethics of Belief’, in Conee and Feldman 2004, 189.
6
24 Though the Dogmatism Paradox also gets its start from the same phenomenon—
25 resistence to consider contrary evidnece—it is a problem in its own right, so I bracket it for
the purposes of this essay. For discussion of the Dogmatism Paradox see Harman 1973 (he
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26
27 attributes it to Kripke), Sorensen 1988, and Conee 2004.
7
28 This might seem a bit far fetched, since it might seem that such an individual would
have been confronted long before now. This is just a harmless idealization, and it would
29
not be hard to adapt my response to more realistic cases, it’s just that more realistic cases
30
are more messy.
31 8
This could arise either directly from my testimony or via Feldman’s principle that, in
32 the relevant class of cases, ‘Evidence of evidence is evidence’ (in Feldman 2007) or Roger
33 White’s similar ‘Meta-Justification Principle’ (in his 2006). The epistemology of
34 disagreement literature provides many ways of seeing that my disagreement provides
35 contrary and potentially defeating evidence for my interlocutor. The best statements of it
36 are Feldman 2006 and Christensen 2007 and 2009. See Kelly 2005 and forthcoming for the
37 opposing view.
9
38 This concerns propositional justification. There is also what Conee and Feldman 2004
39 refer to as ‘well-founded belief’. It concerns doxastic justification which adds proper
basing to a belief the content of which is propositionally justified, the latter consisting
40
solely in evidential fit. There are many interesting issues regarding the basing relation
41
which are beyond the scope of this paper.
42 10
In his 2001, Swinburne develops a view of ‘diachronic justification’ which is based
43 on the concept of adequate investigation. He gives three criteria for determining adequate
44 justification (pp. 168, 174, and 177, respectively), but it is not clear that it fully generalizes
45

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 Reducing Responsibility 13

1 to the sort of reduction I have in mind here. His thesis seems to be that S’s belief that p is
2 responsible when further investigation does not have positive expected utility. Some of
3 what Swinburne says seems to favor this generalization (178–179 in particular), but a
4 survey of his very detailed theory is beyond the scope of this paper. For a treatment of
epistemic responsibility which also leans heavily on instrumental rationality but is more
5
friendly than Swinburne’s to externalism, see Heil 1983 and 1992.
6 11
Sosa 2004, 156 uses the example of counting grains of sand on the beach. Plantinga
7 1993: 98 uses the example of how many blades of grass are on my front lawn.
8 12
Many thanks to my colleagues at Baylor University for helpful discussion,
9 especially Bob’s Roberts, Kruschwits, and Baird, and also to my excellent assistant Jordan
10 Williams for her invaluable help.
11
12
13
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1 Sosa, E. (2004), ‘The Place of Truth in Epistemology’, in M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds.),
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