Abstract
Beliefs are held to norms in a way that seems to require control over what we believe. Yet we don’t control our beliefs at will, in the way we control our actions. I argue that this problem can be solved by recognising a different form of control, which we exercise when we revise our beliefs directly for reasons. We enjoy this form of attitudinal control not only over our beliefs, but also over other attitudes, including intentions—that is, over the will itself. Closely tied to our capacity for reasoning, attitudinal control is in important respects more fundamental than the voluntary control that we exercise over our actions. In the course of developing this account I respond to two objections recently raised against an earlier version of it by Booth (Synthese 191:1867–1880, 2014).
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Notes
In this paper, ‘actions’ refers to bodily actions. I will ignore mental actions.
I use terms like ‘doing’, ‘conduct’ and ‘behaviour’ broadly, to include believing. This is just a terminological expedient.
The relevant sense of responsibility here is a generalisation of something like what Scanlon (forthcoming) calls ‘moral reaction responsibility’, as opposed to ‘substantive responsibility’.
See McHugh (2013) for more.
It is sometimes suggested that such a link follows from the ‘ought implies can’ principle. While there is something importantly right about this, in its simple form the inference is a non-sequitur (Chuard and Southwood 2009).
Emotions like fear might seem to constitute exceptions to some of these claims. After all, you can have reasons to be afraid, but it’s not so clear that fear is under your control. It seems to me, though, that fear is under your control to the extent needed for my claims to go through (see §5 below and McHugh (2013)). I intend to discuss this issue further on another occasion.
Arguably, if you ought to believe that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, that is not just because of the overwhelming evidence, but also because you have practical reasons to have a view on the matter. This raises interesting issues, but they don’t affect what I want to say here.
This is not to confuse the question whether we’re responsible for a certain domain of conduct with the question what the content of the norms governing that conduct is. You can be generically responsible for your conduct in a domain even if there are no norms specific to that domain. But in the case of belief there are norms proper to this domain—epistemic ones—and we’re interested in your responsibility with respect to these.
Intentions to form or not form intentions of certain types can play a role in planning, and arguably in resolution. The fact remains that we don’t form and revise particular intentions by forming and executing intentions to do so.
It is sometimes held that the relevant form of control must be a kind of indirect voluntary control—‘indirect’ in the sense that it involves getting yourself to, e.g, acquire certain beliefs, by first doing certain other things that will bring this outcome about. But that misdiagnoses the error behind (iii). The error is in supposing that the only relevant kind of control is that which can get you to respond to incentives. Being able to get yourself to believe that the sky is green for an incentive isn’t plausibly the sort of thing that matters for epistemic responsibility.
In distinguishing ‘taking’ something to be a reason from reacting to that reason, I am not assuming that doing something for a reason requires having a belief about that reason. I use talk of ‘taking’ just to mark the distinction between two ways for reasons-responsiveness to fail.
See McCormick (2011) for discussion of how to apply the ownership condition in the epistemic case.
Steward (2012) is an exception.
I am neutral on whether determinism is, in general, compatible with responsibility, and for this reason I don’t use the label ‘doxastic compatibilism’ for my view. The question I am interested in is whether there are any special reasons to be worried about epistemic responsibility in particular.
The house-building example is from Korsgaard (2009).
Reasoning can also lead to dropping or withholding an attitude. For simplicity I focus on reasoning that leads to acquiring an attitude.
It is sometimes held that only truths can be motivating reasons (e.g. Alvarez 2010). Still, falsehoods can be considerations in the light of which one holds an attitude, and in that sense can be reasons for which attitudes are held. It doesn’t matter for my purposes whether we restrict the label ‘motivating reasons’ to truths.
I say ‘full-blown’ in order not to rule out ‘sub-intentional actions’ (O’Shaughnessy 1980). These are not done for reasons. If there are such actions and we are responsible for them, then this is because they are susceptible to being performed, modified or stopped intentionally and hence for reasons.
See Shah (2013) for such an account.
Hieronymi (2009b) makes similar claims. One might wonder why a belief that you get yourself to have by executing an intention doesn’t thereby count as held for whatever reason the intention was held for. After all, an action counts as performed for the reason for which the corresponding intention was held, and if the action is one of getting yourself into a certain state, you can also count as being in that state for that reason. But even if you can count in this derivative sense as being in the state of believing for a practical reason—and there are serious difficulties with this (Williams 1972; Winters 1979; Bennett 1990)—your situation would be very different to that of someone who believes for a reason in the ordinary sense. Believing for a reason in the ordinary sense involves reasoning, or being disposed to reason, from that reason to that belief, as opposed to reasoning to an intention concerning that belief. This deep difference is worth marking in our terminology.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Davor Bodrožić, Miloud Belkoniene, Matthew Chrisman, Tony Booth, Fabian Dorsch, Magnus Frei, Matthias Steup, Jonathan Way, Daniel Whiting, and the editors of this special issue. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/K008188/1].
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McHugh, C. Attitudinal control. Synthese 194, 2745–2762 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0643-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0643-7