With this account of epistemic reasons on board, we can understand belief norms as requirements that derive their normative authority from reasons for belief. This is a kind of buck-passing account since the normativity of the ought claim rests on the normativity of reasons that underlie it. The locution ‘given the evidence, one ought to believe that it is raining’ captures in plain language the thought that reasons for belief, in this case evidence for the belief that it is raining, support obligations to the relevant beliefs. In this case, we can imagine that there are strong, perhaps decisive, epistemic reasons to believe that it is raining. This tight connection between belief norms and reasons for belief is not universally endorsed, and there is a fascinating literature on the relationship between reasons and requirements or obligations.68 Parfit seems to accept a buck-passing view of ‘ought’ in On What Matters. His position is that there is a sense of ‘ought’ that is intimately tied to normative reasons. Although he formulates it strictly in terms of actional oughts and reasons for action, his account should apply to belief oughts as well:
When we have decisive reasons, or most reason, to act in some way, this act is what we should or ought to do in what we can call the decisive-
reason-implying senses. Even if we never use the phrases ‘decisive
reason’ or ‘most reason’, most of us often use ‘should’ and ‘ought’ in these reason-implying senses.69
Transposed to the belief case, when we have decisive reason or most reason to hold a
68 Broome, D. (1999). “Reasons and Requirements”; Gert, B. (2009). Brute Rationality. OUP; Kolodny, N.
(2005). “Why be rational?” Mind, 114, 509-563.
belief p, then we should believe that p. Dancy also defends a buck-passing view of ought claims and mounts powerful arguments against those who maintain that the buck cannot be passed from reasons to oughts.70 While it is far beyond the scope of this project to mount a complete defense of the relationship between norms and reasons, I think there is strong philosophical precedent for such a view.
Since there are several different kinds of epistemic reasons, we might expect that a multitude of different epistemic norms, distinguished by the type of underlying
epistemic reason. It is clear that motivating reasons, cannot ground epistemic norms, since their primary role is explanation rather than justification. Restricting our attention to normative epistemic reasons, we can recognize epistemic obligations that are grounded on subjective reasons, such as the agent’s other beliefs and desires. That an agent
believes that she is thinking may provide her with a decisive normative reason for believing she exists, and for this reason she might be obliged to believe that she exists. More controversially, someone might hold that an agent’s strong desire to beat cancer may give her a decisive normative reason to believe that she will beat it, and for this reason she might be obliged to believe that will beat it. In both of these cases, an element of the agent’s psychology functions as the normative reason that underlies the epistemic norm. This role can also be played by an objective epistemic reason. The example given above of the obligation to believe that it is raining outside might be grounded on the strong evidential reasons for believing it. If the agent is has all the relevant evidence, and there is no reason to think she is being deceived, then we might hold that she ought to believe that it is raining outside. In this case, the epistemic reasons that underlie the epistemic norm are objective, perspective-independent facts about the atmospheric
conditions and the agent’s location with respect to them. This last fact is important, since even really strong objective evidence for a given proposition might fail to establish any epistemic obligations for someone, if the evidence is unavailable to her.
There are also norms that require an agent to engage in some sort of belief-
producing action. Since these are norms that require actions, rather than beliefs, they will be justified by normative reasons for action of either the subjective or objective type. If an agent strongly wants to have true beliefs about some subject, and if she has no conflicting desires, she might have an obligation to believe seek evidence or to
reflectively on the strength of the evidence she already has. The basis of this epistemic norm is comprised by subjective reasons for action that are given by one of the agent’s desires. By contrast an actional norm might be based on objective reasons for action. We might think that moral considerations having to do with avoiding preventable harm give an agent a strong reason to see whether her car tires are appropriately inflated. Both of these norms are similar in that they require actions that have significant epistemic upshots. In the first case, the underlying reasons are subjective, and in the latter they are objective.
This clearing of the conceptual space, though tedious and at some remove from questions of moral responsibility for ignorant action, will pay off in subsequent sections. The central question for this chapter and the next is which sort of epistemic norms are relevant to questions of culpable ignorance and moral responsibility. The remaining portion of this chapter will focus on whether ignorance traceable to violations of actional epistemic norms is culpable. I will first consider actional epistemic norms whose basis is subjective reasons for action. By way of preview, I will argue that agents who violate
these epistemic obligations are not culpably ignorant in a way that would establish moral responsibility for action on her ignorance. Then I discuss actional epistemic norms whose basis is objective reasons for action. I show that agents who fall short of these norms can be culpably ignorant and morally responsible for action on that ignorance. In the following chapter, I will discuss belief norms. There I will argue that, given the nature of the epistemic reasons that ground belief norms, an agent who falls short of such expectations does not thereby show that she has a poor quality of will.