The proposal I will consider is that certain agents who fall short of belief norms are culpably ignorant only if the belief norm is underwritten by both epistemic reasons and moral reasons. It is commonplace to talk about agents who stand in certain professional or care-giving roles as having role-specific obligations to act in certain ways. For example, doctors and parents should act in ways that is conducive to the well-being of those in their care. We also speak as if they have obligations to have certain beliefs or that they should avoid certain types of ignorance. For example, parents should know that their children need sleep and certain essential nutrients in their diet. It is important to recognize that these latter obligations are not necessarily obligations to act so as to ensure
76 There is an interesting question here about whether it is possible for moral reasons to support a belief norm
that is not also supported by epistemic reasons. Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud suggest something like this in their discussions of epistemic partiality. They hold that the duties of friendship may require us not to conform our beliefs to the best evidence.
that the agents have certain beliefs or avoid ignorance. Rather, they are obligations to believe. As I discussed in the taxonomy of epistemic norms in chapter 3, the verb that falls under the scope of ‘should’ is ‘believe’ as opposed to ‘act’ or ‘do’. In the case I have been discussing, the parent has an obligation to believe what reliable medical professionals have told her regarding her child’s medical condition. This belief norm is just a joint application of the more general norm requiring believers to believe in
accordance with evidence and to defer to reliable epistemic authorities. The mother and the neighbor fall short of the same belief norm, but, since it is underwritten by moral reasons in the parent’s case, the parent’s ignorance is morally significant. This moral significance might form the basis for the claim that the parent’s ignorance is culpable and that she is responsible for any harm her child might suffer. In the neighbor’s case,
culpability is blocked because, though she falls short of the same belief norm, it is not underwritten by moral reasons. Her ignorance is epistemically significant, to be sure. We think that it reflects on the neighbor qua believer, that her beliefs do not accord with her evidence. This merely epistemic failure is not morally significant and seems like a less viable candidate for establishing culpable ignorance. As a general strategy for figuring out which belief norm violations, if any, are relevant to the epistemic condition, we can simply assess whether the belief norm has a single basis in epistemic reasons, or whether it has a dual basis in both epistemic and moral reasons. Of course, the feasibility of the dual basis view depends on whether we can make sense of the idea that moral reasons can support belief norms.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to think that this dual basis view of belief norms is not feasible. The first simply that morality is typically understood to involve the
evaluation of actions. Most of our moral discourse and deliberation seems to be aimed at answering the question of what to do rather than what to believe. Moreover, most
contemporary discussions of moral reasons conceive of them as considerations that favor a certain action.77 Of course, many reasons theorists characterize reasons for belief in a similar way - as considerations that favor a certain belief. However general their account of reasons might be, when the discussion concerns moral value or moral wrongness, the relevant reasons seem to be exclusively reasons for action.78 If this each of these
reflections on morality is right, then how can we make sense of belief norms being part of morality? Additionally, if moral reasons are understood as reason for action, can moral reasons underwrite norms requiring belief?
One obvious line of response to this worry is to note that the sphere of morality includes non-actional elements such as character traits and emotions. In his defense of a position that is similar to the one I am considering here, Sher notes that, even granting that morality is primarily concerned with the assessment of actions, there is room for moral evaluation of other non-actional features79. He says:
Because the standards in terms of which we assess people’s traits, feelings, and attitudes clearly are offshoots of our moral scheme, it is evidently possible for the demands of action-guiding morality to ramify in many non-action-guiding
directions.80
77 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Chapter one. 78 Ibid., 153.
79 Sher, ibid. p. 113. 80ibid.
If moral norms can require us to be generous or trustworthy, and if they can require that we feel disgust or shame, then there is no room for the argument that norms cannot require beliefs because that is to require a non-action. With this expanded account of what can be required by morality, we cannot rule out belief norms on the grounds that they are not norms of action.
This response to the worry that moral reasons cannot underlie belief norms is unsatisfactory. Simply pointing to the fact that there are types of moral evaluation that are non-actional is no positive defense of the claim that an agent’s beliefs can be morally evaluated as well. The question confronting us is whether morality ramifies in a way that it includes belief norms. The answer to this question might still be no, even if we accept that moral evaluation ramifies to other non-actional domains. This is not say that what Sher says in the quotation is false. It certainly does seem possible for our moral scheme to expand beyond action evaluation. What we need are reasons to think that we should so expand it.
I think, however, that there is a central worry about extending or expanding morality so that it subsumes belief norms. It might be thought that the normativity of belief is already fully accounted for by epistemic reasons and that any inclination to think that there are moral reasons for belief norms is actually a conflation of a two distinct normative domains. I will refer to this as the conflation objection. Continuing with this line of thought, what seem like moral reasons for belief are actually moral reasons for
acting in a way that provides us with evidence for a certain proposition. Once the
evidence is acquired, however, our belief formation is governed by belief norms that call for forming beliefs in accordance with the evidence. In this second phase we are not
acting at all. We are simply forming beliefs in response to the evidence we now possess, and, ideally, we are forming beliefs in a way that conforms to belief norms. This is a two-step process that should be familiar – there are moral reasons that support performing evidence producing actions and there are epistemic reasons for forming certain beliefs given the newly produced evidence. This might be offered as an
alternative proposal in every case where there seems to be a moral reason supporting a belief norm. For example, in the parent case discussed above, rather than hold that there are moral reasons that underlie the belief norm that requires true beliefs about the child’s allergies, this alternative picture has it that the parent has moral reasons to act in a way that is conducive to maintaining her belief and that these actions provide her with evidence for her belief. This strategy, if it is workable, has the attractive feature of keeping two seemingly autonomous domains of normativity distinct. According to the conflation objection, the problem with the dual basis view of belief norms is not that moral reasons can only ground actional norms. Rather, the conflation objection shows that it is unnecessary to appeal to belief norm violations in order to establish that some bit of ignorance is culpable. In the next two sections, I hope to develop these claims much further.
In the absence of a positive argument for expanding morality in the direction that the dual basis view requires, and in the presence of the conflation objection, the idea that there can be belief norms are grounded on the same reasons as plain moral norms seems at best unmotivated and at worst stillborn. In the next section, I evaluate an attempt to make a positive case for including belief norms in the set of norms that are relevant to assessments of moral responsibility. This positive argument is that certain cases of