Abstract Vice epistemology studies how character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles systematically get in the way of knowledge, while doxastic responsibility is concerned with what kinds of responses are appropriate towards agents who believe badly. This paper identifies a new connection between these two fields, arguing that our propensity to take responsibility for our doxastic failures is directly relevant for vice epistemology, and in particular, understanding the social obstacles to knowledge that epistemic vices can create. This is because responses to norm violations are an important mechanism by which norms are upheld, and maintaining epistemic norms is crucial for our collective epistemic successes. This paper then identifies a new kind of vice, one which is bad precisely because of the way it undermines the epistemic norms that our blaming practices help maintain, and thus the benefits that said norms create. I call this vice epistemic evasiveness, and it concerns the attitude that one takes towards their own performance as an epistemic agent. Evasiveness is bad because it creates uncertainty about which agents are reliable, it prevents holders of this attitude from learning from their mistakes, and it signals to third parties that the norm is not being upheld, making them less likely to follow the norm. 

/pdf/vice-epistemology-norm-maintenance-and-epistemic-evasiveness-25g1m7vh.pdf

Vice epistemology, norm-maintenance and epistemic evasiveness

Abstract Does having a mental disorder excuse bad behavior? On a standard naïve view, the mentally ill are often regarded as clear examples of individuals lacking full-fledged freedom and responsibility. However, our evolving understanding of the brain and human agency reveals that there is more agency in mental disorders than it might seem at first blush. Psychopathology affects agency in such a variety of ways that it’s difficult to draw an inference about one’s moral responsibility merely from the fact that one has a mental disorder. Symptoms only sometimes reduce one’s agency and sometimes enhance it. This nuanced view paves the way for a cognitive continuum on which all people lie, which can help to reduce the stigma we commonly attach to mental disorders. 

Mental Disorder

Abstract The primary aim of this chapter is to better understand how responsible action is connected to our evaluative stances as agents. According to the theory of basic responsibility, agents are guided by their representations such that, when responsible, their actions reveal the things that matter to them. Unlike traditional views, however, the theory understands these cares as being partially constituted by those responsible doings. It is through an agent’s activities that their preferences, priorities, and cares are composed. With this general approach in hand, the chapter argues that similar treatments can be given for assessment of character and attitudes. Character assessments can be understood as more general, cumulative assessments built out of responsible doings. The cruel person is just one who is responsible for many cruel things. Similarly, the chapter argues that agents are not separably responsible for their attitudes. Instead, the sexist is blameworthy due to their sexist activities (which can include mental activities like considering, attending to, endorsing, and so on). The chapter also criticizes a common distinction in the literature between two purported kinds of responsibility (attributability and accountability), reiterating the theory’s commitment to providing a unified view of responsibility. 

Beyond Basic Responsibility

Extract Immanuel Kant famously proclaimed: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” I would add the three-pound organ between my ears. It’s no understatement to say we’re in the age of brain science. We’ve come so far since the days of lobotomies and phrenology, and yet we remain largely ignorant of how these billions of neurons generate the mind. Since the brain is the seat of the self, this new frontier brings forth new ethical conundrums and forces us to reconsider the conception of ourselves as rational, virtuous creatures with free will. As with all frontiers, there is the risk of excessive zeal and overreach. Unlocking the mysteries of the brain and deploying novel neurotechnologies is both alluring and scary. Many scientists and ethicists are led to speculate about and oversell the prospects or perils of the science. We’re sometimes told that advances in neurobiology reveal that free will is a farce but that these same advances also have the power to make us superhuman. Ethical alarm bells ring with urgency. 

Preface

Subject Moral Philosophy Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online 

Dedication

According to a popular line of thought, being excluded from interpersonal life is to be exempted from accountability, and vice versa. In ordinary life, this is most often illustrated by the treatment of people with serious psychological disorders. When people are excluded from valuable domains on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics (such as race and sex), they are discriminated against, prevented from receiving the benefits of participation in those domains for morally irrelevant reasons. Exemption from accountability—via exclusion from the interpersonal domain—seems to prevent exempted parties from receiving crucial human goods for morally irrelevant reasons. This chapter discusses two widely deployed ways of trying to ameliorate morally costly disabilities. Both fail to apply viably to various psychopathologies. The solution involves disentangling accountability and interpersonality in a way that also provides insights into our shared human nature. 

Disordered, Disabled, Disregarded, Dismissed

When Tom Brady throws an interception, he yells at himself and pounds his fists on his helmet. When Serena Williams misses a shot, she breaks her racket. When Tiger Woods misses a long putt, he falls to his knees and shakes his head. These athletes are clearly blaming themselves. Surprisingly, though, current theories of blame have a very hard time accounting for such cases. Most theories of blame take other-blame – directly expressed dyadic blame – as their paradigm, typically thought to be a response to poor quality of will or moral wrongdoing and consisting of some kind of relationship modification, communication, or protest. None of these features seems to apply in the cases of athletic self-blame. Recently, some theorists have taken self-blame to be a more fundamental paradigm than other-blame, but they are focused on self-blame as guilt, which again can’t capture the athletic cases, because Tom, Serena, and Tiger aren’t feeling anything like guilt when they blame themselves. As a result of these problems, I offer a new theory of self-blame, one that starts by theorizing directly about the athletic cases. I draw from some fascinating recent psychological work on the phenomenon of self-talk to make the case that the emotional core of self-blame is in fact very different than that of other-blame, as is evidenced in a new puzzle I introduce about hypocrisy and its limits. 

SILVA M.M

Papers

Disordered, Disabled, Disregarded, Dismissed

The Trials and Tribulations of Tom Brady