CRITICAL D ISCUSSI ON Belief-Policies Cannot Ground Doxastic Responsibility

William Alston has provided a by now well-known objection to the deontological conception of epistemic justification by arguing that since we lack control over our beliefs, we are not responsible for them. It is widely acknowledged that if Alston’s argument is convincing, then it seems that the very idea of doxastic responsibility is in trouble. In this article, I attempt to refute one line of response to Alston’s argument. On this approach, we are responsible for our beliefs in virtue of the fact that we have certain belief-policies, that is, policies about what (not) to believe in certain circumstances. I present the advocate of this strategy with a dilemma: either belief-policies are themselves beliefs or they are not. If they are, then they are as involuntary as our other beliefs. If they are not, then they cannot make a difference to the beliefs we hold. I conclude that if we bear doxastic responsibility, it should not be explained in terms of our belief-policies. In ‘‘The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification,’’ a by now classical article, William Alston argues that epistemic justification should not be spelled out in terms of obligations, permissions, praise, blame, and responsibility. His main argument for this thesis runs as follows: (P1) We are obligated to believe certain propositions only if we have sufficient voluntary control over our beliefs. (P2) We do not have sufficient voluntary control over our beliefs. (C) We do not have doxastic obligations. R. Peels (&) Philosophy Department, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13a, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 1 For this argument, see Alston (1989), 115–136. 123 Erkenn DOI 10.1007/s10670-012-9384-5