Reading Neil Levy’s very good paper on responsibility for belief reminded me that I’ve probably never posted here my view about the connection between voluntarism about belief and deontological conceptions of justification. I keep forgetting this, but I do have one extreme philosophical view. (Most of my views are just mundane common sense, which I regret a little, but sometimes the truth is like that.) I’m a fairly extreme voluntarist about belief. I think there are some propositions that you can come to believe more or less at will, at least with a little practice. I don’t think this is always easy. Moving your beliefs around at will is like moving your arms around at will when there are heavy weights attached to the ends of them. It can be done, but practice helps.

Anyway, I think that the kind of voluntarism we need to defend a deontological conception of justification is actually quite weak, and almost plausible. (It’s certainly true, since stronger versions of voluntarism that are definitely not plausible by current standards are also true.) Let’s start by noting some fairly obvious truths about the connection between voluntary action and moral responsibility. Today was graduation at Brown, and I had an obligation, of a sort, to attend the departmental graduation ceremony. Despite the torrential rain, I did so. Now I could well have stayed at home, and had the game I’d been watching (Wolverhampton-Sheffield playoff for the last premiership position, if you’re keeping score) been any closer or the rain been any heavier, I may well have. Had I done so, I would have been morally culpable. And in part this would have been because it was within my voluntary control to get myself to the graduation ceremony.

Now, I couldn’t have reached the graduation ceremony by just clicking my heels and wishing myself there. I would have been a little drier had I been able to do just that, but sadly it was impossible. But there were a series of actions that were within my direct voluntary control (one foot in front of the other, keep the umbrella pointed towards the wind so it doesn’t invert, etc.) that resulted in my being at the graduation ceremony. It might not be easy to carry out this series of actions, especially in the rain, but as long as the series exists then my presence or otherwise at the graduation is sufficiently under my voluntary control that it I’m responsible for whether or not it happens.

How does this relate to belief? The most direct way it does is if for some beliefs, the ones for which you are responsible, there is a series of voluntary actions you can take such that you’ll end up having that belief. I think that’s sometimes possible, but I don’t want to try convincing you of that here. And the reason for that is that for present purposes I don’t need to. If I could have failed to have a certain belief by performing a series of actions that are under my voluntary control, yet I still have the belief, then that seems like enough for responsibility. And actually it’s rather easy to remove beliefs, at least non-perceptual beliefs, by voluntary actions. The good kind of scepticism, the kind that teaches you to doubt charlatans, fraudsters, used car salesmen, magicians, Republican politicians, spammers with Nigerian millions, news that’s too good to be true, stories that are too incredible to be fiction, anything said by philosophers and so on, basically consists in an exhortation to doubt everything doubtable. And that kind of exhortation can work, especially when presented the right way. If we do our job in teaching entry level philosophy courses, one of the skills we generate is the ability to doubt at will, and this kind of doubt defeats belief.

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Take any claim that you believed at first but later regretted believing. In America this should be easy – unless you disbelieved every factual claim made by the administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war, there’s probably something you believed and regretted. (I’m cheating a little here. The adminstration did say things like that Saddam is evil and the Iraqi people would be better off with him removed, which are both true, and even factual on a cognitivist theory of morality. Ignore these claims. I’m sure most readers believed them then, and don’t regret believing them now. The claims about the military capacities and threats of the Iraqis are what we care about here. The basic administration line, recall, was that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the U.S. and that they were so weak militarily that a few thousand soldiers and some smart bombs should see them out. It’s the parts of that line that I’m focussing on.) Many people, for example, believed what Colin Powell said at his presentation at the U.N. about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons capacity, and I’m sure some of them regret so doing. I think many of these people could have, if they had tried hard enough, remained sceptical about these claims. They could have retained a sceptical doubt even in the face of apparently sincere assertion by Sec. Powell. If they couldn’t have done just this, their regret would be at least a little misplaced. Not entirely, since we can regret things that are outside our voluntary control, but a little I suspect. And I think this kind of situation is one in which we often find ourselves. It’s natural to take things at face value, to believe what people say, but we don’t have to do this, and we often shouldn’t.

That’s all we need I think to salvage a deontological conception of justification. We don’t need that people can believe at will. We don’t even need that people can doubt at will. We just need that there are procedures we can use, the kinds of procedures we teach students in critical reasoning courses, that if properly carried out will lead to doubt and hence not to belief. If the agent could have carried out these procedures, but believes anyway, then s/he is culpable, because her/his belief is in the relevant sense under her/his voluntary control – it was within her/his power to not have that belief.

That much I think is fairly moderate. The radical bit is where I try and turn this into an argument that one can generate beliefs just as easily as one can destroy them. But I might leave that for a different late night blog.