There’s lots of interesting comments in the thread on disagreement below. I’m about to head off to the SOFIA conference, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to dive into the debate when I’m back. In the meantime, here is the almost complete draft of the doxastic responsibility paper I’ve mentioned a few times here.

bq. “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DatD.pdf

The paper tries to cover a lot of ground. Here are the key points.

* We need to distinguish the claims that beliefs are volitional from the claims that they are voluntary and that they are free. (The importance of this distinction is made clear in Ryle’s _Concept of Mind_, and it plays an important role in some contemporary moral psychology.)
* We also need to distinguish claims about whether belief formation is volitional/voluntary/free from claims about whether belief maintenance is volitional/voluntary/free.
* So there are six possible claims here, and if any of them are true that would imply that we have some level of responsibility for beliefs.
* Given that, whether belief formation is volitional isn’t particularly relevant to whether we have responsibility for beliefs.
* There are close parallels between belief formation/maintenance and other actions that are free (and perhaps voluntary) and beliefs, from which I conclude that the formation and maintenance of many beliefs is free (and perhaps voluntary).
* But some beliefs (esp perceptual beliefs) are formed unfreely, and at least in the short term are maintained unfreely.
* So while we have responsibility for some beliefs, we don’t have responsibility for all beliefs, and this matters for epistemology.
* This dichotomy opens up a defence of externalism from the new evil demon argument. The defence is similar to, though I think not quite identical with, the defence offered by externalists such as “Clayton Littlejohn”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF).
* Although epistemic justification is a deontological concept, it should not be construed as being something like blamelessness; rather, having justified beliefs for which one is responsible is a respect in which one is praiseworthy.

Along the way, there are a few asides about will, self-control, evidence and other concepts, as well as a running commentary (mostly in footnotes) on the relevance of various Rylean observations to my argument and to various related works in moral psychology. So the paper is probably not as focussed as it might have been, but I hope it is fun anyway!

On a different note, but keeping with the theme of the blog in recent days, the final “Arché Vagueness Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/vagueness/index.html will be held this June, and the call for papers is at the attached link. It’s a lot of fun being in St Andrews, especially when there’s all that daylight around the solstice, and it looks like the philosophy they’ll have on show will be absolutely first class.