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June 05, 2009
New paper: The elusiveness of doxastic compatibilism
While moral theorists regularly appeal to compatibilist accounts of freedom in order to reconcile the concept of moral responsibility with the prospect of determinism, few epistemologists are as concerned to find a workable doxastic compatibilism to underwrite the concept of epistemic responsibility. I suggest that, at least for internalists about justification, epistemic responsibility is crucial and so some version of doxastic compatibilism is necessary for those who take the prospect of determinism seriously. In this paper, I survey Matthias Steup's recent attempt to formulate just such a version of doxastic compatibilism, modeled along the lines of traditional proposals for compatibilism about the freedom of action. I argue, however, that Steup's proposal does not work, mostly on his own terms. After attempting to refine his proposal to meet my counterexamples, I express a general skepticism about the workability of doxastic compatibilism, and offer a brief libertarian account of doxastic freedom that I believe should be taken seriously by those internalist epistemologists who take epistemic responsibility seriously.
Posted by Ben at June 5, 2009 12:34 AM