An Inductive Risk Account of the Ethics of Belief

Abstract

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents’ doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the “doxastic strategies” of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on “processes” in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent’s reflectively available “reasons” which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.