| abstract | To be a doxastic deontologist is to claim that there is such a thing as an
ethics of belief (or of our doxastic attitudes in general). In other words, that we are
subject to certain duties with respect to our doxastic attitudes, the non-compliance
with which makes us blameworthy and that we should understand doxastic justification
in terms of these duties. In this paper, I argue that these duties are our all things
considered duties, and not our epistemic or moral duties, for example. I show how this
has the surprising result that, if deontologism is a thesis about doxastic justification,
it entails that there is no such thing as epistemic or moral justification for a belief
that p. I then suggest why this result, though controversial, may have some salutary
consequences: primarily that it helps us make some sense of an otherwise puzzling
situation regarding doxastic dilemmas. |
