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Clayton Littlejohn on Justified Normative Judgments

Matt,

Thanks for your extensive comments, you and Jeremy have given lots to think about. Just to clarify a little, if I'm reading you correctly you think that it's possible for situations to arise where:
(i) S's belief that p is justified and false;
(ii) S is epistemically permitted to treat p as a reason for action (for choices that S knows to be p-dependent);
(iii) S is _not_ practically permitted to act on p (i.e., do that which S ought to do if p were true where S knows this is what S ought to do if p);
(iv) (i)-(iii) can hold if 'p' is the proposition that the agent is permitted to A.

I think part of what makes this confusing is that I'd think if (i)-(iv) could be satisfied, the gin/petrol case would be the case where these conditions are satisfied. But, you seem to insist that he's permitted/justified to drink the petrol (share the petrol with friends?) and that permission/justification seems practical. Suppose our agent reasons as follows:

I've promised A I'd get us a gin drink. This is a gin drink and I'm permitted to drink it. So, we should drink this one

As our drinker and his partner head to the hospital, I say that he should be excused for giving the petrol to his partner because he reasonably thought that it was gin. I'm happy to say that and no more. So, I'm happy to say that his relevant normative judgment (i.e., that it's permissible to drink the stuff he shared with A) is false. (I'm not going to say that it's justified/permissible/consistent with discharging his epistemic duties, etc...). You say that's too weak--what he did was permissible. But, then his normative belief isn't justified and false. It's epistemically justified and true.

Matt McGrath on Justified Normative Judgments

Hi Clayton,

I'll jump in here. Your response to Jeremy brings up a number of interesting questions. I will consider several of these (apologies for length).

1. What is the relationship between talk about reasons and talk about appropriately treating something as a reason?

Jeremy and I tend to talk about having a reason rather than appropriately treating something as a reason. But you are right to ask about the relation between the two, and between these two and epistemically qualified statuses like p’s being warranted enough to be a reason you have to PHI. We are sympathetic to the following claims:

i. If p is a reason you have to PHI, you are appropriate to treat p as a reason to PHI.
ii. If p is warranted enough to be a reason you have to PHI, you are epistemically appropriate to use p as a reason to PHI.

We would not want to drop ‘epistemically’ in (ii). Suppose you are grading and you know a student likes Neil Diamond. You cannot stand Neil Diamond or those who like his music. Is it appropriate to treat the fact that the student likes that music as a reason to flunk him? That sounds wrong, but for reasons irrelevant to the epistemic status of the fact for you. So, we would not accept JB2 in your last comment.

2. Do we have to include a qualification ‘epistemically’ or ‘warranted enough’ in any proposed connection between epistemic and practical justification?

In the book, we do affirm some relationships between knowledge and action without those qualifications. We say:

If you know R is a conclusive reason there is for you to PHI, then you have a conclusive reason to PHI, viz. R.

If you know that there is most reason for you to PHI, then you should PHI.

But we do not claim these hold for justified belief, because of worries about act-availability. Those worries would also spoil the corresponding wide-scope rational requirement to be such that if you believe R is a conclusive reason there is for you to PHI, then PHI. We are sympathetic to a similar requirement involving intending to PHI, as some Brad suggests. However, in some rather wild cases even the intentions might not be available, and so perhaps we need to retreat to a requirement like this: be such that if you believe R is a conclusive reason there is for you to PHI, then you don’t intend not to PHI.

3. If you are justified in believing that you ought to PHI, and justified belief is all you need to make something warranted enough to be a reason to PHI, how could it fail to be true that you ought to PHI?

Suppose we think of oughts as grounded in reasons. What you ought to do is what you have most undefeated reason to do, or something like that. Here is the answer to the question of (3), then: it could be that you ought to PSI, rather than PHI, because your reasons to PSI beat out, perhaps just barely, your reasons to PHI, but you are nonetheless justified in thinking your reasons favor PHI-ing, and so justified in thinking you ought to PHI. You might be justified in this false belief because you miscalculated the reasons or relied on the normally reliable word of someone else who knew your reasons, etc.

4. Finally, a clarification about the gin/petrol case. We discuss this case as part of an argument that one can have something as a reason even if it is false. We take it to be plausible that the guy in this case is perfectly reasonable/rational/justified in reaching for a drink, despite the fact that it contains not gin but very well-disguised petrol. If you can only have true reasons, it gets harder to find sufficient reasons to ground this reasonableness. One can try turning to the likes of I think it’s gin or it looks like gin, but there are two problems here. One is that these look like weaker justifications than this is gin. But it seems the guy with petrol in his glass is exactly as reasonable to reach for a drink as the guy with gin. (Mark Schroeder makes these and related points in his really nice paper, “Having Reasons.”) The other is that it is pretty clear that what motivates the guy to reach for a drink is not any consideration about what he is thinking or even about the appearances, but simply the consideration that, mmm, here is a glass of gin! So, his motivating reason – the consideration that moves him to reach – is a falsehood. And since the very same linguistic oddities that are used to raise doubts about whether normative reasons-possessed can be falsehoods are found in the case of motivating reasons, too, this is encouragement to think that those oddities do not show us that normative reasons-possessed must be true. (The statement ‘The reason for which he reached for the glass was that it contained gin’ sounds no better and no worse to our ears than ‘He had a reason to reach for the glass, namely that it contained gin’.)

Clayton Littlejohn on Justified Normative Judgments

Hey Jeremy,

Thanks, you've given me a lot to think about. I'll need to respond in shifts.

I probably didn't make this sufficiently clear in the post, but there's The View and there's The View-light. I took you and Matt to be defending something in the neighborhood of the view, in part, because of remarks like this concerning the gin/petrol example, "… it is highly plausible that if two subjects have all the same very strong evidence for my glass contains gin, believe that proposition on the basis of this evidence, and then act on the belief in reaching to take a drink, those two subjects are equally justified in their actions and equally justified in treating what they each did as a reason, even if one of them, the unlucky one, has cleverly disguised petrol in his glass rather than gin."

I took you to be saying that if p is justifiably believed (w/knowledge-level justification), p is justifiably acted upon where that means that there's no practical obligation to refrain from acting on p. Rather than endorse:

(W-Con) SO(SBSOΦ → SOΦ)

Here's a possible counterexample to (W-Con) the view I thought you were committing yourselves to avoids. SBOΦ but Φ-ing is permissible and refraining from Φ-ing is permissible. Provided that someone can be obliged to believe that they ought to Φ, such cases are counterexamples to (W-Con).

Something safer avoids that view:

(WeakWide) SO(SO~Φ → S~BSOΦ)

The idea is that if S believes she ought to Φ and it's not the case that S ought to refrain from such a belief, it's not the case that she ought to refrain from Φ-ing. The gin/petrol passage suggested that you thought that if it's permissible to believe that you ought to Φ, it's permissible to treat _that you ought to Φ_ as a reason for action (e.g., when reasoning to the necessary means, sufficient means, etc...). I can't tell whether you want to give up (WeakWide) as well, but I suspect that given a fallibilist view of justified belief, (WeakWide) will generate problems structurally similar to (W-Con). No special pleading for 'oughts', but special pleading for 'mays'?

This touches on an issue that I'm interested in. Some seem resistant to the idea that justifiably/permissibly believing p entails justifiably/permissibly treating p as a reason for action for some p-dependent choice because the _kind_ of justifications differ. As I read your remarks here:

"When trying to determine what is true – that is, in forming beliefs – we draw conclusions from the reasons we have. The same goes for trying to decide what to do. Here, too, we draw conclusions about what to do – we form intentions – from the reasons we have. We bring reasons into our reasoning knowing that we might draw all sorts of conclusions from them along the way, some practical and some theoretical” (forthcoming: 78)"

I thought the view you were recommending was something stronger than the view that says it is mere epistemic propriety at issue. When you justifiably believe p and take p to count as a reason in favor of Φ-ing, it is neither epistemically nor practically improper/impermissible/unwarranted/wrong/unjustified to do so. Anyway, it's hard for me to assess the view, in part, because I thought you were committing to something like this and figured that this sort of view naturally supports (WeakWide) given some further assumptions about reasons and oughts.

In your remarks you said, "If you can have knowledge-level justification for falsehoods, then you can have knowledge-level justification for false propositions about what you ought to do." That's an interesting move. I had two questions here. First, would you be willing to say both:

(i) If you can have knowledge-level justification for falsehoods, then you can have knowledge-level justification for false propositions about what you ought to do.
(ii) If you can have knowledge-level justification for falsehoods, then you can have knowledge-level justification for false propositions about what you ought to believe (including beliefs about what you ought to do).

I guess if you accept both (i) and (ii), you could still hold onto certain wide-scope principles linking permissible belief about what ought to be done with permissible doings in accordance with belief.

Second, when you have the false, justified belief: [Φ-ing is either permissible or mandatory], can you justifiably Φ and and justifiably treat this (false) proposition as a reason for action (e.g., in reasoning towards the necessary means to Φ-ing)?

_________________
Concerning (2).

"What McGrath and I don't like is that only true propositions or facts can be reasons Coop has."

Yes. I, predictably, love the opposite view, but I wanted to push things in the OIC direction to avoid sinking back into those debates. I suspect (but I could be wrong) that there's very little that I'm going to say that is going to move you to the view that only a true proposition/fact/actual state of affairs can constitute a (normative) reason. I think that like you I would love to know what someone can say about what happens to the reasons when you can't. One idea is that the reasons aren't reasons when they aren't reasons you can act on. This brings me to another question about your view that I've been dying to know the answer to.

You and Matt give a really nice rational for the principle that knowledge-level justification for believing p gives you justification for treating p as a reason. I noticed (and note in a footnote in some other work) that there are two ways you can go here. You can say:

(JB1) If S's belief that p is justified, p is a reason that S can justifiably include in S's deliberations.
(JB2) If S's belief that p is justified, S can justifiably include p in S's deliberations because whether or not p is a genuine reason, this won't affect the normative standing of S's treating it as such.

It seems that if you go for (JB2), we can say that there's the question about what the reasons are and a separate question about when we're entitled to use them as reasons for the purpose of justifying various things and the right to treat something as if it is a reason does not entail that it is a reason. No special pleading. Reasons are like currency. You can permissibly treat something as currency that isn't provided that you justifiably believe that it is the genuine article.

_____
I will try to come back and say more about (3), but this has been immensely helpful and rewarding (to me), so thanks again. These issues have been bouncing around in my head for months now and working through your manuscript has been a whole lot of fun.

John's view, though, totally wrong. I mean, the arguments for it are clever and original, but you just have to have a much crazier view than he's willing to sign on for if you plan on wielding (W-Con).

Jeremy Fantl on Justified Normative Judgments

Hi Clayton,

This is a nice worry. Matt and I had a conversation about this, and I think we generally agree on what to say in response. We have three basic points. (Sorry, this is a bit lengthy.)

1. If you're using us as representatives of The View, we resist that label, and not just for the reasons you point out in the footnote. Rather, we're suspicious of W-Con and the inference from (1) to (2) (and we explicitly say things to this effect in the first appendix of the book). If one opts for fallibilism (or, rather, denies factivity) about knowledge-level justification, then we don't see the appeal of special pleading for 'oughts'. If you can have knowledge-level justification for falsehoods, then you can have
knowledge-level justification for false propositions about what you ought to do.

2. What McGrath and I don't like is that only true propositions or facts can be reasons Coop has. But this view is not the source of the problem in the Coop case. For here are some true propositions/facts which Coop knows: an infant's life is worth more than a puppy's, a kitten's, my having a gumball, or my keeping the quarter; and so if I save the infant, I'll be promoting more good than I would if I save the puppy,the kitten, etc. These facts seem to support saving the infant. Does this mean Coop ought to save the infant? Everyone should have some stance on the answer to this question. What options are there for those who want to deny that Coop ought to save the infant? Here are two: 1)perhaps they can say that these aren't really reasons Coop has to save the infant (not because they're false, of course: they're all true). Maybe this is simply because the action can't be done (and one can't have reasons to perform an action one can't perform). 2) Or perhaps they can say that these are reasons Coop has to save the infant, but the
fact that the action can't be performed defeats them and so prevents the reasons from making it the case that Coop ought to save the infant. Notice, though, that McGrath and I can make these very sorts of moves about whatever false propositions appear to support saving the infant
(such as saving the infant is the best thing I can do or, assuming oughts can be reasons, I ought to save the infant). We can say that these falsehoods either (a) fail to be reasons Coop has to save the infant, because that action is unavailable to him, and a consideration can be a reason for doing something only if that action can be done, or (b) are reasons for Coop but are defeated by the fact that the action is
unavailable. In this way, we, too, can avoid having to say that Coop ought to save the infant. These false considerations, we could say, are rather reasons only for Coop to try to save the infant or to decide to save the infant or to take steps toward saving the infant, and not for him to save the infant.

3. Here's something we think is pretty solid: Coop ought to decide to save the infant. If justified falsehoods can be reasons Coop has, as
McGrath and I think, this result can be secured. For Coop has a very strong reason to decide to save the infant, viz.: saving the infant is something I can do and better than anything else I can do. But, if false propositions can't be reasons then, because this is false it's not a reason. The closest true proposition in the vicinity is that saving
the infant is something Coop *probably* can do and it is better than the other options. The danger, though, is this: once you deprive Coop of "false" reasons the "true" reasons that remain might not be strong enough to ground the
right "oughts".

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Clayton Littlejohn on Justified Normative Judgments

Hey Brad and Jussi,

Have to run to a different class, but in response to Jussi.

Good point. I happen to be a kind of externalist about evidence (e.g., I think that evidence consists of only true p's and any p we know non-inferentially) and I know that there are those who are even more 'externalist' than I (e.g., Williamson) who don't restrict evidence in this way to that which is known without inference. It makes it tough to evaluate their views (as evidenced by the exchanges in the OUP volume on Williamson (where I think he wins just about every exchange)), but I think it's independently plausible to think that this externalist maneuver won't help The View that much if we say this:

(*) A subject's justification for believing p won't involve p itself if that belief is only inferentially justified.

So, while we might not be able to duplicate our subjects' evidence in @ and w1, I think we can duplicate the evidence that serves as the basis for these subjects' beliefs.

Brad C on Justified Normative Judgments

Hi Clayton,

Interesting. I will have to think about your worries...

For what it is worth: I was thinking, in part, of a more general view that reasons are best understood as reasons for judgment sensitive attitudes, and that thus, strictly speaking, there are no reasons to act. By extension, there is, strictly speaking, never an act that we ought to perform.

However, on this neo-Scanlonian view, there *are* reasons to intend to perform an act of a certain type and there are types of acts of which we ought to intend to perform a token -- & our ordinary talk of reasons for actions should be taken as referring to these reasons.

This *seems* to eliminate your second worry...but maybe those who hold the View you are after would not like that position...

Brad

Jussi Suikkanen on Justified Normative Judgments

Clayton,

ah I see. I think I was slightly confused about the dialectic (perhaps I am still). Someone might though also try to save (W-con), (S1) and (S2) by being an externalist about justification as well. That might make (2) in your response false. So, they might think that Coop doesn't have the same evidence either in @ and the counter-part world. In fact he has less evidence in our world, given that whatever information he has here does not make it any likelier that he will be pushing a button that works given how many failing machines there are around. This is why he is not in the same state as someone who knows (and whose evidence is sufficient to tell the working machines apart because there are no failing machines in that world). This would explain why he does not have sufficient evidence and why he should believe what he believes. This would avoid the absurd conclusion even if (S1) and (S2) might still be true. I don't know how plausible or implausible externalism about evidence is but at least it might save the View.