Responsibilism within Reason

Abstract

According to ambitious responsibilism (AR), the virtues that are constitutive of epistemic responsibility should play a central and fundamental role in traditional projects like the analysis of justification and knowledge. While AR enjoyed a shining moment in the mid-s, it has fallen on hard times. Part of the reason is that many epistemologists – including fellow responsibilists – think it paints an unreasonably demanding picture of knowledge and justification. While AR’s defenders have responses to this worry, they tend either to collapse AR into a much less ambitious view, or to threaten virtue’s explanatory force in AR’s analyses. I agree that such objections undermine AR’s existing versions. But I think it would be premature to draw the curtains on the view. My goal is to show that the stock objections only threaten the periphery of certain versions of AR, and to develop a novel version that avoids them. With this goal in mind, here is the plan. I will begin in Section . by clarifying the core commitments of AR and explain how influential responsibilists have added to these commitments in optional ways. In Section ., I will rehearse the standard objections to AR, explaining why they only target optional accretions. I’ll then turn in Section . to develop a version I call Kantian Responsibilism (KR). KR is a two-level view, consisting of (i) a high-level analysis of epistemic normativity in responsibilist terms, and (ii) a first-order account of the conditions under which these terms apply. According to KR’s first tier, epistemically virtuous thought is thought that