Two Faces of Responsibility for Beliefs

Abstract

The conception of responsibility for beliefs typically assumed in the literature mirrors the practices of accountability for actions. In this paper, I argue that this trend leaves a part of what it is to be responsible unduly neglected, namely the practices of attributability. After offering a diagnosis for this neglect, I bring these practices into focus and develop a virtue-theoretic framework to vindicate them. I then investigate the specificity of the belief case and conclude by resisting two challenges, namely that attributability cannot amount to genuine responsibility and that it can be reduced to a sort of accountability.