Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. James Montmarquet. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. Pp. xi, 147 Montmarquet’s book is an attempt to defend the view that in order to hold individuals morally responsible, we must also hold them directly responsible for their beliefs, and not just when those beliefs lead to untoward behavior. He argues further that responsible belief is to be understood in terms of epistemically virtuous belief, making how work part of a growing interest in virtue epistemology. The epistemic virtues Montmarquet discusses are ways of being conscientious in trying to find the truth, of which he distinguishes three: being impartial, showing intellectual sobriety (something like being dispassionate or disinterested in the moral sphere), and being courageous. He never raises the issue whether his list is complete; instead, the primary motivation for his list is to dissociate his view from broader construals of the virtues, according to which any truth-related character trait counts as a virtue. A connection to traditional epistemological concerns arises when he argues that such a conception of responsible belief connects directly with the concept of morally justified action, generating a conception of epistemic justification applying to beliefs that is analogous to moral justification as it applies to actions. Such a conception of justification requires, Montmarquet claims, some type of direct control over both belief and action, and he expends considerable effort arguing for and clarifying the claim that we have control over our beliefs.





In its crucial tasks, however, the book is not entirely successful. First, Montmarquet admits that his account of epistemic justification (“S is justified in believing p insofar as S is epistemically virtuous in believing p” (p. 99)) implies that spontaneous perceptual beliefs are not justified. Nonetheless, he maintains that this conception of justification is just the sort needed for evaluating whether actions are morally justified. The result, however, is that when actions are based on spontaneous perceptual beliefs, those actions are not morally justified, but are only “morally excusable”. Yet, he claims, his sense of justification is subjective, constructed explicitly to allow us to deny that persons are responsible even when, objectively speaking, the results of their actions are quite bad. This introduction of the concept of moral excusability suggests that Montmarquet has simply failed to find the required subjective concept of justification. After all, what is it to have a moral excuse? On the face of it, it is just to have had good reasons for what one did, to be justified in the course of action one took--and, clearly, Montmarquet’s conception of justification is not adequate for these purposes. Moreover, the concept of excusability is at home most when a person has done something wrong. When actions are the right ones, it is quite deviant to label them “excusable”. One needs no excuse for appropriate action. So the theory of moral justification that Montmarquet uses to defend his epistemological conclusions is subject to severe, if not crippling, disabilities.





Montmarquet travels down the road from epistemically responsible belief to epistemically justified belief on the basis of what he terms “Hume’s insight” about morality--that even though moral concepts such as praise and blame are typically attributed to actions, our concern for such matters depends on our antecedent view that “actions manifest recognizable personal traits, traits of moral character” (p. 97). On the basis of Hume’s insight, Montmarquet concludes that the concept of moral justification must in some way connect to virtues of character. No such conclusion follows, however. Even worse, Montmarquet cites with approval my own discussion of this issue, without ever coming to grips with the fact that it is completely at odds with his approach. On this alternative approach we distinguish sharply between evaluations of action and evaluations of character, even if our interest in the former depends on our interest in the latter. That is, we understand the concept of moral ideality in terms of two elements, good action and good character, thereby blocking any attempt to import issues of character into some concept of morally justified action on the basis of Hume’s insight. Similarly, in the epistemological realm, epistemic ideality consists both in good beliefs and good character, allowing us to resist any inclination to import considerations of intellectual character into an account of justified beliefs. This alternative approach may have problems that need to be addressed, but some discussion of the view would certainly be in order if one wishes to defend the alternative conception which ties together issues of moral character and morally correct action. So Montmarquet’s attempt to generate his theory of epistemic justification from his theory of moral justification is inadequate. Furthermore, his theory of epistemic justification simply cannot stand on its own. Montmarquet is nonchalant at the failure of his theory to account for the justification of spontaneous beliefs, but his only defense of this attitude is perplexing. His only argument is that there is a sense of “epistemic justification” on which such beliefs are not justified, even if there are other senses in which such beliefs are justified (p. 111). The troublesome consequences of his view are not limited to spontaneous perceptual beliefs alone, however. Descartes’ belief that he exists is justified, on Montmarquet’s view, only if he reflects on it. Descartes apparently does do so, but certainly he need not have in order to be justified in believing it. In addition, in cases where one evaluates carefully, Montmarquet thinks people can fail to justified beliefs even when they base their belief on evidence that conclusively shows their belief to be true (they might not have a justified belief because their investigation was “ill-intended” (p. 17)). Yet, Montmarquet insists that the concept he delineates is a concept of epistemic justification. I see no reason to think so. First, Montmarquet expends no effort at all defending the view that ‘epistemic justification’ is ambiguous so that there is more than one concept of it. Others have attempted such defenses, but the issue is hardly settled enough to warrant assuming the point, especially in the face of the lack of any syntactic clues of such ambiguity. Furthermore, even if the ambiguity thesis is true, that alone won’t rescue Montmarquet’s theory; not everything becomes a bank once we notice that ‘bank’ is ambiguous. A more plausible view might be that Montmarquet has delineated only a concept of virtuous belief, one having no connection at all with the concept of justified belief.





My last complaint concerns the voluntariness claims Montmarquet makes. He grants that beliefs are not strongly voluntary in the way that actions are, for we can’t believe something merely because we would like to or want to. Nonetheless, Montmarquet thinks that beliefs are voluntary in a weaker sense, one that is supposed to save his theory. Montmarquet defines this weaker sense as follows: A belief is weakly voluntary to the extent that it is formed or held under circumstances (a) allowing for, but not dictating, its epistemically virtuous formation or retention; and that (b) had the subject not been epistemically virtuous, this belief would not have been held, or continued to be held, with the same degree of conviction (p. 83). Montmarquet seems to be on a journey with one foot nailed to the floor. A requirement for a belief to be epistemically virtuous, we were told, is that it is voluntary in some sense, and the right sense of “voluntary” is one that allows for the formation of epistemically virtuous belief. Any decent student in a first philosophy class could see the circularity. Such circularity could be avoided by listing certain traits of character in the definition in place of the concept of epistemic virtuosity. Doing so would require some claim of completeness to the list, a claim Montmarquet never defends. Passing over such concerns, however, the revised account still wouldn’t do without a careful investigation of when a trait-infected belief is “dictated,” something Montmarquet never attempts. Furthermore, the counterfactual clause in (b) raises all the problems associated with counterfactual analyses in general, but displayed in the moral sphere by the large body of literature on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. The counterexamples to some versions of that principle provide easy recipes for counterexamples to clause (b) above. Perhaps an evil demon would have forced one’s belief to be held with the same degree of confidence, had the belief not been virtuous. Nothing follows from that, however, about its actual character if the demon in fact does nothing.



