Greenberg, A;
(2019)
Epistemic Responsibility and Criminal Negligence.
Criminal Law and Philosophy
10.1007/s11572-019-09507-7.
(In press).
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Abstract
We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for belief by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a (lack of) concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a (lack of) concern for the truth.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Epistemic Responsibility and Criminal Negligence |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11572-019-09507-7 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-019-09507-7 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| Keywords: | Belief, Responsibility for Belief, Epistemology, Negligence, H.L.A. Hart |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10084577 |
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