RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER TWO

On What the Queen Told Alice:
Willing to Believe

Section III

Let us recall why we are examining voluntary control over belief. It seems people are in some way responsible--and can be praised or blamed--for at least a great number of their beliefs: that the X-ray shows a tumor on the inferior vena cava, that Margaret is upset with me, that African-Americans are intellectually handicapped, that I need to improve my self-concept, that women need to be p t in their place, that the bow string is not taut enough, and so on. People are also often responsible for what they fail to believe. If they are responsible in these ways, however, they also must have some degree of control over what they believe or fail to believe. After all, if someone cannot help but believe what he believes or could not have believed what h e fails to believe, then he isn't really to be blamed or praised.

So far certain assumptions seemed to have been playing an important role and have contributed to the failure of the types of voluntary control over belief we have examined. First, we assumed that belief is essentially passive, something that happens to a subject or is undergone.

Second, in the cases of basic, nonbasic immediate, and long-range voluntary control our assessments viewed responsibility for belief in a "belief by belief" fashion. In other words, those forms of control are necessary only if praise and blame fundamentally attach to individual, definite, and particular beliefs: e.g., it is wrong and prohibited to believe that p; it is permissible to believe that q; it is right and required to believe that r. Such evaluation, I think, focuses merely on propositional content and the mental attitude or psychological stance taken towards that content (i.e., belief, as opposed to desire, hope, doubt, etc.) rather than on, for instance, the etiology of the belief.

Third, control over and responsibility for individual, definite, particular beliefs presupposes a certain degree of foresight--it is a particular belief that p which will result from a certain volition. This became clear especially in the case of nonbasic immediate voluntary control where Alston distinguished between "doing A in order to bring about E, for some definite E, and doing A so that some effect within a certain range will ensue" (1989b:130).

The questions that face us, then, fall into three categories: [1] whether the form of passivity involved in belief is compatible with some kind of responsibility and/or whether belief can in any sense be taken as an activity; [2] whether we can reasonably continue the sort of praise and blame we give to individual beliefs and/or whether responsibility for belief can be treated in a way other than in a "belief by belief" fashion; and [3] whether foresight is necessary for responsibility and/or whether there is any kind of foresight available in belief-formation. I use "and/or" since it need not turn out that these questions pose exclusive choices.

In his "Responsibility Especially for Beliefs" (1982) Michael Stocker treats precisely these issues by outlining and arguing for some general considerations regarding activity, responsibility, foresight, and control--considerations which he applies to belief. In his argument Stocker constructs a similar and complementary account to that which Alston gives under the category of "indirec voluntary influence." Let us turn first to Stocker's account.