The words “duty” and “blame” can be used in many ways. You can blame the computer for an evening ruined by a computer failure, but computers are not morally blameworthy. You can talk about Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, performing her duties, but morally speaking her duty was – what? To work somewhere else? To become a spy? To screw up her work as much as possible? When I say that there are no epistemic blame and epistemic duties I mean to say that epistemic norms behave very differently from moral duties as deontologists talk about them and epistemic irrationality behaves very differently from moral blame as free will/moral psychology people talk about it. I do not intend to deny that epistemology is normative, but that it is normative does not imply that for every ethical concept there is an epistemological concept that is exactly isomorphic to it.
I talked in previous posts about why I think there are no practical reasons to believe, though there can be practical reasons to make yourself believe. At this point I will say nothing about duties to make yourself believe things and stick to putative duties to believe or not believe things – say, not to believe contradictions.
The thing about deontology is that you get an A for effort. Suppose, for example, Violet has a duty to return Kiyoshi’s book, which she promised to give him back on March 16th. However, a large snow storm causes her flight to be cancelled, and despite all her efforts, she can only get back to Kiyoshi on the 17th. Any Kantian will hold that even though the book does not return to its owner on time, Violet’s good will shines like a jewel as long as she has tried. Some would say that ought implies can and therefore Violet did nothing wrong. She discharged her duty. Others would say that she has done wrong, but is exempt from blame.
Compare that to an epistemic norm: one ought not believe contradictions. Suppose Violet, who is in my intro ethics class, tries hard not to believe contradictions (my opening spiel on the first class often includes a reference to the importance of not believing them). She tries especially hard with regards to the class material, which she studies feverishly, rehashes in office hours, etc. Still, in the final paper, she writes sincerely, in response to one question, that all morality is relative to culture and, in response to another, that murder is “absolutely” wrong, regardless of circumstances. Violet’s valiant efforts not to believe contradictions do not result in her getting an A for effort – not literally, in my class, and not figuratively, vis-à-vis epistemic norms. If it is epistemically irrational to believe in contradictions, Violet is irrational in believing one, regardless of how hard she tries not to be. She is not the least bit less irrational because of her efforts.
It might seem that epistemic norms too grant As for effort, because they do sometimes grant an A for a process of responding to reasons that results in a false belief. For example, a person I met at a conference guessed quickly, plausibly and wrongly that my name is Turkish. The error makes sense – there is a place in Turkey called Arpali, and the man made an inference from that – and, assuming that the man’s degree of credence was proportional to evidence, he does get “an A” for his reasoning or for his response to epistemic reasons. But despite the tempting analogy, it’s important that the A is not literally for effort. As it happened, no effort was involved – the man’s guess seems to have come to him quickly. He made a good inference, and it doesn’t matter whether it came to him through effort or not – in fact, some might regard him as more epistemically virtuous because no effort was needed. On the other hand, if, instead of making a good guess, he were to stand there and wrinkle his forehead and come up with a guess that makes no sense at all, no amount of effort on his part would make us treat his inference as less bad.
It is an interesting question whether the effort thing is a problem for epistemic virtue talk, as opposed to duty talk. While trying hard to return a book may discharge your duty to return it, trying hard to acquire the virtue of courage, say, does not mean that you have that virtue of courage, and trying to act generously does not automatically imply acting generously. Virtue ethics does not generally give As for effort (whether it gives some credit for effort is a different question).
Here is a related asymmetry regarding blame and the charge of epistemic irrationality. Suppose Anna attacks her professor because she believes, during a psychotic episode, that he is the devil. Anna is exempt from moral blame: “you can’t blame her, she was psychotic”. She is not exempt from the charge of epistemic irrationality that can be leveled at her belief that the professor is the devil. (“She’s not epistemically irrational, she is psychotic”? Doesn’t work. Having a psychotic episode is one way of being irrational).
Someone might ask: Ok, so we don’t have duties to believe, or not to believe, or to infer, but don’t we have other epistemic duties – say, a duty to deliberate well, or to avoid watching fake news if we can help it? Can’t we incur epistemic blame if we fail to discharge these duties? Ok, to be continued. I mean it.
The View from the Owl's Roost 