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Agency, Akrasia, and the Normative Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2019
Abstract
Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actually compatible with the existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another.
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- Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2019
Footnotes
Earlier versions of this material were presented to audiences at Pomona College, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado Boulder, Sacramento State University, the St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, and the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful to everyone who commented on those occasions, in particular to Alfred Mele, Juan Comesaña, Abigail Bruxvoort-Wilson, John Phillips, Jonathan Way, Grant Rozeboom, Sarah Stroud, and Peter Railton. The material has also benefitted enormously from written commentary from and conversation with Pamela Hieronymi, Dion Scott-Kakures, Andrew Hsu, Tyler Burge, Stephen White, Andrew Jewell, Amy Floweree, and Baron Reed.
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