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342 KRUSE
principle is also necessary for ascribing epistemic blame and praise, which is also important
for guiding the intellectual conduct of epistemic agents 4 .
Alston himself gives one of the most famous arguments for the fourth premise. He argues that
epistemic agents are not able to form doxastic attitudes voluntarily because of the epistemicreason-responsive
nature of the cognitive processes, which are used to form doxastic attitudes
(Alston 1988: 263-268). Alston identifies having voluntary control over one’s doxastic
attitudes with having an effective choice about what doxastic attitude one takes toward a
proposition p in a certain situation (Alston 1988: 261). According to Alston voluntarily
bringing about a state of affairs φ implies that one has the control to bring about φ as well as
some incompatible alternative to φ 5 (cf. Alston 1988: 261). He then asks us to consider
whether we have an effective choice, given we take our evidence to speak (conclusively) in
favor of p? He answers that if we take our evidence to speak (conclusively) in favor of p, we do
not have the power to bring about another doxastic attitude toward p than the belief that p.
The same holds for the formation of the disbelief that p if we take our evidence (conclusively)
to speak against the truth of p. If we take our evidence to speak neither against nor for the
truth of p, Alston argues that we do not have the power to form a different doxastic attitude
toward p than the suspension of judgment about p (cf. Alston 1988: 263-268). From these
considerations Alston concludes that we do not have an effective choice over our doxastic
attitudes and, therefore, we are not psychologically able to form doxastic attitudes voluntarily
(cf. Alston 1988: 263).
Premise three and four together with modus tollens give us five. Five and premise one
together with modus tollens give us the conclusion that there are no epistemic duties. Since
epistemic duties unlike epistemic norms in general serve to guide the intellectual conduct of
epistemic agents, the third premise does not hold for epistemic norms in general. Therefore,
the argument is not an argument against the existence of epistemic norms. However, the
argument raises doubts on the viability of the “ethics of belief”, taken as an epistemic theory,
and the viability of the epistemic realm which is concerned with the epistemological aim to
guide our intellectual conduct. As far as the viability of those research disciplines is
dependent on a viable notion of epistemic duty, Alston’s argument threatens the viability of
those disciplines as well.
1.3 The Norm of Evidentialism
Especially, proponents of evidentialism like Feldman (2001, 2002) and Steup (1998), who
take evidentialism to be the only viable epistemic theory of the “ethics of belief”, have
objected to Alston’s argument. In what follows, I will shortly describe how each of them tries
to reject Alston’s argument. After that I will explain why they fail to show that the norm of
evidentialism is an epistemic duty.
Feldman characterizes the evidentialist norm in the following way:
For any person S and time t, if S considers p at t, then S has the duty to have the
attitude toward p that fits the evidence S has at t concerning p. (Feldman 2002: 368)
Beside Feldman and Steup, many epistemologists consider the evidentialist norm as the
paradigmatic epistemic duty. According to this norm, there is only one doxastic attitude
which the epistemic agent ought to have at t toward a certain p, she is considering at t. The
epistemic agent ought to have the doxastic attitude toward p which fits her available evidence
at t (cf. Feldman 2000: 680). Feldman agrees with Alston that we do not have direct
4
I will explain this in more detail in the third section of this paper.
5
Whether Alston’s notion of voluntary control is neutral regarding compatibilist and incompatibilist
approaches to the free will need not concern us here, because there are compatibilist as well as
incompatibilitist interpretations of the condition of having an effective choice.