David Hunter, “The Ethics of Belief”

15th November (Wednesday, 16-18pm) at Logic and Philosophy of Science Seminar (Room 714).

Abstract: Believing something can be to a person’s credit or discredit and there can be things a person ought to believe. To understand this we first need to understand the ontology of belief properties. In particular, we need to see that they are qualities and not sortals. This matters because qualities are not goodness-fixing properties. This means that belief norms cannot be grounded in the nature of belief itself. Rather, they are grounded in facts about the believer. More specifically, they are grounded in her sortal properties, in what is needed for her to be good in various ways. Seeing all of this can help us put the believer, rather than her belief states, back at the heart of our account of the ethics of belief.