1. The Problem with Responsible Belief
The problem that some philosophers have with the very idea that we can be properly held responsible for what we believe can be developed as follows. One way to explain what it means to behave responsibly is to say that one behaves in such a way that one does what is either required or permitted and refrains from doing what is forbidden.Footnote 1 To behave responsibly is to comply to one's requirements (one's duties and obligations) as well as one's prohibitions. Now there is the time-honoured principle that “Ought implies can” according to which a person cannot be required or prohibited to do a certain thing unless she has a choice or any other form of voluntary control over whether or not to do that thing. It can be no one's duty to bring it about that iron expands when cooled down because no one has voluntary control over iron's expanding when cooled down.Footnote 2 Likewise, no one can be prohibited to be born because no one has voluntary control over his own birth. William Alston says: it makes no sense to speak of someone's obligations and prohibitions to do a certain thing if she lacks an effective choice as to whether or not to do that thing.Footnote 3
The next step in developing the problem is to apply what was said about behaviour to belief—which goes as follows. To believe responsibly is to comply to one's doxastic requirements (duties and obligations), as well as prohibitions and permissions. Again there is that time-honoured “Ought implies can” principle. Applied to belief it says that a person cannot be obliged or prohibited to believe a certain thing unless she has a choice as to whether or not to believe that thing. But, and this is crucial in the development of the problem, no one has a choice as to whether or not to believe a particular thing. It isn't the case that for every proposition that we care to consider we can chose whether or not to believe it. It isn't even clear that there is any proposition such that we can bring it about that we believe it simply by deciding to do so. Alston concludes that belief is not under direct voluntary controlFootnote 4, and Bernard Williams that we cannot decide to believe a certain thing.Footnote 5
The final step is to draw the conclusion that follows from these considerations. Since we have no choice as to what we believe, it makes no sense to speak of obligations and prohibitions that pertain to belief. But if that is true, then it makes no sense either to speak of responsible belief—or believing responsibly. And if that makes no sense, then it makes no sense either to hold each other responsible for what we believe, nor does it make sense to blame or criticize (or praise and affirm) each other because of what we believe. And what holds for belief, so the argument can be extended, also holds for knowing, forgetting, and ignorance. The entire idea that we can be blamed or praised because of what we believe, know, forget and are ignorant of, is wrong-headed. Or so the argument goes.
2. The Ubiquitous Use of Deontological Epistemic Expressions on the Web
The denial of the idea that we can properly be held responsible for what we believe, know, forget, and are ignorant of, however, stands in stark contrast to the ways in which we speak. Talk of obligations and duties with respect to belief, knowledge, forgetting and ignorance abounds. We furthermore talk about permissions with respect to believing, knowing, forgetting and ignorance—and also about rights with respects to each of them.
The relations between obligations, permissions and rights on the one hand and responsibility and blame on the other, can be stated as follows (the capital B represents, cast in the correct form, conjugations of the verbs ‘believing’, ‘knowing’, ‘forgetting’, and ‘being ignorant of’):
• If one doesn't B what one has a duty to B, one can properly be held responsible, i.e. blamed, for not B-ing. [And if one does B what one has a duty to B, one's B-ing is responsible]Footnote 6
• If one Bs what one has no permission to B, one can properly be held responsible, i.e. blamed, for B-ing.
• If one Bs what one has no right to B, one can be properly held responsible, i.e. blamed, for B-ing.Footnote 7
The use of deontological epistemic expressions is ubiquitous. I don't want to leave this claim at this lofty level, though, but, as indicated, substantiate it by presenting the findings of a web search on the use of these expressions. My procedure will be to select one deontological term at a time (‘obligation to/duty to/ought to’, ‘permission to’ and ‘right to’) and to consider various combined hits with belief, know(ledge), forgetting, and ignorance respectively.
A. Obligations, duties and oughts
a. With respect to belief
An enormous amount of web pages talk about obligations concerning belief. A Mormon father, we read, said this to his son who was about to study physics in college: “Son, you only have an obligation to believe that which is true”.Footnote 8 The son is reported to have never forgotten this, perhaps because his father's saying is somewhat unclear (and unclarity is food for thought). It doesn't mean, one would hope, that the father is saying, to quote a sentence from another web page, that “If something is true, then you have a moral obligation to believe it”, i.e. that the son has an obligation, with respect to every truth, to believe it, for there are truths by the zillions, far too many for him to even consider. The father, presumably, will have just wanted to tell his son that it is his obligation, with respect to any proposition he might, or may be forced to, consider, to believe only the true ones. It is not my job to pronounce on the helpfulness of this fatherly advice—but that may not be very great, for this is really no better than the advice to do only what is good. Helpful advice would be advice that enables the son to recognize a truth when he encounters one.Footnote 9
Other obligations reported on the web are: “If a person goes to a therapist and lays a complaint, the therapist has an obligation to believe that person” and: “According to Basedow, people have an obligation to believe in the truth of any proposition upon which their happiness depends”. Basedow's obligation, I should think, either is no obligation at all, or a very silly one. If your happiness depends, even if only in part, on your health and your doctor has told you that you have contracted AIDS, then Basedow obliges you to believe you are perfectly healthy! But I am going to refrain of commenting on all alleged obligations. My task here is to report my findings, not to evaluate the merits thereof!
Very many pages on the web talk about doxastic obligations in a religious setting. One page says that “Belief in the Prophet Muhammad is a necessary obligation for every individual. Belief is not complete without it and Islam only valid with it”. Another has it that “a Jew has the obligation to believe that everything that G-d creates is ultimately for the best” and yet another that Baptists believe “that all men are under obligation to believe and obey God”.
It is interesting to note a difference in the way doxastic obligations are framed inside and outside religious settings. Inside religious settings the obligation to believe is described to pertain to specific contents, such as (I rephrase a bit here) that Muhammed is a prophet, that what God creates is for the best, and that God exists. Not so outside religious contexts—there the obligation is claimed to pertain to whatever the complaint of the patient is, and whatever the propositions upon which one's happiness depends turn out to be. To frame a terminological distinction, we might say that the obligations referred to in religious contexts are ‘content targeted’ whereas outside that context they are ‘source targeted’.
The expressions indicating doxastic obligations mentioned so far have been in the affirmative. They concern obligations we supposedly have. Numerous pages, however, inform us about obligations we don't have. For instance: “you do not have an obligation to believe the media”, and “I am under no obligation to believe what reason and experience show me to be false” and “I'm afraid that I've reached a point where I don't feel under any obligation to believe what I'm told by the Prime Minister”. The lack of doxastic obligation in these cases pertains not to specific propositions but to a class of propositions, the members of which are either brought to one's attention in a certain way, e.g. through the media or the Prime Minister, or posses a certain identifiable feature, e.g. being false.
In many contexts ‘duty’ is a synonym or near-synonym for ‘obligation’, so let us next consider the phrase ‘duty to believe’. John R. Polito, a Nicotine Cessation Educator, submits “that physicians have a legal duty to believe their ears and eyes above clinical study assertions that will never ever be duplicated in real-world use.” The Nobel Committee holds that “it is our duty to believe that the cause of peace can only be promoted through common interests and brotherhood.” Another page states that “If the experts say it was a weather phenomena over O'Hare Airport, it's our duty to believe them”. But surely not everyone is in agreement with this. Richard Dawkins, for example, says: “Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe” (and we may safely assume that many experts are scientists). It is, again, interesting to note a difference between the Nobel Committee that affirms a ‘content targeted obligation’ (viz. to believe that peace can be promoted through common interests and brotherhood) on the one hand, and John Polito and others on the other, who affirm the ‘source targeted’ duty to believe propositions that one hits upon in a very specific way, viz. through one's own seeing and hearing, or via experts.
It bears bringing out that, as the previous paragraph indicates, there is considerable disagreement as to what the genuine doxastic obligations and duties are.
It goes without saying that many sentences that do not contain the words ‘obligation’ or ‘duty’ in relation to belief, still convey a tacit acknowledgment of doxastic obligations and duties. The most commonly used phrase is ‘ought to believe …’. This expression is used by two identifiable groups of people: first and foremost by epistemologists who endorse, or at the very least discuss, claims like “we ought not believe what we have no evidence for” and “we believe what we ought to believe by believing what is true.” References here are to William James, Bill Clifford, Fred Feldman, Earl Conee and many, many others. Second, the expression is used by religious believers who say such things as “If God said it, then we ought to believe it just like He said it”, and “Faith is believing what God says; believing what God says about his Son. This you can believe; this you ought to believe”. Although the ought-to-believe expression is mostly used by epistemologists and religious believers, others use it as well. Here are some examples from the web: “Pacifism is true and everyone ought to believe it”, “We ought to believe in our heart that every child can learn” (this one is from George Bush), “You ought to believe the snow will melt if you believe it's raining” (well, this is actually from an epistemology paper), and on a lighter note “Everybody ought to believe in somethin’. I believe I'll have another drink.”
Next to ‘ought to believe’ there are other expressions that would seem to convey tacit acknowledgement of doxastic obligations and duties, such as ‘must believe …’, ‘should believe …’, but I won't give examples from the web.
b. With respect to knowing
Next, many web pages specify obligations with respect to knowledge. Here too a number of hits indicate their use in religious contexts. One page out of many of its likes has it that there is “the Christian obligation to know God”.
Many pages talk of epistemic obligations that come (and go) with particular professions. Here are some examples, “Kazakh officials had an obligation to know the risk these men faced if returned”, “War reporters in my view have a profound moral obligation to know the rules”, “Each student has the obligation to know and uphold College Rules and Regulations”. The ‘content targeted’ obligation to know specific things (risks, rules, regulations) in these quotes is tied to having a certain officially recognized position (being an administrative representative, being a reporter, being a college student). The moment one would step down from that position, one would lose the obligation attached to it. Without that position, one would not be blameworthy for not knowing what the position would require one to know.
It should be noted, however, that many epistemic obligations are not, or not obviously, tied to an officially recognized status or other. It is not obvious that the hit I am to quote next, ties an obligation to know to any status (or role): “You have the right, even the obligation, to know what elected and appointed officials are up to”, although you might think this obligation is implicitly tied to one's position of state citizen. But even implicit ties seem to be lacking in statements like the following: “We all have a moral obligation to know and not to forget the wrongs that have occurred”. This epistemic obligation is claimed to pertain to humans just by virtue of being humans. And this is held to be a moral obligation.
A search for “ought to know” hits gives like results, witness such phrases as “What Everyone Ought to Know about the Law of Attraction”, “What Everybody Ought to Know About Composition”, “What Everyone Ought to Know about Preventing Credit Card Fraud”, “Ten Things Everyone Ought To Know About Global Warming”, and “What Everybody Ought to Know About Leadership”. This talk of epistemic obligations has nothing to do with official positions.
Another issue arises here, however. Do these quotes really express genuine obligations, must these ‘oughts’ be construed in a deontological way? Does every ‘ought’ express an obligation, as it is sometimes claimed?Footnote 10 There is reason for doubt. For if someone knows nothing, or only a very little, about the Law of Attraction, or about composition, or about preventing credit card fraud, is that person blameworthy for it? Is this ignorance culpable? It would seem not—unless, of course, that person is a professor of physics, a composer, or a security agent. But how shall we understand ‘ought to know’ in cases where absence of knowledge is not blameworthy? I think as follows: when, in such cases, it is said there are things that everybody ought to know about the Law of Attraction, what is meant is that it would be a good thing when everybody knows about it. The state of knowing about it is to be preferred over the state of being ignorant about it. Knowledge is the ideal. But failing that ideal through ignorance is no reason for blame (although perhaps for shame).
What this suggests is that (i) many epistemic obligations are not sui generis obligations, but are attached to officially recognized positions, (ii) those epistemic obligations that are sui generis, are of a moral kind, (iii) ‘ought to know’ not necessarily expresses an epistemic duty.
The expression ‘duty to know’ is also widely used. Duties to knowledge are ascribed to citizens, as well as parents and other persons or groups of persons with officially recognized positions, witness these quotes: “The American people have the right to know—they have the duty to know—what their (military is) doing in their name”, and “Parents have a right and a duty to know what's going on in their child's life”. As is to be expected, some talk suggests the existence of sui generis epistemic duties: it is asserted that it is “our duty to know about our genetic makeup”, and furthermore that everyone “has an ethical duty to know whether or not he or she is a carrier” of the HIV virus. To what our epistemic duties extend, is, as the following quote indicates, a matter of dispute: “Some might say, however, that beyond a right to know, you have a duty to know–that you ought to find out whether or not you will get the disease.”
One particularly interesting site on the web in this regard contains Herman Goering's answers to questions posed to him by his prosecutor during the Neurenberg trials. The prosecutor asks Goering whether it wasn't his duty to know about the Nazi gas chambers and annihilation camps. After Goering has explained that many of his opinions differed from those of Hitler, the interrogation continues as follows:Footnote 11
Q. In other words, you thought it possible, even in spite of these differences, to collaborate with Hitler?
A. I have emphasised it and I maintain that it is true. My oath does not only hold good in good times but also in bad times, although the Fuehrer never threatened me and never told me that he was afraid for my health.
Q. If you thought it possible to co-operate with Hitler, do you recognise that, as the second man in Germany, you are responsible for the organising on a national scale of murders of millions of innocent people, independently of whether you know about those facts or not? Tell me briefly, yes or no.
A. No, because I did not know anything about them and did not cause them.
Q. I should like to underline again, “whether you knew about these facts or not.”
A. If I actually did not know them, then I cannot be held responsible for them.
Q. It was your duty to know about these facts.
A. I shall go into that.
Q. I am questioning you. Answer me this question: Was it your duty to know about these facts?
A. In what way my duty? Either I know the fact or I do not know it. You can only ask me if I was negligent in failing to obtain knowledge.
Q. You ought to know yourself better. Millions of Germans knew about the crimes which were being perpetrated, and you did not know about them?
A. Neither did millions of Germans know about them. That is a statement which has in no way been proved.
Like so may other Germans after the war, Goering said “Ich habe es nicht gewüsst” (I didn't know). Now the prosecutor clearly implied that even if Goering really didn't know about the murder of millions of innocent people, he clearly had a duty to know about it. And although Goering seems to deny the intelligibility of the notion “duty to know”, he does seems to acknowledge that the notion of “being negligent in failing to obtain knowledge” makes sense. But this, in turn, seems an implicit acknowledgment of a “duty to know”. The prosecutor seems to imply that this duty was attached to Goering's being the ‘second man in Germany’.
c. With respect to forgetting
Compared to the expressions used so far, ‘obligation to forget’ is seldom used. In certain instances ‘forgetting’ isn't used in what I call an epistemic sense, viz. when it means paying no attention to. This is true in the following two cases: A journalist, who visited a place where much help was needed, said in an interview: “Above all else, I believe that there comes a point at which it is your obligation to forget the camera and address the needs of the human being.” Surely ‘forget’ here doesn't have the same meaning as in the sentence “I forgot it was your birthday yesterday”. The following statement merits a similar comment: “This factor places educators under obligation to forget the old cliché that education is for scholastics and look to the needs of the community”. The obligation here is not to no longer know an old cliché, but to stop acting according to it.
Some expressions, however, suggest there is an obligation to genuinely forget something, i.e. to no longer know or remember it. For example: one site speaks about “the obligation to forget things which are difficult” and another tells us that “As part of healing its wounds, we have recognized our obligation to forget many harsh words and rash acts”. It is an open question whether we are able to pull some such thing off. For the obligation to forget that X may seem as paradoxical as the injunction to a shy person to be spontaneous.
Although, then, some sites suggest an obligation to forget certain specific things, other sites explicitly state obligations not to forget. In relation to victims of an attack it is said: “But no passage of time can incur an obligation to forget.” The flipside of there being no obligation to forget about victims, it would seem, is the obligation to remember them.
Some use is made of the expression ‘duty to forget’ too. But here too it isn't always genuine forgetting that is at issue. About someone's becoming a member of a certain society, it is said: “When a man becomes a member of this body it is his duty to forget the political party that he belongs to”, which obviously cannot mean that the person must no longer be able to remember which political party he belongs to. Something similar holds for the following remark: “There's times in this world when it's our bounden duty to forget ourselves, and think what will help other people”; the duty meant is not to no longer know who we are, but to no longer put our own interests on top. Paul Ricoeur too hadn't real forgetting in mind when he maintains “the duty to remember is a duty to teach, whereas the duty to forget is a duty to go beyond anger and hatred”.
Genuine forgetting is at issue in the words of Heloise to Abelard: “Whatever efforts I use, on whatever side I turn, the sweet thought still pursues me, and every object brings to my mind what it is my duty to forget.” That is also the case in the statement that “For the health of the psyche and the culture, for the individual and the whole society, oblivion is as necessary as memory. One must know how to forget”.
Hits of ‘ought to forget’ indicate the same pattern. Some of those oughts don't concern genuine forgetting (in the sense of no longer knowing anymore), others do, as in the proverbial saying “Thrice blessed is he who can't remember what he ought to forget about others”.
d. With respect to ignorance
It is very interesting that the expression ‘obligation to be ignorant’ has zero hits, as has ‘obligation not to know’. Nobody has formulated any obligation to ignorance. Slight use is made, however, of ‘duty to be ignorant’, just some ten hits. The most important case is a saying of Hilary of Poitiers, a church father from the 4th century, who maintained that “All religious truth is contained in Scripture, and it is our duty to be ignorant of what lies outside it”.
A phrase that does get used rather often, however, is ‘obligation to ignore’. But this, of course, is something altogether different from ‘obligation to be ignorant’. For it is possible to ignore John's presence while not being ignorant of John's presence. One might have the obligation to ignore John's presence—but this is not the obligation to be ignorant of his presence. ‘To ignore X’ is to pay no attention to X, but ‘to be ignorant of X’ is to not know of X.Footnote 12 It may be that Hilary of Poitiers’ contention is really about ignoring, not about ignorance. Let us now turn from obligations, duties and oughts to permissions. The difference between these is relatively clear. If X is something that it is one's obligation to do, then doing X is doing something that is required by a rule: one ought to do X; not doing X would be in some sense improper. By contrast, if X is something that one is permitted to do, then doing X is doing something that violates no rule; not doing X would be in no sense improper. Both obligations and permissions, then, are related to rules, but in different ways. Obligations specify what the rules require, permissions what they allow.
Let us next turn to another class of deontological epistemic expressions—the class of permissions.
B. Permissions
a. With respect to belief
Numerous pages on the web use ‘permission to believe’. Characteristic are various books with the title Permission to Believe: one by rabbi Kelemen (with the subtitle Four Rational Approaches To G-d's Existence, 1990), another one by Samuel E. Karff (subtitle: Finding Faith In Troubled Times, 2005). Permission-to-believe-talk, however, although it is very frequently used inside of it, is also used outside of religious contexts. For example: “We have permission to believe in the depth of our products and what they actually provide”. If one has a permission to believe that p, then so believing is not irresponsible—and hence one cannot be blamed for it.
b. With respect to knowledge
A number of uses of “permission to know” occur in contexts where such a permission is denied. For example: “He should only see information that he has permission to see. He does not have permission to know about any other bugs in the system, yet he sees the bug” and a certain Jody wrote: “I did not give Microsoft permission to know what files I am searching for on my local hard-drive”. Another page says: “Who has permission to know your password? No one!” A report on college teachers states that “Often a faculty member does not know whether a parent does, in fact, have permission to know a student's educational records.”
Permissions are things that have to be given by someone who holds a recognized office, such as a representative of a company, or the owner of a certain piece of electronic equipment, a credit card holder, and even a parent. There are no permissions, unless they have been given.
Permissions to know not only will be given by persons with a certain official standing, as a rule they will also be given to persons with a certain standing. A medical hospital airs the following piece of advice: “Let our staff know the name of the person who has come with you and specify if that person has your permission to know about and discuss your treatment”. A man named Bruce Schneider writes that “Many, many years ago, I had official permission to know information whose classification was higher than ‘Top Secret’”. A group of co-workers using communal computers arranged things as follows: “There are also shared areas on the computer where everyone in the group has permission to know about and to use the files, but not to modify them.”
Self-help sites use the ‘permission-to-know’ lingo abundantly, here's just two quotes: “Give yourself permission to know peace and freedom”, and “Give yourself permission to know when you have done a task well, and tell yourself so”. Here the instance that gives the knowledge permission is the same as the instance that receives it.
c. With respect to forgetting
The various meanings of ‘forgetting’ resurface in expressions of alleged permissions to forget. Some expressions are not about forgetting in the literal sense. For example: “All of us need to give ourselves permission to forget about productivity when our own well being or the lives of loved ones must take priority.” Here too forgetting is not like forgetting a telephone number, but more like paying no attention to something, not being (primarily) concerned about it, etc.
Statements of genuine permission to forget include permissions apparently given by psychologists to their patients, as can be gleaned from this quote: “Underlying this permission to forget was the confidence that even those facts which were consciously forgotten could be recovered during the hypnosis.” Here humans are ascribed the ability of consciously forgetting, which does seem like an oxymoron. And here's another statement of what is thought of as a real permission: “Writing something down is asking permission to forget it.”Footnote 13
According to a book published in 2005 by Quality Press in Milwaukee, the permission to forget is one of “Nine …Root Causes of America's Frustration with Education”. As another site has it: “Unintentionally, schools have created a game with a devastating unspoken rule giving students ‘Permission to Forget’”. Presumably in order to forestall frustration, some schools offer language courses in which “Students are not given permission to forget any of the words.”
d. With respect to ignorance
Statements of permissions to be ignorant are sparse, and then they mostly occur in sentences denying such a permission. “A lot of men don't feel permission to be ignorant,” says a certain Rhodes Lockwood. And of a certain teacher we read that “She refused to give her students permission to be ignorant”.
Only one hit was of a positive permission to ignorance: “Give yourself permission to be ignorant and NOT know. You will soon understand your relationship to the universe.” One can only guess which way the wind blows here, but it would mark a considerable achievement to understand one's relationship to the universe by knowing nothing!
C. Rights
Let us finally consider the class of deontological epistemic expressions that involve ‘rights’. These expressions, as we might expect, will often bring us in legal contexts. Although ‘right’ can be used outside of that context, it very often is an indicator of it.
a. With respect to belief
Rather common are expressions denying the right to believe a certain thing: “we have no right to believe anything of this kind”, we read on the web, and then most often what is denied is not a legal right ‘to believe anything of this kind’; what is denied is another sort of right, perhaps a moral, or intellectual one. Statements positively affirming the right to believe are also very common, and then most often legal rights are meant. For example, one site affirms “The right to believe, to worship and witness. The right to change one's belief or religion. The right to join together and express one's belief.” A representative of a gay organization, with an eye on homophobia in the rap and hip hop scene, says that “People have a right to believe that homosexuality is wrong.” These rights are clearly intended to be legal rights: the law is not against anybody simply because he or she believes a certain thing, or changes his or her belief, or joins with others in order to express the belief. Some, therefore, say that “the right to believe is a natural right.”
The following statement, by the so-called “2% company”, also defends the legal right to believe, even if what is believed is silly. A question on their FAQ site is “Why do you care what other people believe? Why do you criticize and belittle religion, the paranormal, alternative medicine, or any other belief?” The forthcoming answer is: “It is important to understand that we fully support your right to believe whatever you want to believe, regardless of the supporting facts, or lack thereof. We firmly support your right to your own personal beliefs, and we would gladly argue for you to maintain that right. That said, it is equally important to understand that we maintain the right to not believe what you believe, and to think that what you believe is silly. Just because you believe something passionately, don't expect us to respect that belief. We will respect your right to hold that belief, but not necessarily the belief itself.”
Legal rights to believe a certain thing, however, by no means entail non-legal, for example moral or intellectual, rights to believe it. Violation of a non-legal right to believe something, comes close to, and is perhaps identical with, an impermissibly held belief.
b. With respect to knowledge
Especially in the US many Right to Know Laws are in force. For instance: “Every American has the right to know the chemicals to which they may be exposed in their daily living.” On another page we read that during the 2003 legislative session, the Minnesota Legislature passed the Woman's Right to Know Act. This legislation requires physicians to provide women with certain information at least 24 hours prior to an abortion. Yet another page urges “You have a right to know about the hazards you are exposed to in the workplace. The law requires that your employer makes you aware of the hazards.”
Clearly these are legal rights, rights that can be enforced by the law. Are there also non-legal rights to know? Although I haven't found statements to that effect on the web, is seems clearly possible for them to exist. Your spouse, if you have one, clearly has some sort of right to know where you are hanging out, and a parent has some sort of right to know what his children are doing. But these rights don't have legal status.
c. With respect to forgetting
Rights to forget: these are, almost always, declared non-existent. Here is a representative set of statements:
• “We have no right to forget the tragedy of the Holocaust if we want to prevent its repetition”
• “Governments have no right to forget the past”
• “And while the victims have the right to forgive, the perpetrators do not have the right to forget.”
• “We, citizens of the Republic of Moldova, have no right to forget lessons of history”
• “Is it right to forget the people of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, whose islands we. destroyed with our atomic testing?”
• “The public has no right to forget war heroes.”
It would seem that in all these cases ‘forgetting’ is synonymous with ‘paying no attention to’ and doesn't mean ‘no longer knowing’. It would furthermore seem that a violation of a No-right-to-forget maxime, is never legally relevant, never a case for juridical prosecution. As these quotations bear out, however, they certainly can be, and in fact often will be, morally relevant.
No-right-to-forget maxims seem to be the flipside of duty-to-remember maxims. In neither of these cases is failure to comply legally relevant, but in both it is a morally relevant.
d. With respect to ignorance
The “Right to be ignorant” is mentioned on many a page, which is different from an endorsement of it. Some deny there is such a right, or more carefully, some deny that some may defend that right. Compare: “One right which educators ought not to defend is the right to be ignorant and the right to speak ignorantly.”
Many a page, however, asserts a right to ignorance, mainly with respect to medically relevant facts. For example:
• Tuija Takala, a philosopher at the University of Helsinki, endorses “The Right to Genetic Ignorance”Footnote 14
• “The emerging international biomedical law tends to recognise the right not to know one's genetic status”
• It is affirmed that humans “should have the right to not be informed about the HIV test results”
• “The person with dementia also has a right not to know his or her diagnosis”.
Outside the medial context rights to ignorance have been affirmed too, witness the statement: “An Expert Witness must analyse and present a difficult subject to people who have every right to be ignorant of its finer points.”
By way of summary, then: the web search, and some discussion of its findings, provides linguistic evidence for the following claims: (i) humans do hold that there are obligations, permissions, and rights attached to believing, knowing, forgetting and ignorance; (ii) some epistemic obligations, permissions and rights are tied to officially recognized positions; (iii) some epistemic obligations are ‘goal targeted’, others ‘source targeted’; (iv) not all ‘shoulds’ express obligations; (v) some rights to knowledge (and belief) are legal rights, others are not—they are, perhaps, rights of a moral or intellectual kind.
So, I claim that the widespread use of deontological epistemic expressions is linguistic evidence for the claim that in social life we hold each other responsible for what we believe—and hence that we have such responsibilities. This claim presupposes the following relationship between deontological epistemic expressions on the one hand and the notion of responsible belief on the other: to be responsible in one's believing (knowing, etc.), is to comply to one's epistemic obligations, permissions and prohibitions. (And, as I have suggested, to believe what is permitted by the relevant epistemic rules comes very close to, or is perhaps identical with, having a non-legal right to that belief.)
3. Responsible Belief in Education and in the Legal System
Linguistic evidence, however, can be a frail reed. We can't always infer how things ontologically are from the ways we speak. In this section I therefore move beyond the linguistic evidence and argue that two highly important social institutions are built on and presuppose the idea that humans are, and can properly be held, responsible for their beliefs: the educational and the legal systems.
Teachers and professors hold their students responsible for their beliefs, knowledge, ignorance as well as forgetting—there are certain things such that, given the assignments and instructions, they should believe and know, and not be ignorant of and not have forgotten about them. And not only that, they also hold students responsible for the degree of firmness with which they hold beliefs (“You shouldn't have been so sure that the gene is the unit of selection”), for the ways in which they acquired them (“You shouldn't have believed he was innocent simple because he said he was”), and for what might be called their measure of precision of the knowledge (“You should have known not just that it was in the 11th century, but that it was in 1066”).Footnote 15
That teachers and professors hold their students responsible in these ways is evidenced not only by what they say, but also by the grading practice which is an integral part of any educational system. To see this we need to note that what people in general assert, and also what students assert in written and oral examinations, tests and quizzes, in papers and in presentations, expresses their beliefs, knowledge, ignorance and forgetfulness.Footnote 16 These exams, papers and presentations are the objects of grading. But what is it to grade any of these objects? It is to pass a verdict on them. What kind of verdict? Let us canvass various options.
One option is that the verdict is purely factual. Just as a botanist may pass the factual verdict that “There are 5 maples in the garden”, so a teacher may pass the verdict “That student answered 20 out of 30 questions correctly.” Both of these verdicts are factual. It is easy to see, however, that a grade is not just a factual verdict. For noting the fact that the student has answered 20 out of 30 questions correctly as such doesn't entail that he passed the exam, nor that he failed it; it doesn't entail anything about what grade the student deserves (i.e. what grade on the A–F, 1–10 or 1–30 scales). To be sure, ideally grades are based on facts; but it is only facts in combination with a certain standard that can ground a grade—a standard that specifies that if a student answers 20 out of 30 questions correctly, he deserves, say, a B, or a 7, or a 22. Such specifications are not factual verdicts, although they require factual verdicts for their proper application. Such specifications are evaluative.
This suggests that a grade is not a factual but an evaluative verdict: a grade is the result of the application of a standard (an evaluative specification) to a factual verdict. The grading system is used to indicate whether, given a certain standard (and given the specific circumstances such as the books assigned, the instructions given and the available time) the student performed adequately, whether he performed the way he ought to perform—and to what degree, for two students may pass an quiz, while one of them did better than the other. So a grade is an evaluative verdict. However, a grade is not just an evaluative verdict. To see this, compare the verdict that a student scores a ‘6’ on a quiz (and so passes) with the doctor's evaluative verdict that Mary's heart beats much too fast, an evaluation based on the factual verdict that her heart beats 160 times per minute when she is in full rest and the medical standard that says that when in rest, a human heart should beat somewhere between 52 and 78 times per minute. The doctor's verdict is an evaluative verdict—it says that Mary's heart doesn't do what it ought to do. Both the doctor's and the teacher's verdict, then, are evaluative: they both evaluate whether a heart, or student, perform as they should (and to what degree they do or don't). Still, the teacher's verdict differs from the doctor's, for, as I shall show in a moment, the teacher's verdict, the grade, isn't just an evaluative verdict. To be sure, it is based on an evaluative verdict, but it goes beyond such a verdict as well.
To see this, we need to note that the doctor's verdict about Mary's heart is not a moral verdict. It doesn't express moral blame or scorn; it only says that a certain objective standard (a standard that specifies how a heart ought to function if it is functioning properly) has not been met. But when a teacher or professor passes a verdict on a student's performance, that verdict, in addition to specifying whether or not the student's performance satisfies a certain objective standard (a standard that specifies how a student ought to perform if he is to pass), it is a moral verdict on the students on the basis of their performances. Grades implicitly praise or blame the students for their performances, they implicitly praise or blame them for their belief, knowledge, ignorance and forgetfulness. We can think of low grades as implicit formalized expressions of blame for believing what the student should not have believed (or for believing on too slight grounds, or in too imprecise a manner), for not knowing what he should have known (given the assignments and instructions), for being ignorant and for having forgotten something. Likewise we can think of high grades as implicit formalized expressions of praise for believing what the student should believe (again, given the assignments and instructions), for knowing what the student ought to know, for not being ignorant, for not having forgotten something. So I am suggesting that we can think about grades as implicit formalized moral verdicts—‘moral’ taken in a broad sense, the sense in which they express blame and praise. One piece of evidence in favour of this suggestion is the fact that when students perform exceptionally well, the grading system allows them to pass ‘with honour’, or ‘with the highest honour’ (cum laude, or summa cum laude) which are explicit moral terms (construed broadly).
The grading practise has yet another feature that the practise of passing mere factual or evaluative verdicts has not. Low grades are spurs to the students to improve themselves in the ways of knowledge and belief, whereas high grades assure them they are doing well in that respect. The entire institution of education is based on the idea that people can improve themselves in what they know and believe, that they can reduce their ignorance, and that students can and ought to stretch out for what is not, or not yet, in their intellectual (or other),Footnote 17 reach.
If the grading system is indeed, as I have claimed it to be, geared not only toward evaluative but also to moral verdicts—so, if it is indeed used to praise and blame students for their performances, this entails that the educational institution is built on the idea that students can be held responsible for what they do and don't believe and know, what they are ignorant of and what they have forgotten.
Suppose now that the grading is not what I have suggested that it is, that it is not a formalized system for implicit praise and blame, and accordingly that it does not signal the fact that students are held responsible for what they know, believe and are ignorant of. Then what would grading be? Grades would still be verdicts on the student's performances but they would at best be evaluative verdicts only—verdicts that wouldn't differ from the doctor's verdict on the performance of Mary's heart. They wouldn't be moral verdicts, broadly construed, so as expressions of blame and praise. They would not be spurs to improvement nor assurances that one is doing well. But if the grades of the teacher and the professor would not differ from the verdicts of the doctor, education could not be directed at the goal of intellectual (and other) improvement, and the grades would not be incentives to progress. The institution of education would take on a radical different aspect, and wouldn't and couldn't do what society expects from it.
To see how the legal system builds on the idea that humans are responsible for what they believe, know and are ignorant of (I will forget about forgetting) we need to go into the relation between human action and belief. The first thing to note is that many, but not all, actions spring forth from belief. Some actions are not propelled by belief but by instincts, desires, and appetites—by what Thomas Reid referred to as the ‘mechanical’ and ‘animal principles’ of action.Footnote 18 Given the topic at hand, these actions can be put to one side. As to those actions that do, as I said, ‘spring forth’ from belief, it should be noted that there exist diverse relations between beliefs and actions. Two relations stand out: beliefs can motivate an agent to do action A, and beliefs can guide an agent in doing action A. The belief that there was gold out west once motivated and propelled the actions of men and women that constituted what is now called the gold rush—and this belief motivated only in conjunction with many further beliefs on the part of the gold diggers, such as the belief that gold is a highly valued material, that it does well on the market, that rings and other jewellery can be made of it, that it is to be found out west (or at more specified locations), that there is a limited amount of it, etc. At the same time, at least some of these beliefs guided the gold digger's behaviour in specific ways: the belief that there is gold out west, guided them when they were trying to find the way; and the belief that there is only a limited amount of gold, guided them in that it made them wary to tarry. So beliefs can motivate and guide actions—and those beliefs can be about facts, but also about values. It isn't relevant for what follows to draw a sharp distinction between motivating and guiding. What is relevant is that these relations between beliefs and actions exist. Very roughly, we may think of a person's set of beliefs as his route map—a map that depicts his surroundings and indicates where he is heading (and why).
There is yet another possible relation between belief and action that we should pay attention to, viz. necessitation and consider the question whether beliefs can necessitate particular actions—i.e. whether beliefs can be such that an agent's having them is sufficient for that agent's performing a particular action. From a common sense perspective such beliefs could exist but it wouldn't seem likely that they are manifold. If they exist, then very likely we face a case of pathology, such as kleptomania and pyromania. Such cases can perhaps be construed in the following way: someone sees a commodity and forms the belief that I can take with me, or that I can set on fire, and these very beliefs motivate and guide the person in such a way that they necessitate the stealing or the setting on fire of the commodity respectively. Kleptomaniacs and pyromaniacs, we might think, cannot have these beliefs and not perform these sad actions. Now it might not be true that in pathological cases like these it is beliefs that necessitate the actions. It may be that very strong inclinations do the trick. However that may be, from a common sense point of view it is true that in the typical case beliefs may motivate and guide actions, but that they at best only very rarely necessitate them.
With these relations between beliefs and actions in full view, I should now like to argue that our legal institutions are based on the idea that humans can be properly held responsible for what they believe, know and are ignorant of. Consider a non pathological actor S who performs an action A that is motivated and guided by S's sincere belief B.Footnote 19 Suppose now that by doing A S violates the law. Suppose furthermore that S has to appear in court and that he defends himself by saying that he did A, because he sincerely held belief B and that A was motivated and guided by B. How will the judge or the jury respond? That depends on many further factors—such as (i) whether or not B is true, (ii) whether or not holding B is immoral, (iii) whether or not S was culpable for having B, (iv) whether or not it is likely that S did A only because he was motivated and guided by B (S might have acted on other beliefs as well), (v) whether judge or jury are able to evaluate B's truth value, etc. Two of these factors are of special relevance for our present concerns: (ii) and (iii). Let us consider them in turn.
If B is regarded as being no more than an unacceptable and irrational prejudice, if it is, for instance, a crudely racist belief, and if B indeed motivated and guided S's action A, then judge nor jury will hold that S is exculpated or exonerated for doing A. A was motivated and guided by belief B, all right—but S shouldn't have B in the first place. And this implies that judge and jury hold S responsible for having B. Of course, in our Western legal systems S could not be brought to trial simply for having B; belief, with us, is free. S can only be brought to trial if he acts on immoral belief. But even then it is supposed that S should not have that belief, that he can be held responsible for it, and hence that he is blameworthy because of it.
The point just made needs qualification, however—a qualification that is hinted at in (iii). For it is possible that S holds B, an irrational prejudice or otherwise bad sort of belief, but that he does so in a non-culpable way. It might be that S holds B out of non-culpable ignorance, or that S holds B because he was indoctrinated or brain washed. In those conditions judge and jury will hold that S is excused for having B. And they will also hold that S is excused for the action that was motivated and guided by B. This supports, in an indirect way, the claim I am making. For if having a certain belief can only be excused when certain conditions obtain, then absent those conditions those beliefs are not excused. And this means that absent those conditions a person is, and so can properly be held, responsible for believing. Our legal systems, of course, acknowledge cases in which a wrongful action is excused because it was motivated and guided by a non-culpably held false belief. And thus they support, in an indirect way, the claim that those systems suppose that in the absence of excusing conditions, we can properly be held responsible for what we believe.
Beliefs, then, can be culpably held. It should be noted that culpably held beliefs aren't, necessarily, false beliefs. True beliefs can also be culpably held, for instance when they result from poor research or invalid reasoning. Beliefs that motivate and guide illegal actions are therefore beliefs for which agents are responsible and for which they can properly be held responsible—at least in the absence of excusing conditions.
Belief can be culpable, and so can ignorance.Footnote 20 Ignorance isn't always an excuse for an illegal action, only when it is non-culpable. When a financial administrator fails to fill out the tax forms for his company appropriately because he was unaware of certain regulations, then from the point of view of the law his ignorance is no excuse. He should have known the regulations. It was his duty to know them—a duty that comes with his position. Judge or jury can and will hold him guilty for his ignorance. The legal system, then, supposes that the administrator can properly be held responsible for his ignorance, and is not excused for it. In many cases that are brought to court, unlawful actions that were done from ignorance are not excused because of the agent's ignorance. And this, in an indirect way, supports the claim I am making. For in those cases where ignorance is not excused (so where it is not non-culpable), the law assumes that agents can be properly held responsible for their ignorance. Goering's prosecutor at the Neurenberg trials clearly assumed so much; as he tried to establish whether or not Goering was indeed ignorant of the atrophic facts he clearly assumed that ignorance can be culpable.
These considerations, I submit, support the claim that the idea that we appropriately can be held responsible for what believe, as well as what we are ignorant of, underlies the social institution of the law. With respect to belief the argument can be summarized as follows:
(1) Humans are motivated and guided in (some of) their actions by their beliefs.
(2) If those actions violate the law, the law declares agents guilty because of those actions—unless the beliefs that motivated and guided the actions were non-culpably held.
(3) Thus the law assumes that humans are not responsible for non-culpably held beliefs.
(4) That humans are not responsible for non-culpably held beliefs entails that humans are responsible for culpably held beliefs.
(5) If X assumes a, and a entails b, then X assumes b.
(6) Therefore, the law assumes that humans are responsible for culpably held beliefs.
With respect to ignorance the argument is this (and it mimics the argument for belief):
(7) Humans sometimes act out of ignorance.
(8) If those actions violate the law, the law declares agents guilty because of those actions—unless the ignorance is non-culpable.
(9) Thus the law assumes that humans are not responsible for non-culpable ignorance.
(10) That humans are not responsible for non-culpable ignorance entails that humans are responsible for culpable ignorance.
(11) Therefore, the law assumes that humans are responsible for culpable ignorance.
In both of these arguments the fourth premises, so (4) and (10), are the lynchpin. I have suggested that these statements of entailment are true; so what I have suggested is that the following is true:
[A] X is not responsible for non-culpable belief/ignorance entails that X is responsible for culpable belief/ignorance.
It has been objected,Footnote 21 however, that this suggestion is too strong for the following reason: if [A] is true, then so must [B]:
[B] X is not responsible for the non-toxic waste in X's rubbish tip entails that X is responsible for the toxic waste there.
But [B] is quite obviously false: from the fact that you are not responsible for the non-toxic apple peels in your rubbish tip (someone else put those peels there) it cannot be inferred that you are therefore responsible for the cyanide there (after all, someone else might have put that in your tip too). And if [B] is false, then so must [A].
By way of response: this objection assumes that the entailment stated in [A] is of the same form as the entailment stated in [B]. That form must be something like this:
[C] X is not responsible for non-aY entails that X is responsible for aY,
where X is a variable that ranges over agents, Y over states of affairs (such as believing something, or there being waste in one's rubbish tip), and a over qualifications of those states of affairs (such as believing something non culpably, or the waste in one's rubbish bin being non toxic).
The crucial question now is whether it is correct, as the objection also assumes, that if two statements of form [C] have true antecedents, both must have true consequents. More generally, is it correct, as the objection assumes, that if two entailments are of the same form and have true antecedents, their consequents must be true too? The answer, as I shall argue, is that it is not. The argument consists in providing a rather uncontroversial example of two entailments of the same form with true antecedents and of which one has a true and the other a false consequent. Consider
[D] (p entails q) entails (It is true that p entails that It is true that q)
and
[E] (p entails q) entails (It is surprising that p entails that It is surprising that q).
[D] and [E] are entailments of the same form—a form that can be represented as:
[F] (p entails q) entails (Op entails Oq),
where p and q are variables that range over propositions, and O a variable that ranges over what Dretske has called ‘epistemic operators’.Footnote 22 Now suppose we give [D] and [E] true antecendents—for example by substituting for p the proposition that Bill wins and for q the proposition that someone wins. If Bill wins, then someone wins; and this entails, as [D] has it, that It is true that Bill wins entails that It is true that someone wins—which is of course correct. So [D] is true. Again, if Bill wins, then someone wins; and this entails, as [E] has it, that It is surprising that Bill wins entails that It is surprising that Someone wins—but this is of course wrong. After all, Bill's chances to win the race may have been negligible and so it may be surprising that he wins; but that his winning is surprising doesn't entail that it is surprising that someone wins. Any race has a winner.
So here we have two entailments, [D] and [E], that have the same form, [F], and whose antecedents are both true, while [D]'s consequent is true and [E]'s false. This is obvious and unproblematic. And this is a perfect analogy to how it is with [A], [B] and [C]. Not all statements of entailment that share form [F] are true; which are, depends in what is substituted for O. Likewise, not all statements of entailment that share form [C] are true; which are, depends on what is substituted for a and Y. As [F] is true for O = it is true that, but false for O = it is surprising that, so [C] is true for Y = belief or Y = ignorance and a = culpable, but false for Y = waste and a = toxic.
Much more can be said about this highly interesting and difficult matter; but what I have said so far is enough to diffuse the objection. The rest will have to await another occasion.
4. Conclusion
By way of conclusion, then, there is a lot of linguistic evidence for the thesis that human beings can, at least sometimes, be held responsible for their beliefs, knowledge, forgetting and ignorance. This thesis finds further support in that two important social institutions are built on the truth of that thesis. But if this thesis is true, then the problem with responsible belief that was developed in section 1 (viz. the problem that it seems to make no sense to speak of obligations and prohibitions with respect to belief, hence no sense to hold one another responsible for what we believe, and hence no sense to blame or criticize others because of what they believe) must rest on a mistake. On the other hand: if the problem with responsible belief does not rest on a mistake, ubiquitous linguistic practice and important social institutions such as education and the legal system are thrown in jeopardy: large stretches of linguistic practice become unintelligible, and both education and legal practice crucially appear to rest on an untenable assumption—an assumption that, once given up, will cause these institutions to stumble and fall.Footnote 23
