Interpersonal doxastic obligations

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that we have epistemic obligations towards the doxastic attitudes of others. My point of departure will be an underappreciated response by Matthew Chrisman (2008, 2020) to the voluntarism puzzle about epistemic deontology. He argues that there are true epistemic oughts concerning our doxastic attitudes that don’t require voluntary control, namely evaluative epistemic oughts. However, Chrisman also points out that evaluative oughts can imply prescriptive obligations. Which ones? My unorthodox claim will be that a central candidate for such implied epistemic obligations concerns how third parties ought to interact with the beliefs of individual believers. I will then motivate and give an account of these interpersonal obligations by taking inspiration from legal theory, where structurally analogous obligations are well studied and have been systematically codified.