MORAL REASONS, EPISTEMIC REASONS AND RATIONALITY

It is standard, both in the philosophical literature and in ordinary parlance, to assume that one can fall short of responding to all one's moral reasons without being irrational. Yet when we turn to epistemic reasons, the situation could not be more different. Most epistemologists take it as axiomatic that for a belief to be rational is for it to be well supported by epistemic reasons. We find ourselves with a striking asymmetry, then, between the moral and epistemic domains concerning what is taken for granted about whether failures to respond to reasons are failures of rationality. My aim in this paper is to interrogate this asymmetry, and ultimately to argue that the asymmetry is groundless. Instead, I will offer an error theory to explain the asymmetry in intuitions (away). This error theory suggests that we should amend the conventional wisdom about the relationship between epistemic reasons and rationality.