Title: Epistemic Supererogation and the Right to Believe
Abstract
It’s a sad fact that other people are so often unreasonable. Even worse, they think the same of us! How can we live on civil terms with people whose views we can’t rationally endorse? My answer starts with the “right to believe.” Usually, this right is seen as a claim against brainwashing or browbeating, but I argue that there is a quite literal sense in which our rights let us justify our beliefs to others about matters of religion, morality, and aesthetics. Our “epistemic prerogative,” as I call it, is not a reason to believe anything in particular, just as the right to free speech is not a reason to say anything in particular. But the prerogative underlies a liberal culture of toleration. Rather than seeing our own beliefs as obligatory for others to share, we should often see these beliefs as supererogatory, or “beyond the call of duty.”
