Against epistemic agency

Abstract

The view that agency is central to explaining why actions are subject to moral and prudential norms has considerable appeal. With an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, we would have a unified agential picture of moral, prudential, and epistemic normativity. This paper argues against an agential explanation of epistemic normativity. Prominent proposals about epistemic agency cash the idea out in terms of voluntary agency, reasons-responsiveness, or judgment. I show that each of these proposals faces the following dilemma: either the proposal fails to capture any genuinely explanatory concept of agency or it fails to adequately capture the class of items that are governed by epistemic norms. I suggest that there is reason to think that any account of epistemic agency is likely to face this dilemma. My argument gives us grounds for pessimism about the prospects of an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, and a unified agential picture of all normativity. Furthermore, my paper motivates, without defending, an alternate picture of normativity: the idea that actions and beliefs are two distinct species of a common normative genus. Either there is some other property, apart from agency, which unifies all norm-governed phenomena, or there is no such unifying property at all.