Hrishikesh Joshi | Bowling Green State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Hrishikesh Joshi
Synthese (forthcoming), 2022
Following Anthony Downs's classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that m... more Following Anthony Downs's classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: i) the costs to the individual of being wrong are negligible, ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming), 2022
This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one's belief that P-the pre... more This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one's belief that P-the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P. For, it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill's On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is that on morally and politically laden issues in particular, a high degree of doxastic openness might be appropriate.
Politics, Philosophy & Economics (forthcoming)
The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People's political beliefs cl... more The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People's political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project's empirical discussion focuses on the U.S. context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.
Philosophical Explorations, 2017
This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you belie... more This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you believe you ought not to do. I suggest that there is a prima facie tension between this idea and certain plausible coherence constraints on rational agency. I propose a way to resolve this tension. While akratic agents are always irrational, they are not always practically irrational, as many authors assume. Rather, "inverse" akratics like Huck Finn fail in a distinctively theoretical way. What explains why akratic agents are always either theoretically or practically irrational? I suggest that this is true because an agent's total evidence determines both the beliefs and the intentions it's rational for her to have. Moreover, an agent's evidence does so in a way such that it's never rational for the agent to at once believe that she ought to Φ and lack the intention to Φ.
The Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy (Palgrave), 2018
This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to... more This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to minimize the occurrence of unauthorized migration and stay. While the effects of unauthorized migration on a country’s citizens and institutions have been vigorously debated, the literature has largely ignored duties of fairness to would-be immigrants. It is argued here that failing to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized migration and stay is deeply unfair to would-be immigrants who are not in a position to bypass visa regulations. Importantly, the argument here is orthogonal to the debate as to how much and what kinds of immigration ought to be allowed.
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2018
Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Christopher Freiman and Javier... more Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Christopher Freiman and Javier Hidalgo have argued that immigration restrictions conflict with the core commitments of liberalism. A society with immigration restrictions in place may well be optimal in some desired respects, but it is not liberal, they argue. So if you care about liberalism more deeply than you care about immigration restrictions, you should give up on restrictionism. You cannot hold on to both. I argue here that many restrictions on contractual, economic, and associational liberties seem to be justified by considerations other than liberty—thus the (undischarged) task for Freiman and Hidalgo is to tell us why such restrictions are justified but immigration restrictions are not. Moreover, even if this worry can be addressed, I argue, liberalism is not committed to its own demise in scenarios where there exist large enough numbers of would-be immigrants who accept and endorse illiberal norms in a way that is sufficiently resistant to change. Such a commitment requires thinking of border coercion as violating an absolute deontological constraint. This, I contend, is implausible.
Public Affairs Quarterly, 2019
According to G.A. Cohen, the principles of justice are insensitive to facts about human moral lim... more According to G.A. Cohen, the principles of justice are insensitive to facts about human moral limitations. This assumption allows him to mount a powerful defense of socialism. Here, I present a dilemma for Cohen. On the one hand, if such socialism is to be realized through collective property ownership, then the information problem renders the ideal incoherent, not merely infeasible. On the other hand, if socialism is to incorporate private ownership of productive assets, then Cohen loses the resources to distinguish his view from capitalism. For, if agents were ideally motivated, there would be no need for coercive taxation schemes and limitations on trade. Moreover, incorporating coercion drastically undermines Cohen’s original argument for socialism, which relies on an analogy to a camping trip among friends.
Drafts by Hrishikesh Joshi
Philosophical Studies, 2022
Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agen... more Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agent has reason to do obtain? On one class of views, reason facts obtain in virtue of agents' motivations. It might seem like a truism that at least some of our reasons depend on what we desire or care about. However, some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit, have convincingly argued that no reasons are grounded in this way. Typically, this latter, externalist view of reasons has been thought to enjoy the advantage of extensional adequacy-that is, the ability to account for all the reasons we intuitively think people have. This paper provides a novel argument against this assumption by considering a type of case wherein the relative strengths of the agent's reasons can only be adequately explained by reference to what she cares about. Adding some further assumptions yields that there are at least some internally sourced reasons.
Sage Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies, 2023
Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Ferguson and Zwolinski eds.), 2021
Philosophia, 2019
Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to... more Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to both. Would such a system be just? Theodore Sider argues: no. For, any possible criterion of determining where people go will involve treating very similar (possible) individuals very differently. Here, I argue that this point has deep and underappreciated implications for moral philosophy. The argument proceeds by analogy: many ethical theories make a sharp and practically significant distinction between persons and non-persons. Yet, just like in the binary afterlife, this involves treating very similar individuals very differently. I propose two ways out. The first is to deny that such theories are strictly speaking true, but to claim that it is practically best if people adopt them. The second is to modify such theories so as to allow for continuous variation in the scope and strength of the moral obligations arising from personhood.
Ethics: Right and Left (OUP), 2019
According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move ... more According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies would make the world a much better place, particularly by improving average well-being. This essay contends that both of these argumentative strategies fail. Some immigration restrictions are not only morally justified, but morally required.
Book Reviews by Hrishikesh Joshi
Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2021
The Philosophical Quarterly
Our world is complex, and coming to an accurate picture of it is hard. When it comes to the impor... more Our world is complex, and coming to an accurate picture of it is hard. When it comes to the important questions, we find that intelligent and informed people disagree with each other. Yet at the same time, many of us seem to have confident beliefs about controversial issues -the appropriate level of the minimum wage, say, or the proper approach to criminal justice. In his rigorous yet highly enjoyable book, Nathan Ballantyne offers some remedies. He defends a set of principles, which, if we use them to guide our inquiry, will likely make us more doxastically open -that is, agnostic about what attitude (belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment) is warranted given our evidence. In this way, the book is a project in what Ballantyne calls "regulative epistemology." A useful comparison here is non-ideal theory in political philosophy. There the question is: how should we design our political institutions given what humans are actually like? Analogously, regulative epistemology asks: given what we know about human limitations, how should we conduct our epistemic lives?
Books by Hrishikesh Joshi
Routledge Press, 2021
Draft version of the Prologue chapter
Synthese (forthcoming), 2022
Following Anthony Downs's classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that m... more Following Anthony Downs's classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: i) the costs to the individual of being wrong are negligible, ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming), 2022
This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one's belief that P-the pre... more This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one's belief that P-the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P. For, it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill's On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is that on morally and politically laden issues in particular, a high degree of doxastic openness might be appropriate.
Politics, Philosophy & Economics (forthcoming)
The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People's political beliefs cl... more The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People's political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project's empirical discussion focuses on the U.S. context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.
Philosophical Explorations, 2017
This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you belie... more This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you believe you ought not to do. I suggest that there is a prima facie tension between this idea and certain plausible coherence constraints on rational agency. I propose a way to resolve this tension. While akratic agents are always irrational, they are not always practically irrational, as many authors assume. Rather, "inverse" akratics like Huck Finn fail in a distinctively theoretical way. What explains why akratic agents are always either theoretically or practically irrational? I suggest that this is true because an agent's total evidence determines both the beliefs and the intentions it's rational for her to have. Moreover, an agent's evidence does so in a way such that it's never rational for the agent to at once believe that she ought to Φ and lack the intention to Φ.
The Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy (Palgrave), 2018
This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to... more This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to minimize the occurrence of unauthorized migration and stay. While the effects of unauthorized migration on a country’s citizens and institutions have been vigorously debated, the literature has largely ignored duties of fairness to would-be immigrants. It is argued here that failing to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized migration and stay is deeply unfair to would-be immigrants who are not in a position to bypass visa regulations. Importantly, the argument here is orthogonal to the debate as to how much and what kinds of immigration ought to be allowed.
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2018
Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Christopher Freiman and Javier... more Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Christopher Freiman and Javier Hidalgo have argued that immigration restrictions conflict with the core commitments of liberalism. A society with immigration restrictions in place may well be optimal in some desired respects, but it is not liberal, they argue. So if you care about liberalism more deeply than you care about immigration restrictions, you should give up on restrictionism. You cannot hold on to both. I argue here that many restrictions on contractual, economic, and associational liberties seem to be justified by considerations other than liberty—thus the (undischarged) task for Freiman and Hidalgo is to tell us why such restrictions are justified but immigration restrictions are not. Moreover, even if this worry can be addressed, I argue, liberalism is not committed to its own demise in scenarios where there exist large enough numbers of would-be immigrants who accept and endorse illiberal norms in a way that is sufficiently resistant to change. Such a commitment requires thinking of border coercion as violating an absolute deontological constraint. This, I contend, is implausible.
Public Affairs Quarterly, 2019
According to G.A. Cohen, the principles of justice are insensitive to facts about human moral lim... more According to G.A. Cohen, the principles of justice are insensitive to facts about human moral limitations. This assumption allows him to mount a powerful defense of socialism. Here, I present a dilemma for Cohen. On the one hand, if such socialism is to be realized through collective property ownership, then the information problem renders the ideal incoherent, not merely infeasible. On the other hand, if socialism is to incorporate private ownership of productive assets, then Cohen loses the resources to distinguish his view from capitalism. For, if agents were ideally motivated, there would be no need for coercive taxation schemes and limitations on trade. Moreover, incorporating coercion drastically undermines Cohen’s original argument for socialism, which relies on an analogy to a camping trip among friends.
Philosophical Studies, 2022
Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agen... more Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agent has reason to do obtain? On one class of views, reason facts obtain in virtue of agents' motivations. It might seem like a truism that at least some of our reasons depend on what we desire or care about. However, some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit, have convincingly argued that no reasons are grounded in this way. Typically, this latter, externalist view of reasons has been thought to enjoy the advantage of extensional adequacy-that is, the ability to account for all the reasons we intuitively think people have. This paper provides a novel argument against this assumption by considering a type of case wherein the relative strengths of the agent's reasons can only be adequately explained by reference to what she cares about. Adding some further assumptions yields that there are at least some internally sourced reasons.
Sage Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies, 2023
Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Ferguson and Zwolinski eds.), 2021
Philosophia, 2019
Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to... more Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to both. Would such a system be just? Theodore Sider argues: no. For, any possible criterion of determining where people go will involve treating very similar (possible) individuals very differently. Here, I argue that this point has deep and underappreciated implications for moral philosophy. The argument proceeds by analogy: many ethical theories make a sharp and practically significant distinction between persons and non-persons. Yet, just like in the binary afterlife, this involves treating very similar individuals very differently. I propose two ways out. The first is to deny that such theories are strictly speaking true, but to claim that it is practically best if people adopt them. The second is to modify such theories so as to allow for continuous variation in the scope and strength of the moral obligations arising from personhood.
Ethics: Right and Left (OUP), 2019
According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move ... more According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies would make the world a much better place, particularly by improving average well-being. This essay contends that both of these argumentative strategies fail. Some immigration restrictions are not only morally justified, but morally required.
Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2021
The Philosophical Quarterly
Our world is complex, and coming to an accurate picture of it is hard. When it comes to the impor... more Our world is complex, and coming to an accurate picture of it is hard. When it comes to the important questions, we find that intelligent and informed people disagree with each other. Yet at the same time, many of us seem to have confident beliefs about controversial issues -the appropriate level of the minimum wage, say, or the proper approach to criminal justice. In his rigorous yet highly enjoyable book, Nathan Ballantyne offers some remedies. He defends a set of principles, which, if we use them to guide our inquiry, will likely make us more doxastically open -that is, agnostic about what attitude (belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment) is warranted given our evidence. In this way, the book is a project in what Ballantyne calls "regulative epistemology." A useful comparison here is non-ideal theory in political philosophy. There the question is: how should we design our political institutions given what humans are actually like? Analogously, regulative epistemology asks: given what we know about human limitations, how should we conduct our epistemic lives?
Routledge Press, 2021
Draft version of the Prologue chapter