Demotivating Reasons Impartiality

Abstract This chapter critiques two arguments for a reasons impartiality constraint. Christensen’s “restaurant argument” presents a case of disagreement where it is intuitively clear that the disputants cannot legitimately rely on their contested reasoning and that they should give equal weight to their competing views. Christensen argues that to explain these verdicts, one must appeal to a demanding epistemic impartiality requirement he calls “independence.” Against this, it is argued that the intuitive verdicts in the example can be explained by weaker principles, including an internal reason constraint and an agent impartiality constraint. Schellenberg’s “doxastic minimalism argument” holds that genuine investigators will extend default trust to all and only those doxastic practices that are universal and humanly unavoidable. It is argued that Schellenberg relies on an overly restrictive conception of the aims of inquiry, and that even given this conception, his criteria of universality and unavoidability lack a principled basis.