Miriam McCormick

“Given that beliefs cannot directly result from decisions or intention, what does this tell us about our being responsible for beliefs? As we have seen, one possibility is that it is a mistake to praise or blame people for the beliefs they hold, or to see them as responsible for those beliefs. If this were the case, then our attributions of responsibility in the doxastic realm, which are common, would all be mistaken. Most theorists, however, do not want to accept the view that there is such widespread error when it comes to common views about beliefs. If one takes it that responsibility entails voluntary control and one agrees that we lack this control, then one would have to deny that we are responsible for our beliefs. If one thinks we can (and ought) to be responsible for our beliefs, and agrees that we lack voluntary control over beliefs, one must conclude that responsibility does not entail voluntary control.”
― Miriam McCormick, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief

“Locating all responsibility for belief at the level of character is problematic. First, our tendency to blame people with whom we have little experience casts doubt on the character-centered view. It seems like we are able to make justified general claims about what adult believers should or should not believe, and we blame them for particular beliefs, regardless of what their general doxastic tendencies are. Consider someone who does, for example, possess the epistemic virtue of wisdom, who as Owens puts it, “knows to whom credit is due, at what point to form a view, when to open his mind and when to close it,” and most of the time believes in such a way that manifests this virtue. If, one time, perhaps when overcome with jealousy, he forms the false belief that his wife is unfaithful on insufficient evidence, would it really make sense for us to say, “Shame on you, you are lacking merit as a person as you clearly have not cultivated the virtue of wisdom”? Can we really even assess whether someone possesses a particular virtue based on one instance? It seems not, but blame still seems appropriate in this one instance. He is blameworthy because he has a belief he ought not to have, and, I will argue, at least a part of our blame does indicate we think he has failed to exercise a kind of control.”
― Miriam McCormick, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief