Assessing the Relationship between "Moral Responsibility" and "Voluntariness in Belief": A Critical Analysis Based on Self-Fulfilling Beliefs

The question of whether it is possible to believe voluntarily is one of the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral philosophy. In the dominant tradition of twentieth-century epistemology, belief was considered an involuntary state based on evidence, the formation of which is not subject to the agent's will and decision. However, in the twenty-first century, numerous efforts have been made to defend "doxastic voluntarism." Some of these efforts argue that at least in certain specific conditions, voluntarism regarding belief is defensible, including conditions in which there is a special relationship between voluntary believing and the truth of the object of belief, such that the truth of the belief is guaranteed either due to the conceptual features of belief itself or due to particular circumstances. This paper first examines different versions of this idea in the works of David Velleman, Rik Peels, and Andrew Reisner, and demonstrates that their defense of doxastic voluntarism is based on the analysis of "self-fulfilling beliefs." Then, Gregory Antill's critique of these efforts is examined and it is shown that this critique, in its current form, is insufficient to refute the claims of contemporary voluntarists. Subsequently, by adding four new considerations to Antill's critique—"the distinction between propositional belief and doxastic commitment," "the temporality of epistemic justification," "the Acquisition Problem," and "the critical analysis of the role of normative knowledge"—it is argued that self-fulfilling beliefs and states of epistemic suspension cannot serve as evidence for doxastic voluntarismdescription of the nature of belief.