Psychologists and philosophers have argued that the capacity for perseverance or “grit” depends both on willpower and on a kind of epistemic resilience. But can a form of hopefulness in one’s future success also constitute a source of grit? I argue that substantial practical hopefulness, as a hope to bring about a desired outcome through exercises of one’s agency, can serve as a distinctive ground for the capacity for perseverance. Gritty agents’ “practical hope” centrally involves an attention-fueled, risk-inclined weighting of two competing concerns over action: when facing the decision of whether to persevere, hopeful gritty agents prioritize the aim of choosing a course of action which might go very well over that of choosing a course of action which is very likely to go fairly well. By relying on the notion of a “risk-inclined attentional pattern” as a dimension of gritty agents’ practical hope, we can explain that form of hope’s contribution to their motivation and practical rationality, especially on a risk-weighted expected utility framework. The upshot is a more pluralistic view of the sources of grit.
Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to "hope well," and what does "hoping well" involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. 1 | INTRODUCTION Our hopes are multifarious, ranging from the mundane or the prosaic to the life-shaping or the profound: we hope that it won't rain tomorrow, hope for success in our personal endeavors, hope to be cured from life-threatening diseases, and hope that we will somehow overcome the climate crisis. At bottom, is there anything that sets apart our "deepest" hopes from more superficial ones? Or do all hopes, including even the kind we "invest" in other people, in fact share the same underlying nature? Since hope is often portrayed as both valuable and dangerous, questions about its nature take on special significance. We are indeed often told to "never give up hope"; that "there is always room for hope," while also being warned against the possibility of entraining "false hopes," somehow divorced from reality and potentially leading to disastrous outcomes. But without knowing what hope is, how can we aspire to hope well? And what does "hoping well" even mean? Until quite recently, conceptual and normative questions about hope hadn't received much attention within the analytic tradition. This could be due, as Pettit (2004, p. 54) suggests, to the influence of a conception of hope emerging in the Modern period (notably in the works of Hobbes and Hume), according to which all hope consists in the combination of a desire for an outcome and the belief that outcome is possible but not certain. 1 If all there is to hope is "desire in the context of epistemic uncertainty," 2 then hope might not seem worthy of a standalone philosophical investigation. Attitudes toward hope's philosophical significance have now shifted, however, while hope also figures prominently in current public discourse. 3 This article aims to take stock of these recent philosophical developments. Section 2 turns to descriptive questions about the nature of hope, centering on the relationship between hope, desire, and the emotions, while Section 3 focuses on various evaluative measures used for assessing hope, in
I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties.
We often form intentions to resist anticipated future temptations. But when confronted with the temptations our resolutions were designed to withstand, we tend to revise our previous evaluative judgments and conclude that we should now succumb—only to then revert to our initial evaluations, once temptation has subsided. Some evaluative judgments made under the sway of temptation are mistaken. But not all of them are. When the belief that one should now succumb is a proper response to relevant considerations that have newly emerged, can acting in line with one’s previous intention nonetheless be practically rational? To answer this question, I draw on recent debates on the nature of higher-order evidence and on what rationally responding to such evidence involves. I propose that agents facing temptation often have evidence of “deliberative unreliability”, which they ought to heed even when it is “misleading” (that is, even when their evaluative judgments are in fact proper responses to the relevant considerations then available). Because evidence of deliberative unreliability can “dispossess” agents of normative reasons for evaluative judgments and actions that they would otherwise have, being continent despite judging that one should now succumb can often be more rational than giving in.
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