Research

The Belief-Relative Value account, or BRV, evaluates the rationality of belief by expected practical value relative to the agent’s actual beliefs and ends. One attraction of BRV is that it seems to capture what makes sense “from the inside”, from the agent’s own perspective. I argue that this motivation is unstable. Cases of alienated belief show that a belief can guide an agent’s attention, inference, and action while the standpoint from which it guides her remains intrusive, imposed, or estranged. BRV can preserve its austerity by identifying the agent’s perspective with the operative standpoint fixed by her actual beliefs and ends. But then belief-relativity secures only instrumental intelligibility, not deliberative self-guidance from a standpoint the agent can inhabit as her own. Alternatively, BRV can enrich the relevant perspective with an ownership condition, but only by giving up some of the austerity that makes the view distinctive.

Democratic deliberation presupposes citizens who can treat their judgement as entitled to enter public reasoning as the judgement of an equal. This paper asks whether evidentialism, or anti-pragmatism about reasons for belief more broadly, can account for that requirement. Consider a woman deliberating in a sexist environment. Her evidence may suggest that speaking will be costly and that deference is relatively safer. Yet sustaining belief in her entitlement to judge may partly constitute the civic self-trust needed to participate as an equal. Post hoc usefulness is not enough, since it can amount to a rationalisation of favourable outcomes. The paper asks whether practical considerations can count ex ante as reasons for belief, by reference to the role of agential standing-beliefs in keeping agency available under disempowering conditions. Building on Fricker’s (2007) account of epistemic injustice and Li’s (2025) account of doxastic injustice, the paper treats epistemic empowerment as one species of doxastic empowerment. A subject may understand her situation accurately while still losing the standing-beliefs through which agency remains available. I argue that at least some empowerment-based considerations have normative weight as reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs. This claim is selective. I call the corresponding disposition EMPOWER, a form of doxastic faith in oneself that can make belief virtuous where the evidence is permissive. The relevant belief must still empower in the right way, i.e. by supporting agency without gradually eroding the agent’s capacities or flourishing. A further issue concerns beliefs that empower one agent by undermining the standing of others. In democratic deliberation, the anti-disempowerment constraint is internal to the kind of standing at issue. A standing-belief counts as democratically empowering only if it preserves the equal standing of other participants. Beliefs that make one’s standing depend on superior status therefore fall outside the scope of civic self-trust. The result is a more discriminating form of pragmatism, limited to empowerment-based reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs.

This paper compares Hannah Arendt’s figure of the conscious pariah in “We Refugees” with Nietzsche’s use of “Tschandala” in The Antichrist. I argue that both authors examine how belief in degrading labels can shape self-understanding and agency. Arendt writes about Jewish refugees who inherit exclusion as a social fact. Nietzsche writes from a revaluation of values in which Christian morality has degraded the instincts of higher human beings. In Arendt’s essay, the conscious pariah names a refusal of the parvenu’s flight into assimilation. The parvenu tries to escape exclusion by adopting the identity demanded by the surrounding society. Arendt recognises in figures such as Kafka a different relation to exclusion. The pariah label is retained and clarified, without accepting the degrading judgement attached to it. Arendt’s account suggests a form of doxastic empowerment through truthful self-identification. The agent gains agency by seeing her social condition without translating it into self-contempt. Nietzsche’s case works through revaluation. In The Antichrist, “Tschandala” names the type Nietzsche associates with decadence and hostility to life. His answer depends on the claim that Christianity has reversed the order of value. It has condemned the instincts of higher human beings and made strength appear evil. Within the Christian value-system, the superior type is treated as guilty and outcast. Nietzsche responds by rejecting the Christian judgement that degraded the higher type and by redirecting the charge of viciousness towards priests animated by revenge against life. I conclude that Arendt and Nietzsche offer two models of doxastic empowerment through contested labels. Arendt reclaims an imposed label by separating social exclusion from self-degradation. Nietzsche reclaims the superior label by rejecting the Christian order that had turned it into a sign of guilt. The remaining question is whether Nietzsche’s reversal avoids ressentiment as successfully as Arendt’s conscious pariah avoids self-deceptive assimilation.

David Benatar maintains that human lives lack cosmic meaning and that this absence contributes to the case for anti-natalism. His strongest formulation is cumulative: human lives are brief and burdened by adversity, substantial cosmic or ultimate meaning would have mitigated those burdens, and no such good is available. This paper grants that human lives lack the relevant meaning, that some forms of it would be highly valuable, and that their absence may fittingly be regretted. It distinguishes a weak claim, according to which cosmic meaning would have strengthened the justification for creation, from a strong claim, according to which cosmic meaninglessness itself supplies a pro tanto reason for non-creation. Three comparisons must be separated: whether a life with cosmic meaning would be better for its subject, whether a world containing such a life would be better impersonally, and whether creating it would be easier to justify. None of these comparisons by itself establishes that creating a life without cosmic meaning has negative normative weight relative to non-creation. Three principles could supply the required connection: a person-affecting deprivation principle, a justified-burden principle, or an impersonal marginal-value principle. Benatar comes closest to the second, but does not specify its threshold, bearer, or substitutability conditions. The same structural problem appears under welfare, harm-based, consent-based, asymmetrical, and impersonal approaches to procreative ethics. Cosmic meaning could strengthen a defence of creation. Its absence supplies an independent reason against creation only if a further normative principle explains why.

This MA thesis examines the normativity of belief at the intersection of contemporary epistemology, pragmatism, Nietzsche studies, and the philosophy of nihilism. It argues that neither evidentialism nor austere forms of pragmatism provide an adequate account of rational belief. Against belief-relative pragmatism, the thesis develops an objection based on the distinction between thin instrumental intelligibility and thicker forms of agential ownership. It then explores more selective, value-shaped forms of pragmatism, arguing that empowerment cannot serve as a sufficient condition for rational belief, while an anti-disempowerment constraint appears more promising. The later chapters interpret Nietzsche as an axiologically oriented pragmatist about belief and argue that the most corrosive form of nihilism depends not on meaning nihilism alone, but on its conjunction with an unconditional sovereignty of truth over belief-like attitudes.

La tesi ricostruisce il rapporto tra superuomo e nichilismo classico a partire da Nietzsche e dalla sua ricezione novecentesca, con particolare attenzione all’interpretazione heideggeriana. Superuomo, volontà di potenza, trasvalutazione, eterno ritorno e nichilismo vengono letti come parti di un lessico teorico unitario, le cui nozioni si chiariscono solo nelle loro connessioni reciproche. Il lavoro mette così in luce problemi che attraversano insieme studi nietzschiani ed epistemologia: verità e valore, normatività delle credenze, funzione pratica del credere, crisi dei fondamenti e forme del nichilismo.