UCLA

My dissertation investigates the epistemic, moral, and political significance of open-mindedness. Its main goal is to argue that there is an imperfect duty of open-mindedness that sets moral and epistemic requirements on the structure of one’s agency.The common understanding of open-mindedness describes it as a purely epistemic virtue consisting for an individual to be willing to expose oneself, horizontally, to different views, and to cognitively engage with them. I argue that this purely epistemic, intellectual, horizontal, and individual conception is incomplete in several respects. First, open-mindedness comprises also a vertical dimension, oriented not only towards the broadening of one’s perspective, but also towards the deepening of one’s understanding; second, when the subject matter involves other people, vertical open-mindedness has a distinctively moral value; third, open-mindedness towards other people has a practical, action-oriented dimension, which calls for practical engagement and cooperation; finally, open-mindedness can sometimes be articulated also at the collective level, through the creation of structures and procedures embodying forms of institutional open-mindedness and fostering in turn individual open-mindedness. The basic idea is that there is something wrong with our agency if, in our cognitive engagement with a subject matter, and/or in our practical engagement with other people, our agency and our mind are not appropriately open to that subject matter, or to those people. The duty of open-mindedness does not necessarily require one to do some specific thing, in a given circumstance. It is an imperfect duty in the Kantian sense – it prescribes structuring one’s agency around certain values. My strategy to defend my view is twofold. First, I offer a general argument for what a duty of open-mindedness consists in and what its moral and epistemic grounds are. Second, I show that recognizing this duty would help us to better address specific problems in different areas of epistemology and moral philosophy. On the epistemic side, I argue that a duty of open-mindedness can help us give a fuller account of the requirements for well-formed beliefs, by appealing to the structure governing the direction of attention during inquiry. On the moral side, I argue that open-mindedness can help us explain our obligations to practically engage with people whom we are not related to yet, such as prospective co-workers and prospective co-citizens. This in turn provides further support for the idea that we should acknowledge a duty of open-mindedness and helps us spell out in more detail what open-mindedness consists in and its central role in the normative landscape.