Chapter 4 - Knowledge and Seemingly Risky Actions

Summary

Here, I argue that knowledge-level justification for p suffices to make it rationally permissible to treat p as a reason for action. I will arrive at this conclusion indirectly, by first defending the sufficiency direction of the knowledge norm for practical reasoning (KRS) in sections 4.1–4.4 against popular counterexamples. In section 4.5, I consider why our intuitions about the counterexamples are misleading. In section 4.6, by running the subtraction argument presented in Chapter 2, I argue that knowledge-level justification for believing p suffices in all contexts for rational permissibility and I point out how this view still vindicates part of the knowledge-first project.