Parity and the Permissivism Puzzle: A Defense of Epistemic Options

Moral philosophers generally affirm that there are moral options: a single person sometimes has multiple morally permissible actions at a time. But epistemologists generally deny that there are epistemic options: a single person never has multiple epistemically permissible doxastic attitudes at a time. This asymmetry is striking. Furthermore, there are intuitive cases of epistemic options. However, it's not clear how these cases differ from cases where withholding is required, such as a coin flip case. We call this the Permissivism Puzzle. In this paper, we offer a solution to the Permissivism Puzzle and defend the possibility of epistemic options by appealing to epistemic parity, which is something like imprecise equality. Not only does epistemic parity help solve the puzzle, but it also helps the permissivist respond to notable objections from, for example, arbitrariness and accuracy.