Good, the Bad, and the Feasible

Feasibilism urges manifesting the best feasible dispositions--ways of forming and retaining doxastic states, as well as choosing and acting--that are available to beings like us. The first part of The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible presents case studies showing how epistemological implementations of feasibilism can advance long-standing debates in epistemology, including the New Evil Demon Problem, puzzles involving higher-order evidence and defeat, and challenges facing broadly consequentialist approaches. Maria Lasonen argues that a knowledge-centric implementation of feasibilism provides the most promising normative theory in epistemology: simple, elegant, metaphysically respectable, and explanatorily powerful. The second part of the book moves from epistemology to a more systematic defense of the feasibilist normative framework. Just as in the epistemic domain, in the moral domain we are confronted with problems of luck and limitation. For instance, given any plausible standard of moral rightness, in some situations it is only possible to do the right thing by luck. Again, we need a normative standard more attuned to our limitations. Lasonen argues that applying the feasibilist framework to the moral domain yields interesting and surprising results, such as it being possible to be blameworthy for morally right action. Feasibilism thus unifies different normative domains within a single, non-ideal framework, offering standards attuned to human limitations but tied to valuable normative successes.

Maria Lasonen is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Her research specializes in epistemology and normative theory. She has previously held academic appointments at the University Michigan and the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at several institutions. Her work has appeared in leading philosophy journals and edited collections, and it has won several prizes.