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Suppose a supernatural being tells me, and I know that he is speaking truthfully, that if I so choose, he can make sure that over the next year I will unjustifiedly acquire a lot of true beliefs about all kinds of topics that are important and interesting, and, moreover, I will adhere to these beliefs quite firmly even though they will remain unjustified and will not constitute knowledge. Moreover, he promises that the true beliefs will not be misleading, and that in the process, I will not acquire any false beliefs that I wouldn't have otherwise acquired. Furthermore, if I accept the offer, I will forget that I have accepted it.

Should I accept the offer?

On the one hand, truth is worth having. On the other hand, it seems that my acquiring these beliefs will involve epistemic vice. If I agree to the offer, I am acting like a doxastic consequentialist: getting things right justifies what might be thought by some to be inappropriate means.

I don't for sure know the answer to the question. But I want to observe one thing. The answer to the question does not seem to lie within epistemology as it is usually practiced. I already know the beliefs wouldn't be knowledge. I also know they wouldn't be epistemically justified. But now that I know all that, I need to decide whether or not to allow myself to gain these beliefs. And this, I think, is a question about what a good human life is like, about what virtue and vice are. It seems to me to be a moral question.

If this is right, then ultimately the question how one should act in the doxastic sphere is a moral question. For although this case is contrived so as to make the questions it raises more obvious, I think similar issues of value are present in any decision on a course of doxastic action.

This isn't an argument that epistemic norms, insofar as they have normative force, are a species of moral norms (something that I also think is true), but rather it is an argument that any guidance we get from epistemic norms is subordinated to moral norms, even when the doxastic life is all that is relevantly in view.

Alexander Pruss

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2007/12/unjustified-true-belief.html