J-Reliabilism and the New Evil Genius

In this post, I outline what has come to be known as the New Evil Genius objection to reliabilism. There are several versions of reliabilism currently available, but the one I have in mind has to do with justification and amounts the following claim:

(J-Rel) For any agent S, S’s belief that p is justified IFF it was formed via a reliable process (i.e., a process that tends to produce true beliefs).

The following claim seems to be in keeping with our common sense intuitions about justification:

(NEG) The extent to which S is justified in believing that p at time t is the same as the extent to which S’s recently envatted duplicate is justified in believing that p at t.

However, the combination of both (NEG) and (J-Rel) leads to the following implausible conclusion:

(C) The beliefs of S’s recently envatted duplicate are produced by reliable processes.

To see this, let us begin by simplifying (J-Rel) and (NEG) for the purpose of argumentation. First, we may note that (J-Rel) entails (A):

(A) If S’s belief that p is justified, then it was produced by a reliable process.

Likewise, we may simplify (NEG) by noting that in cases where S’s belief that p is justified, (NEG) entails (B):

(B) (Recently envatted) S’s belief that p is justified.

From premises (A) and (B) we can construct an argument for the conclusion (C), as follows:

(Arg1):

(A) If S’s belief that p is justified, then it was produced by a reliable process.

(B) (Recently envatted) S’s belief that p is justified.

Therefore, by modus ponens:

(C) (Recently envatted) S’s belief that p was produced by a reliable process.

But (C) is intuitively false. For those given to logical minutia, the proof for the denial of (J-Rel) from the above premises would look something like this:

1. ~(C) {premise (ex hypothesi)}

2. {(A) . (B)} → (C) {premise (restatement of (Arg1) above)}

3. (NEG) → (B) {premise (as defined above)}

4. (J-Rel) → (A) {premise (as defined above)}

5. (NEG) {premise (common sense intuition)}

6. ~{(A) . (B)} {from (i) and (ii), by modus tollens}

7. {~(A) V ~(B)} {from (vi), by De Morgan’s laws}

8. (B) {from (iii) and (v), by modus ponens}

9. ~(A) {from (vii) and (viii), by disjunctive syllogism}}

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10. ~(J-Rel) {from (iv) and (ix), by modus tollens}