philosophy homework questions
The Ethics of Belief
William Clifford
Moral Duty to Believe according to Evidence
Part 1
Ship-Owner Story
Relevant Duty
Relevant Facts about the Emigrant Ship: old, not over-well built, constantly used, and often needed repairs
Relevant Conclusion from such Facts: Its seaworthiness should be doubted.
Relevant Duty based on such Conclusion: The ship owner ought to have it thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense.
Biased Belief or Self-Deception
A Case of Biased Belief (Confirmation Bias) or Self-Deception: The ship-owner succeeded in overcoming the demand of the relevant duty. He did that by favoring other facts or beliefs that can cancel out the duty: its many successful voyages and the trust in Providence that guarantees the safety of passengers. He dismissed from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors, while he acquired sincere and comfortable conviction that the ship was thoroughly safe and seaworthy.
Responsibility and Belief
Suppose the ship went down and the ship-owner got his insurance money.
Question: Is the ship-owner responsible for the deaths of passengers for ignoring the belief that he had the right to believe due to the relevant facts and the relevant conclusion from such facts?
Answer: YES, even if he sincerely believed in the soundness of his ship. Despite the sincerity, he had no right to believe it, considering the evidences that are available and accessible to him. He has a duty to honestly earn a belief through patient investigation (not by stifling his doubts).
Responsibility and Belief (Part 2)
Suppose the ship was not unsound, i.e. it made numerous safe and successful voyages.
Question: Does that diminish the ship-owner’s responsibility for ignoring the belief that he had the right to believe due to the relevant facts and the relevant conclusion from such facts?
Answer: NO. “When an action is once done, it is right or wrong forever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out.”
Ethical Theory about Epistemic Duty
“The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.”
Religious Islanders Story
False Accusation and the Right to Believe
An island with some religious inhabitants who do not believe in the doctrine of original sin or eternal punishment
Suspicion: They had made use of unfair means to get their doctrines taught to children.
Accusation: They removed children from their parents or legal guardians, stole them away, and kept them from their friends and relatives.
Some men gathered themselves into a society to agitate the public about the matter, published grave accusations against individual citizens of the highest position and character, and did everything within their power to injure them in the exercise of what they claim to believe.
A commission was appointed to investigate the facts, but, after careful inquiries into all the available evidence, it appeared to the commission that the religious inhabitants were innocent. There is no sufficient evidence for the accusation. As a matter of fact, the evidence of their innocence would have been readily available, if the agitators inquired fairly.
The agitators lost their credibility in the eyes of people, since “they had no right to believe on such evidence as was before them,” despite the agitators sincere and conscientious belief in the charges that they made.
The agitators’ sincere convictions, instead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion.
True Accusation and the Right to Believe
Suppose the accused are guilty.
Would this make any difference in the guilt of the accusers? NO!
“[T]he question is not whether their belief was true or false, but whether they entertained it on wrong grounds.”
“Everyone of them, if he chose to examine himself [conscientiously], would know that he had acquired and nourished a belief, when he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him; and therein he would know that he had done a wrong thing.”
The Duty Applies to Belief Itself, Not only to Action
Part II
Rightness and Necessity of Judging the Wrongness of Action (not Belief)
It is right and necessary to say that it is not the belief that is judged to be wrong, but the action following upon the belief. For example, see the stories about the ship-owner and the agitators. In the case of the ship-owner, it is not his belief in the soundness of his ship that is judged to be wrong; rather it is his failure to fulfill his duty to make sure that the ship is safe. In the case of the agitators, it is not their belief in the justice of their cause and the truth of their convictions that is judged to be wrong; rather, it is their failure to patiently and carefully examine the evidence.
Right: “…even when a man’s belief is so fixed that he cannot think otherwise, he still has a choice in regard to the action suggested by it, and so cannot escape the duty of investigating on the ground of the strength of his convictions…”
Necessary: “…those who are not yet capable of controlling their feelings and thoughts must have a plain rule dealing with overt acts.”
The Insufficiency of Applying Wrongness to Action (not Belief)
Inseparability of Belief from Action
“…it is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.”
Belief’s Influence on Action
One’s belief must have an influence on one’s action. A belief is either realized immediately or a guidance for the future. “It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may some day explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character forever.”
The Publicity of Belief
“…no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.”
Belief and the Lives of other People
Judgment: It is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation.
Reason for the Judgment: In the cases of ship-owner and religious islanders, the belief held by one man was of great importance to other men.
Belief
Conclusion: “…we have….to extend our judgment to all cases of belief whatever.”
Belief: “…that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of the will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendor to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only cast down, but also to degrade us. Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of this belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.”
The Duty Applies to Everyone, Not only to the Educated Part III
Why the uneducated?
The uneducated may kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions that clog their groups of people.
The uneducated may transmit to her children beliefs that can either build or destroy a society.
So, even the uneducated have the duty to question all that they believe.
Burdensome Duty
“It is true that this duty is a hard one, and the doubt which comes out of it is often a very bitter thing. It leaves us bare and powerless where we thought that we were safe and strong. To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances. We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, than when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn. And if we have supposed ourselves to know all about anything, and to be capable of doing what is fit in regard to it, we naturally do not like to find that we are really ignorant and powerless, that we have to begin again at the beginning, and try to learn what the thing is and how it is to be dealt with – if indeed anything can be learnt about it. It is the sense of power attached to a sense of knowledge that makes men desirous of believing, and afraid of doubting.”
Power in Knowledge
“The sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation. For then we may justly feel that it is common property, and holds good for others as well as for ourselves. Then we may be glad, not that I have learned secrets by which I am safer and stronger, but that we men have got mastery over more of the world; and we shall be strong, not for ourselves, but in the name of Man and in his strength. But if the belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town. What would we thought of one who, for the sake of a sweet fruit, should deliberately run the risk of bringing a plague upon his family and his neighbors?”
Wrong to Believe: True Belief without Good Evidence
Part IV
Belief without Evidence
A bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards.
Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence.
We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.
Bad Action and Believing without Evidence
Stealing Money: There may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession. He may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.
Believing on Insufficient Evidence: There may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that I should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
Harm by Credulity
“The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me. Men speak the truth to one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other’s mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe things because I want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleasant? Will he not learn to cry, “Peace,” to me, when there is no peace? By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbors ready to deceive. The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are. So closely are our duties knit together, that whose shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”
Wrongness of Belief with Insufficient Evidence
Conclusion: It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
“If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it – the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”
Quote from Milton
“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
Quote from Coleridge
“He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”
No Time for Inquiry = No Time to Believe
“Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete.
‘But,’ says one, ‘I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.’ Then he should have no time to believe.”