The Ethics of Belief
Or: Good epistemic hygiene is important
In an 1877 paper, Cambridge mathematician and philosopher William Clifford describes the case of a shipowner about to make a sale:
“A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.” — William Clifford, The Ethics of Belief
In other words, this shipowner believed on insufficient evidence that his ship was sea-worthy. This was done on the basis of a sort of motivated reasoning — he really wants to sell the ship, and the ship being unsafe is inconvenient to that end result, so it’s easier to rationalize away pesky things like “standards of evidence”.
If the ship sold ended up sinking, it seems intuitive that the shipowner is morally culpable for his actions. In fact, this principle is enshrined in modern legal concepts like the tort of negligence — the law may not track morality, but it certainly rhymes.
This is all to say that what we believe has moral worth, and our actions to secure a solid evidentiary base for belief are of moral import. While we won’t always land on the truth, it’s important that we try. For a very concise summary, here’s some key bullet points:
- What we believe has material consequences (i.e.: the ship crashing)
- It’s important to have true beliefs
- It’s impossible to be certain we know the truth
- To have the best chance of getting at true beliefs, its important to have good truth-finding processes
People often defend their beliefs not on the basis of evidence, but because “it’s just what I believe, it isn’t harming anyone.” You can see this in a lot of religious and alternative medicine contexts. I think it’s important to realize that excusing beliefs on the basis of being “only” beliefs is morally suspect to the extent that these beliefs change real-world behaviour.
Ideas have consequences. Let’s look at some of them.
Alternative Medicine
Sandra has recently been diagnosed with cancer. It’s treatable, but will require her to go on a regime of chemotherapy and have some surgery done. She leaves the hospital with this diagnosis and walks past an acupuncture shop, with window advertisements claiming acupuncture can fix problems modern medicine can’t. She enters and is met by a woman who claims acupuncture can cure her cancer quicker and less painfully than chemo ever could. Sandra decides to spend 2 months receiving personal acupuncture treatments from this woman and finds her condition hasn’t improved — in fact, it’s gotten worse. By the time she goes back to the hospital, the cancer has gotten worse, and the odds of fixing it are far lower.
Who here bears responsibility for this outcome? To some degree, Sandra chose to follow this course of action freely. However, Sandra’ behaviour was predicated on the beliefs of the acupuncturist claiming to have a cancer cure.
Sandra is not an expert. The acupuncturist isn’t either, but pretends to be. This pretension of expertise brings with it a greater onus to cultivate true beliefs about the world; if other people are relying on your testimony to make life-changing decisions, you have a responsibility to adequately verify the information you give them.
These sorts of scenarios happen more often than you think. Steve Jobs is notable for having developed a treatable form of cancer and foregoing medical treatment in favour of special diets and alternative medicine.
I’m growing tired of explaining why acupuncture and other alternative medicines don’t work, but do feel an obligation to give resources explaining why. See below for a link to a well-documented post detailing acupuncture’s many conceptual and practical failings:
Acupuncture and other forms of alternative medicine are often defended on the grounds of simply being “different ways of knowing”. Their defenders may appeal to the importance of tradition, the inherent value of indigenous knowledges, or simply the right to believe what one wants. I can agree that freedom of belief is important, but beliefs come with consequences. For example, I can believe any number of bigoted things and be held morally culpable for those beliefs despite having the freedom to do so.
Acupuncture is much the same — acupuncturists can believe what they want, but they do bear a moral responsibility to adequately examine their beliefs, particularly when positioning themselves as experts. If Sandra were to die as a result of choosing acupuncture over standard cancer treatment, I’d be quite comfortable in condemning the acupuncturist that convinced her of that course of action.
Bigotry
Bigoted beliefs are easy enough to think of, and I’ll leave them as an exercise for the reader. These beliefs cause actions which we rightly condemn as bigoted — a hiring committee passing up excellent female candidates in favour of less-qualified men is a textbook example of sexism-in-action. The actions are bad, and so are the beliefs that give rise to them.
Not every bigoted action is predicated on bigoted beliefs; we may call some policies racist for having disparate impact on communities of colour (the war on drugs comes to mind). Regardless, it is often the case that bad beliefs cause bad actions, and the holders of those beliefs are morally culpable for not adequately examining what they think they know and why they think they know it.
As a society we seem to have a general consensus that believing untruths about any group is a bad thing. When we do hold beliefs that we think apply to groups, it’s incumbent on us to critically examine them — especially when these are beliefs likely to change our behaviour towards those groups.
This feels like the most unobjectionable category in this post, so I’ll spend my time discussing more controversial subjects.
Religion
Note: Before starting this section I feel the need to note that religious belief is fine to the extent that it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Nothing below should be taken as a general critique of religion — only specific interpretations of specific texts and their associated consequences. I’m irritated I even need to write this disclaimer, but here we are.
“The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not ‘cowards,’ as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith — perfect faith, as it turns out — and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.” — Sam Harris, The End of Faith
What we believe has consequences of great ethical import. Beliefs originating in religion are no exception. Think of all the horrific acts committed in the name of religious belief — to get you started, I’ll name a few:
- 8 countries still have the death penalty for homosexuality based on religious grounds
- Jihadi terrorism
- The Spanish Inquisition
- Abortion clinic bombings
- The Crusades
- Anything the Westboro Baptist Church has ever done
These vary in magnitudes of badness, but are all connected in that they directly flow from religious belief. In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris describes how the 9/11 terrorists were driven by religious belief to commit one of the worst attacks in recent memory. These attackers were ordinary people. They were smart — two even had PhDs. While they may have had many motivations, the belief that their actions would send them to heaven was undoubtedly a strong factor in their behaviour.
The Westboro Baptist Church is an even clearer example. These are fanatical christians who take a particularly literal view of scripture and routinely demonstrate at public events in ways that lead them to be universally reviled by any sane person. See below for some examples (if you’re uncomfortable with homophobia and anti-semitism, skip this):
This may be controversial, but I think the WBC are doing a good job of following through on the tenets of their religion. If you’ve ever read the bible, you’ll know that despite all the nice lines of “loving thy neighbour”, there’s a lot of things to suggest a highly-limited sense of what constitutes “neighbour”, and far more that explicitly calls for the subjugation of women, keeping of slaves, open racism, homophobia, and more. The WBC is simply acting in accordance with the bible — or at least their interpretation of it.
While we condemn the actions of the WBC and the 9/11 hijackers, we should also oppose the beliefs that give rise to their behaviour. A genuine belief that God is real and wants you to do [awful thing] is virtually certain to be a belief that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At a deeper level, these behaviours can also be caused by beliefs about Heaven and Hell — and what gets you into either:
“Once a person believes — really believes — that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.” — Sam Harris, The End of Faith
One last example: I recently came across this video of Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens handling questions from callers about the merits of gay marriage:
Their first caller, a republican, compares homosexuality to beastiality on the basis of their faith and is rightly repudiated. The second, a democrat, apologizes for the rude behaviour of the first, only to use her faith to still argue against what she calls sexual perversion. However nicely they may phrase what they believe, these callers seem to genuinely be forming their opinions on gay marriage based on the bible. This has real consequences.
I think it’s important to hammer this point home. We often excuse religious beliefs as something private and not to be criticized. However, to the extent that these beliefs inspire bad actions, it seems right to challenge them. This is not to say that all religious belief is bad, only that some forms of religious belief have bad consequences.
Climate Change Denialism
Much like the alternative medicine example, I’m not going to spend my time outlining a general proof of climate change or its projected impacts. Let’s leave it at: climate change is caused by humans to a significant degree, the changes to our climate will affect the lives of billions.
The claims I listed above are, at the end of the day, beliefs about the world. Some people genuinely believe the opposite. Here’s a funny example:
When Sen. James Inhofe throws a snowball at the president to falsify claims of climate change, I do not doubt he believes what he says. Some people really are that ignorant. Yet his beliefs have material impact in matters of policy — as a US Senator, he has a non-zero degree of influence over how one of the world’s largest polluting countries handles its response to anthropogenic climate change. I feel very confident in saying Senator Inhofe has a duty to cultivate beliefs adequately supported by evidence about matters in which he has influence — climate change being one of them.
Much like Clifford’s shipowner, Senators like James Inhofe will be left watching climate change ravage the lives of billions of people, wishing they had adequately examined their beliefs when making policy. Just kidding, they’ll be gone from this planet by then — but are still culpable for the actions they take now.
Takeaway
I worry I’ve made this sound to easy. Climate change denialism, the Westboro Baptist Church, and Acupuncturists are, frankly, easy to identify as bunk.
I expect many of my own beliefs will be later condemned as deeply wrong in obvious ways, and perhaps my future self will note that — and rest easy, confident that his opinions are 100% adequately supported by evidence. Animal rights, for example, seems like an area where I’m likely to have false beliefs or wilful ignorance about the quantity and quality of suffering in the production of the world’s animal products.
At the end of the day, all we can do is try our best to falsify our own beliefs. It’s really easy to get caught up in asking ourselves “can I believe this”, not “must I believe this”. To that end, I challenge you to think about your own most deeply-cherished beliefs. On what grounds do you believe them? Try to identify what evidence would make you not believe them. It may be you’re right — many beliefs are true, after all — but more excitingly you may be wrong, in which case you have the opportunity to change your mind.
We can’t always get at the truth, but it’s important that we try.
