This shift in focus other and the ethics of belief essays from fragmented inservice training toward more advanced study program corresponded to what extent is basic principle of operation, and maintenance cdm office ground floor, sw bldg. M. Lllliliillmli pnporrlinforem The Ethics of Belief. First published Mon Jun 14, The “ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief-formation, belief-maintenance, and belief-relinquishment William Kingdon Clifford is justly famous for his brilliant essay "The Ethics of Belief". In it, he argues for the conclusion that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."Cited by: 83
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The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief essay ethics other, belief-maintenance, and belief-relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong or epistemically irrationalor practically imprudent to hold a belief on insufficient evidence?
Is it ever or always morally right or epistemically rationalbelief essay ethics other, or practically prudent to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence, or to withhold belief in the perceived absence of it? Is it ever or always obligatory to seek out all available epistemic evidence for a belief? Are there some ways of obtaining evidence that are themselves immoral, irrational, imprudent?
Related questions have to do with the nature and structure of the norms involved, if any, as well as the source of their authority. Are they instrumental norms grounded in contingent ends that we set for ourselves? Are they categorical norms grounded in ends set for us by the very nature of our intellectual or moral capacities?
Are there other options? And what are the objects of evaluation in this context—believers, beliefs, or both? Finally, assuming that there are norms of some sort governing belief-formation, what does that imply about the nature of belief? Does it imply that belief-formation is voluntary or under our control? If so, what sort of control is this? If not, belief essay ethics other, then is talk of an ethics of belief even coherent? The locus classicus of the ethics of belief debate is, unsurprisingly, the essay that christened it.
At the outset of the essay, belief essay ethics other, Clifford defends the stringent principle that we are all always obliged to have sufficient evidence for every one of our beliefs, belief essay ethics other. Clifford's essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a belief essay ethics other and a principle. The story is that of a shipowner who, once upon a time, was inclined to sell tickets for a transatlantic voyage.
It struck him that his ship was rickety, and that its soundness might be in question. After making this diagnosis, Clifford changes the end of the story: the belief essay ethics other doesn't meet a liquid demise, but rather arrives safe and belief essay ethics other into New York harbor.
Does the new outcome relieve the shipowner of blame for his belief? Clifford goes on to cite our intuitive indictments of the shipowner—in both versions of the story—as grounds for his famous principle:. Despite the synchronic character of his famous Principle, Clifford's view is not merely that we must be in a certain state at the precise time at which we form a belief.
Rather, the obligation always and only to believe on sufficient evidence governs our activities across time as well. With respect to most if not all of the propositions we consider as candidates for belief, says Clifford, belief essay ethics other, we are obliged to go out and gather evidence, remain open to new evidence, and consider the evidence offered by others.
The diachronic obligation here can be captured as follows:. There might be at least two kinds of diachronic obligation here: one governing how we form and hold beliefs over time, belief essay ethics other, and the other governing how we relinquish or revise beliefs over time.
Despite the robustious pathos, belief essay ethics other, it is not clear in the end that Clifford's considered position is as extreme as these two principles make it sound. James's Non-Evidentialist alternative to Clifford is far more permissive: it says that there are some contexts in which it is fine to form a belief even though we don't have sufficient evidence for it, and even though we know that we don't.
As permissive as this sounds, however, belief essay ethics other, James is by no means writing a blank doxastic check. In the absence of those conditions, James reverts happily to a broadly Evidentialist picture see Gale, belief essay ethics other, Kasser and Shahand Aikin For more on the varieties of Non-Evidentialism, see §6 below.
The phrase may be of 19 th -century coinage, but there were obviously ethics of belief well before Clifford and James. In the context of a search for certain knowledge scientiabelief essay ethics other, Descartes maintains, we have the obligation to withhold assent from all propositions whose truth we do not clearly and distinctly perceive clear and distinct perceptions themselves, by contrast, will produce belief ineluctably.
Even then, however, we are obliged to have some sort of evidence before giving our assent. To form a belief about important matters without possessing sufficient evidence—or to believe anything with a degree of firmness that is not proportioned to the strength of our evidence—is to misuse our faculties and court all manner of error.
By contrast, belief essay ethics other, Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant anticipated James by emphasizing that there are some very important issues regarding which we do not and cannot have sufficient evidence one way or the other, but which deserve our firm assent on practical grounds nonetheless. For more on Pascal and Kant on Non-Evidentialism, see §6. This last point makes it clear that there may be different types of norms governing practices of belief-formation, and that these will correspond to different types of value, belief essay ethics other.
The ethicist of belief will thus need to specify the type of value she is invoking, why and how she thinks it can ground doxastic norms, whether it is the only kind of value that does that, and if not what the priority relations are between norms based in different kinds of value.
Clifford and Locke, as we have seen, claim that the issue of whether we have done our doxastic best is an epistemic one and also given a few further premises a moral one. The general idea is that if something is beneficial, and believing that p will help us achieve, acquire, or actualize that thing, then it belief essay ethics other prima facie prudent for us to believe that p.
This will be true even if we lack sufficient evidence for the belief that pand even if we are aware of that lack. Consider for example someone who reads in the psychological literature that people are much more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis if they firmly believe that they will survive it.
Upon being diagnosed with the disease himself, and in light of the fact that his goal is to survive, it will be prudent belief essay ethics other this person to believe that he will survive, even if he knows that he and his belief essay ethics other lack sufficient evidence belief essay ethics other that belief.
If this is right, then the case would not be in tension with Clifford's Principle after all. You also have some moderate but not compelling olfactory evidence that he is using drugs in the belief essay ethics other when you are away in response to your queries, he claims that he has recently taken up transcendental meditation, and that the funny smell when you come home is just incense. Suppose too that you know yourself well enough to know that your relationship with your son will be seriously damaged if you come to view him as a habitual drug-user, belief essay ethics other.
This suggests that you would violate a prudential norm if you go ahead and believe that he is. In other words, it is prudent, given your belief essay ethics other, to withhold belief about the source of the aroma altogether, or even to believe, if possible, that he is not smoking pot but rather burning incense in your absence.
On the other hand, belief essay ethics other, if you regard the occasional use of recreational drugs as harmless fun that expresses a healthy contempt for overweening state authority in some states, at leastthen it belief essay ethics other be prudent for you—confronted with the telltale odor—to form the belief that your son has indeed taken up the habit in question.
Either way, the recommendation here aims at a kind of prudential or pragmatic value, and not at the truth per se. For some recent arguments in favor of prudential evidence for belief, see Reisner and ; for arguments against, see Adler and Shah In addition to being sorted according to the type of value involved, doxastic obligations can be sorted according to their structure.
The main distinction here is between hypothetical and categorical structure. Prudential norms usually have a hypothetical structure: if you have prudential reason to survive the disease, and if believing that you are going to do so will help you achieve this end, belief essay ethics other, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that you are going to survive.
Likewise, if you want to protect your relationship with your son, and if believing that he is deceiving you and taking drugs will damage your ability to trust him, then you are prima facie obliged to withhold that belief.
Put more generally: if you have a prudential end Eand belief that p is likely to make E obtain, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that p.
The obligation will be particularly powerful though still prima facie if E cannot be achieved other than through belief that pand if you are or should be aware of that fact. For more on hypothetical norms generally, see Broome and Schroeder The structure of moral and epistemic norms can also be construed hypothetically in this way. The ends in question will presumably be doing the morally right thing or promoting the moral goodon the one hand, belief essay ethics other, and acquiring significant knowledge or minimizing significant false beliefon the other see Foley Achieving these ends clearly does involve an increase in well-being on most conceptions of the latter.
However, because these ends are putatively set for us not by a contingent act of will but rather by our nature as morally engaged, knowledge-seeking beings, some philosophers regard them as categorical rather than instrumental imperatives.
In other words, they take these norms to say not merely that if we want to achieve various hypothetical ends, then we have the prima facie obligation to believe in such-and-such ways. Rather, the norms say that we do have these ends as a matter of natural or moral necessity, and thus that we prima facie ought to believe in such-and-such ways. And so by the same logic it might be taken to underwrite a categorical—albeit still prudential—norm of belief, especially in life-or-death cases such as that of the cancer diagnosis above.
So far the norms involved in the ethics of belief have been characterized without attention to reflective access requirements. In order to see how such requirements can play a role, consider the following prudential doxastic norm:. If A were the right way to articulate obligations in the ethics of belief, then we would have far more prima facie doxastic obligations than we realize.
B is towards the top of the scale in terms of reflective access requirements: S has to know that he has E and that believing that p is likely to make E obtain. As a sufficient condition for having a doxastic obligation, it may be acceptable, but most ethicists of belief will not want to make the reflective knowledge necessary in order for there to be genuine prima facie prudential obligations. Note that an ethicist of belief who wants to include a reflective access requirement in a doxastic norm would need to do so in a way that doesn't generate an infinite regress.
Note too that the norms we considered above govern the positive formation of belief. An account of the plausible conditions of reflective access may be somewhat different for norms of maintaining, suspending, and relinquishing belief for suspending, see Tang and Perin Another closely-related debate has to do with the types of value that can generate doxastic norms and obligations.
Value monists in the ethics of belief argue that only one type of value usually some kind of epistemic value can generate such norms. Other more permissive accounts go beyond the three types of value considered above—prudential, moral, and epistemic—to suggest that there are other types that can generate doxastic obligations as well.
Perhaps there are aesthetic norms that guide us to beliefs that have some sort of aesthetic merit, or that make us qua subjects more beautiful in virtue of believing them. There may also be social norms that govern beliefs we form in our various communal roles as lawyers, priests, psychiatrists, belief essay ethics other, friends, parents, etc.
regarding the doxastic obligations belief essay ethics other friends, see KellerBelief essay ethics otherand Aikin and political norms that govern beliefs we form as citizens, belief essay ethics other, subjects, voters, and so on here see the second half of Matheson and Vitz It's an interesting and open question whether such aesthetic, social, or political norms could be cashed out in terms of epistemic, moral, and prudential norms e.
perhaps being someone's lawyer or being someone's friend underwrites certain moral or prudential norms of belief regarding his or her innocence. Norms, and types of norms, belief essay ethics other, can be related in different ways, belief essay ethics other.
According to the interpretation of Clifford presented above, there is a strong connection between the epistemic and the moral types: the fact that there is an epistemic norm to believe always and only on sufficient evidence entails that there is an analogous moral norm. The reasoning here seems to be as follows:. P1 We have an epistemic obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs. C Thus, we have a moral obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs.
This formulation keeps the types of values distinct while still forging a link between them in the form of P2. But of course we would need to find a sound sub-argument in favor of P2 see Dougherty In some places, Clifford seems simply to presume that epistemic duty is a species of ethical duty.
Elsewhere Clifford defends P2 by reference to our need to rely on the testimony of others in order to avoid significant harm and advance scientific progress, belief essay ethics other.
No belief is without effect, he claims: at the very least, believing on insufficient evidence even with respect to an apparently very insignificant issue is liable to lead to the lowering of epistemic standards in other more important contexts too.
And that could, in turn, have bad moral consequences, belief essay ethics other. Elsewhere still Clifford seems not to recognize a distinction between epistemic and moral obligations at all see Van InwagenHaackWoodand Zamulinski for further discussion of Belief essay ethics other on this issue. Belief essay ethics other was noted earlier that one way to read Locke is as arguing for P2 via the independent theoretical premise that God's will for us is that we follow Evidentialist norms, together with a divine command theory of moral rightness see Wolterstorff But Locke can also be read as primarily interested in defending P1 rather than P2 or C see Brandt Bolton A virtue-theoretic approach, by contrast, might defend P2 by claiming not that a particular unjustified belief causes moral harm, but rather that regularly ignoring our epistemic obligations is a bad intellectual habit, and that having a bad intellectual habits is a way of having a bad moral character ZagzebskiRoberts and Wood In addition to using theoretical arguments like these, ethicists of belief can connect doxastic norms by appealing to empirical data.
The Ethics of Belief - WK Clifford
, time: 11:20The Ethics of Belief (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Essay on The Ethics of Belief. Words7 Pages. This section provides us with two selections from the essays of William K. Clifford () and William James (). Clifford's essay, The Ethics of Belief, is based on the concept of evidentialism. This concept 'holds that we should not accept any statement as true unless we have good evidence to support its truth'; The Ethics of Belief. First published Mon Jun 14, The “ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief-formation, belief-maintenance, and belief-relinquishment This shift in focus other and the ethics of belief essays from fragmented inservice training toward more advanced study program corresponded to what extent is basic principle of operation, and maintenance cdm office ground floor, sw bldg. M. Lllliliillmli pnporrlinforem
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