Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”

Fall 2012

Dr. David FrostInstructor of PhilosophyUniversity of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

The Ethics of Belief

•Where in Philosophy does this essay belong?

•Ethics? Philosophy of Religion? Epistemology?

•There is a demand upon us to be careful how we act.

•But there is also a demand upon us to be careful in terms of what we believe.

•We are morally required to perform “due diligence” in forming beliefs that will affect others, i.e., practical beliefs

The Ethics of Belief

•We justify our actions by our beliefs, but that is not enough.

•We must justify our actions by justified beliefs.

•Beliefs seem to be justified or not depending on how they were “acquired.”

•Consider Clifford’s example of the shipowner and the non-seaworthy emigrant ship.

The Thought Experiment

The Thought Experiment

The Thought Experiment

•The Story

•Clifford’s story shows there may be at least two kinds of acquisition of beliefs.

•“honestly earning” the belief by “patient investigation” or

• “willingly working himself into” the state of belief.

The Thought Experiment

•So what matters is not “Well, I did what I did because I believed such and such, so I’m not guilty.”

•It’s rather about whether you have a “right to believe” what you believed.

•That’s philosophical language: “a right”– my ears pop up.

•You have a right to believe X only after performing due diligence with respect to reasons to belief X.

The Thought Experiment

•What’s Clifford doing when he says, “Let’s change the case a little”?

•He imagines, first, that people die and then asks what if they didn’t.

•It’s like a controlled experiment.

•Change one thing at a time to see what else changes.

The Ethics of Belief

•To review…

•Practical Reasoning is thinking in an orderly way about what to do, what actions to take.

•First step is to have reasons for actions

•Those will be beliefs or desires or some combination

•Second step, which Clifford says is often overlooked, is to have reasons for those beliefs. Reasons for your reasons.

The Ethics of Belief

•To review…

•We know intuitively that there are standards of action.

•But there are also standards of belief.

•After Clifford introduces us to the demand to know better other philosophers will show us how hard it is to know you know anything.

•Clifford: “No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all we believe.”

The Ethics of Belief

•“Making yourself believe something,” seems too convenient and self-serving, doesn’t it?

•One, it was in his interest, so it’s suspect;

•Two, you can’t make yourself believe anything you want.

•Belief-formation is a matter of responsiveness to evidence or reasons.

•And there seems to be standard of rationality such that we can say whether someone was properly responsive to reasons or just irrational.

Thank you