The Ethics of Belief

For classical sceptics, a dearth of arguments, or a clash of countervailing arguments, lead to peaceful suspension of belief, whereas in our own times it is seen more as a license for people to believe what they like. Perhaps this is a consequence of our general appetite for freedom and license. And there is a general impression that 'scepticism', like 'atheism', is a bad thing. Not having convictions is often bad form, unsociable or unpatriotic. 'Faith' is a word with a positive ring to it, although of course it rings really positively only when it means 'faith like ours' rather than the conflicting faiths of others.

Insincerity still bothers us: even a politician should not be caught saying what he does not believe. But as for what a person does believe, well that, we tend to think, is much more his or her own business. It is a morally important fault, we suppose, if politicians claim that some country has weapons of mass destruction when they know that it does not, or if NASA says that a shuttle is safe when it knows it is far from it. But it is not a morally important fault if they believe the same thing although all the evidence points against it. How we weigh evidence, like religion, tends to be regarded as a private affair. Perhaps it does not matter if a thousand flowers bloom, or if we are none too good at distinguishing weeds from flowers. Perhaps our situation is like that of Rome as described by Gibbon: 'The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.' But is it really the cranky, oversensitive philosopher who spoils the party?

William Clifford was a nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematician and polymath, who partly anticipated Einstein by claiming that mass and energy are each perturbations in space-time. He also has an algebra named after him. He is remembered in philosophy mainly for one classic essay, 'The Ethics of Belief', and that in turn is famous because of the reply to it given by the American philosopher William James. Their dispute may appear to have a dated air about it, defining as it does the state of late-Victorian anxiety specifically about religious faith. But philosophically the issues it raises go deeper than that. They concern not only the right to belief, but also the nature of belief, and my aim is not so much to judge the debate about anyone's right to conviction, as to follow it into deeper waters. The philosophy of religion is here only an introductory taster, or a laboratory example, of a wider perplexity.

In his essay Clifford argues that there is a duty to believe carefully, in the light of reason alone. He begins with a story nicely designed to induce a sense of outrage:



Clifford is surely right that we censure the negligent shipowner. We would find his 'faith' in his ship discreditable, even though Clifford is careful to tell us that it is sincere. About this Clifford comments that:



In a marvelous passage Clifford enlarges on the danger of ignoring our duty to reason:



A train, here, is a train of explosive leading from a detonator to a mine. And of course, Clifford is right. Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them. Clifford also emphasizes our social duty. Our beliefs help to create the world in which our descendants will live. Making ourselves gullible or credulous, we lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them, and that means 'sinking back into savagery'.

Clifford is admirably stern about the position of the untouched, unclouded innocent who just believes what he has been told:




Thus apologists for religious identity politics sometimes describe themselves as having been born one thing or another: born a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Jew. According to Clifford this is false consciousness. People are born human beings, nothing else. They may have been taught to regard themselves as one thing or another, and they may have been taught as well the doctrines and attitudes of particular traditions. But if they choose to go on refusing to question what they have been told, and if, as is so commonly the case, what they have been told is incredible or pernicious, then their continued adherence is, in Clifford's eyes, a sin against mankind.

That's all very well, but what then is the mark of reason? How are we to tell whether particular convictions escape Clifford's rather strenuous call to doubt and query? Are we, like the Greek sceptics, to regard all questions as open questions? That way (as Clifford acknowledges) lies paralysis. Even to conduct the inquiries that Clifford demands, we will have to stand somewhere. To try to unearth historical or metaphysical or other error, we will need to take many things for granted.

Clifford sees the problem, and answers it in terms of method rather than in terms of results:



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Clifford's moral broadside attracted a radical answer, the essay ?'The Will to Believe' by William James, and it is some of the insights and confusions of that essay that now define our landscape.

James sees belief in terms of a choice between options. At a particular moment something that we may be asked to believe in may strike us as a ?'live' hypothesis, meaning that we think it has some chance of being true. Our choice between believing it and avoiding belief in it is a ?'forced' option, for there is no third alternative. And the choice may be momentous, in that important consequences hang on it. When this is all true, James calls the option of belief a ?'genuine' option. He thinks there are then the same risks either way:



There are several things to notice here, all of which, from Clifford's point of view, serve to confuse the discussion. First, we should not be blind to the forces that lead to issues becoming ?'live'. James himself recognizes the cultural background to such a view. Perhaps for me the question of whether Jupiter prefers oxen to sheep as a sacrifice, or whether Mohammad took a night flight to Jerusalem, are about as dead as can be. Neither is of any interest at all. If for someone else one or the other or both these questions matter a great deal, we already have a kind of clash. By having a mind prepared to take such an issue seriously, you are already half-way to perdition. Everyone is dead to innumerable actual and possible objects of convictions, from tooth fairies to Santa Claus, so from Clifford's perspective, resurrecting some arbitrarily favored few from the dead is already to be a victim of unknown dark forces, silently betraying the rule of reason.

Second, we should not be so sure in advance that an issue cannot be ?'decided on intellectual grounds'. Many things which have appeared to some people as articles of faith are to others intellectually sufficient improbable as to be, in effect, decidable: astrology, homeopathy, the transmigration of souls or the belief that the world is a product of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing intelligence, for example.

Third, we should certainly not accept that whenever something is not decidable, its probability is evens (so that the risk of believing it and the risk of avoiding belief are the same). It may not now be decidable whether the roulette wheel will show 34 on its next spin, but it is very unwise to be convinced that it will, and very unwise to bet at evens that it will. Where we have a whole slew of possibilities (which is always so since the realm of the supernatural, or in other words the realm of human imagination, has many inhabitants: our gods and other objects of conviction can come in all shapes and sizes) then in the absence of ?'intellectual grounds' the probability of any one being true is vanishingly small.

Finally, we may suspect the role of ?'passion' in these matters. James is probably not asserting that we have the right to believe whatever we like, or whatever would be pleasant for us to believe, although he comes quite close to it. He does allow our wishes to close the gaps or uncertainties that reason leaves open. And this interplay between what we would like to believe and what we end up believing is deeply disturbing. It is as if James is objectifying belief. He treats it as one might treat an ornament, for which the only questions would be: does this suit me; is it a good thing to wear to the social party? And then taking the ornament (conviction) or leaving it behind (avoiding it) are options that may be quite evenly balanced.

Now this is not the ordinary way of thinking about beliefs. Beliefs, we usually suppose, answer to a different set of values: those of truth and falsity. Fairly obviously, there are things it may be expedient (even in the wildest sense) for me to believe (for instance, that I am the most popular person in the class) but which are not true, and there are things that may be true which it may be deeply uncomfortable and threatening to believe. Truth has rights and privileges of its own, and they are not jus the same as those of utility.

A related charge is that James is privatizing belief, concentrating not upon the social trust that is at the forefront of Clifford's discussion, but upon the private satisfactions that follow upon settling a matter in one's own mind. And it is this privatization of belief that leads to relativism: my belief ceases to exist in a public space, up for acceptance or rejection by all who pay attention. It starts to be a matter of ?'my truth' or ?'your truth', like my ornaments or your ornaments, which serve fine if they are to my taste or yours, and about which we can be indifferent to the taste of others.

This is not how we think of beliefs. In philosophers' jargon, a belief is a state with a ?'content'. We believe in propositions, and when an issue arises, it is some proposition and its truth and falsity upon which our attention turns. If the issue is a historical one, then our attention will be turned to the historical period and the sources that help to establish what occurred. If it is a scientific one, our attention will be turned to whatever experiments or theories are most likely to establish a verdict. The issue determines its own epistemology. The satisfactions of people who hold one or other conviction are not to the point, unless the issue itself is one about those very satisfactions.

This suggests that we simply cannot-self consciously, bring our passions and desires into the matter. However we vividly present to ourselves the happiness of believing something (that our children are uniquely brilliant, that our partners are immune to temptation) it will not by itself make us believe it. At best it may dispose us to be seduced into believing it, making us likely to seize upon confirmed evidence and ignore any which fits badly. Our happiness can give us a biased disposition to pay attention to some evidence and to ignore other evidence, but it does not independently give us belief. Indeed, any feeling that it had done so would undermine belief: we would recognize ourselves as defective instruments for registering how things stand. To say that someone is a victim of wishful thinking is to criticize them, and to think that we ourselves may be the victims of wishful thinking is to doubt our own judgment.

Similarly, the conversational move of expressing a belief is not, one hopes, a ploy of pursuing the advantage of having the hearer believe something. It is, or should be, a matter of cooperation rather than manipulation. I may want you to become like-minded with me about some issue, but this should be because that is the truth about the issue in my eyes. It should not be expedient to me for you to become so minded. It is sometimes said that one of the casualties of the general suspicion and mistrust that permeated the old Soviet Union was that the distinction between truth and other motivations to believe tended to break down. Upon hearing a purported piece of information, the reaction was not ?'Is this true?' but ?'Why is this person saying this -- What machinations or manipulations are going on here?' The question of truth did not, as it were, have the social space in which it could breathe. This is a generalization of the attitude behind the question the trenchant British television interviewer Jeremy Paxman is supposed to ask himself on talking to a politician: ?'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?'

Sadly, it may indeed be wise to ask this question, especially in a political culture of mistrust, rhetoric and spin. There are plenty of people of whom Paxman's question is the one to ask, but this is because they are manipulative villains, not because the issue of truth and the issue of utility come to the same thing.

There are other rhetorical devices at James's disposal:



Here the device is to suppose that the leap of faith (when, we must remember, an issue cannot be decided by other means) gives us ?'the blessings of real knowledge'. How can this be so? Suppose, for instance, it occurs to you that the oak tree in your garden might contain the spirit of Napoleon. You find this a momentous thing, and manage to convince yourself that it is so. Now how does ?'real knowledge' get into the picture? Even supposing that we waive the difficulties with this notion of ?'spirit', the likelihood of you being right must be next to nothing. Even if it makes metaphysical sense to suppose that you are right, which most philosophers would deny, your guess is overwhelmingly improbable. (Why your oak tree? Why Napoleon?) And even if you are, against all the odds, right, having guessed so luckily still scarcely brings you the title of knowing anything.

And always, against the alleged blessing of your conviction, we have to lay Clifford's train of social and practical disasters, ready to explode. If the oak tree contains the spirit of Napoleon, perhaps the child contains the spirit of the devil, and the people next door are all creatures of Satan, and need dealing with accordingly.

James also casts doubt on Clifford's attachment to scientific and empirical method:



But immediately following he protests that he is not after all offering an indiscriminate defense of any kind of irrationality, dogma or bigotry:



This sounds close enough to Clifford's ?'fallibilism' or open-minded attention to evidence and experience, which he in turn was opposing to dogma and unearned conviction.

James's final strategy is to seize Clifford's ground, surprisingly turning Clifford's own agnosticism into the dogmatic villain. It is, after all, Clifford who is ?'vetoing' James's right to whatever faith he chooses, and James rebels:



This is the familiar charge that suspension of belief is itself a kind of faith. It is also making the issue into a practical rather than theoretical one - a transformation perhaps encouraged by Clifford's moralizing of the issue. That is, the battle of conviction verses doubt is played as if it were a question of the costs and benefits of each. Whereas we would ideally like a pure, independent ideal of proportioning belief to evidence regardless of cost or benefit. We would like truth to have a life of its own.

Even on its own terms, however, James's rhetoric is more impressive than his argument. Once more there is the privatization (as if our own hopes or fears were the only costs or benefits in the case). There is silence about what Clifford sees as the dire consequences of the social habit of irrational conviction. There is the implication that the probabilities are about equal (?'dupery for dupery…'). And there is the silent assumption that only one religious hypothesis is in question, having some antecedent right to get taken seriously when its innumerable possible, and equally probable, competitors do not.

And James is wrong. Refusal to believe something is not a kind of faith. You may believe that Feng shui really works. I refuse to believe it. I do not necessarily believe that it does not work, I may refuse to come down either way. I may not think it is worth thinking about. I may express myself just by saying that ?'it might not', or ?'it's not very convincing'. My practical expression of my state of mind would be just not being prepared to risk anything on it, not even crossing the road to look into the shop. Whereas you are prepared for all sorts of practical tests: the more dogmatic and convinced you are, the more you are happy to risk.

The more such faiths you absorb, the more your risks fail to pay off. You make an expensive partner, but is it any worse than that? Clifford, of course, tells us that it is. Your habit is dangerous. Your disrespect for caution, for evidence, for plausibility may lead anywhere. ?'Those who can make you believe absurdities,' said Voltaire, ?'can make you commit atrocities.' By contrast, my caution cannot do any such thing.