Quote of the Day: Craig on Intellectual Freedom

"Be on guard for Satan’s deceptions. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in a spiritual warfare and that there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Which leads me to ask: why are you reading those infidel websites anyway, when you know how destructive they are to your faith? These sites are literally pornographic (evil writing) and so ought in general to be shunned. Sure, somebody has to read them and refute them; but why does it have to be you? Let somebody else, who can handle it, do it. Remember: Doubt is not just a matter of academic debate or disinterested intellectual discussion; it involves a battle for your very soul, and if Satan can use doubt to immobilize you or destroy you, then he will."

— William Lane Craig, "Q&A #29: Faith and Doubt" from http://www.reasonablefaith.org/faith-and-doubt

Pope v. Illinois — Serious Value According to Whom?

Obscenity is an exception to First Amendment free speech protection. This doesn't mean obscenity is automatically illegal; it means states can choose to restrict it. For example, the following is a misdemeanor in Nebraska:

"It shall be unlawful for a person knowingly to (a) print, copy, manufacture, prepare, produce, or reproduce obscene material for the purpose of sale or distribution, (b) publish, circulate, sell, rent, lend, transport in interstate commerce, distribute, or exhibit any obscene material, (c) have in his or her possession with intent to sell, rent, lend, transport, or distribute any obscene material, or (d) promote any obscene material or performance."
— Nebraska Revised Statute 28-813

Where "obscene" is defined as meaning:

"(a) that an average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, material, conduct, or live performance taken as a whole predominantly appeals to the prurient interest or a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,
(b) the work, material, conduct, or live performance depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically set out in sections 28-807 to 28-829, and
(c) the work, conduct, material, or live performance taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;"
— Nebraska Revised Statute 28-807 (emphasis added)

This language is taken from the Supreme Court's Miller Test for obscenity. What's interesting about the Miller Test is that all three parts must hold to classify material as "obscene." A photograph could, for example, be judged by "contemporary community standards" to appeal to sexual interest as a whole, it could depict state-defined sexual conduct in a "patently offensive way," yet if it contains "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" it would not be legally obscene.

Pope v. Illinois was a 1987 Supreme Court case which looked at the "serious value" test. Specifically:

"whether, in a prosecution for the sale of allegedly obscene materials, the jury may be instructed to apply community standards in deciding the value question."

Why is this important? Suppose there's a novel with sexual elements that most people would find offensive. In Oregon, it's legal because people in Oregon still see literary value in it. In Alabama, it's obscenity and you can go to jail for selling the book because people in Alabama don't see literary value in it. I'm picturing Burt Reynolds hauling banned books across state lines.

Case Background

Rockford, Illinois in 1983. Police arrest two part-time clerks in an adult book store for selling porn mags. The clerks are convicted for selling obscenity. (This makes me wonder what officials thought adult bookstores normally sold.)

In both trials, the jury was instructed to decide the question of value according to how "ordinary adults in the whole State of Illinois" would view these magazines. Both clerks were convicted. Both lost Appellate Court appeals. The Illinois Supreme Court passed, but the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue.

In a majority decision, the Supreme Court decided:

"Just as the ideas a work represents need not obtain majority approval to merit protection, neither, insofar as the First Amendment is concerned, does the value of the work vary from community to community based on the degree of local acceptance it has won. The proper inquiry is not whether an ordinary member of any given community would find serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value in allegedly obscene material, but whether a reasonable person would find such value in the material, taken as a whole." — Opinion of the Court (emphasis added)

The Supreme Court also decided to send the case back to the Appellate Court to determine whether convictions based on constitutionally faulty jury instructions would be upheld. (See the text of the case for a lively debate about "harmless error.") I had trouble finding out the ultimate fate of the clerks.

Communities and Reasonable Persons

When reading Pope, I kept wondering, "How is 'community' defined? The state, the city, or what?" So I went back and skimmed through Miller v. California. In that case, it's made clear that the "forum community" is meant, i.e. for a California state law the forum community would be the whole state of California. Presumably for a city ordinance, it would be that whole city.

If a state-wide community doesn't get to decide whether a work has "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value," who does decide? One answer might be: the entire community of the United States of America. This would make decisions more consistent across state lines, but we could have situations where the people of Oregon see value in a work that Americans as a whole might not esteem. And there may be works of great artistic value to a broadly scattered fanbase that aren't esteemed by any one geographic community as a whole.

Happily, the Court rejected "community standards" outright when it comes to determining value (see the bold text I quoted above). Unhappily, the replacement standard of what "a reasonable person" would find valuable isn't very helpful. Ask a jury to decide whether a reasonable person would find value in a "patently offensive" film and — I suspect — they would take themselves to epitomize reasonable people, note that they themselves don't see value in it, and answer accordingly.

What is Beauty?

In a concurring opinion, Justice Scalia questions the entire notion of legally judging artistic value:

"I must note, however, that in my view it is quite impossible to come to an objective assessment of (at least) literary or artistic value, there being many accomplished people who have found literature in Dada, and art in the replication of a soup can. Since ratiocination has little to do with esthetics, the fabled "reasonable man" is of little help in the inquiry, and would have to be replaced with, perhaps, the "man of tolerably good taste" - a description that betrays the lack of an ascertainable standard. If evenhanded and accurate decision making is not always impossible under such a regime, it is at least impossible in the cases that matter. I think we would be better advised to adopt as a legal maxim what has long been the wisdom of mankind: De gustibus non est disputandum. Just as there is no use arguing about taste, there is no use litigating about it. For the law courts to decide "What is Beauty" is a novelty even by today's standards."

I'm not used to wholeheartedly agreeing with Scalia! Another approach with similarly broad results comes from Justice Stevens' dissent. Referring again to the bold text I quoted above, Stevens writes:

"The problem with this formulation is that it assumes that all reasonable persons would resolve the value inquiry in the same way. In fact, there are many cases in which some reasonable people would find that specific sexually oriented materials have serious artistic, political, literary, or scientific value, while other reasonable people would conclude that they have no such value. The Court's formulation does not tell the jury how to decide such cases.

In my judgment, communicative material of this sort is entitled to the protection of the First Amendment if some reasonable persons could consider it as having serious literary artistic, political, or scientific value."

You can guess by now that both Scalia and Stevens are questioning the utility of having obscenity laws at all, at least as far as consenting adults are concerned. Stevens goes even farther and argues that such laws are unconstitutional because the difference (in this case) between legal pornography and illegal obscenity is not something the clerks could have been expected to know before being charged and convicted:

"Under ordinary circumstances, ignorance of the law is no excuse for committing a crime. But that principle presupposes a penal statute that adequately puts citizens on notice of what is illegal. The Constitution cannot tolerate schemes that criminalize categories of speech that the Court has conceded to be so vague and uncertain that they cannot 'be defined legislatively.' [...] If a legislature cannot define the crime, Richard Pope and Michael Morrison should not be expected to. Criminal prosecution under these circumstances 'may be as much of a trap for the innocent as the ancient laws of Caligula.'"

(You can't see it, but I'm applauding here.)

Finally, Stevens points out that mere possession of obscenity is legal and he characterizes laws against selling or distributing obscenity as an "insult" to a citizenry that has the "right to read and possess material which it may not legally obtain."

I agree and consider obscenity laws — "absent some connection to minors, or obtrusive display to unconsenting adults" — to be outdated relics of a less tolerant age.

Text of Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497 
Text of Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15

Quote of the Day: Aristotle On The Use of Maxims

"Further, maxims are of great assistance to speakers, first, because of the vulgarity of the hearers, who are pleased if an orator, speaking generally, hits upon the opinions which they specially hold. What I mean will be clear from the following, and also how one should hunt for maxims. The maxim, as we have said, is a statement of the general; accordingly, the hearers are pleased to hear stated in general terms the opinion which they have already specially formed. For instance, a man who happened to have bad neighbors or children would welcome any one's statement that nothing is more troublesome than neighbors or more stupid than to beget children."

— Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 21

Impurity and Total Value

I don't remember much about school before high school, but I do remember my seventh grade Reading class and the city-wide furor that came out of it. I think of that class in two parts. In the first, I was surprised that something as fun as reading fiction could be a class in school. My teacher, Ms. L., had a positive attitude and was great at helping individual students find books that interested them. I hope these kind of classes are still popular beyond the standard English Lit curriculum.

Then the crisis. Sticking to the public record, let's just say my mother objected to some of the material that was read out loud in my classroom, then in other Reading classrooms, then in the school library. What followed was a typical book challenge followed by a not-so-typical political movement culminating in her election to the school board. Some challenged books were moved to the high school library and some were reviewed and remained where they were. Emotions were high on both sides, to put it mildly. The whole ordeal changed more in terms of the people involved than the availability of the books in question. I'm intentionally being vague about other people, but I was pulled out of public school.

Fast forward two decades. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU and about one-third of the way through a Master of Library and Information Science program. One of my personal goals is to reduce the kind of antagonism I witnessed back in junior high. I'm sure there are some irresolvable points of difference, but I'm also sure there is substantial room for improvement. In this post, I want to highlight one way challengers and defenders talk past each other.

Of Cake and Hair

A frequently used metaphor in the Harry Bosch noir detective series is "hair on the cake." This refers to the way one little legal problem with a criminal case can screw the whole thing up. No matter how great 99.99% of the cake may be, the hair ruins it.

Some people take the same approach to books, movies, music, etc. One rude word and the whole work is "trash" so far as they're concerned. One depiction of sex or violence and it's "unsuitable for minors." (Well, in America, it takes violence at the level of Cormic McCarthy rather than John Wayne. Meanwhile, mentioning female sexuality at all is sufficient.)

98% Fat Free!

A very different approach is to focus on the value of a work on the whole. A person who takes this approach might not approve of every element, but still believes the book/movie/album/etc. is worthwhile for its overall message, or its social importance, or a greater proportion of good bits. For example, one of my favorite books is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, despite some rather disgusting cultural bigotry near the beginning.

The Disconnect

When two people who take these different approaches argue about whether X is a good book, or Y is a good movie, or Z is a good album, they're going to think the other person is totally daft in the very common case where the material has a little objectionable content.

The objector will point at this rude word or that sexual passage as if they're hairs on a cake; since it has these elements at all, the work in question is therefore bad. Meanwhile, the defender will ask, "Did you read the whole thing?" Since the answer is usually "no," the defender is baffled; how could the objector possibly have a valid opinion about the goodness or badness of the work as a whole? And so it goes.

For a relatively recent example, check out this letter to the editor. Scroggins, the objector, writes of the novel Speak:

"As the main character in the book is alone with a boy who is touching her female parts, she makes the statement that this is what high school is supposed to feel like. The boy then rapes her on the next page. Actually, the book and movie both contain two rape scenes."

Scroggins is complaining about the inclusion of any sexual elements in a book about dealing with rape. He doesn't seem to care about the book's impact on helping young people avoid dangerous situations and, especially, helping them deal with life after rape. It mentions sexuality in relation to *gasp* high schoolers, so it has to go. (The author's response is worth a read.)

A Tactic For Reconnecting

Now I do think it's appropriate to respond to objections by listing a work's virtues and weigh them against whatever content people find objectionable, but if it's clear that the objector is of the "hair on the cake" variety, this difference in philosophy needs to be directly addressed. No matter how many virtues a defender lists, the objector can still wave around the "bad bits" as if they settle the matter. By explicitly and repeatedly refocusing the question on whether — in general principle — the presence of bad bits makes a work bad, one of three things might happen:

• The objector refuses to acknowledge the question, which will cause the objector to lose credibility with onlookers who understand the question.
• The objector affirms that the presence of bad bits makes any work bad. The defender can then highlight respected works with bad bits to, again, cause the objector to lose credibility with many onlookers.
• The objector affirms that the presence of bad bits doesn't necessarily make a work bad. Now the objector is publicly committed to weighing the various elements of any given work. Differences in judgment may still occur, but at least a conversation about overall value has become possible.

I hope that greater awareness of these two approaches of "It's impure!" vs. "It has positive total value!" can help everyone in such disputes understand each other better and pin down any essential points of disagreement more quickly. Disagreements happen, but misdiagnosing the disagreement makes resolution unnecessarily difficult.

I'll leave you with a quote from the 1950's that could have been written this year:

"The major characteristic which makes for the all-important difference seems to me to be this: that the selector's approach is positive, while that of the censor is negative. This is more than a verbal quibble; it transforms the entire act and the steps included in it. For to the selector, the important thing is to find reasons to keep the book. Given such a guiding principle, the selector looks for values, for strengths, for virtues which will over shadow minor objections. For the censor, on the other hand, the important thing is to find reasons to reject the book; his guiding principle leads him to seek out the objectionable features, the weaknesses, the possibilities for misinterpretation. The positive selector asks what the reaction of a rational intelligent adult would be to the content of the work; the censor fears for the results on the weak, the warped, and the irrational. The selector says, if there is anything good in this book let us try to keep it; the censor says, if there is anything bad in this book, let us reject it. And since there is seldom a flawless work in any form, the censor's approach can destroy much that is worth saving." — Lester Asheim, Not Censorship But Selection

Reasons of Love & Living a Meaningful Life

Creative Commons (cclark395).

What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Googling for "meaningful life" does turn up material written from the perspective of academic philosophy, but the first hit has to do with "psycho-spiritual lessons" from Jewish mysticism. There are also a variety of pages giving advice on how to get involved with advocacy or how to change personal habits in a goal-oriented way. This may be the area of popular philosophy most neglected by English-speaking philosophers, but it's not neglected by all of them.

A few years ago, Susan Wolf gave a pair of lectures titled: Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. These have recently been put into book form along with some responses. Since the book is overdue locally, I read through a slightly less polished PDF version (and will be quoting from that). Anyway, I warmed up to Wolf's approach pretty fast when I read this bit:

"In offering a conception of meaningfulness, I do not wish to insist that the term is always used in the same way, or that what I have to offer as an analysis of meaningfulness can be substituted for that term in every context. On the other hand, I do believe that much talk of meaning is aimed at capturing the same abstract idea, and that my proposal of what that idea is fits well with many of the uses to which the word is put."

This is a bit like Paul Ziff's treatment of the meaning of "good" — at its most general — as answering to certain interests implied by context. Seemingly different usages of "good" can be understood in this more abstract fashion. Wolf wants give an abstract explanation of meaning-in-life talk that works for specific instances. How does her "conception of meaningfulness" shake out? Before getting into details, it's important to understand what she means by the phrase "reasons of love."

Reasons of Love

Kant sought for moral principles in a kind of rational willpower that didn't depend one bit on consequences or, especially, human desires:

"That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire."
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Philippa Foot challenged this idea by suggesting that the pursuit of some human desires could be what morality is really all about:

"It will surely be allowed that quite apart from thoughts of duty a man may care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, and wanting to help if he can. Of course he must want not the reputation of charity, nor even a gratifying role helping others, but, quite simply, their good. If this is what he does care about, then he will be attached to the end proper to the virtue of charity and a comparison with someone acting from an ulterior motive (even a respectable ulterior motive) is out of place."
— Philippa Foot, Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

Just because I'm following my own desire to help another person doesn't make my action selfish. Our desires can be self-oriented or other-oriented. It's not a stretch to say that a person acting out of other-oriented desires is acting out of love, i.e. acting for reasons of love. This might explain why we don't worry about people (or robots) with poor reasoning as much as we worry about those with excellent reasoning but who lack other-oriented desires.

Does this mean that acting for moral reasons and acting for reasons of love are equivalent? Susan Wolf says no. We can have and pursue desires which aren't particularly self-oriented, but they aren't particularly moral either. These desires might be oriented toward other people (e.g. helping a friend move) or they might be oriented toward impersonal interests (e.g. keeping a garden free of weeds). Wolf's categories look something like this:

My Desires

• Self-oriented (selfish reasons)
• Impersonal interest oriented (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Non-moral (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Moral (moral reasons)

No One's Desires

• Kant's notion of moral duty (dualistic moral reason)

Wolf admits she is lumping together two categories under the "reasons of love" label, but this is because she wants to emphasize that there are desires (and therefore reasons) which fall outside of the other categories:

"My claim then is that reasons of love – whether of people, ideals or other sorts of objects - have a distinctive and important role in our lives, not to be assimilated to reasons of self-interest or to reasons of morality. Insofar as we fail to recognize and appreciate the legitimacy and value of these reasons, we misunderstand ourselves and our values and distort our concerns."

Maybe you're skeptical. If you have an expansive view of morality, you might want to put both categories of other-oriented desires together. This would imply that, for example, a desire to help a kid learn to read would be both a reason of love and a moral reason. Environmentally minded folks might even want to make impersonal projects like preserving biodiversity a moral issue. Most fundamentally, isn't love itself a moral positive? This is all fine. I understand Wolf to be talking about strong moral imperatives when she talks about morality. We don't expect everyone to personally go out of their way to combat illiteracy or preserve an obscure plant species the way we might expect them to go out of their way to combat hunger or injustice.

The important thing about reasons of love is that they're personal and passionately held. Yours and mine can be quite different, and that's ok. I don't have to love your spouse the way you love your spouse. I don't need to feel the same thrill participating in cosplay culture that you do.

As you may have guessed by now, these personal and passionately held reasons of love are a central figure in Wolf's views on what it means for a life to be meaningful.

Engaging With What We Love

"Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something– as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all that she does."

This is the first of the two parts of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness." She's trying to capture the idea of finding your passion and actively pursuing it. This is subjective and can vary a lot from person to person, especially since she's talking about passions which aren't self-oriented desires or universal moral duties. Maybe I have a passion for dance, or writing about philosophy, or competitive video gaming. I don't think Wolf mentions it, but we might put charity causes here which are clearly moral but the particular cause isn't something we expect everyone to be involved with. So organizing and then participating in a breast cancer walk could count as a personal passion for an individual.

All of these things bring us "feelings of fulfillment" that living a merely selfish life or living only for an abstract moral code doesn't seem to provide. What's especially interesting about fulfillment so construed is that what fulfills me may not be the same as what's healthy or comfortable for me, or what makes me happy, or what morality demands. Our reasons of love can be in competition with these other human goods.

Loving What's Worthwhile

The other part of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness" has to do with a worry that might have come up when you read the last couple of paragraphs: doesn't it matter which passions we pursue? Would a person's life be meaningful if she pursues passions that are pointless? What about passions that are wickedly dangerous to others?

Wolf uses Richard Taylor's thought experiment of Sisyphus fulfilled. Instead of feeling bad about rolling a boulder up a hill forever, this Sisyphus loves rolling the boulder uphill all day every day. Since he is subjectively fulfilled by following his passion, shouldn't we characterize him as living a meaningful life? Wolf writes:

"Something desirable seems missing from his life despite his experience of fulfillment. Since what is missing is not a subjective matter – from the inside, we may assume that Sisyphus’s life is as good as can be – we must look for an objective feature that characterizes what is lacking."

For this objective feature, Wolf appeals to another common way of talking about meaning in life: being involved with something "larger than oneself." Of course this is figurative; it doesn't mean that caring for a physically larger person counts while caring for a physically smaller person would not (otherwise, sorry babies!). Wolf takes it to mean that a person with a meaningful life must be engaged with something that has value beyond or outside the value she herself places on it. If Sisyphus is the only one who esteems boulder rolling, then his love for boulder rolling may make him feel fulfilled but it doesn't give his life meaning in the bigger picture outside of his mind.

This might not sound objective enough to you. Wolf wrestles with this problem too. On the one hand, she wants to be "minimally exclusive" when it comes to defining the kind of objectivity required. On the other hand, she wonders how we could maintain, e.g. that adding an observer who feels fulfilled by watching Sisyphus merrily roll his bounder would suddenly make Sisyphus' life meaningful. How could multiplying subjective valuers create objective value? After a few pages, Wolf concludes:

"Though I believe we have good reason to reject a radically subjective account of value, it is far from clear what a reasonably complete and defensible nonsubjective account will look like. The absence of such an account gives us all the more reason to be tentative in our judgments about what sorts of project deserve inclusion in the class of activities that can contribute to the meaningfulness of a life."

She's inclined to call some activities objectively worthwhile (even if no one else appreciates them) and others not worthwhile (even if lots of people value them), yet she tries hard to avoid the charge of snobbery by admitting it's hard to be sure which is which, or to even apply any certain methods of making such determinations.

Fitting Fulfillment

Putting these two parts together, Wolf sums up her "fitting fulfillment" view like this:

"[M]eaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something good or positive about it."

or

"[M]eaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way."

Or is that three parts? It's multi-part at any rate. But why would a single concept — meaningfulness — have distinct parts like this? Wolf argues that these parts are intertwined even when we talk in ways that make them seem like separate concerns. In subjectivity, an element of objectivity:

"When someone recommends that you find your passion and go for it, it seems, there is a hope, if not an expectation, lurking in the background, too. The hope is that the passion you find will be an intelligible one, within a certain range. You will not be passionate – at least not for too long – about stone-rolling, or Sudokus, or caring for your goldfish, or making handwritten copies of War and Peace."

And in objectivity, an element of subjectivity:

"[W]hen the recommendation to get involved with something larger than oneself is offered, it is typically offered in the hope, if not the expectation that if one does get so involved, it will make one feel good. The thought is that if one tries it, one will like it, and one will like it in part because of one’s recognition that one is doing something independently valuable."

I'm surprised she didn't include a Yin Yang diagram. While I was reading Wolf's paper, I wanted to say that fulfillment (subjective) and meaning (objective) could simply be treated as separate, peer ideas. Now I'm not so sure. She makes an interesting point about background assumptions when we talk about one idea or the other. Plus, it's a fact that we casually use "meaning" to refer to both aspects. Perhaps we do operate on a two-fold conception of meaning in life.

Human Nature & The Nature of Value

I'm one of those people who gets uncomfortable when the term "objective value" comes up. Means-end value, I understand. Subjective valuing, I understand. But I come up empty when I try to grasp value that is neither means-end nor subjective. I want to collapse Wolf's objective element into one or both of the kinds of value that make sense to me.

So how about this: because intellectually mature humans are social beings by nature, a significant portion of our subjective fulfillment is held hostage by the valuing of others. We crave appreciation, if not for ourselves then at least for our projects or for the results of our projects. I may love tapping piano keys randomly, but if I realize that no one else appreciates or even would appreciate this form of music, my social desires are frustrated. Wolf touches on this idea when she writes about "our need (or wish) not to be alone" and to "see (or try to see) oneself from an external point of view."

What about joyful Sisyphus? If he is fully satisfied because he loves boulder rolling and isn't frustrated even knowing that no one else could share his appreciation for boulder rolling, then — in a sense — he isn't human. He may share my DNA, but his psychology is alien to me. On this view, only subjective value is needed. The constraint on activities we call "meaningful" comes from typical human nature, not from an impersonal source of value.

Now what would be really interesting would be another society (with human DNA or not) that so differs in their valuings that our projects are meaningless to them, and their projects are meaningless to us. This implies neither our lives nor their lives would be meaningful in a sense that transcends all valuers, but I don't understand what it would mean for life to be meaningful in that sense anyway.

Quote of the Day: Locke on the Meaning of Words

"[M]en talk to one another, and dispute in words, whose meaning is not agreed between them, out of a mistake that the significations of common words are certainly established, and the precise ideas they stand for perfectly known ; and that it is a shame to be ignorant of them. Both which suppositions are false ; no names of complex ideas having so settled determined significations, that they are constantly used for the same precise ideas. Nor is it a shame for a man not to have a certain knowledge of anything, but by the necessary ways of attaining it ; and so it is no discredit not to know what precise idea any sound stands for in another man’s mind, without he declare it to me by some other way than barely using that sound, there being no other way, without such a declaration, certainly to know it. Indeed the necessity of communication by language brings men to an agreement in the signification of common words, within some tolerable latitude, that may serve for ordinary conversation : and so a man cannot be supposed wholly ignorant of the ideas which are annexed to words by common use, in a language familiar to him. But common use being but a very uncertain rule, which reduces itself at last to the ideas of particular men, proves often but a very variable standard."

— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III Chapter XI

On "The Ethics of Belief"

In his 1877 essay, The Ethics of Belief, William Clifford claims: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The bulk of the essay is concerned with what counts as sufficient evidence, but I'm not going to get into that here. Let's just assume it's clear when a belief is based on sufficient vs. insufficient evidence.

A Sea Tale

What's so ethically wrong about believing something upon insufficient evidence? Clifford begins by telling a story about a shipowner who doubted his ship was safe, but stifled his doubts until he came to sincerely believe it was safe. The ship sank and he received his insurance money. What a jerk! Intuitively, he's guilty of something. But what, exactly? Clifford writes:

"He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it."

There's a problem here. Clifford's goal in this essay is to convince us of the wrongness of merely holding a belief without sufficient evidence. A more appropriate story would start with the shipowner believing the ship is seaworthy and then neglect to confirm his belief to some appropriate degree. He would not have "knowingly and willing worked himself into that frame of mind." We could consistently condemn someone for doubt-stifling yet not condemn someone for whom the doubt never arose.

Clifford goes on to say that the shipowner's guilt would not be reduced "one jot" if he stifled his doubts and the ship was — in fact — completely seaworthy. I agree that the shipowner would still be failing to carry out due diligence, but he can't be "guilty of the death of those men" as Clifford had claimed about the original case. This is a terrible story for making Clifford's point because it mixes in guilt for manslaughter, guilt for doubt-stifling, and the whole controversial idea that a person can choose what to believe.

Catch-22

What if the shipowner were convinced that the ship is fine, but checks it anyway to fulfill his professional obligations? Clifford would condemn him for believing the ship is fine before checking it. And even if the confident shipowner checks the ship and finds no problems, Clifford would still(!) condemn him for continuing to believe his ship is fine.

"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."

Why is being "really in doubt" unbiased, yet it's biased to believe something? Are doubters somehow immune to confirmation bias while believers are not? Can someone loan me a time machine so I can show Clifford the modern denialist movements?

Infection

I have to admit this bit is rather poetic:

"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 someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever."

So not only are we in a permanent failure state if we already believe something important without sufficient evidence, any "trifling" misheld belief is just as bad. As anti-religious as Clifford is, I feel like he's introducing his own system of everyone's-a-sinner. He actually does use the word "sinful" later on.

Virtue and Vice

We finally see more explicit ethical theory two paragraphs before his oft-quoted conclusion. First, he rejects act consequentialism:

"And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to be considered; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards."

He does dabble with justification for his maxim from rule consequentialism.

"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 rule consequentialism might not cover all cases of believing for insufficient reasons. I suspect believing that one's own prescriptions are effective drugs is helpful as a rule, even though doctors sometimes prescribe placebos. Also, stifling doubts about doing something dangerous-but-necessary may increase one's chance of success.

Clifford turns to a form of virtue ethics as his primary justifications for saying it's wrong to hold any belief without sufficient evidence.

"If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from 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."

So it's not about immediate or far off consequences associated with the loss of money; it's about acting contrary to the kind of beings we are. We're social beings and social beings respect property. Likewise, beliefs held on insufficient evidence may have this or that consequence, but what's really wrong with such beliefs is that they turn us into credulous savages.

Beliefs and Ethical Goals

For Clifford, not falling into intellectual savagery is an ultimate and overriding ethical end. Holding beliefs without sufficient reason is detrimental to that end, so it's always wrong to do so. I don't think most of us would agree because we have other values that are (at least) on the same level as doing our epistemic duty.

I would connect evidence to ethics in a way that's quite significant, even if it isn't as absolute as Clifford's connection. Informally:

• Beliefs held with sufficient evidence are more likely to be true than beliefs held without sufficient evidence. 
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when holding relevant true beliefs than relevant false beliefs.
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when relevant beliefs are held with sufficient evidence.
• Ethical rightness involves maximizing the likelihood of achieving certain goals.
• Ethical rightness involves holding relevant beliefs with sufficient evidence.

At any rate, "The Ethics of Belief" is a provocative and fun read...or maybe an infuriating read. I appreciate the way he criticizes Christianity by only criticizing other religions directly. He's sure not a boring writer.