The Ethics of Belief

Philosophy
1

I was thinking about starting this thread a few days ago but was bogged down with school work, then a thread in the Religion forum drifted this way. I’ve pasted PLaClair’s post to start the discussion.

Darron,
The ethical stance is to look at the available evidence then decide, not reach a conclusion then look for rationalizations to support it.
No. You can logically start from any point. . . . Why argue against people who are a minority? That hardly scratches at the vast thing that is Christianity across time and space. It seems insane to me. Is it a clever tactic I don't understand? Chris
Maybe you think you addressed Darron's point but to me and I suspect to him, you missed the key word - ethical - and thereby missed the point entirely. Sure, you can start from any point you like, including a flying spaghetti monster but you'd be making it up. Darron can speak for himself but I think I understand what he's saying, and I agree with him: in an ethical worldview people shape their opinions about facts based on what we can reliably know. This includes what we can see and measure, and also what we can deduce but it must be grounded in objective reality. You're making it out as though we can appropriately learn about facts by mere assertion. Both reason and experience say that is not true. We should conform our fact claims to what we can reliably know, not insist that the universe must conform to what we wish to believe. Humans have invented thousands of gods. The literalist Christian believes in one of them and disbelieves in the rest, which means that the literalist Christian admits the point by her actions. There are many reasons why many of us secularists insist that belief in imagined gods - and all of them are imagined - is unethical: 1. It's mere wish fulfillment, as Freud observed, which is a form of self-indulgence. 2. It leads to irresponsible thinking, which leads in turn to irresponsible acting. There can be no clearer proof of this than the plethora of ways in which people claim to know "the Word of God," then use it to justify anything they want to do, including the enslavement or annihilation of entire peoples. You can say such actions are aberrational but in point of fact, they are not. 3. It severs the connection between values and reality. You couldn't possibly be more anti-God than that, and here I'm using "God" as a word for what is ultimately real and true. There probably are other reasons but those should more than suffice. I don't think of myself as a radical at all. In fact, many of my fellow secularists think of me as too friendly to religion: I describe myself as a born-again Humanist, and a nephew by marriage - who I call the most Catholic man in Pennsylvania - says I am the most religious person he has ever met. I take religion very seriously, so when I see it bastardized by theism and theology, I get upset because theism and theology do violence to the human search for beauty and truth, and therefore for God.

Paul got my viewpoint right. I am attending a Catholic University in Austin, TX, and the school requires each student take a Critical Thinking class and an Ethical Analysis class. I have also taken Intro to Ethics at a local community college and Business Ethics at St. Edward’s. While researching a paper for my Ethical Analysis class I ran across William Clifford’s essay from 1877, The Ethics of Belief]. Those who are interested can click the link. My takeaway from Clifford’s essay, and other ethical studies, is that believing something without evidence is harmful individually and to society as a whole. Clifford states this in his essay.
As Paul mentioned, believing things without evidence leads to irresponsible thinking, as we can see in our society with right wing Republicans denouncing AGW as a hoax. We saw it when the Bush administration concluded Saddam Hussein had WMDs, then built a case for war on dubious evidence while ignoring the CIA analysts’ recommendations. We see it now as our government is shut down by a few Tea Party elected Republicans who want to defund the Affordable Health Care Act, even though both houses of Congress approved it in 2010, the Supreme court affirmed it, and the American people reelected the President who guided the act into law.
Basing your beliefs on empirical evidence is the ethical stance versus basing your beliefs on what you want to be true.

2

I agree that such words as reason, belief, faith, truth, reality, logic, rational, irrational, etc. and various subtle aspects of their meanings and interrelationships are great grist for discussion. However, I see ethics as a very different concept that’s sort of noncoplaner with all of the prior ones. Certainly, while one or more of those words may determine the content of one’s ethics, I don’t think choosing any of those words would necessarily lead to a specific ethical structure. If one wants to include some particular set of ideas along with one of those words, that almost certainly will color the ethics derived, however, that difference would be from those ideas, not from the above word chosen.
Occam

3

Darron,
I’ll need to think more about this and look a few things up. But here are a few quick comments.

The ethical stance is to look at the available evidence then decide, not reach a conclusion then look for rationalizations to support it.
I replied 'No. You can logically start from any point', and that's true, and even a powerful tool in good thinking. Arguments sometimes need to be run backward, like a machine, to test them. However I did not engage directly with the thought behind your quote. Someone suggested I missed the point of it, but hell, there's a lot flying around a typical thread in this forum! thread drift? More like thread hurricanes. *Ethics* in thinking - how *should* or *ought* you reason - must entail *intent*. Just as I cannot be accused of murder if I did not intend to kill an innocent man, one cannot be accused of unethical thought-processes if that is not one's intent. The mere fact that one is not arguing well, or making unjustified or even unjustifiable assumptions, is like the mere fact that a man is dead by your hand - it's terrible, but not just thereby immoral. So, as one comment, we cannot call 'unethical' any old crappy thinking. Like typical or 'paradigm' immoral actions, the crappy thinking must be either intentional, or wilfully dangerous. The last is illustrated by an old medieval example: you randomly fire arrows into the air near a busy road. You don't intend to hit anyone, strictly, but you should know shooting off arrows in such an area is likely to hurt someone. (In talk, the Church has traditionally lumped this under 'causing scandal': I wouldn't yak about process theology (God is growing through history) in the middle of a Baptist Bible study. Wrong crowd; it's a little mean of me, especially since I don't buy it myself. You also cannot call 'unethical' argumentation that your own position would imply to be wrong. This can be hard to say to a room full of atheists and secular humanists, most of whom are also naturalists, BUT. Naturalism is not a knock-down theory, and it is not a science in itself, and it is not a part of any other science, and it is not necessary to practice any science. Even if it is true, it is not thereby *unethical* to be a non-naturalist. If you cannot believe this, we will have a short discussion. But there is more. We have more than logic, we have *ideas*, or notions, or concepts - whatever your word for those odd things that are not logical relations, but aren't individual things either. Some concepts are more or less directly founded in the physical world, but we've gone a long, long way from the neo-Platonists' naive claim that we somehow *see* the ideas out there. We see the Sun, the Moon, the planets, we see - in a more hinky sense - their motions; and then we *conceive* them to travel in perfect circles (Eudoxus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo), then ellipses (Kepler), then deformed ellipses (Newton). Every single one of these ideas is strictly false. How justified was Eudoxus in calling them perfect circles? Was he being *unethical* in positing perfect circles despite the fact he knew the paths of the planets and stars most empirically were not? What's *empirical* about Okham's Razor? Or 'simplicity': no-one's got a clue what 'simple theory' really means. Really. Look it up. But really strangely and interestingly, we can conclude from straightforward evidence from the natural world, concepts that are not strictly empirical from empirical ones. Here's a very simple argument: Everything that comes into being has a cause of their coming into being. But this sequence stops somehow or it could never get started. Therefore there is a First Cause that didn't come into being (or it'd need a cause to make it come into being). "And this we call God." I don't want to turn this thread into a debate about the details of this argument. I only want to point out that it *not unreasonably* moves from concepts we can derive from Nature, to one that we could not. We've *discovered* something new - and if not a new thing, a First Cause, then at the least new *ideas*: first cause, thing that does not come into being, necessary. Recall that one of the great advances in physical science was a very non-empirical concept, non-being, the Void, 'empty space'. People loved it or hated it for centuries; a bishop (Tempier) in the thirteenth century had to *make* people stop saying God couldn't make a vacuum. There is nothing unethical about this kind of reasoning even though it leads to unempirical concepts. It may well turn out to be a bad argument (let's not pursue it's details here) - after all there is no true vacuum in the Universe. The point is not that an argument can come to a false conclusion, but whether it is *unethical* to do this. Well, it's awfully arguable that doing this is unethical to me! These are just some initial notions and very tentatively sketched examples. Maybe there are better ways to get the thread started. Chris
4

Occam,

I agree that such words as reason, belief, faith, truth, reality, logic, rational, irrational, etc. and various subtle aspects of their meanings and interrelationships are great grist for discussion. However, I see ethics as a very different concept that's sort of noncoplaner with all of the prior ones.
We should distinguish *irrational* from *immoral*. It's immoral to intend to throw word-dust in your eyes to throw you off; it's just my confusion if I do it while trying to be clear. Consider the physicist Krauss. He has a book out The Universe from Nothing. His claim is to conflate the quantum fluctuation of spacetime with 'nothing'. That's *dumb*, because that's just not what is meant by, well, *nothing*, not-anything a'tall. He's been taken to task by a lot of people, including other physicists. But is he being immoral? Meh. He thinks philosophy is so on the ropes that we can take the strict meaning of nothing and throw it out without regret. So he does justify his move, even if most of us think that is an *unjustified* move. But again, an unjustified move, even as weird as his - and it seems he's gotten stubborn about it now - doesn't seem like *unethical* or *immoral* thinking. Chris
5
. . . one cannot be accused of unethical thought-processes if that is not one's intent.
Yes you can, and appropriately so. Any reasonably intelligent person who uses the internet has access to a vast body of information. There's no excuse in these times for intelligent people not to check their facts before passing on information, or to ignore established scientific facts just because they don't want to believe them, etc., ad nauseam. You can decline to call it unethical if you want to. I say it's irresponsible in our times, and as such is unethical.
6
. . . I cannot be accused of murder if I did not intend to kill an innocent man . . .
Right, because by definition intent is an element of murder. But what about crimes like negligent homicide? There's no intent to kill or even hurt anyone, the perpetrator was criminally negligent and he can still go to prison for it, especially if he keeps doing it. The subject at hand is ethics, which is a broad subject, like crime. Murder and dishonesty are examples of crimes and a lack of ethics, respectively. There are also such things and intellectual ethical breaches, such as intellectual dishonesty. The Framers of our Constitution envisioned a responsible citizenry that would keep abreast of the issues and make decisions responsibly; that view of citizenship holds our methods of thought to be ethical matters. There are three domains of Being: thought, emotion and action. The most obvious and most common domain in which ethics are judged is action; on the other hand, intent includes emotions. On the other hand, we have more control over our actions and our thoughts, in general, than we have over our emotions. All three domains are relevant to ethics. I lay out my idea of ethics in a website I maintain. Because CFI properly frowns on advertising, if you send me a private message here, Chris, I'll give you the domain name for the site.
7
I agree that such words as reason, belief, faith, truth, reality, logic, rational, irrational, etc. and various subtle aspects of their meanings and interrelationships are great grist for discussion. However, I see ethics as a very different concept that's sort of noncoplaner with all of the prior ones. Certainly, while one or more of those words may determine the content of one's ethics, I don't think choosing any of those words would necessarily lead to a specific ethical structure. If one wants to include some particular set of ideas along with one of those words, that almost certainly will color the ethics derived, however, that difference would be from those ideas, not from the above word chosen. Occam
I kinda see what you're saying, but just barely. Is it necessary that we be led to a specific ethical structure? Could we leave that structure somewhat in the background, until a specific ethical dilemma raises its head? As far as I know, no one has created the perfect ethical structure, so if we start going down that road, either we'll get lost or we'll be famous. I think the difference between where belief or non-belief leads you is far enough apart that it can be discussed without specifics of exactly where those two roads are.
8
I lay out my idea of ethics in a website I maintain. Because CFI properly frowns on advertising, if you send me a private message here, Chris, I'll give you the domain name for the site.
To be fair, Paul, we don't frown on people posting links to their blogs or other non-remunerative websites, and for regular members in good standing (that is to say, not first-time or second-time posters, or the like) we are willing to allow limited self-disclosure, particularly if it is in the context of a relevant discussion.
9

You’re making a category error here, Chris. I gave real-world examples of the dangers of believing things without evidence, and you came back arguing that my logic means cutting edge science is unethical. That is obviously ridiculous. There is a huge difference between proposing a scientific hypothesis and waiting for peer review and leading a nation into a war of choice on manufactured evidence. Please stick to the topic and try not to derail the discussion with a red herring.

10
Is it necessary that we be led to a specific ethical structure? Could we leave that structure somewhat in the background, until a specific ethical dilemma raises its head? As far as I know, no one has created the perfect ethical structure, so if we start going down that road, either we'll get lost or we'll be famous. I think the difference between where belief or non-belief leads you is far enough apart that it can be discussed without specifics of exactly where those two roads are.
That's like saying it's a great plan to ignore national laws because no one has come up with a perfect legal system.
11

Darron,

You're making a category error here, Chris. I gave real-world examples of the dangers of believing things without evidence, and you came back arguing that my logic means cutting edge science is unethical. That is obviously ridiculous.
Too ridiculous to be true. To add to this post, I think cutting-edge science is Kool. Kool is not unethical. Therefore etc. Btw, you've shifted from 'unethical' to 'dangerous'. Nobody has argued that mistakes can have dangerous consequences. 'Unethical' implies some kind of intent - directly, or by the law of double effect. I'm not sure about your second example - you mean GW Bush and the leadup to invading Iraq, right? the thread is about unethical *believing* - Paul, as I've begun to ken, thinks that reasoning processes outside of natural-scientific ones are at bottom misuses of reasoning, and he doesn't mind moving thereby straight to calling such processes immoral. (I think; stay tuned.) I *don't* think the Bush government was unethical in that sense - if they did wrong it was the uh, old-fashioned way. They used standard tools of intelligence (let's assume, unless you know something), so they weren't being unethical in their reasoning itself. Instead they stretched the truth, they lied, they suppressed other evidence, etc. That's not specifically unethical *thinking* or *reasoning* - is it? It seems pretty garden-variety immmoral; there was (allegedly) intention to deceive. If you do this in an article for a newspaper or journal, it's straight up wrong; it's doubtfully something we'd naturally call it unethical belief. Chris
12

Paul,

Any reasonably intelligent person who uses the internet has access to a vast body of information. There's no excuse . . .
Wilful ignorance involves intent, just not direct intent: the Internet blogger barrels along without doing due diligence, and he knows what due diligence is. He doesn't intend to darken counsel with ignorant words, but he knows that's the usual effect of not doing due diligence. If I really were ignorant of due diligence - one poster here, after all, innocently asserted that posters here *shouldn't have to* do more than state their private opinions - then what i've done is hard to class as *unethical*. On a side note, there is a difference between *immoral* and *unethical*. Example: Even if abortion is immoral, doctors who properly perform abortions are not just because of that acting unethically. Chris
13
I lay out my idea of ethics in a website I maintain. Because CFI properly frowns on advertising, if you send me a private message here, Chris, I'll give you the domain name for the site.
To be fair, Paul, we don't frown on people posting links to their blogs or other non-remunerative websites, and for regular members in good standing (that is to say, not first-time or second-time posters, or the like) we are willing to allow limited self-disclosure, particularly if it is in the context of a relevant discussion. Thanks, Doug. I'll keep that in mind for next time.
14
Paul,
Any reasonably intelligent person who uses the internet has access to a vast body of information. There's no excuse . . .
Wilful ignorance involves intent, just not direct intent: the Internet blogger barrels along without doing due diligence, and he knows what due diligence is. Chris
As far as I am concerned, intellectual laziness is also unethical. I was very tough on my kids, maybe rigorous is a better word. In our household, certain things weren't excusable, including some matters of intellectual process and method. Partly as a result, I have one PhD candidate in the neurosciences at Johns Hopkins and one Masters student in science journalism at Columbia. And despite somewhat less than the usual amount of complaining when they were home, I see the habits we engrained in them coming back to us like a reward. Children live up to what their parents expect of them, if their parents make the rules clear and sensible to the children. If you study social psychology, you learn that what we expect of each other shapes our cultures. We live in a culture with dysfunctional notions of freedom, some of which CFI's Austin Dacey wrote about in The Secular Conscience. See p. 15, where he discusses the liberty fallacy and the privacy fallacy, the latter being the dysfunctional assumption that your right to an opinion means that you should be free from criticism of it. Many people say that we shouldn't discuss politics and religion with our friends (notwithstanding what the Framers had in mind), yet the people who say the stupidest and most indefensible things can be the last ones anyone will criticize. You can set your ethical boundary somewhere else if you like but this is where I set mine. Let's not imagine that an idea like ethics has a fixed definition, as though it was a physical substance like quartz. We decide what is ethical, and this is where I say we should put the boundary. As Gene Roddenberry put it, "This is my vision."
15
Is it necessary that we be led to a specific ethical structure? Could we leave that structure somewhat in the background, until a specific ethical dilemma raises its head? As far as I know, no one has created the perfect ethical structure, so if we start going down that road, either we'll get lost or we'll be famous. I think the difference between where belief or non-belief leads you is far enough apart that it can be discussed without specifics of exactly where those two roads are.
That's like saying it's a great plan to ignore national laws because no one has come up with a perfect legal system. No it isn't. I did not suggest ignoring generally agreed upon standards of ethics. "Somewhat in the background" means just that; visible, acknowledged, aware that it is incomplete, but not ignored.
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Paul,

[1]As far as I am concerned, intellectual laziness is also unethical.
[2]We live in a culture with dysfunctional notions of freedom, some of which CFI's Austin Dacey wrote about in The Secular Conscience. See p. 15, where he discusses the liberty fallacy and the privacy fallacy, the latter being the dysfunctional assumption that your right to an opinion means that you should be free from criticism of it. [3]Many people say that we shouldn't discuss politics and religion with our friends (notwithstanding what the Framers had in mind)
[4]Let's not imagine that an idea like ethics has a fixed definition, as though it was a physical substance like quartz. [5]We decide what is ethical, and this is where I say we should put the boundary. As Gene Roddenberry put it, "This is my vision."
R1. Sure. Specifically, moral laziness falls under wilfulness. But is it a special kind of immoral behavior? R2. I dunno about his analysis. (2.i) My experience is that a lot of people confuse having an opinion or belief criticized with being personally criticized - and often the two do get confounded by an opponent, so it's not always even a *fallacy* - the opponent is just trying to get under the other guy's skin, or he doesn't know how to tease apart issues with an argument and issues with the person. (2.ii) Also, a lot of people aren't ready to defend a belief in any detail. (All of us, in any complex society, take most of our beliefs on faith in relevant authorities.) Example: a sharp Christian apologist who thinks an intelligent but not very well read botanist should be able to defend everything he happens to believe (with reasonable trust in authority) about evolutionary theory. He's not fighting fair, is he? R3. Well, come now, you know the true import of the proverb 'never discuss politics and religion.' It's about polite company, not about avoiding all debate in any place at any time. Don't bring up your bid for the Tea Party at Thanksgiving while liberal-secularist Dad is carving the tofurkey. You're just looking for a fight - and that's not very moral either. R4. Heh, let's instead imagine that we can knock people around for *ill* defined crimes. R5. We decide, eh? Or *you* say where to set bounds. (5.i) by all means, set personal bounds and goals. But a man is not lazy just because he doesn't get up as early as *you* draw the line at 'early enough'. I'm *being* lazy implies there's a real fact of the matter, and not just an opinion. Otherwise, all you can really say is I get up at 7am, you get up at 6; (5.ii) Or the neighbors, or better our bosses, approve of waking at 6 and disapprove of waking an hour later. How is this morality distinct from social force? Isn't that high school in the lunchroom? No thanks. Chris.
17
Occam,
I agree that such words as reason, belief, faith, truth, reality, logic, rational, irrational, etc. and various subtle aspects of their meanings and interrelationships are great grist for discussion. However, I see ethics as a very different concept that's sort of noncoplaner with all of the prior ones.
We should distinguish *irrational* from *immoral*. It's immoral to intend to throw word-dust in your eyes to throw you off; it's just my confusion if I do it while trying to be clear. Consider the physicist Krauss. He has a book out The Universe from Nothing. His claim is to conflate the quantum fluctuation of spacetime with 'nothing'. That's *dumb*, because that's just not what is meant by, well, *nothing*, not-anything a'tall. He's been taken to task by a lot of people, including other physicists. But is he being immoral? Meh. He thinks philosophy is so on the ropes that we can take the strict meaning of nothing and throw it out without regret. So he does justify his move, even if most of us think that is an *unjustified* move. But again, an unjustified move, even as weird as his - and it seems he's gotten stubborn about it now - doesn't seem like *unethical* or *immoral* thinking. Chris
Chris, I'm fascinated by your complete lack of ability to understand what the words and meaning of my post was. Your response was amazingly off the point. Disgusting that since I'm a moderator, I can't put you on ignore, because your posts make no sense at all in terms of reference to the prior ones. Occam
18

Occam,

Chris, I'm fascinated by your complete lack of ability to understand what the words and meaning of my post was. Your response was amazingly off the point. Disgusting that since I'm a moderator, I can't put you on ignore, because your posts make no sense at all in terms of reference to the prior ones. Occam
Sweet fancy Moses, that's amazingly insulting. As far as I could see, you didn't *say* much of *anything*. So here is what I *really* thought: - First, you said a bit of nothing about how tough it is to deal with all these 'subtle' words. - Then you spoke a truism (they provide 'great grist for discussion') without actually doing any discussing. This suggests it was more a sneer than a contribution, so I had two reasons to ignore it. I could be wrong about the sneer except, well, here's a great big sneer right in front of me. - You think ethics is non-coplanar with all the other terms. That's a remarkably clotted way to say 'they are very different things' but never mind. I'd finally found something to hang onto! And that's where I thought I could at least partly agree with you, and partly disagree with you. - I moved on to a possible example of an intellectually immoral move. Then I questioned if it was a real example - thus suggesting you may still be right. Okay? Is this a little better? Am I getting closer? You're a *moderator*? Chris
19
that’s amazingly insulting.
Really? I was just trying to give an honest evaluation.
Okay? Is this a little better? Am I getting closer? You’re a *moderator*?
No, no, and yes. Occam
20
Is it necessary that we be led to a specific ethical structure? Could we leave that structure somewhat in the background, until a specific ethical dilemma raises its head? As far as I know, no one has created the perfect ethical structure, so if we start going down that road, either we'll get lost or we'll be famous. I think the difference between where belief or non-belief leads you is far enough apart that it can be discussed without specifics of exactly where those two roads are.
How's this for a specific ethical dilemma: Jenny McCarthy. Her son was diagnosed with autism shorty after receiving vaccinations. Since then she has ignored all available evidence and has gone on numerous television shows advising parents to not have their children vaccinated against diseases. Children have died after their parents followed her advice, yet she continues to telling people vaccinations cause autism. This case illustrates my wider point about the ethics of belief, and what Paul has argued. Believing things without evidence is unethical in a general sense. At best it leads people to blindly embrace new-age mysticism or other forms of woo. At worst it leads people to not vaccinate their children, or follow political and religious leaders who preach all manner of nonsense. Look how many people in the United States don't believe in the Theory of Evolution. The most passionate of those work to get Creationism taught in public schools, and we spend our time and tax dollars fighting those forces of ignorance. Global Warming deniers are guilty of the same ethical lapse. They do not want to believe the scientists who devote their careers to studying the climate, and use all manner of subterfuge to spread doubt among the general populace, which in the United States includes millions of people who will not bother reading the science behind global warming, but choose rather to believe the denial machine's misinformation. The people and corporations funding the denial think-tanks are obviously guilty of ethical failures, but so are the people who believe their lies because those people could easily educate themselves about the truth, but willingly refuse to do so. Believing things without evidence has real and tragic consequences. The fundamentalist Christians who let their children die instead of getting medical treatment are extreme examples, but there are far too many people, especially in the United States, who ignore hard realities and choose to believe things simply because their beliefs make them feel good. Edit: reworded last sentence for clarity.