pafret Loc: Northeast

Free Download: ‘William Kingdon Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief’


"Believing Without Evidence Is Always Morally Wrong"
by Francisco Mejia Uribe

"You have probably never heard of William Kingdon Clifford. He is not in the pantheon of great philosophers – perhaps because his life was cut short at the age of 33 – but I cannot think of anyone whose ideas are more relevant for our interconnected, AI-driven, digital age. This might seem strange given that we are talking about a Victorian Briton whose most famous philosophical work is an essay nearly 150 years ago. However, reality has caught up with Clifford. His once seemingly exaggerated claim that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ is no longer hyperbole but a technical reality.

In ‘The Ethics of Belief’ (1877), Clifford gives three arguments as to why we have a moral obligation to believe responsibly, that is, to believe only what we have sufficient evidence for, and what we have diligently investigated. His first argument starts with the simple observation that our beliefs influence our actions. Everyone would agree that our behavior is shaped by what we take to be true about the world – which is to say, by what we believe. If I believe that it is raining outside, I’ll bring an umbrella. If I believe taxis don’t take credit cards, I make sure I have some cash before jumping into one. And if I believe that stealing is wrong, then I will pay for my goods before leaving the store.

What we believe is then of tremendous practical importance. False beliefs about physical or social facts lead us into poor habits of action that in the most extreme cases could threaten our survival. If the singer R Kelly genuinely believed the words of his song ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ (1996), I can guarantee you he would not be around by now.

But it is not only our own self-preservation that is at stake here. As social animals, our agency impacts on those around us, and improper believing puts our fellow humans at risk. As Clifford warns: ‘We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to …’ In short, sloppy practices of belief-formation are ethically wrong because – as social beings – when we believe something, the stakes are very high.

The most natural objection to this first argument is that while it might be true that some of our beliefs do lead to actions that can be devastating for others, in reality most of what we believe is probably inconsequential for our fellow humans. As such, claiming as Clifford did that it is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence seems like a stretch. I think critics had a point – had – but that is no longer so. In a world in which just about everyone’s beliefs are instantly shareable, at minimal cost, to a global audience, every single belief has the capacity to be truly consequential in the way Clifford imagined. If you still believe this is an exaggeration, think about how beliefs fashioned in a cave in Afghanistan lead to acts that ended lives in New York, Paris and London. Or consider how influential the ramblings pouring through your social media feeds have become in your very own daily behavior. In the digital global village that we now inhabit, false beliefs cast a wider social net, hence Clifford’s argument might have been hyperbole when he first made it, but is no longer so today.

The second argument Clifford provides to back his claim that it is always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence is that poor practices of belief-formation turn us into careless, credulous believers. Clifford puts it nicely: ‘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.’ T***slating Clifford’s warning to our interconnected times, what he tells us is that careless believing turns us into easy prey for f**e-news peddlars, conspiracy theorists and charlatans. And letting ourselves become hosts to these false beliefs is morally wrong because, as we have seen, the error cost for society can be devastating. Epistemic alertness is a much more precious virtue today than it ever was, since the need to sift through conflicting information has exponentially increased, and the risk of becoming a vessel of credulity is just a few taps of a smartphone away.

Clifford’s third and final argument as to why believing without evidence is morally wrong is that, in our capacity as communicators of belief, we have the moral responsibility not to pollute the well of collective knowledge. In Clifford’s time, the way in which our beliefs were woven into the ‘precious deposit’ of common knowledge was primarily through speech and writing. Because of this capacity to communicate, ‘our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought’ become ‘common property’. Subverting this ‘heirloom’, as he called it, by adding false beliefs is immoral because everyone’s lives ultimately rely on this vital, shared resource.

While Clifford’s final argument rings true, it again seems exaggerated to claim that every little false belief we harbor is a moral affront to common knowledge. Yet reality, once more, is aligning with Clifford, and his words seem prophetic. Today, we truly have a global reservoir of belief into which all of our commitments are being painstakingly added: it’s called Big Data. You don’t even need to be an active netizen posting on Twitter or ranting on Facebook: more and more of what we do in the real world is being recorded and digitized, and from there algorithms can easily infer what we believe before we even express a view. In turn, this enormous pool of stored belief is used by algorithms to make decisions for and about us. And it’s the same reservoir that search engines tap into when we seek answers to our questions and acquire new beliefs. Add the wrong ingredients into the Big Data recipe, and what you’ll get is a potentially toxic output. If there was ever a time when critical thinking was a moral imperative, and credulity a calamitous sin, it is now."
- https://aeon.co/ideas/
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Freely Download "The Ethics of Belief", by William K. Clifford, here:
- http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf

rumitoid

Belief is always a fallacy of judgment, or it would not be belief. Belief caters to our psychological needs, desires, and fears. It can do nothing better, no matter how noble and selfless those beliefs appear.

Love is the whole purpose of T***h. If you are certain of your beliefs, you will always be in contradiction to T***h.

To be of the same mind as Christ requires no belief.
To be of the same mind as Christ is the end of belief and the end for belief.

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

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Your first statement is simply wrong. Beliefs can be true or can become true, especially with proper evidence. Your second statement is wrong. We have a body of true beliefs from which we practice our daily lives. Your third statement is semantic nonsense. I believe I will have a cup of coffee.

pafret Loc: Northeast

It is a marvel how far off the mark Rumi is about almost everything.

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

I do agree!

woodguru

The beliefs that are destroying this country are not the religious ones as much as the political ones, the beliefs formed without proof, simply because it's what you've heard by someone you have chosen to believe.

The GOP has promoted an entire dialog based in the complete absence of facts surrounding Russian interference. Trump called it f**e news, a witch hunt, made up, and the GOP intelligence committees have filled it in without the benefit of the hard evidence. A whole group of people have chosen to form beliefs that are hard set even before we see factual evidence, and many of these people will then refuse to believe the facts when they see them because they go against what they already believe.

Forming beliefs then fighting for them when the reality is opposite will get you k**led, it's not good survival sk**ls.

woodguru

Why form a belief that might turn out to be true, when using the process of assessing reality and facts will lead you to whether it is true or not?

The flip side of a belief turning out to be true is that it turns out to be wrong, but the person who operates on beliefs goes on to defend the thing he believes in because he is a person who believes in defending his beliefs.

There is nothing honorable about defending a belief that is wrong, it means you went beyond ignorance into stupidity.

pafret Loc: Northeast

This is an interesting statement:

"The GOP has promoted an entire dialog based in the complete absence of facts surrounding Russian interference."

With whom is the GOP conducting this dialog? You state there is a clear absence of facts surrounding Russian interference, yet, there has been a special prosecutor and a team of twenty or so hatchet men all looking to find what you assert does not exist. They have been doing so for at least two years and who knows how much longer they intend to milk this Swiss Navy Project. This is somehow the GOP's fault, the dastards should have left some evidence lying around so that there would be at least one or two facts to justify this effort.

What branch of the alphabets are those "GOP intelligence committees" that are filling in all of this void. Seems like Republicans are really bad guys, they are fabricating defenses against baseless accusations and doing it with a rigid unbelief, in non-facts, because that goes against their ingrained hard-set disbelief in non-evidentiary statements. What fools!

woodguru

The GOP and FOX is running a rhetorical dialog without the presence of facts, The GOP intelligence committees expect it's base (and FOX) to run a dialog based on what they say when they are using information they classify so that you cannot base your understanding on the facts but have to rely on what they say. The facts come out but the dialog has already run for weeks and the hard facts are then ignored and called f**e.

An example of the absolute falsehood of "there hasn't been a shred of evidence released by Mueller yet"...

Look at any indictment (that resulted in a guilty plea) that wasn't sealed because of ongoing investigations. The list of evidence and a rundown of what the prosecution has is right there to see, it's spelled out. They have even listed unindicted coconspirators, one who would appear to be Trump.

It's there to see if you would stop calling published full indictments with all the pages printed for the public to see f**e news. Open your eyes and read it, it is what it is. Indictments have to fully present the case in order to convince the judge or he will throw it out.

So on one side, you have the "liberals" and dems reading the unredacted indictments rather than taking anyone's word for it, even though the MSM is quoting and using word for word court documents as it's sources...

...and on the other you have FOX and Trump calling everything the media is reporting on f**e, and the people believing them can't figure out how to read a court indictment and see who is lying. It gets very frustrating to be arguing and fighting with people that won't accept public documents straight from the court. There is no reference of factual information anymore to base arguments on when one side won't accept anything real as the basis.

This is called propaganda, it takes people that will not use source documents, they choose to believe their leaders who are spinning an alternate reality.

The GOP has the balls to look people right in the eye and say that when they repeat a lie often enough it becomes some people's t***h. Kelly Ann Conway directly responded to lies by saying they were alternative facts, that if people believe them they become their t***h.

The divide stops when people start using their common sense to figure out what is the t***h and who is lying to them about the t***h.

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

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Rational people dump a false belief just as soon as solid proof has been given for its falsehood. Unscrupulous people manufacture facts to be believed and defend them until the belief is overwhelmed by full evidence to the contrary is presented and understood.

A good example of this is in the belief that collectivism is a superior mode of governance. This is belied by a number of facts: 1) control of manufacturing and distribution of goods and services to a nation is mired down by inability to cope with the complexity inherent in a modern economy even with supercomputers and an army of experts and programmers; 2) The t***sition from a different economic system to collectivism is disastrous to the population, because of the considerable resistance they put up that has to be quelled by force, and the extended suffer time needed to complete a collective system; and 3) for mankind, it is far too difficult to change their mindset to a collective system approach, even when attempted by generations of elite ideologues.

What appears to happen is the creation of a totalitarian dictatorship, not a Utopia.