Beliefs are ethically neutral: a response to W.K Clifford

I. Introduction

W.K. Clifford argued that one has not only an epistemic responsibility, but also an ethical duty, to hold a given belief only with sufficient evidence. In responding to Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief,” I will address only Clifford’s ethical claims regarding beliefs. Clifford’s claims about epistemic rights will not be considered. Specifically, I intend to show that actions alone have an ethical character and that beliefs alone are not subject to ethical judgments. A public belief, a belief that is shared with or taught to others, is considered to be an act, or a portion of the act of sharing or teaching. Private beliefs can be divided into private motivating beliefs (PMBs) or purely private beliefs (PPBs). Clifford’s example of the shipowner’s belief that his vessel was not seaworthy is an example of a PMB. An example of a PPB would be the opinion of a non-expert that Venus, rather than Saturn (Ingersoll), is the windiest planet in our solar system. PMBs can affect the ethical character of the act that follows from the belief, particularly in the case of a blameworthy act, in which case the PMB can either aggravate or mitigate the “wrongness”, for want of a more precise word, of the prohibited act.

II. My Ethical System

In this paper, I will analyze W.K. Clifford’s “Ethics of Belief” using an ethical system on which I have been working slowly for several years. It is by no means complete, and much of it will likely sound very familiar to the reader. This in not by accident: my fledgling ethical theory stands humbly on the shoulders of giants. To the extent that the origins of derivative parts are not properly attributed to their creators, it is solely because they have been in my thought for so long that I have forgotten the source from which I absorbed them. I explicitly acknowledge that my ethical theory is not composed completely of my original thought and is, in this stage, little more than a minor refinement of rights-based ethics.

To briefly sketch the current state of my ethical theory, the terms “ethical” and moral” are considered equivalent and may be used interchangeably. Only actions by free moral agents may be the subject of ethical analysis or judgment. Such actions fall into one of the following categories: ethically prohibited, ethically neutral (but permitted), ethically required, or supererogatory. Actions alone, not persons, can be evaluated. Rights may be either positive or negative, and for each right, there is a corresponding duty (e.g., if person A has a right to X, some person B has a duty to provide X). A group can be said to have a particular right or duty if and only if at least one person in the group has that right or duty. It is obviously possible to make all sorts of claims regarding rights and duties, and a cohesive manner for evaluating those claims is an unfinished part of theory. However, borrowing from Kant’s first formulation of his Categorical Imperative, one cannot claim the existence of a particular right unless he can genuinely claim, without a logical or physical inconsistency that all people have that right. This obviously raises the bar significantly for claims to positive rights. Another key concept of my theory is that ethically prohibited acts are those that cause unjustified harm. As with rights and duties, a group or society cannot be said to be harmed unless at least one member of the group, other than the actor, is harmed. Acts that harm the actor are not considered ethically prohibited, as a free moral agent, by definition, acts in accordance with his own intent and self-interest. A person who harms  himself as a result of coercion or mental illness is not a free moral agent and therefore cannot commit an act that has an ethical character.

III. Clifford’s Argument

W.K. Clifford’s “Ethics of Belief” can be satisfactorily condensed by using his own summation: “[t]o sum it up; it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (Clifford 363). In his essay, Clifford denies the very existence of PPBs, claiming that “…no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone” (Clifford 361). He offers no evidence in support of this claim, and the following example provides a sufficient argument to topple this claim. Most people, if asked which planet is the windiest, would have no idea, and their mistake or lack of this knowledge affects the operation of society not at all. Prior to NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, the scientific astronomy community believed that mantle of “windiest” belonged to Neptune. As is the nature of science, new information led to a new conclusion, but it necessarily implies that the previous information was insufficient. It would be absurd to conclude that scientists at NASA or educators had committed an ethically prohibited act by disseminating to the then-current knowledge that Neptune was the windiest planet. It is difficult to conceive of someone being harmed by another person’s silently holding such a belief.

IV. Other Scholars’ Arguments Regarding Clifford and My Response

Most of the scholarly work found during my search for secondary sources on Clifford was concerned with the epistemic aspect of his claim and was therefore outside the scope of this paper. William James stands out as a philosopher who opposes Clifford’s claims in the realm of ethics. In the case of beliefs involving ethics, James turns Clifford’s argument against itself: “[m]oral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solutions cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is not a question of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist” (James 373). To start here and follow Clifford’s argument to its conclusion, it would be unjust for Clifford to hold a belief about whether anything at all is unjust.  Michael Shaffer comes to Clifford’s defense, citing C.S. Peirce’s publicity of belief argument, which states that “bona fide belief cannot be conceptually separated from action. In other words, bona fide beliefs are those upon which one is prepared to act” (Shaffer 41).

The belief to which Shaffer and Peirce refer appears to coincide with a belief that has the potential to become a PNM, which would place it in the sphere of ethical concern. PNMs are outside the scope of my thesis, but the mere preparedness to act upon a PPB, if the eventuality arose, is not sufficient to make it a PNM, absent the action itself. Mental preparedness or willingness to act is not an act in itself. Shaffer muddies the waters by inferring that Clifford’s thesis is purely epistemic: “[i]t is always (epistemically) wrong to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence” (Shaffer 45). This inference is not supported by Clifford’s essay.

V. Conclusion

The sources of our beliefs are too numerous for practical enumeration. Some are the products of events that occurred so early in our lives that we cannot remember them. Many are the results of what we experience in our daily lives, which is partially determined by the society into which we happen to be born. We form beliefs based on our sensory information, and our beliefs are affected by our mental and emotional states. Of all of those influences, each person can have complete, and privileged, knowledge of only his own thoughts and emotions. In every other aspect of life, he must act on incomplete and perhaps incorrect information.  Ethics generally does not require one to trivially cast his life aside. One acts based at least in part on what he believes, and requiring him to suspend all belief, and therefore all action, until he possesses complete information amounts to the same thing. It is sufficient that one acts with benevolent intent and with thoughtful consideration of the available evidence, however incomplete it may be.
To review my argument:
P1: Only acts by a free moral agent have an ethical character.
P2:  PPBs are not acts.
C: PPBs cannot have an ethical character.
Since PPBs are incapable of causing harm to another, they are outside the proper sphere of ethics. It may be that our minds may be our only truly free domains, and I believe I have shown that they are also truly private, their contents beyond the reach of the ethical pronouncements of others. The ignorant man deserves no condemnation simply because he is ignorant, and the wise man must go beyond the mere possession of wisdom in order to be ethically praiseworthy.

Works Cited

Clifford, W.K.. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Philosophy of Religion Reader, edited by Chad Meister,
359-365. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Feldman, Richard. “The Ethics of Belief.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60, no. 3
(2000): 667-695.

James, William. “The Will to Believe.” In The Philosophy of Religion Reader, edited by Chad Meister,
366-378. New York: Routledge, 2008.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Two Storms Caught in the Act on Saturn.” National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/apr/HQ_04119_saturn_storms.html
3, 2008)

Shaffer, Michael J.. “The Publicity of Belief, Epistemic Wrongs and Moral Wrongs.” Social
Epistemology 20, no. 1 (2006): 41-54.

Zamulinski, Brian. “A Re-evaluation of Clifford and His Critics.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy
40, no. 3 (2002): 437-457.

A work in progress: a response to W.K Clifford’s “Ethics of Belief”

For my Philosophy of Religion course, I am working on a paper that will be a response to W.K. Clifford’s “Ethics of Belief.” If you’re unfamiliar with Clifford, I’m not going to spoil the surprise. Once the paper is completed, I intend to publish it here – almost certainly by the end of 2008.

I’m also working on a paper on Aristotle’s thought on natural justice and the best type of government. I have not decided whether it will be “re-polished” and published here.

A brief note on animal “rights”

As one might guess from other posts, I consider wildlife conservation, preservation of the world’s remaining wild places, and tree-hugging in general to be good things.

Does that, gentle reader, mean that I am a proponent of animal rights? Ummm, no. While I allow causes that I support to leak occasionally onto this blog, at the end of the day it remains a space to discuss ethics. Books could be written about what delineates a person as a free moral agent and, by extension, subject to a particular system or theory of ethics. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that the individual must be able to understand his or her ethical rights and duties and must be free to choose his or her actions.

Even the non-human animals closest to us in terms of intelligence or ability to communicate with humans fails the first criterion. The second, therefore, need not be examined. Chimpanzees, elephants, or cetaceans may be moral agents with respect to other members of the same species, but they are not moral agents with respect to humans. If they owe no ethical duty to humans, then we are arguably free of any ethical duty to them.

The matter of reciprocity as it applies to ethics is an interesting subject for future investigation.

Humans’ role in the extinction of other species is an example of our capacity to behave badly outside in a way that is ethically neutral within the confines of ethical theory.

A non-theoretical crisis

I have always maintained that humans and non-human animals cannot be moral agents with respect to one another. A human has no rights or duties among non-human animals, and in the strict sense, vice versa.

One could craft a very plausible argument that we each have a duty to our fellow humans, individually and collectively, to damage our habitat as little as possible to meet our needs. Essentially, “don’t shit in camp.” Well, with 6 billion of us, camp is nearly everywhere, and not all of us are doing our duty.

While this doesn’t relate directly to ethics among humans, PLEASE take a moment and visit the site of the Great Apes Survival Project, a project of the United Nations Environment Programme, and see how close we are to losing our nearest relatives, from whom we still have so much to learn, forever. I have no connection with this organization other than a shared goal. The link will open in a new browser tab or window.

A parting thought: This is not nature taking its course. For the most part, this is not an impoverished farmer competing with primates for the same resources for survival. This is a multinational corporation destroying habitat inside national parks, using not only bulldozers, but also mercenaries with automatic weapons to kill the under-trained, under-armed, under-supported park rangers.

Would a multinational corporation do this because it dislikes national parks, or because it makes tremendous profits selling the fruits of its crimes to you and me, here in North America and Europe? Think back a decade, and imagine how you would have responded to such a situation. Now think forward a decade, and imagine a world in which there is no such thing as a wild orangutan or western lowland gorilla. A decade. Yes, it is that close.