The Duty to Believe Carefully

One of the things that makes me a realist is the problem of faith and good intentions. All the faith in the world will not make it such that I am sitting on a beach on a Pacific island at this time; nor will all the best intentions in the world stop somebody from being very badly injured, if I suggest that they jump off a cliff. All the best faith, and the most benign intentions in the world count for little if you have no good reason to believe in them.

In a famous essay, the Victorian mathematician and polymath William Clifford, explored the duty to believe carefully as not only a duty to reason but a moral duty. He tells the story of a shipowner who sends a damaged ship to sea in honest good faith that no harm can come to it:

He knew that she was old and was not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy...Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home...He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such a way, he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe...

The ship sinks and he collects his insurance money. The sincerity of conviction cannot compensate for the accuracy of the process employed in arriving at it. It's interesting that people will often forgive sincere bad faith, as long as it is sincere. I have read defences of Hitler's actions that rest on this argument. I call it the 'Hitler gets away with it dilemma' - the belief that a rationalization of morally irresponsible acts, whose consequences may have been averted by greater care, is sufficient to excuse it. Not so.

The content of our beliefs is as important as the faith we put in them. We don't simply sit on beliefs, we respond to them in a manner that is exactly plays out the content of the belief in causal actions. To genuinely believe an evil act is good, is no defence for it. Let me elaborate. If somebody acts on the claim that some country has weapons of mass destruction when he knows that it may very well not; or to send a space shuttle into space knowing that it is far from safe to do so, we are quick to rebuke and reproach such actions. But supposing our moral agents above both go back in time and believe the exact same thing again, with all the relevant facts just the same as before, except this time they genuinely believe the rightness of their actions. In the latter case, people will often be far more forgiving. This is dangerous.

Can it be excused to believe something - especially if it has calamitous consequences - when there was no justification for believing it it at all? I can't say it is excusable. I call this moral negligence. There is a third alternative: where our moral agents act exactly the same, and are genuinely committed to ensuring that their actions are right, but still get it wrong in the end. I can forgive this. The reason is that I see reasoning about situations - moral or otherwise - as being justified in terms of method, rather than simply intention or outcome. How we weigh evidence is not a private affair. It is, like the search for a lost possession, a committed process, which must be justified in light of likelihood of success, and the accuracy, sincerity and care taken in seeking such success.

Beliefs are the content of our actions. A single pernicious belief is enough to invite other such beliefs to unify and reinforce it. False knowledge justifies a certainty in action which, when inaccurate, can lead to grave consequences. There is a duty to believe carefully, and to continue to believe what does not stand up to reason, is a crime against humanity.

Historical Materialism

Historical materialism is the classical Marxist view of history. It is described by Engels in the introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as seeking 'the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggle of these classes against one another'.

Historical materialism is described by Marx and Engels as a scientific, empirical hypothesis, but in fact is a framework or guide for historical explanation, and as such measured more by the unifying insights it gives and the success of the research programme it generates. According to historical materialism, changes in the productive forces of a society lead to social conflict, and the specific forms of social organisation that emerge reflect the underlying structure of the means of production.

One of the main problems in understanding Marxism is to relate historical materialism to historicism, or the idea that history takes a determined, inevitable shape, with movements and aims that are not in accord with that shape being doomed in advance to failure. In principle historical materialism has no such implication, and Marx himself took care to distance it from any fatalistic interpretation.

Counterexample

A counterexample is an example that refutes a claim about some subject-matter. Switzerland is a counterexample to the claim that all countries with armed citizens are dangerous. Notice that it is not a counterexample to the claim that some countries with armed citizens are dangerous. Much philosophy proceeds by finding counterexamples. For example, the claim that if you have promised someone to be at a place at a particular time, you must be there, could be countered by the example of a situation in which the person you promised to meet has died in the meantime. In some developments of logic, a counterexample set is made by combining the premises of some argument with the negation of the conclusion, and seeing if a contradiction can be derived. If it can, then the original argument was valid.

Evolutionary Ethics

Evolutionary ethics was a movement in the 19th century which attempted to base ethical reasoning on the presumed facts about evolution. The movement is especially associated with Herbert Spencer. The premise is that later elements in an evolutionary path are better than earlier ones; the application of this principle then requires seeing western society, laissez-faire capitalism, or some other object of approval, as more evolved than more 'primitive' social forms. Neither the principle nore the applications command much respect. The version of evolutionary ethics called Social Darwinism, emphasises the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify and assist such a struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society, or betweens ocieties themselves. More recently the relation between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in light og biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.