Ryan Preston-Roedder
UNC Chapel Hill
Faith in Humanity1
1. Introduction
American politicians are no strangers to scandal. In 1797, the nation barely two decades
old, a newspaper published Alexander Hamilton’s love letters from Maria Reynolds, with whom
Hamilton had had an extramarital affair, and to whose husband he had paid more than one
thousand dollars in blackmail. The revelation of the affair, together with investigations into his
conduct as Treasury Secretary, arguably prevented Hamilton from rising to the presidency.2 So,
political scandal is nothing new. Nevertheless, Americans’ appetite for accounts of politicians’
private wrongs, especially accounts of sexual misconduct, seems to have reached unprecedented
levels. And cases in which a politician’s affair comes to light, the public expresses outrage, and
the politician, facing humiliation and the possible end of his career, makes a public apology are
now all too familiar.3
Thinking about media coverage of politicians’ private lives raises the following
questions: First, are politicians and other public figures’ private wrongs appropriate objects of
public concern at all? In other words, is it appropriate for the media to publicize the details of a
politician’s extramarital affair, or for the public to seek such details or discuss them? Second,
does it make sense for people to feel resentment or outrage when they learn about public figures’
1
I am grateful to Bernard Boxill, Thomas Hill, Edward Hinchman, Erica Preston-Roedder, Radha-vallabha Dasa
and to audiences at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the 2009 Pacific APA Symposium on Trust for very
helpful comments and discussion.
2
See Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004), Chapter 30. The story of the
Reynolds affair is sensational, even by contemporary standards. Among the many interesting details is the fact that,
when Reynolds divorced her husband in 1793, she hired as her lawyer Aaron Burr, who killed Hamilton in a duel
roughly ten years later (Alexander Hamilton, p. 417).
3
The revelation of Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair, after his week-long disappearance, is the latest prominent
example. See Jim Rutenberg and Shaila Dewan, “Back at Work, Governor Puts Apology on Agenda”, The New
York Times (2009, June 26). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/27sanford.html
1
private wrongs? It does seem appropriate to resent a politician who cheats on his spouse if the
fallout from the affair forces him to resign or prevents him from winning reelection, derailing a
potentially productive career in public service. But many are disposed to react in these ways
whether or not the politician’s affair prevents him from doing his job. So the second question is
whether it makes sense for people to respond to public figures’ private wrongs in these ways,
even when the wrong has no negative affect on his job performance.
In this essay, I will address the second of these questions, arguing that, even if people
have reason to avoid seeking or publicizing details of politicians’ private wrongs, as I suspect
they do, resentment and outrage may be appropriate when such wrongs surface, whether or not
these wrongs have further bad effects. My route to this conclusion will be somewhat indirect:
First, I will argue that a morally good person will have a qualified form of faith in humanity, a
disposition to judge that people are morally decent and to expect them to act in decent ways.4
More precisely, I will argue that having such faith is a natural result of having certain other
moral virtues. Second, I will argue that, provided that having faith in humanity is part of being a
good person, politicians and others whose private lives are exposed to public scrutiny owe it to
the public to lead lives that will not undermine people’s faith. That is, they owe it to the public
to lead morally decent lives. So, when a politician has a sordid affair that is thrown into the
media spotlight, he wrongs the public in an important respect, and as a result, it makes sense for
people resent him, whether or not his actions derail his career or have other bad effects.
2. Faith in Humanity
Julia Driver makes the related claim that a morally virtuous person will exhibit “blind charity”, a disposition to see
the good in people, but not the bad (“The Virtues of Ignorance”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 7 [July,
1989], pp. 381 and 382). Susan Wolf makes the related claim that a moral saint, a person who is “as morally worthy
as can be” will “look for the best in people” and “give them the benefit of the doubt as long as possible” (“Moral
Saints”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 8 [August, 1982], pp. 419-422). Wolf’s assessment of this sort of
trait is less favorable than Driver’s, and less favorable than my own. Part of Wolf’s point is that such traits prevent
the moral saint from appreciating certain goods that are well worth appreciating.
2
4
I will begin by explaining, in greater detail, what it means to have faith in humanity. My
characterization draws on Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud’s illuminating accounts of a related,
but importantly distinct, form of faith that good friends typically have in one another.5 If
someone has faith in humanity, in the sense I have in mind, her moral judgments about the
goodness or badness of people’s characters and about the rightness or wrongness of their actions
tend to be, to borrow Stroud’s phrase, slanted in people’s favor. She has a kind of optimism
about people’s character and actions, laying the burden of proof with those who believe that
people are base or that they will behave badly. We might say that she believes in people, gives
them the benefit of the doubt, or sees them in a good light, morally speaking.
Typically, when someone who has faith in humanity acquires evidence concerning the
quality of people’s characters, she tends to interpret this evidence favorably. For example,
imagine that a professor snaps angrily at one of his graduate students. It may be that he is simply
hostile or insensitive, but there are other, less damning interpretations of his behavior, and
someone who has faith in people will be disposed, to some extent, to recognize and accept them.
For instance, it may be that he yelled at the student in a more or less well-intentioned attempt to
motivate him to produce good work, even if the assumption that yelling would be an effective
motivational technique was false. Or, if such a story is unlikely, it may be that, even though the
professor yelled out of anger, his actions do not reflect as badly on his character as they initially
appear to. It may be that he was under a great deal of stress, say, because he had recently
See Simon Keller, “Friendship and Belief”, The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
and Sarah Stroud, “Epistemic Partiality in Friendship”, Ethics 116 (April 2006), pp. 498 – 524. I do not have space
to compare, in detail, the sort of faith that Keller and Stroud describe, which we might call the faith of friendship, to
faith in humanity. But I will mention three differences: First, while the virtuous person’s faith in humanity is an
impartial faith in all people, the faith of friendship is a form of partiality toward one’s special relations. Second,
faith in humanity is primarily a faith in people’s moral decency, but the faith of friendship has at least somewhat
wider application. Third, Keller and Stroud offer different rationales for the claim that a good friend exhibits the
faith of friendship, both of which differ from my rationale for the claim that a virtuous person has faith in humanity.
3
5
received bad news about his health or suffered a major setback in his career, and he was
emotionally volatile as a result. Once one recognizes such alternative interpretations, one might
also come to recognize good evidence that one of them is correct. But, even in the absence of
such further evidence, merely becoming aware of plausible, less damning interpretations of the
professor’s behavior can lead one to mitigate one’s initial, negative judgment of his behavior, or
even to suspend judgment altogether.
My claim that a virtuous person has faith in humanity has some important qualifications:
First, a good person’s disposition to believe that people are decent and that they will behave
decently is, of course, defeasible. One can have faith in humanity and nevertheless come to
believe, say, that a co-worker who often belittles female colleagues is sexist and rude. Similarly,
one can be an optimist, generally, but nevertheless come to believe on the basis of good evidence
that a particular project will go poorly. Second, faith in humanity can be epistemically rational,
and I only argue that a good person has faith in cases in which it would be epistemically rational
to have it. It may be that a good person would also have faith in some cases in which the faith
would be, to some extent, epistemically irrational but I will not try to settle that question here.
Setting aside cases in which someone has decisive evidence that people are morally
decent or that they will act decently, there are at least two sorts of cases in which it can be
epistemically rational for someone to have faith in humanity: In the first, the believer has, say,
sufficient reason to believe ill of someone and sufficient reason to remain agnostic, or even to
believe well of him. In this sort of case, the believer’s faith merely determines which of two or
more justified beliefs, or epistemic stances, she will adopt. In the second sort of case, the
believer does not have prior evidence that justifies the belief that someone will behave decently.
Nevertheless, adopting this belief will lead her to treat that person in certain ways, and this may
4
result in his behaving decently. For example, a teacher who believes that, for the most part, his
students will not cheat might allow them to take exams with little supervision, avoid being
combative when he asks them about irregularities in their work, and so on. Some students’
recognition that he treats them in these ways might motivate them to live up to his apparent
expectations. In William James’ words, these are cases in which “faith in a fact can help create
the fact”.6
My claim also has a third qualification: Someone who has faith that a person will behave
decently can nevertheless take steps to minimize the significant losses that will result if the
person does not behave decently. Generally, a good person who has faith in humanity will take
such steps when something sufficiently morally important is at stake. I should stress that
believing that something will happen is compatible with taking steps to minimize the losses that
will result if it does not happen. For instance, consider a couple whose child will take the family
car on a road trip. Imagine that they keep the car well maintained and reasonably believe that it
is in good repair. Nevertheless, they might take the car to a mechanic before their child’s trip,
indeed, we might expect them to do so, because something very important to them is at stake:
their child’s safety. So the parents’ belief that the car is safe is, by itself, consistent with their
taking steps to ensure that their child will not be harmed if it turns out to be unsafe.
Nevertheless, even if trying to minimize the losses that will occur if people behave badly
is compatible with believing that they will behave decently, it may seem incompatible with
having faith that they will so behave. One does not have faith that something will happen unless
one leaves oneself vulnerable, at least to some degree, to its not happening. I grant that having
faith in someone involves vulnerability, but someone who has faith in humanity does leave
William James, “The Will to Believe”, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York:
Longmans, Green, and Company, 1897), Section IX.
5
6
herself vulnerable, in important respects, to the possibility that people will behave badly. As I
will explain below, a good person who has faith in humanity does not merely expect people to
behave decently, she is also invested in this expectation. She wants people to behave decently,
and it is important to her that they do so. So, at the very least, she is vulnerable to the pain of
having these expectations disappointed. Furthermore, it may be that a person’s life goes worse,
to some extent, when a desire in which she is invested is thwarted. In that case, someone who
has faith in humanity is also vulnerable to suffering another important loss if other people turn
out to be base: the quality her own life may be somewhat diminished.
3. Faith and Virtue
As I said above, a virtuous person will have some measure of faith in humanity. In this
section, I will discuss three considerations that help explain why a virtuous person will have such
faith.
1. To begin with, a good person will love humanity, and having faith in humanity is a
natural result of having such love. When someone loves a person, in the relevant sense, she
wants that person to flourish, for his own sake. This desire is no mere whim or fancy; rather, her
beloved’s flourishing is, in itself, important to her.7 I do not claim that all loves have these
features, but there is a class of loves that has them, and I will restrict my discussion to the loves
in that class. I believe that having such a love of humanity, that is, wanting people to flourish
and being invested in that desire, is part of the virtue of benevolence. But, provided that having
such love is part of what makes one virtuous, it does not matter for my purposes whether this
love is part of benevolence, part of another virtue, or a virtue in its own right.
See Harry Frankfurt, “On Love, and Its Reasons”, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006).
6
7
My claim that it is important to a good person that people flourish has an important
qualification. Whether someone flourishes depends on several moral and non-moral
considerations: whether she lives a morally decent life, how much pleasure and pain she
experiences, whether she achieves the aims that matter most to her, and so on. It will be very
important to a virtuous person that people flourish, but it need not be important that they flourish
in every possible respect. Rather, it may simply be important that people flourish in certain basic
respects: that they live morally decent lives, that they do not endure great suffering, that they
develop certain basic human capacities, and so on. So, when a good person encounters someone
whose chief aim is, say, to become a rock musician, it need not matter very much to her whether
he achieves this aim. Of course, she will wish him well, prefer that he succeed, and so on, but
his success in this particular project need not be very important to her.
Generally, when one loves a person, one has some form of faith in her. For instance,
imagine that a child performs poorly on his first few exams at school, and suppose that, in light
of his performance, it would be reasonable either to conclude that he is unintelligent or merely to
withhold judgment. While a disinterested observer might reasonably conclude that the child is
unintelligent, it seems that a good parent, who loved the child, would not accept this conclusion
so quickly.8 Or consider someone whose husband accuses her of infidelity, even though his
evidence is meager and ambiguous. The accusation, or for that matter, the mere suspicion that
she has been unfaithful, is likely to be painful for her, in part, because it suggests that the
husband is irrationally jealous, and because trust, when lost, can be very difficult to regain. But
it could also be painful because it casts doubt on his love for her; one typically expects more of
the people one loves.
This case derives from Daniel Kelly and Erica Preston-Roedder’s “Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit
Bias”, Philosophy Compass 3 (3):522–540.
7
8
The fact that it is important to the lover that her beloved flourish helps explain why it is
natural for her to have faith in the people she loves. Because the lover is invested in her desire
that her beloved flourish, this desire causes her, without her intending to do so, to look for
evidence that her beloved actually flourishes, to dwell on such evidence when she encounters it,
and to interpret evidence concerning her beloved’s flourishing favorably. In particular, a good
person, in virtue of her love of humanity, wants people to flourish in certain basic respects:
roughly, to live morally decent lives and have certain basic needs met. Since it matters a great
deal to her whether this desired state obtains, her desire disposes her, to some extent, to handle
evidence in ways that favor the conclusion that people really are decent, and that, perhaps in the
very distant future, people’s basic needs really will be met. She does not deliberately slant her
beliefs in this direction, and she need not deliberately adopt any particular behavior in order to
slant them in this way. Rather, her desire causes her to handle evidence in these ways without
her intending to do so, and often without her realizing it.
It may seem that anyone who handles evidence in these ways is simply engaging in
wishful thinking, and therefore irrational. I grant that, in many cases of wishful thinking, a
person’s desire that some favorable state obtain leads her, through processes like the one I
described, to believe that it does obtain, despite the absence of supporting evidence and the
availability of good evidence to the contrary. Such a person’s beliefs are irrational, but this does
not imply that all cases in which a one’s desire that something be the case leads one, in the way I
described, to believe that it really is the case are cases of irrationality.
To the contrary, many such cases are familiar and unproblematic. For example, imagine
that a legal theorist has a novel hunch about the justification of punishment, a hunch that she
cares a great deal about confirming. It is important to her that she defend her view, and this
8
helps determine whether she believes that a given objection to the view is decisive, or believes,
at least for a while, that some response must be available. But her desire need not make her
irrationally insensitive to argument, or irrational in any other way. Rather, it may simply
determine, within reasonable limits, how she responds to arguments against her view, and to the
apparent absence of arguments supporting it. Furthermore, it may be good that, generally,
researchers’ desires influence their beliefs in this way. A theorist’s desire to confirm her view
might enable her to believe that developing the view is worthwhile, despite some evidence to the
contrary; and by developing approaches that may seem initially unpromising to disinterested
observers, she could shed new light on her topic.9
2. A good person will not only acquire faith in humanity through the non-deliberate
processes that I just described, but also cultivate such faith deliberately, in order to sustain
certain other good traits. More precisely, real people are morally imperfect; they are not simply
born disposed to act, feel, and deliberate as they should. Rather, they have to do a good deal of
work, and receive a good deal of help from their environments, their biological endowments, and
from other people, to become virtuous, and to remain so. So, in the real world, a good person
will not simply be benevolent, fair-minded, honest, and so on, but will also commit herself to
acting in ways that help her develop and maintain these traits.
Two traits that a good person will try to cultivate are humility, roughly, a tendency to
avoid overestimating or overemphasizing her own importance, and a love of humanity. She can
cultivate both by committing herself to acting in ways that cultivate her faith, that is, by looking
for evidence that people are morally decent, by attending to such evidence when she finds it, and
by trying to find favorable interpretations of available evidence concerning people’s decency.
In Section VIII of “The Will to Believe”, William James makes a similar point about the role that scientific
researchers’ desires play in the advancement of science.
9
9
Her acting in these ways, particularly if it disposes her to believe that people are morally decent,
will help her cultivate humility by focusing her attention on other people’s virtues, as opposed to
their defects, her own accomplishments, and so on.10
Furthermore, it will help her develop, or at least maintain, a love of humanity. As I said
above, among virtuous people, such love consists, in part, of a desire that people flourish in
certain basic, non-moral respects. Generally, if a good person seeks and attends to evidence that
people are morally decent, this will dispose her to believe that people really are decent, and that
they therefore deserve to flourish in these non-moral respects. And the belief that people deserve
to flourish, and are therefore appropriate objects of her concern, makes her love easier to sustain.
This is something like a case in which a wife, disturbed that her marriage is failing, and hoping
to bolster her commitment to her spouse, tries to find and dwell on reasons to believe that the
relationship is worth fighting for. In each case, someone looks for and attends to reasons to
believe a claim because believing the claim would make it easier for her to preserve her concern
for something she cares about. And in each, the person’s deliberately gathering and attending to
evidence in the ways I described naturally leads her to believe the claim.
3. In some cases, a good person will deliberately cultivate her faith in other people, not
only in order to cultivate her own love and humility, but also to help cause people to act
decently. After all, as I said above, there are many cases in which, if someone believes that
people will act decently, she will behave in certain ways, and her behavior will help cause them
to act decently. Provided that the agent is virtuous, she wants people to lead morally decent
lives. So, if she realizes that her beliefs can indirectly affect other people’s behavior, she will act
in ways that dispose her to believe that people are morally decent. Furthermore, in cases in
10
I am grateful Thomas Hill for this suggestion.
10
which she knows that her belief that some particular person will act rightly is likely to cause that
person to act rightly, she will simply adopt the belief that he will act rightly, provided that she
lacks the sorts of fears, prejudices, and so on that might prevent her from doing so. Of course,
this does not imply that, generally, she can believe or disbelieve claims at will. Rather, she can
deliberately believe that this particular person will act rightly only because she knows that
adopting the belief in this case will help make the belief true.
4. Moral Decency and Public Life
The view that being virtuous leads one to have faith in humanity has important
implications concerning both the private lives of public figures and the attitudes that people have
when such figures’ private wrongs come to light: Provided that having faith in humanity is part
of being a good person, public figures owe it to the public to lead the sorts of lives that will not
undermine people’s faith; more precisely, they owe it to the public to lead morally decent lives.
It follows that, for instance, when a national politician has an extramarital affair with a staff
member, he not only wrongs his spouse, his children, and others who are immediately affected,
but also risks wronging the public. So it makes sense for the politician’s constituents and others
who learn about the affair to feel resentment, or even a sense of betrayal, whether or not his
private failing prevents him from doing his job.
Public figures’ duty to avoid doing what will undermine people’s faith in humanity
derives from a more basic duty, which everyone ought to observe, whether or not she is a public
figure, to avoid doing what will make it harder for people to be virtuous. More precisely,
everyone owes it to the people around her to avoid making it harder for them to be good. As I
argued above, having certain moral virtues, together with the desire to cultivate these virtues,
naturally leads people to develop faith in humanity. But, generally, when someone commits a
11
serious wrong, he makes it harder for the people who learn about the wrong to maintain their
faith, and as I will now explain, he does so in a way that can make being virtuous burdensome
for them.
In Section 3, I described ways in which being virtuous naturally leads a person to have
faith in humanity, and these can be divided into two categories: First, a person’s love of
humanity can cause her, without her intending to do so, to see people’s characters and actions in
a favorable light. Second, in order to cultivate her own or other people’s virtue, she can
deliberately commit herself to thinking about people in ways that dispose her, within limits, to
judge that they are morally decent. When the wrongness of people’s actions or the baseness of
their characters becomes salient to her, both sources of faith are undermined, and both are
undermined in ways that can make being virtuous a considerable burden for her.
More precisely, because a good person loves humanity, and it is very important to her
that people lead morally decent lives, the vivid realization that someone has committed a grave
wrong can be difficult for her to bear. Of course, she will sometimes suffer the pain of
disappointment when she learns that someone has committed a serious wrong; but her concern
for people also makes her vulnerable to a different, and far more serious, kind of burden. If her
belief that people are morally decent is repeatedly and vividly disappointed, she might lose her
disposition to see people’s current actions in a favorable light, retaining only a hopeful
expectation that people will lead decent lives in the (perhaps distant) future. And if she
continues to encounter vivid examples people’s grave wrongdoing, she might lose this hope as
well, falling into despair over people’s wickedness. To yield to such despair is, in an important
sense, to give up on people; and, as when one comes to accept that one’s child is hopelessly
12
irresponsible, that one’s spouse will never be committed to the marriage, or that a certain friend
simply cannot be relied on in a crisis, giving up on the people one loves is a terrible burden.11
In some cases, a person’s vivid recognition that certain people are base not only makes
her love of humanity painful to bear, it also causes her to become less virtuous, or at least
prevents her from becoming more virtuous. As I said above, a good person commits herself to
looking for, and dwelling on, reasons to believe that people are morally decent, and to
interpreting charitably evidence concerning the quality of people’s characters. Her thinking
about people in these ways disposes her to believe that people really are morally decent and, as a
result, plays important roles both in shoring up certain of her own virtues and in helping others
lead decent lives. But, when the wrongness of someone’s actions becomes salient to her, say,
because she knows the person or because his misconduct is very vividly described, it becomes
harder for her to find or attend to reasons to believe that people are decent, and harder to
construct favorable interpretations of people’s behavior. As she loses her capacity to see
people’s characters and actions charitably, she loses one of the means by which she sustains both
her own and other people’s virtue.
In short, as I said above, when someone commits a serious wrong, whether public or
private, she risks undermining the faith of people who learn about her behavior, undermining it a
way that makes being virtuous burdensome for them. Provided that each person has a duty to the
people around her to avoid making it harder for them to be virtuous, it follows that each has a
duty to those around her to avoid committing grave wrongs. That is, each owes it to her family,
her colleagues, her students, and so on to lead a morally decent life.
11
W.E.B. Du Bois discusses such despair in his account of the life of Alexander Crummell in The Souls of Black
Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903), Chapter XII.
13
This duty applies with special force to national politicians and certain other public
figures. First, the private lives of such figures are subject to more or less constant, pervasive
public scrutiny. So, if a prominent politician has a sordid affair or sexually harasses a campaign
worker, he risks making the cultivation of virtue at least somewhat more burdensome for an
extraordinary number of people. Second, such politicians are often especially well-placed to
strike serious blows to people’s faith. Typically, they have wealth, good educations, and so on;
and when they act wrongly, they do so in the absence of many of the pressures, like crushing
poverty or the lack of opportunities for advancement, that might drive people to do wrong. So,
such figures have an especially strong duty to the public to avoid committing serious wrongs,
whether public or private; and when a national politician’s private misconduct comes to light, it
makes sense for people to respond as they often do, with the sense that he has let the public
down.
14