Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”
Fall 2012
Dr. David Frost
Instructor of Philosophy
University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
The Ethics of Belief
• Where in Philosophy does this essay belong?
• Ethics? Philosophy of Religion? Epistemology?
• There is a demand upon us to be careful how we act.
• But there is also a demand upon us to be careful in terms of
what we believe.
• We are morally required to perform “due diligence” in
forming beliefs that will affect others, i.e., practical beliefs
The Ethics of Belief
• We justify our actions by our beliefs, but that is not enough.
• We must justify our actions by justified beliefs.
• Beliefs seem to be justified or not depending on how they
were “acquired.”
• Consider Clifford’s example of the shipowner and the nonseaworthy emigrant ship.
The Thought Experiment
The Thought Experiment
The Thought Experiment
• The Story
• Clifford’s story shows there may be at least two kinds of
acquisition of beliefs.
• “honestly earning” the belief by “patient investigation” or
• “willingly working himself into” the state of belief.
The Thought Experiment
• So what matters is not “Well, I did what I did because I
believed such and such, so I’m not guilty.”
• It’s rather about whether you have a “right to believe” what
you believed.
• That’s philosophical language: “a right”– my ears pop up.
• You have a right to believe X only after performing due
diligence with respect to reasons to belief X.
The Thought Experiment
• What’s Clifford doing when he says, “Let’s change the case a
little”?
• He imagines, first, that people die and then asks what if they
didn’t.
• It’s like a controlled experiment.
• Change one thing at a time to see what else changes.
The Ethics of Belief
• To review…
• Practical Reasoning is thinking in an orderly way about
what to do, what actions to take.
• First step is to have reasons for actions
• Those will be beliefs or desires or some combination
• Second step, which Clifford says is often overlooked, is
to have reasons for those beliefs. Reasons for your
reasons.
The Ethics of Belief
• To review…
• We know intuitively that there are standards of action.
• But there are also standards of belief.
• After Clifford introduces us to the demand to know better
other philosophers will show us how hard it is to know you
know anything.
• Clifford: “No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can
escape the universal duty of questioning all we believe.”
The Ethics of Belief
• “Making yourself believe something,” seems too convenient
and self-serving, doesn’t it?
• One, it was in his interest, so it’s suspect;
• Two, you can’t make yourself believe anything you want.
• Belief-formation is a matter of responsiveness to
evidence or reasons.
• And there seems to be standard of rationality such that
we can say whether someone was properly responsive
to reasons or just irrational.
Thank you