Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief

by Miriam McCormick

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.

Genres: Philosophy

144 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2014

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief (2014) by Miriam McCormick

What is the ethics of belief? It's an idea commonly traced back to William Kingdon Clifford's essay of that name, in which he famously claimed "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." And by wrong, he meant morally or ethically wrong, in the same sense that it's wrong to commit theft or murder. Since Clifford, generations of philosophers have weighed in on this issue. Is it ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence? (If not, then every religion is immoral, since no religion comes close to providing sufficient evidence to support its supernatural claims.) Do people even have a choice ("agency", to the philosopher) about what they believe? Generally speaking, when we can't choose our actions, we can't be held morally responsible for our actions. For example, we generally don't choose how tall we grow to be, so it makes little sense to hold people morally responsible for their adult heights.

For a shorter introduction to the issues at play, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry The Ethics of Belief by Andrew Chignell.

McCormick's writing style is fairly typical for philosophy. Expect long sentences packed with multiple subordinate clauses and phrases separating subject and verb. It's everything that books about plain language teach against, and which best-selling novelists and journalists learn not to do. And even best-selling scientists like Richard Feynman - see this quote and this quote. My experience plowing through this badly-in-need-of-an-edit mess mirrored Feynman's as he read similar books written by humanities professors. Feynman had to read each sentence slowly and deliberately, translate it into plain English, and then he realized there was nothing to it!

For more on plain language writing, see:
* Oxford Guide to Plain English (2004) by Martin Cutts
* Writing in Plain English (1996) by Baden Eunson

Here's a fairly typical sentence from the book:

If this seems right—that we normally take ourselves to be assessing or reacting to a particular state rather than ones’ personality or character—then these character-based views which argue that we are responsible despite our lack of any kind of control, seem to be closer to those which deny the legitimacy of our attributions of doxastic responsibility than it initially appears.

I don't know about you, but reading sentences like that is not my jam.

This book doesn't seem like a serious attempt to promote a system of ethics, because that would require a book that many people can and will read. Instead the book seems to be written to impress a tiny group of philosophers who mistake unintelligibility for erudition. I don't understand the point of making normative assertions in a way that cannot detectably shift a norm. If you think an action is right, or wrong, for everybody, then doesn't that entail trying to persuade everybody to agree with you? Why express your normative assertion in a way guaranteed to never expand beyond a narrow clique?

To her credit, McCormick gives a nod to psychology as being foundational to any ethics of belief. Psychology can tell us about how people form and change their beliefs, and to what degree people might control this process. However, McCormick doesn't seem to have read far in psychology. Her discussion of agency needs a rethink after you read books like these:
* Maximum Willpower: How to Master the New Science of Self-Control
* The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control
* Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose
* Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind
McCormick seems unaware that a science of "willpower" exists. People appear to be born with different amounts of willpower (see the Marshmallow Test), but people can to some degree cultivate more willpower through deliberate actions such as breath control and taking up physical exercise.

McCormick doesn't seem to view agency as something that a person can exercise progressively. By analogy, a person who has never lifted weights has less "agency" for lifting a heavy weight than they might obtain by following a weight-training program. Many people have the capacity to double or triple their starting untrained strength in particular lifts. A person may not be able to choose to lift a particular weight today, but they can choose to undertake a program of exercise that will enable them to lift that weight in a year or two.

Applied to belief-agency, McCormick does mention the need to base beliefs on evidence, but she could be clearer about the sometimes large amount of work this can entail. For example, a person raised in a family and church that teaches Young Earth Creationism has had their mind corrupted with a mess of disinformation. Cleaning up that mess can require years of deliberate study and reading. And while McCormick cites many books in this book, and she undoubtedly reads many books, she never points out explicitly the degree to which her own beliefs have been shaped by her choice of which books to read. By choosing to read certain books, and ending up with certain beliefs as a result, she exercises a kind of agency over what she believes.

And I think this clarifies the habit McCormick describes when we judge other people for believing "improperly." We aren't (or shouldn't be) judging them for failing to make a choice about what to believe right now - rather, we are judging them in the way we judge a couch potato who refuses to exercise. It's not the couch potato's fault that he isn't choosing to lift a particular weight, because he can't lift it at the moment. Rather, if we have been busting our behind in the gym for years, we judge the couch potato for failing to have made a similar effort to realize his physical potential. By analogy, people who read hundreds of substantive books tend to think and believe differently than people who exist in a particular belief community and never bother to read outside of it. I suspect that's why we judge the Young Earth Creationist - not for failing to make the choice to believe differently, a choice she probably can't make at this moment, but for choosing to remain willfully ignorant of science, thus insuring she will remain mentally "out of shape" years into the future.

McCormick ignores other relevant findings from psychology, such as the dual-process theory (Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider model), and pretty much everything in behavioral economics and Thinking, Fast and Slow (namely, the whole list of cognitive biases). She also seems not to have heard of psychometrics, behavioral genetics, or the science of human intelligence differences, all of which bear on how people form beliefs and the varying degrees to which different people might influence that process.