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Carrion Luggage #1088454 added May 1, 2025 at 5:53am
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Truth or Consequences
Here's a relatively short one (for once) from aeon. It's a few years old, but given the subject, that hardly matters.
And right off the bat, we're getting off to a bad start. Proclaiming that something is "always" (or "never") something just begs someone to find the one counterexample that destroys the argument.
In this case, that someone is me.
You have probably never heard of William Kingdon Clifford. He is not in the pantheon of great philosophers – perhaps because his life was cut short at the age of 33 – but I cannot think of anyone whose ideas are more relevant for our interconnected, AI-driven, digital age.
33? That's barely old enough to have grown a beard, which is a prerequisite for male philosophers. Or at least a mustache.
However, reality has caught up with Clifford. His once seemingly exaggerated claim that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ is no longer hyperbole but a technical reality.
I'll note that this quote is not the same thing as what the headline stated. I guess it's pretty close, but there's a world of difference between "without evidence" and "upon insufficient evidence."
There is, for example, no evidence for a flat Earth beyond the direct evidence of one's senses (assuming one is in Kansas or some other famously non-hilly location), and overwhelming evidence that the Earth is basically round. Okay, not a great example, because flat-Earth believers can be shown to be wrong. But morally wrong? I'm not so sure.
I hold the belief, for a better example, that murder is wrong. There's no objective evidence for this, and moreover, we can argue about what constitutes "murder" as opposed to other kinds of killing, such as assisted suicide or self-defense. And yet, it seems to me that believing that murder is wrong is, on balance, a good thing for people's continued survival, and thus morally right.
His first argument starts with the simple observation that our beliefs influence our actions.
Okay, that seems self-evident enough. The article provides examples, both practical and ethical.
The second argument Clifford provides to back his claim that it is always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence is that poor practices of belief-formation turn us into careless, credulous believers. Clifford puts it nicely: ‘No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character.’
I've heard variations on this argument before, and it does seem to me to have merit. Once you believe one conspiracy theory, you're primed to believe more. If you accept the concept of alien visitations, you can maybe more easily accept mind-control or vampires. That sort of thing.
Clifford’s third and final argument as to why believing without evidence is morally wrong is that, in our capacity as communicators of belief, we have the moral responsibility not to pollute the well of collective knowledge.
And that's fair enough, too.
So why do I object to the absolutist stance that it's always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence?
Well, like I said up there, I can come up with things that have to be believed on scant-to-no evidence and yet are widely considered "moral." The wrongness of murder is one of those things. That we shouldn't be doing human trials for the pursuit of science without informed consent and other guardrails. That slavery is a bad thing. And more.
I'm not even sure we can justify most morality on the basis of evidence (religious texts are not evidence for some objective morallity; they're just evidence that someone wrote them at some point), so to say that belief on the basis of insufficient evidence is morally wrong (whether always or sometimes) itself has little evidence to support it. You have to start by defining what's morally right and wrong, or you just talk yourself in circles.
While Clifford’s final argument rings true, it again seems exaggerated to claim that every little false belief we harbour is a moral affront to common knowledge. Yet reality, once more, is aligning with Clifford, and his words seem prophetic. Today, we truly have a global reservoir of belief into which all of our commitments are being painstakingly added: it’s called Big Data.
Again, though, that's a matter of scale. People have held others to certain standards since prehistory; in the past, this was a small-community thing instead of a global surveillance network.
None of this is meant to imply that we should accept the spread of falsehoods. The problem is that one person's falsehood can be another's basic truth. That makes it even more difficult to separate the truth from the lies, or even to accept the reality of certain facts.
Yes, having evidence to support one's beliefs is a good thing overall. But we're going to end up arguing over what constitutes evidence. |
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