Should Beliefs Aim at Truth?
May 14, 2017如果信念可以被描述为有一个目标或目的,那么肯定就像瞄准真理一样。
Forlast month’s pandemic puzzle, I posed the title question of this blog, noting that I meant it in amoralsense (rather than a legal one):
When do false beliefs exculpate?
The idea is that sometimes having a false belief exculpates one of a wrongdoing, but other times not—and perhaps even the opposite.
My example of a false belief thatdoesexculpate was a vet who accidentally puts down the wrong dog, because it looks almost identical to the one she was in fact supposed to put down: maybe she wascareless(which is bad), but her false belief about the identity of the dog she put down exculpates her ofmurder(which is much worse).
My example of a false belief that doesnot“开脱”指的是某个种族主义者,他杀死某个种族的人,因为他错误地认为该种族的人都是被恶魔控制的没有思想的身体。Thatisstill murder—the false belief notwithstanding.
So in one case a false belief about what reality is like (which animal has which identity) lets a person off the moral hook for murder. But in another case the false belief about reality (who is human and who is controlled by demons) does not. Can we find a general principle that will distinguish the two kinds of cases?
Last time, I floated the following as the principle that explains how false beliefs exculpate, calling it thefalse belief criterion of exculpation:
FBCE: If a person performs an action guided by a false belief, and that act wouldnotcount as a moral offenceifthe belief were true, then the person is not guilty of committing the offence.
This seemed promising, since it helped explain the vet case. But the racist-cult-murderer example shows that it can’t be right, because (as it stands) it would let the murderer of the hook, which is not the right result. So what shall we say?
My approach to solving this won’t involve discardingFBCEaltogether. Rather, I’ll modify it in a way that will make it work, and I’ll do this in a way that takes its inspiration from Aristotle’s discussion of the moral import ofignoranceinNicomachean Ethics, Book III,though I piece the puzzle together somewhat differently from the way Aristotle does.
Two quotations from Aristotle will give us some material to work with:
1) InIII.5he writes: “No one would reproach a man blind from birth or by disease or from a blow, but rather pity him, while everyone would blame a man blind from drunkenness or some other form of self-indulgence.”
2) And earlier, inIII.1, he writes: “What sort of acts, then, should be called compulsory? We answer that without qualification actions are so when the cause is in the external circumstances and the agent contributes nothing.”
An important theme from the first quotation is that some limitations on knowledge (like blindness) are themselves culpable, while others are not. The theme of the second is how to sort out acts that a person wascompelledto do from those that weren’t compelled: to the extent that the causes of the act were external—as opposed to originating from within the person’s own psyche—the act was compelled.
I think we can apply this perspective to beliefs, not just acts, in a way that can help us reach a solution (just keep in mind that the exact details of the solution would require a muchlongerpaper!).
False beliefs—as one kind of limitation on knowledge—can result either from unlucky external circumstances, from dereliction or negligence,orfrom active cultivation. Of course, probably almost no one actively cultivates them under the description that they are false. But people can indeed choose to do things that predictably cultivate the having of certain beliefs, which may in fact end up being false.
So the first step in the solution is to divide theroutesto having a false belief into three rough categories:pure mistake(where the evidence was just misleading),negligence(where the agent failed to look at enough evidence), andactive cultivation(where the agent takes active steps to convince themselves of a particular proposition). It may be that the lines between the first two categories are blurred, but the third is clearly distinct, since it involves a person’s willfully taking steps to acquire a belief with a specific content. And notably, people with religious allegiances areknownto dothis.
If all that is correct, then the move we can make is to add a*toFBCE, which would basically say that its exculpatory principle only covers false beliefs that are the result of pure mistakes and negligence; it doesnotinclude false beliefs that were actively cultivated. That leaves the ruling on the vet case as is. But it means thatFBCE *doesnot暗示这个种族主义邪教凶手是无罪的,只要这个人的种族主义信仰是被积极培养的(看起来很有可能)。
This approach seems to me to be on the right track. I’ll leave it to you to test against further hypothetical scenarios to see if it works generally!
There’s one more thing I’d like to say about the nature of active cultivation, which is relevant to the present cases. Some beliefs are such that they are muchlikelierto lead to acts that would be heinous atrocities (or perhaps milder forms of wrongdoing), if the belief contents were false. An example of belief contents that donotfit this description would be the Quaker belief that everyone has an inner Divine Light: even if it’s false, no one will get hurt from the acts that are motivated by it. But the contents of the racist-cult-murderer’s beliefsarelike that, obviously.
To my mind, that in factaddsa layer of culpability. Anyone who actively endeavors to convince themselves of something that would lead to what would be heinous atrocities if it were false iseven moreguilty of those heinous atrocities—no matter how convinced they are of the truth of their beliefs at the time of acting.
如果信念可以被描述为有一个目标或目的,那么肯定就像瞄准真理一样。
Our brains evolved on the African savannah, but are now expected to deal with complex statistical information and other intricate concepts every day.
Turns out that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong: in a vacuum, a feather and a bowling ball will fall from a tall building at exactly the same speed.
对真理的追求往往被认为具有“内在”价值。科学家和哲学家,他们回避宗教理由…
We all want to lead a moral life. But even if we all agreed on what that would mean, we still have to balance our own self-interest with the competing demands of morality.
从亚里士多德和康德到休谟和达尔文,哲学家和科学家长期以来一直否认动物能够出于道德原因而行动。
Some psychologists claim to have demonstrated that humans are systematically, deeply and perhaps irredeemably irrational in their reasoning and decision making.
Whether for counterterrorism measures, street level crime, or immigration, racial profiling of minorities occurs frequently.
2013年,乔治·齐默尔曼因特雷沃恩·马丁之死被无罪释放,#黑人的生命也很重要运动由此开始,如今已经变成了一场……
People tend to treat other people who differ from them, even in seemingly small and insignificant ways, as less than fully human.
如果信念可以被描述为有一个目标或目的,那么肯定就像瞄准真理一样。
Our brains evolved on the African savannah, but are now expected to deal with complex statistical information and other intricate concepts every day.
Turns out that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong: in a vacuum, a feather and a bowling ball will fall from a tall building at exactly the same speed.
对真理的追求往往被认为具有“内在”价值。科学家和哲学家,他们回避宗教理由…
We all want to lead a moral life. But even if we all agreed on what that would mean, we still have to balance our own self-interest with the competing demands of morality.
从亚里士多德和康德到休谟和达尔文,哲学家和科学家长期以来一直否认动物能够出于道德原因而行动。
Some psychologists claim to have demonstrated that humans are systematically, deeply and perhaps irredeemably irrational in their reasoning and decision making.
Whether for counterterrorism measures, street level crime, or immigration, racial profiling of minorities occurs frequently.
2013年,乔治·齐默尔曼因特雷沃恩·马丁之死被无罪释放,#黑人的生命也很重要运动由此开始,如今已经变成了一场……
People tend to treat other people who differ from them, even in seemingly small and insignificant ways, as less than fully human.
Comments(1)
Tim Smith
Sunday, January 10, 2021 -- 6:15 AM
This is not where I thought我没想到你会这么说但这招确实管用。
有一种被动的修行,也许没有一个人或机构驱使人们去做奇怪的事,如果不是坏事的话。这些人应该被追究责任吗?我不知道。
电影《出租车司机》中的Travis Bickle就是一个有趣的例子。我将把我的想法留给读者,但我鼓励那些没有看过这部电影的人去看它,思考一下尼尔的帖子和我们所知道的世界。
This was a good read that got me to think. Thanks for the link.