Meditation 66: The Ethics of Belief

Are we ethically responsible for our beliefs? What choices do we have where our beliefs are concerned? How far does the world impose beliefs upon us and to what extent are they a matter of personal commitment? Why should it matter, morally speaking, if we are responsible for our beliefs or not? Rules of conduct are rules of action, and we hold people morally and legally responsible for their actions. Yet people act upon their beliefs, whether they are well founded or not. Thus to the extent people choose their beliefs, they are responsible for them, and the behavioral consequences that follow from them. The formation of belief, therefore, falls under an ethical imperative to believe what is true, while basing this belief, as far as possible, on good evidence.

Not all beliefs are chosen by us. Where this is the case, our moral responsibility is limited. For example, the core beliefs by which we live unreflectively from an early age are given us by family, neighborhood, country, religion, culture, and so on. This initial dose of belief is open to revision upon questionings, and part of our ethical responsibility with respect to these beliefs is precisely to question them. Other beliefs for which we are only minimally responsible are those that we form on the basis of perceiving the world as it appears to our senses. Here the world mostly has the last say, though there are cases where we can be deceived by appearances, as in the case of illusions, mirages, delusions and the like.

So what are the areas in which we do have some choice in what we believe? We do not have much choice in what to believe when it comes to simple sums, the shapes of geometrical figures, the axioms of logic, and so on. In science, beliefs are backed up by evidence, but held only as long as nothing better comes along. Here our choice in what to believe is quite severely restricted, though not as much as in the a priori sciences. Competing scientific hypotheses allow individuals a choice about which hypothesis to support. Nevertheless, all the various hypotheses compete on the basis of empirical evidence of one sort or another. The moral responsibility of the scientist is not to believe anything for which there is no good evidence, and to be open to a possible change of belief in the light of later discoveries.

So, if the main moral responsibility we have for our beliefs does not lie mainly in our childhood upbringing, perceptual beliefs, scientific hypotheses, mathematics or logic, then where does it lie? It lies precisely in an area not covered by perception, common sense, scientific or a priori investigation. It lies in an area where there are no definite answers, or none that satisfy everyone. We are in an area where we want to believe something, but realize that we have no compelling evidence one way or another. Here we must choose to believe, and we have nothing but intuition and good sense to guide us.

Among the beliefs we choose to accept and act upon are such things as the reality of the external world, the efficacy of causation, the predictability of nature, and most importantly in today’s world, religious beliefs. Here one is morally responsible for what one believes, since religious beliefs have far reaching repercussions, both for ill, and sometimes, perhaps, for good. My point is that since religious beliefs have no logical or empirical proofs, accepting them must be filtered to see if it is ethical to believe them. If they are not, they ought to be discarded, and not even faith should stand in the way.