Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXX: William Kingdon Clifford—The Ethics of Belief

Imagine a ship owner who sells tickets for transatlantic voyages. He is at the dock one day, bidding his ship farewell, when he remembers a warning he had received from his mechanics the week before, that the integrity of the ship’s hull was questionable and that it might not be seaworthy. But on some plausible grounds or other he forms the sincere, honest conviction that his ship really is seaworthy, ignores the warning from his mechanics, and wishes the ship and passengers farewell. Sure enough, the ship sinks during its voyage. Is the ship owner responsible?

Yes, says the Victorian-era mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford: the ship owner is guilty of their deaths because even though he sincerely believed that the ship was seaworthy, he had no right to believe it. On the contrary, he had a positive obligation to make certain that his beliefs were founded on sound evidence and reason, and he failed to do it. What we have described, in other words, is not simply a failure of reason, but of ethics. But suppose, on the other hand, that the ship had made its voyage safely. Would the ship-owner then be innocent? By no means—he would only not be found out.

In his famous essay, “The Ethics of Belief” [PDF], Clifford went on to describe the central obligation that the ethics of belief imposes on us: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” Another way to put this principle would be to say that beliefs are guilty until proven innocent: the mere fact of having beliefs does nothing whatever to justify them. Rather, we have an obligation to investigate and either find sufficient grounds for our beliefs, to modify them in light of new evidence, or drop them all together.

Clifford offers several grounds for thinking that this is, indeed, a moral obligation. In the first place, we owe it to ourselves. The person who allows themselves to believe this or that, more or less irresponsibly, only because it is what they have always believed, because it suits them, or because it would cost them too much trouble to investigate, is failing to measure up to what they could and should be as a human being. It’s not so much a matter of acquiring true beliefs (it’s always possible our beliefs are wrong, no matter how scrupulous we are), or of being more intelligent than others (since we’re not morally on the hook for things we don’t control), but rather, of making good use of the gifts we have in our given situation. We degrade and injure ourselves by dimming the light of natural reason within us.

Secondly, beliefs inform actions, and actions affect other people. But if it is wrong to act in a way that unnecessarily harms others, then it is surely wrong to hold beliefs which motivate such actions as well. It is therefor not simply a matter of having obligations to one’s self, but of having obligations to other people as well. So if we find ourselves taken to task by a disciple of Clifford, who demands that we give an account of this or that belief, we cannot appeal to our “right to our own opinion.” What we have is not so much a right to our own opinion, but a duty to other people to have sensible opinions. In that same vein, when we acquire beliefs, not on the basis of prejudice or spurious appeals to passion, but after diligent and serious inquiry, we win a benefit not just for ourselves, but for the community. Just as the person who believes irresponsibly harms the people around them through their actions, so the person who believes responsibly benefits them by rendering themselves more likely to act in a beneficial way, and by coming into the possession of knowledge that he can share with others.

Since no belief is irrelevant to our actions, no belief can get the benefit of indifference, and our obligation to form evidence-based beliefs cannot be relaxed one little bit. But some will say that they have no time to make a proper inquiry. They have a family, they have a business, they have chores and obligations, and they need some time to relax on the side. Must they become philosophers as well? Yes, Clifford argues. If they have no time to investigate, they can simply and honestly relieve themselves of the obligation by relieving themselves of the beliefs that impose it.

Clifford foresees several lines of attack on his evidentialist thesis. In the first case, he imagines an impish skeptic who accepts his entire line of argument, and concludes—reasonably enough, it seems—that since he has no positive reasons to refrain from, let’s say, robbing strangers, it would be unjustified for him to form the belief that it is unethical to rob strangers. Worse, because Clifford hasn’t imposed on us any positive obligation to form certain beliefs (about, say, ethics) he not only has no belief that it is unethical to rob strangers, but he has no obligation to investigate the matter at all, and if anyone tries to persuade him that it is, in fact, unethical to rob strangers, he can shut down their entire chain of reasoning by simply declining to consider the question one way or another. After all, according to Clifford, we’re only on the hook for the positive beliefs we hold, not for the beliefs we decline to hold, or even to consider. So it’s not at all obvious how we’re going to bring our philosophical criminal around to a more ethical point of view. To this, Clifford responds that truths of this type are more or less self-evident, and that anyone who is sufficiently concerned about the ethics of belief to form an opinion about the question is hardly going to be negligent when it comes to questions of ethics more generally. In other words, we don’t have to worry about this philosophy turning people into cheerful criminals because the whole nature of the inquiry presumes a certain habit of mind, itself inimical to criminality. But if someone worries that the principles of ethics might really fail to stand up to inquiry, his answer is that our convictions in this matter will be strengthened, not weakened, by scrupulous inquiry. Knowledge, not faith, is to be our guide in ethics, as in thought and life generally, and we hardly need to fear that it will let us down.

A similar challenge is posed by the skeptic of science, who refuses to believe, for instance, that the sun is made of hydrogen atoms, because he has no direct experience of hydrogen and has never been near enough to the sun to find out what it is made of. And as in this case, throughout the domain of science generally. Would they not be the blind follower of authority, and a failure insofar as concerns their epistemic duty, to simply accept whatever they are taught by the scientist, who expounds on the nature of objects millions of miles away? Events tens of millions of years in the past? Or objects so small they are imperceptible to the eye? Isn’t this principle ruinous to science? No, Clifford answers, for while the individual may not have any first-hand knowledge of the things under discussion, they nevertheless have reason to suppose that the scientists who discuss these matters know what they are talking about. The testimony of knowledge is itself a form of evidence that prudent and reasonable people are bound to consider. And additional grounds for taking science seriously are provided by the tremendous practical benefits that accrue to people and societies who do, as opposed to those that do not, and that, too, counts as evidence in its favor.

A more serious worry, it seems, confronts us when we consider the nature of experience. Consider, for instance, the case of a child who fears to touch the flame because past experience indicates that it burns. The child’s behavior is perfectly sensible, but does this past experience in fact constitute sound evidence of a future likelihood? What the child has an experience of is the past flame, not the one before it. On what basis does the child suppose that the current flame will affect them in a like manner as the past? More generally, on what basis do we assume that present or future experience will conform to past? What we actually experience is particular events, objects, and people, and the possibility that our expectations of them will fail to conform to the actuality has to be admitted. For Clifford, however, the answer is simply that the philosophical idea here (“uniformity of nature”) is so intuitive, compelling, and useful, that we are entirely justified in helping ourselves to it at the outset. We don’t have to prove it a priori, it just is how we experience the world. So it forms part of the bedrock that we reason from, rather than being a result of reason itself.

Finally, Clifford has no patience for those who appeal to sacred tradition as the basis for their beliefs. Clifford contends that a tradition is, in the first place, a living body of thought, not a dead body of fixed belief. That person reveres tradition best who participates in it constructively, and that person participates the most constructively who does so according to reason, not by shirking their epistemic duty and becoming the blind follower of authority. Further, the point of any tradition of thought ought to be to get at the truth, not to perpetuate itself without reference to it. A tradition serves us insomuch as it serves truth, so it is surely perverse to cling to it in preference to truth. Here he quotes the poet, Coleridge: “He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end loving himself better than all.” So to stifle doubt or refuse to look into things just because one has it on the authority of Augustine or Calvin or some other venerable churchman that such and such is the case, and to believe it is part of the sacred tradition, is just the kind of epistemic irresponsibility that Clifford wants to call out. “It is wrong,” Clifford repeats, “in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.”

Well, that’s all very decisive. It’s hard to find a stronger advocate for evidentialism in epistemology than Clifford! Is there anything to be said on the other side? Are there times when belief, in the absence of evidence, is good and proper? Or where we have no such duty to inquire? The American psychologist and philosopher William James read Clifford’s paper and thought there was plenty to be said on the other side. In our next article, we’ll explore James’ riposte, in his essay, “The Will to Believe.” (The discussion of Alvin Plantinga, promised in the last article, has been moved to art 32 of the series. Sorry for the delay!)

Daniel Halverson is in the PhD program at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. His research focuses on the history of evolutionary biology in the Victorian and WWII eras.

---

---

If you’re just beginning to follow this series, or would like a handy reference, here are links to the previous articles:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Ian Barbour—The Conflict Model

Part III: Ian Barbour—The Independence Model

Part IV: Ian Barbour—The Dialogue Model

Part V: Ian Barbour—The Synthesis Model

Part VI: John Hedley Brooke, Complexity Thesis

Part VII: Plato and the Geometric Model of Knowledge

Part VIII: Arthur O. Lovejoy, the Great Chain of Being

Part IX: Did Heliocentrism Knock Humanity off Its Perch?

Part X: Thomas Paine and the Controversy over Extraterrestrial Life

Part XI: Arthur O. Lovejoy, the Great Chain of Being and Pre-Darwinian Biology

Part XII: Michael Allen Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity

Part XIII: William of Ockham and the Origins of Nominalism

Part XIV: Nominalism, Petrarch, and the Renaissance Origins of Humanism

Part XV: A Fractured World: God, Humanity, and Nature

Part XVI: Did Medieval Islamic Theology Subvert Science?

Part XVII: Galileo Goes to Jail?

Part XVIII: Humanistic, Scientific, and Theistic Approaches to History

Part XIX: What Is Science? (Part A)

Part XX: What is Science? (Part B)

Part XXI: Charles Taylor: A Secular Age (Part A)

Part XXII: Charles Taylor—The Bulwarks of Belief (A Secular Age, Part B)

Part XXIII: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part A)

Part XXIV: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part B)

Part XXV: Charles Taylor—The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Disciplinary Society

Part XXVI: Charles Taylor — Providential Deism and the Impersonal Order

Part XXVII: Charles Taylor—The Malaise of Modernity

Part XXVIII: Charles Taylor—The Dark Abyss of Time

Part XXIX: Antony Flew—The Presumption of Atheism