RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
June 5, 2021 at 4:29 pm
(This post was last modified: June 5, 2021 at 4:30 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
The above responses prompted me to wonder when an epistemic failure is also immoral specifically for religious beliefs. AF culture tend to view any theist’s epistemic failure as more than just an innocent mistake but as the kind of cognitive error indicative of the theist’s moral or intellectual deficiency. Fortunately, I don’t feel that vibe nearly so much on serious threads. :-)
Let’s say a new Christian member to AF starts promoting YEC, to use vulcan’s example. My bias as a Christian could be in favor of considering his belief an innocent intellectual error but not a moral one, i.e. the new member had no moral duty to hold any particular opinion about evolution. I would bet that most AF members would have a bias in the other direction; it is a moral failure to not see that YEC is nonsense that even other Christians recognize as a bunch of scientific sounding rationalizations used to maintain an impoverished hermeneutic ,<takes deep breath>. When I read the personal experiences of earlier posts, I hear stories of truly stand-up people that hold truly fringe opinions, like a harmless YEC-believing friend or a neighbor who harbors a pet conspiracy theory. But I myself would feel much differently about a high-school biology professor teaching YEC or a CRT-promoting mayor (And yes, I think CRT is as epistemologically flawed as YEC, if not worse.) I guess what I am saying is it seems that epistemic failures, when the practical application of a belief is of consequence, suggest a logically prior moral failure to perform the intellectual due diligence required to establish whether a belief has sufficient warrant for relying on it in the first place.
At the same time I want to oppose my own rush to judgement because I am truly sick and tired of moral scolds on every side telling everyone else how every minor activity of life apparently has important, wide-ranging moral consequences that demand tribal commitment. I don’t care if you’re a Republican/Tory or a Democrat/Labour – fifty percent of the population cannot be 100% wrong. Why is it so difficult to see the beliefs of intellectual rivals as horribly mistaken, but not evil. On a more personal level, I suspect this wide-spread contemptuous attitude towards epistemic failures has infected many of my private conversations. People more frequently say things like…
What did you think was going to happen?
And you didn’t think to ask?
What kind of person thinks like that?
How could they not know better?
So while I generally believe every capable human being has a moral responsibility to think clearly and critically about actionable things to the degree those things matter, I also want to resist any kind of intellectual scrupulosity that add unnecessary animosity to the world.
Let’s say a new Christian member to AF starts promoting YEC, to use vulcan’s example. My bias as a Christian could be in favor of considering his belief an innocent intellectual error but not a moral one, i.e. the new member had no moral duty to hold any particular opinion about evolution. I would bet that most AF members would have a bias in the other direction; it is a moral failure to not see that YEC is nonsense that even other Christians recognize as a bunch of scientific sounding rationalizations used to maintain an impoverished hermeneutic ,<takes deep breath>. When I read the personal experiences of earlier posts, I hear stories of truly stand-up people that hold truly fringe opinions, like a harmless YEC-believing friend or a neighbor who harbors a pet conspiracy theory. But I myself would feel much differently about a high-school biology professor teaching YEC or a CRT-promoting mayor (And yes, I think CRT is as epistemologically flawed as YEC, if not worse.) I guess what I am saying is it seems that epistemic failures, when the practical application of a belief is of consequence, suggest a logically prior moral failure to perform the intellectual due diligence required to establish whether a belief has sufficient warrant for relying on it in the first place.
At the same time I want to oppose my own rush to judgement because I am truly sick and tired of moral scolds on every side telling everyone else how every minor activity of life apparently has important, wide-ranging moral consequences that demand tribal commitment. I don’t care if you’re a Republican/Tory or a Democrat/Labour – fifty percent of the population cannot be 100% wrong. Why is it so difficult to see the beliefs of intellectual rivals as horribly mistaken, but not evil. On a more personal level, I suspect this wide-spread contemptuous attitude towards epistemic failures has infected many of my private conversations. People more frequently say things like…
What did you think was going to happen?
And you didn’t think to ask?
What kind of person thinks like that?
How could they not know better?
So while I generally believe every capable human being has a moral responsibility to think clearly and critically about actionable things to the degree those things matter, I also want to resist any kind of intellectual scrupulosity that add unnecessary animosity to the world.
<insert profound quote here>
