Journal of Applied Philosophy 28(4)

...is now out, and includes my paper "Moral Conviction."

(Feel free to e-mail me for an e-copy of the paper.)

The Courage of Conviction

Here's the next essay in the series of (what a colleague of a colleague calls) "quasi-popular" essays I aim to write on many of the issues I've discussed on this blog and in some of my other work:

The Courage of Conviction

As always, comments appreciated.

Reflection, Take 2

(A little more friendly to Williams this time, and a little bit of a tease at the end...I'm in the midst of the continuation right now...more to come...)

Conviction and reflection might seem to be awkward partners, their relationship constantly strained. Although Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, we might suspect that because reflection tends to undermine our sense of certainty in our own beliefs—since in reflecting we question and critique those very beliefs—that reflection also tends to undermine conviction. This might seem to be especially true of moral beliefs, since a little exposure to the diversity of moral opinion and practice throughout the world may lead us to reflect upon the extent to which our own beliefs are influenced by our own particular upbringing and cultural and historical situation. Bernard Williams has suggested in such cases that “reflection can destroy knowledge,” which is to say that reflection can deprive us of confidence in our own ways of living and valuing, and thereby our convictions. At least, reflection might destroy our certainty that our way living and valuing is the right way.

Destruction is not, it should be kept in mind, always a bad thing. We want to destroy our illusions and false opinions, the biases that prevent us from recognizing truth. However, one might think that if knowledge is good and reflection can destroy it, then something has gone wrong in those cases when reflection does destroy knowledge. But how could reflection ever do such a thing? Shouldn’t what we call knowledge be more durable than that? A short—and somewhat unhelpful—answer is that it depends on what exactly we are willing to count as knowledge.

What is potentially unsettling about Williams’ point does not turn so much on how we choose to use the term knowledge but rather on the fact that reflection—as well as exposure to other ways of living and valuing—can undermine our confidence in our own moral beliefs. We can be led to question whether the certainty we have about our own convictions is justifiable when we consider that others have felt just as certain about the rectitude of various other systems and practices. What is equally unsettling is that simply refusing to reflect on such matters will seem dishonest (or dogmatic or lazy): if we refuse to reflect, then we may well fall (or have fallen) for just about anything. Unless we are foolish or arrogant enough to believe that we have already got everything right, then we will see that we cannot make any progress in our own moral or intellectual life without reflection.

The danger of reflection is not that it unsettles us; sometimes we need to be roused from cheap comfort. Rather, the danger is that reflection can lead to a cramped kind of skepticism that induces paralysis or despair. We can lose our grip and not know how to go on. In having lost our certainty, we may be led to the thought that we have lost everything—that without certainty, we cannot (or should not) allow ourselves to have convictions.

But this is a strange position.

"Moral Conviction" Published Online (Early View)

Here it is.

Forthcoming: Moral Conviction

I forgot to mention/celebrate here that my paper "Moral Conviction" is now forthcoming at the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The link above takes you to the final non-typeset version. I'll leave it up while I can.

This paper/idea has gone through a lot of re-writes and reconceptualizations, and I'm glad that it's coming out: it is, in effect, where "it" all started. That is, much of what I've been talking about here and in other recent papers-in-progress is an effort to expand upon some of the themes and examine more closely some of the concepts (like integrity and humility) that I give only a cursory treatment in this paper.

In some ways, I think the paper is very basic, perhaps some will think too basic, or obvious. I guess if you feel that way, you can see it as an attempt to give what Wittgenstein called "reminders" (if that's not too presumptuous on my part!).

Hot Off the Press: Communities of Justice

I'm happy to announce the publication of the latest Philosophy of Peace volume, Communities of Justice: Confronting Injustice and Creating Justice, edited by Danielle Poe (U Dayton), in which my essay, "Moral Conviction and Disagreement" appears. I heard some of these papers at the 2009 Concerned Philosophers for Peace conference in Dayton, and Arnold Farr's paper was my first encounter with the lovely line by Adorno, "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

Must We Always Stand By Our Convictions?

Here is a draft of a paper excerpted from my larger summer project on conviction and integrity.
Comments appreciated!

NOTE: Revised version posted 6/29/10.

Moral Conviction and Disagreement: Getting Beyond Negative Toleration

Here it is.

ABSTRACT: Toleration seems essential for peace in any sufficiently diverse society. At the same time, no one thinks that we should (or can) tolerate everything. That there are limits to what is tolerable gives rise to a difficult puzzle to be resolved by any society in which some of the differences between individuals or groups are, or seem to be, differences in their moral convictions. Toleration of beliefs and practices that conflict with one’s moral convictions seems problematic: how can it be compatible with living in accordance with one’s convictions that one tolerate things that one judges to be morally intolerable? This apparent conflict can be resolved by showing that tolerant engagement is compatible with moral integrity, and is furthermore an appropriate relationship to cultivate with those with whom one has moral disagreements, given other basic values (of persons and of humility). Tolerant engagement can take the form of discourse, compromise, and integration. None of these activities guarantees the resolution of moral disagreements, but they provide a better starting point than more adversarial relations (such as what I call “civil intolerance”) because they encourage the development of a community moral judges rather than, as it were, a community of moral strangers.

Comments are welcome.

Tolerant Engagement Redux

I currently revising the paper I'm to give at the Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference in a couple weeks. The idea is to figure out how toleration can be squared with one's own moral convictions (and preserving one's integrity), where one has serious moral disagreements with others.

The line I've been tempted by is that it won't do to say that we should tolerate those with whom we have serious moral disagreements, unless toleration is understood as something more than restraint and forbearance. After all, why should I restrain myself toward someone I think is doing (or promoting) something I think is pretty seriously wrong?

The concept I'm pushing is tolerant engagement. We can't tolerate something if we don't understand it, and we can't understand another person sufficiently without having some (sympathetic) understanding of that person's perspective. So, we have to engage.

While revising, it's become clearer to me that (and easier to state straightforwardly why) one can't write off tolerance without writing off the virtue of humility and the validity (or however you like to put it) of the principle of respect for persons. And I suspect, as noted before, that those are fairly basic, widely shared values. And if that's right, then justifying tolerance (or tolerant engagement) shouldn't require any elaborate--or as some put it, substantive--framework of liberalism. (Much of the reading I'd done in working up to this paper seemed to suggest that tolerance does need that framework. Am I missing something that should be obvious? Am I being blinded by my own unwitting liberalism here?) The point is, it's a good thing for tolerance if it turns out to be a much more basic value--like humility (from which it flows), it's one of those things we need so that we don't act like self-righteous idiots.

(And importantly, you don't have to be a self-righteous idiot to have, and honor, your moral convictions, which is the other part of the story. I'll post a draft when it's ready.)

P.S.: Yeats

I'm starting to revise "Moral Conviction and Character." I want to send out a thanks to the person in the RoME audience who gently called me out on a misuse of a line from Yeats' "The Second Coming," which I had pulled from a quotation book early in my inspiration-seeking on the topic. The line is: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." By itself, one might read this as saying that if you're one of the best, you avoid conviction (and its intensity), or else you'll become a fanatic (one of the worst). But actually, Yeats is lamenting the lack of conviction amongst "the best." (One interpretation I quickly dug up identifies the best as roughly young intellectuals.) A lack of conviction here is a cause of passivity, and the worst, full of intensity and unimpeded, wage war. (Yeats is writing after WWI.)

It's an interesting, and important, charge to level at a certain kind of intellectualism that disengages from the world. It goes to the aim of my paper: we are often dismayed at the damage that people with certain kinds of convictions level against others, but we also admire (other) people of conviction. In comments on the last post, Rob and I have been talking a bit about reflection and whether it can be trusted. But I think Yeats' basic worry is equally legitimate--that the wrong kind of reflection (or intellectual distance) can undermine convictions that it would be good to have. The Socratic thought that we "know nothing" can lead to a kind of nihilism. But that has to be a perversion of the Socratic ideal, since Socrates himself was an exemplar of moral commitment. (There's a nice essay by George Kateb called "Socratic Integrity" which examines the balancing between Socratic ignorance and the moral integrity displayed by Socrates. The essay is in Integrity and Conscience, ed. Shapiro and Adams, NYU Press, 1998.)

Moral Convictions, "Absolutes," and the Real World

I'm back from the RoME Congress in Boulder, and got some helpful feedback on my paper "Moral Conviction and Character."

Julia Driver (my commentator at RoME) presented a case meant to question whether I am right to say that we stand up for our convictions in a way that we don't stand up for "lesser" beliefs: Samantha has always strongly believed that it's wrong to cause pain just for fun, but lately she's been reading some work that challenges this claim (using fantastic scenarios where the utility of the causing of pain outweighs the pain caused), and as a result is no longer utterly convinced that it's (always) wrong to cause pain just for fun. Nevertheless, Samantha still thinks it's more likely that it is always wrong. So, she no longer believes with full conviction, but would still, given the odds (as she sees them), still stand up against causings of pain just for fun.

This example got me thinking about the relationship between our practical convictions and moral theory (or theories), particularly the use of fantastic (and "desert-island") cases to motivate particular sorts of theories.

Samantha's uncertainty here doesn't plausibly seem to be uncertainty about whether it's wrong to cause pain just for fun, roughly, in the real world. Rather, she's unsure of some more theoretical principle, like, "it's wrong to cause pain just for fun in all possible worlds (or in all logically possible scenarios)." But one could hold both (1) that it's wrong to cause pain just for fun in the real world and (2) that it's not always wrong to cause pain just for fun in all possible worlds, etc. That's exactly what some utilitarians say. (Hare, for example, said similar things about slavery.) Now there are people--call them absolutists--who find this combination of beliefs odd. (I myself have often found it odd.) However, utilitarians often use these fantastic cases not so much to figure out what we ought to do in the real world, but to deflect certain kinds of criticisms--e.g. to show how strange the world would have to be for certain seemingly unsavory actions to be morally obligatory (or ok). It's a theoretical point that in some possible world, some causings of pain just for fun would have the highest utility. But at the practical level of life in this world, that point is of diminishing interest.

So my suggestion at RoME was that Samantha could--for practical purposes--put these theoretical questions aside and thereby stand by her conviction with full force: in the real world, it's (always) wrong to cause pain just for fun. Now, if she is a utilitarian, then she needs some kind of empirical support for that claim--that is, she needs to show why it's contingently true that the actual world is such that causing pain just for fun could never have a higher utility. That, if anything, would have to be the source of any reasonable doubt on Samantha's part. (An aside: I'm a bit concerned here, however, whether we can tidily disentangle the empirical and the conceptual here...)

So, I think the take-home point is that if our moral convictions are primarily practical--that is, concerned with value and action in the actual world--then Samantha shouldn't become doubtful about her prior conviction in the face of a fantastic scenario. As Williams might say, if she does doubt it, then she has had "one thought too many."

This relates to another point that came out in the discussion of the paper: that with respect to some convictions (perhaps including the one above), "maintaining a reflective stance" on the conviction is not a reasonable requirement (which is something I've got to tidy up in the paper). Some moral claims are basic to moral thinking, and to reflect on them--that is, to reflect on whether they really are correct--would be a perversion of moral reflection.

Is Conviction Necessary?

I've been thinking about how (and when) to have moral conviction. In particular, I've been considering something like a Jamesian defense of the idea that we can legitimately adopt (or embrace) moral convictions when we are presented with a "forced and momentous" option. (See Section IX of "The Will to Believe" for the idea.)

A colleague of mine suggested that perhaps we don't need to go all the way to conviction in such cases. Instead, we might accept one option over the other as our "working hypothesis" (by our own lights). The point is that if conviction is a form of belief, it might not be rational to adopt any particular belief between the options themselves (e.g. believing that option A is the right one), but we might accept one option as the one we're going to take, and treat as our "working hypothesis"--i.e. we're going to treat that option as if it were the right one.

(He referenced Bas van Fraassen's work in the philosophy of science as the source of this idea. It's supposed to resolve the problem of adopting certain scientific theories despite an anti-realistic view of truth in science; roughly, that there's not an "objective," theory-independent realm of scientific truth, which would make believing that one's theory itself is true sort of awkward.)

I think my colleague might be right that in some instances, we needn't go all the way to conviction. But I have reservations. Suppose I am faced with (sorry to be dramatic) a life or death sort of situation--it might involve my own life, or someone else's. I have to decide what to do, which values to honor in the case. What I said to my friend is: "Maybe I could put my own life at risk for the sake of a "working hypothesis"; I'm not sure about someone else's..." (I'm not inclined to think I'd do either.) So, I don't think "working hypotheses" are always going to cut it. Am I wrong about this? (Or am I splitting hairs?)

For a lively illustration, go read (or re-read) Billy Budd.

Defending Intolerance?

I'm currently working on an essay entitled "In Defense of Intolerance." The basic idea is this: we often tend to think that intolerance must be bad because intolerant individuals often do horribly violent things. But this confuses (or ignores) that the line between the tolerable and the intolerable has nothing to do with the lines we can draw between various means of acting upon our intolerance. In my view, that we find something personally (and morally) intolerable does not itself justify violent intolerance. But that, importantly, doesn't mean we should reject our own intolerance. Some things are intolerable. And sure, just what is intolerable is often a contentious issue. But the fact that issues are contentious does not, I think, justify the view that we must therefore put all our convictions on hold. On the other hand, as I'm putting it in the essay: while I may have the right to risk my own life for the sake of a thesis, I have no right to risk the lives of others for it (especially when they are not consenting).

(I hope the parenthetical appeal to consent doesn't "go too far," as I want the basic argument to have as broad an appeal as possible. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.)

Moral Convictions and the Summer of (In)Tolerance

So, let's get this thing off to an uncontroversial start. I've been thinking about moral convictions, their value, and the problems that arise when various people have moral convictions that conflict. I'm mainly interested in thinking about these issues at the personal level, rather than the political. So my organizing questions concern the relationship between a person's moral convictions and the proper grounds for believing with convicition, as well as what a person may do in the service of his or her convictions. Thus, additional questions: Is tolerance incompatible with integrity? Does forbearance amount to an unacceptable compromise? Can we even, in a different sense, make compromises when it comes to our moral convictions? Or, on the other hand, is it ever reasonable to elevate a belief to a conviction? Yeats says no: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That seems wrong to me.

I'm giving a paper in Boulder at the RoME Congress in August where I suggest that moral convictions are valuable for a variety of (not only personal) reasons, but that they are risky, and must be handled with care. As the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller attests. That situation, and the mass of ensuing commentary, gets at some of my key worries. How can someone who has the conviction that abortion is murder not feel compelled to "do something about it"? I won't go through all the possibilities or link to all the raging. But I'm pretty sure that the start is to see that there are HUGE disanalogies making the pernicious comparisons floating about--that Tiller is comparable to Jeffrey Dahmer, and (the perennial view) that abortion is comparable to the Holocaust--incredibly irresponsible and basically vicious. (And I'm sure that seeing that doesn't require that a person have a settled view on abortion.) Perhaps more detail later, in the event that it's not obvious. Discuss.