W.K Clifford Flashcards
The ethics of belief
•Mathematician and philosopher at Oxford
•In his youth, Clifford was a believer, also an athlete, he climbed a church steeple and hung upside down from the weathervane.
•Clifford famously wrote “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (Atheistic/agnostic  Evidentialism)
•Only what is evident to the senses can be believed, and we can only go beyond the senses from effects to like causes (like Hume)
•” if men were no better than their religions, the world would be a hell, indeed.”
Clifford’s cases
•Example of a ship owner who lets a ships set sail even knowing it isn’t seaworthy, but convincing himself to believe it is seaworthy in spite of the evidence.
•The ship sinks and the passengers drown— Clifford argues the ship owner is morally to blame.
•Agitate against a religion, turns out the accusations against the religion were false.
•Even if the agitators sincerely and conscientiously believed in them, they had no right to make their accusations on insufficient evidence.
•What if we just said not that the belief was wrong, but the action.
•The shipowner and the agitator might well believe what they do, but still shouldn’t have acted differently?
Beliefs matter overtime
•”If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; prepares us to receive more It’s like, confirms those which resemble it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave it stamp upon our character forever.”
Belief is not just a private, but social
•Clifford argues that we cannot just hold a private belief, to ourselves.
•We inherit words and beliefs from those in our society, and we pass on our beliefs to future generations.
•We should thus be very careful what we believe because that will influence future generations.
•Even the most seemingly trivial believe is part of our beliefs and passed on to others.
•It therefore cannot be exempt from the need to have evidence.
•And not just applying to the educated, but every “rustic” and “wife of an artisan.”
•We all have a universal duty to question all that we believe.
Our duty to mankind
•Taking pleasure at a belief that is lacking sufficient evidence is a stolen pleasure.
•It violates our duty to mankind.
•And when we believe without good reasons we weaken our ability to believe carefully in the future.
•Even if a particular instance of belief on insufficient evidence has no effect, it is still wrong.
•Just as a thief that goes undetected is still wrong, because then his character is tainted, he is dishonest.
•Even if my belief on insufficient evidence never harms to anyone, I have still become credulous.
•If we are credulous, we will sink back into “savagery.”
Evidentialism
•”To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
•”If a man, holding a belief for which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposefully avoids the reading of books and the company of men that called into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it— the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”
Religion and  Evidentialism
•As the devout Christian John Milton, and as Coleridge said, even if one believes in Christianity, if one does so just on authority, or without evidence, this is a “Hersey” or will lead to self-love rather than truly love in Christ.
•Objection: but it takes so long to sort through all the evidence, and I’m busy.
•Response: then you shouldn’t be entitled to believe in things you can’t investigate.
•Is this a satisfying response?
Universal skepticism
•Does evidential is some lead to doubting everything since we don’t seem to have good evidence for all sorts of beliefs?
•”…Certain great principles, and these most fitted for the guidance of life, have stood out more and more clearly in proportion to the care and honesty with which they were tested, and have acquired in this way a practical certainty. The beliefs about right and wrong which guide our actions and dealing with men in society, and beliefs about principal nature which guide our actions in dealing with animate and inanimate bodies, these never suffer from investigation; they can take care of themselves, without being propped up by “acts of faith,” the clamour of paid advocates, or the suppression of concrete evidence.”
•Is this sufficient evidence, that certain great principal seem to stand up to investigation? Is Clifford just exempting here certain things he hold dear?
•And can we act on probabilities, we don’t have to just take things as certain.
The uniformity of nature
•How can we know that things will keep being as they are? (Humes challenge)
•”We may go beyond experience by assuming that what we do not know is like what we do know; or, in other words, we may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature.”
•Can we assume it.
•But why? Where is Clifford’s justification for this? Isn’t he believing it on insufficient evidence?
•We can trust scientific Claims when the process that it arrives at them is well known and When they open up new lines of inquiry.
•We can trust historical claims so long as we don’t expect that the author would have a special motive to lie.
•”Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, but help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.”
•Has Clifford justified this assumption? Has he lived up to his own requirement?
