Jouni Vilkka

2002-01-10

In order to form a belief one has to start from a set of premisses (whether they are explicit or not) and then use a proper (not necessarily "valid") form of inference to come to a conclusion that then can be adopted as a belief. The conclusion must not be included in the premisses, obviously.

A belief must be (relatively) well grounded for one to be epistemically justified in believing it. And to be ethically justified in believing, one has to have epistemic justification first. This is so, because one is not to believe untruths and lies, for they are potentially harmful - not only to oneself, but also to those others that may be affected and infected by the claims: Others are likely to believe what one says, or otherwise to spread the claims made, so one has some responsibility about what one believes and (especially) what one says.

To form a belief based on wishful thinking is just as unethical as basing the belief directly in other people's opinions. For one's pre-philosophical beliefs, habits of mind and general tendencies are likely to be strongly social in nature - socially constructed and uncritically adopted for mainly social reasons. To form a belief in an ethically acceptable manner, such social beliefs must be eliminated. Since it is impossible to totally eliminate a belief in practise, judgment about them must be suspended instead, until the relevant claims can be put to trial. One is then obligated to search for the best knowledge available, pertaining to the matter, and finally, based on what one has learned, to make up his mind: either discard or accept the belief in question, or to continue to hold it suspended in the case the information one has gathered does not yet warrant a decision either way.

But even in accepting a belief as justified, one must be careful not to emphasize one's conviction beyond the justification provided by the grounding of the claim; and even in the strongest cases, one must only accept the belief provisionally, as amenable and even potentially false. Of course, a similar attitude must also be extended to those claims deemed untrue or unjustified at present - for they may later be proven otherwise.

This is the only attitude that an intellectually honest person who strives to live and think ethically can adopt - and it is the attitude that makes the person a philosopher.

~j~