Epistempolicy part 1: Confidence
So I have various normative beliefs about how society ought to be. Call my personal moral view M. Here's a deceiving question: Do I believe that M is likely to be true?
No. With an air of paradox, I'm well aware that all throughout time and space, people have held all sorts of competing moral views, and given that they've all been different, then very few of them, if any, have been correct. Since I have no reason to think that my ability to spot moral truth is vastly better than other people's have been, the likelihood is that my view is also false.
So what degree of confidence do I have in M? Let's imagine that I think that M has a 1% chance of being correct. This sounds low given that I do believe M. But this is ok so long as I also think that all other views that I'm aware of have a less than 1% chance of being correct (they may be so numerous that the aggregate confidence in them is 99%, or perhaps I'm mostly confident that the correct view is one I'm not aware of at all). Let's imagine that I give all other views precise confidence-values too. Note that my confidence in all these views will be raised or lowered by the opinions of others. "Why, if that clever guy Derek endorses alternative view C, then I must have been too little confident in that!".
After completing this process, we can, for each possible correct view, multiply the chance of it being correct by the rightness it assigns to an action, then sum these values. This gives us the expected moral rightness for any action. Call the set of these evaluations E. E is obviously not a true moral view: It's a mish mash of views given my confidence in each. (Indeed, E could possibly lead to apparently inconsistent decision making.)
Let's take a different simple example to illustrate E. Let's imagine that I afford each of 100 different views a 1% chance of being correct, and according to each of these views respectively, I ought to give 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, percent of my income to Oxfam. So I am 1% confident that I ought to give 1% of my income to charity, 1% confident that I ought to give 2% to charity, and so on. After I consider this fact, I realise that I ought to give 50% of my income to charity, since this appopriately weights my actions with my confidence in various moral truths. Giving 50% of my income to charity maximises the expected moral rightness of my action.
Back to the original example. I now have two views: M, the view I have most confidence in, and E, the view that will not be correct itself, but which, if lived by, maximises the expected rightness of my actions. What should I live by? I'm tempted to say E, though I suspect that may be controversial (that nasty word integrity springs to mind, though I can never get a hold on what this might be).
Certainly it seems that living purely by M is a little over-confident. Let's imagine two further examples: In one I am 99% confidence that C is true, 1% confident that D is true. In the other, I am 51% confident that C is true, 49% confident that D is true. Is it really the case that I should equally live by C in either situation? And if we're not merely going to live by the view we're most confident in, it seems to me that the best non-arbitrary thing to do is to live by E.
What do others think?
I think you're making
I think you're making problems for yourself which don't exist.
Firstly, it makes no sense to have a moral view which one doesn't think is correct. How can it be my view if I think it's almost certainly wrong? Even if it's the single view I think most likely, that dosen't make it 'my' view.
Secondly: 'we can, for each possible correct view, multiply the chance of it being correct by the rightness it assigns to an action' Errr.. no we can't. How do you give 'rightness' a numerical value?
You want us to imagine a situation but you make it so unlike any real moral situation as to have nothing to tell us about morality.
Thirdly, your moralist seems to have a very positive belief in the existence of moral facts. Even if he doesn't know which theory is best, he is committed to the idea that one theory is true.
As to the final questions, you ask: Is it really the case that I should equally live by C in either situation? Well, the fact is you don't have much choice. The alternative is to live by the theory you have less confidence in. Any attempt to swing between the theories would, as you suggest, result in a lack of integrity - meaning, that since moral theories are only important at all if we believe we should stick to them, as soon as we think we should do what one theory says sometimes and the other at other times, both theories are dead.
1) If you couldn't hold a
1) If you couldn't hold a belief unless you were 100% sure it was correct, than I think you'd hold very few beliefs. So what is the criteria for believing something? You say that it can't merely be the thing you are most confident of - so what's the alternative?
2) Talk of "multiplying" is bound to rub some people up the wrong way, but I assume you can understand the sense of combining the chance of a view being correct and what that view implies.
Let's take an example, to cover your next point as well. I'm pretty confident that abortion is morally permissible (though let's not derail this discussion into one on abortion). But I also admit that there are some strong arguments in favour of the claim that it's always morally forbidden. I think these arguments will turn out to be mistaken, but I'm not completely sure. But if these arguments are right, then, well, abortion is a terribly bad act to do.
Surely, in this situation (and again, let's ignore whether this is a sensible situation for me to be in), we can make some sense of asking: How confident am I that abortion is permissible? How unsure am I that it's instead terrible? If I want to try and be moral, how much should I take account of my confidence in these views?
I'm suggesting that if I'm 20% sure that abortion is murder, then one ought to think of having an abortion as being morally equivalent to an action that has a one in five chance of killing someone. Is that really so impossible to make sense of? Talk of multiplying confidence and rightness sounds nasty, but it doesn't seem to me to completely distort the basic position at hand.
3) Yes, I'm a moral realist, and I tend to describe problems in ways amenable to that understanding. Still, I suspect that most anti-realists can make sense of what's at issue, even from their perspective. Most anti-realist views will want to be able to capture some sense in which moral views can be in "error" and in which we might be more confident than some are "true" than others.
4) Your final paragraph starts to get at the question, but I don't quite see an argument there. Why is a theory "dead" if you are anything but arrogant with respect to how it influences how you live?
Al
I agree totally that 100 %
I agree totally that 100 % certainity is not required for belief. I didn't say it was. But I think that in order to call a theory, 'my view' I would have to have a reasonable amount of certainity. The exact level cannot, of course, be stated but it must be more than 50% since I can hardly believe something I think is most likely not true. I would suggest at least 70% and probably somewhat more for serious issues.
And this is important because the only way E and M could come into conflict would be if my theory had no strong views on the topic and the others I consider possible had very strong ones indeed. But again, I think this is unlikely because of the integirty issue. If you have strong doubts about your position on abortion then you have doubts about the entire value system upon which that position is based. Why than take any position at all? Once you have taken a position, because it's a moral position, you must believe in its moral base. If you sometimes suspend that belief because rival theories shout very loudly on a particular topic then that base is clearly unsteady. Once the base is considered unsteady, why build anything upon it all?
That's what I mean by saying the theory is dead.
"I can hardly believe
"I can hardly believe something I think is most likely not true."
I certainly appreciate the force your reasoning here, but I don't feel compelled to agree. This is for the simple reason that, in my own case, I really don't think that much of what I believe is true, but I don't think it's true that I personally have no beliefs.
I guess on your view (and I repeat, it has a lot of force) I must just be mistaken when I say that I really don't think much of what I believe is likely to be true. But how are you going to justify that? Aren't I authoritative as to how confident I am in my beliefs?
Al
Now you've got me smiling -
Now you've got me smiling - I kind of feel the same way - I think that a lot of what is 'believed' is known to be unlikely to be true, but I don't think this squares with the normal meaning of belief in philosophy.
I wish you wouldn't use the phrase 'in your view'. I very rarely have one. I'm only trying to test yours. I felt your use of belief didn't match the generally understood one, therefore I challenged it.