14.3. Unraveling the mystery of morality: The unity of comprehension and belief explains moralism and faith

4th in Morality Series

Supposedly objective moral judgments—as opposed to adopting personal standards on which to base a principled integrity—issue always in falsehood; consequently, moral discourse is irrational. Knowing the rational purpose that principles of integrity serve might help people reject moralism—conveying this knowledge the point of 14.0, 14.1, and 14.2—but doesn’t fully explain objective morality’s wide acceptance, since objective moralism irrationally rigidifies the principles moralists adopt. This essay unravels the mystery of morality.

To understand moralism’s near-universal grip, I rely on social psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert’s findings on the relationship between comprehension and belief, what I call the unity of comprehension and belief. Gilbert’s essential findings are:

1. Merely to comprehend a message, you must suspend disbelief and accept the message as true.
2. To disbelieve a message, once understood (hence believed), you must later decide to reject it.

The mechanism of moralism

Comprehension requires suspending disbelief, a radical, counter-intuitive finding. The reason objective morality is a viral meme can now be fathomed: hearing and understanding a moralistic viewpoint in childhood—before absorbing or constructing concepts that could inoculate against the virus—implants an uncontestable moral conviction, protected by an unconditional reluctance to grasp conflicting ideas, including morality’s logical deconstruction, because purportedly objective moralities dictate not only what people ought do but also what they ought believe: a moral person “knows the difference between right and wrong.” Just as properly prudential persons avoid drifting into irrational beliefs, so properly moral persons avoid drifting into immoral beliefs. But the consequences differ. To avoid irrational belief, you update the information it’s based on and change the belief accordingly, but to remain moral, believers in objective morality must abjure changes to their foundational beliefs. The unity of comprehension and belief implies that if persons believe they ought continue their moral course they will unconsciously avoid understanding messages refuting their beliefs about morality’s demands and its nature.

The unity of comprehension and belief leaves no room to entertain views that narrow the application of moralistic principles but leaves some latitude to entertain positions that broaden it, since adding moral claims doesn’t necessarily contradict implanted beliefs. This implication conflicts with the observation that moralism’s scope—driven by free will’s death agony—is declining in the Western world. But what is waning isn’t moralism’s scope but its intensity, which the free-will myth fuels. While rejecting free will violates objective moralities, which incorporate moral blame, the declining influence of free will isn’t due to the doctrine’s widespread rejection. Free will’s influence declines with increased understanding of the specific circumstances influencing outcomes. If we had a complete determinist theory, people might believe in free will yet see no room for its exercise. Without rejecting the doctrine itself, people consider actual conduct variably responsive to free will—variably accountable to morality.

Faith and fanaticism

Religious faith works in exactly the manner of morality. Moralists can’t understand a refutation of moral realism because to reject morality—even momentarily—is to be immoral. For the faithful, arguments that would undermine their faith—even momentarily—are self-censored, since religious faith shares with secular morality the conviction that one ought to believe.

When believers relinquish religion, it’s often because they’ve been indoctrinated concurrently with a conflicting moralism; perhaps personal tragedy makes the contradiction vivid by raising questions about God’s justness and benevolence. In mainly such manner—that of superseding fideistic convictions with moralistic convictions—is a dying theism replaced by a secular moralism.

Some political ideologies carry the same intransigence as do moralism and faith. When the obligatoriness of politics focuses on states of personal consciousness—whether raising it on the left or purifying it on the right—beliefs that would lower or pollute consciousness must not just be eventually rejected but must remain uncomprehendingly unreceived, since the preventive to avoid ever holding the belief is refusing to understand its challenge. The only hope for the fanatical, the faithful, and the moralistic is surprise’s shock when they reach unexpected conclusions from unrelated concepts.

11.1 Is epistemic equality a fiction? THE CONFUSION BETWEEN BELIEF AND OPINION AND THE NATURES OF FANATICISM AND PHILISTINISM. PART 2.

Concepts

The leading concept, epistemic superiority (discussed in 11.0), refers to relatively greater capacity to distinguish relevant truth from falsity, as demonstrated by objective evidence. Epistemic justification refers to evidence proving an adherent's epistemic superiority. Credentialing means according epistemic superiority. The agreement theorem (according to my parsing) requires epistemic justification to claim epistemic superiority rationally. Rational adherents modify their beliefs upon learning that an epistemic equal disagrees.

Superior expertise

Proving the agreement theorem is mathematically trivial, and the previous post was supposed to demonstrate, almost intuitive. Yet, because the theorem conflicts with prevailing norms, which reinforce adherents' untoward opinionation, mathematically sophisticated students commonly reject the proof initially. Contentious beliefs—their adherents regarding themselves epistemically superior—indeed complicate matters, but self-description isn't epistemic justification: a claim to epistemic superiority is just another justification-requiring belief. Self-credentialing is rational only if adherents first prove their epistemic superiority with respect to their claim to epistemic superiority!

Circular reasoning is obvious when adherents contend adherence to the belief itself proves their epistemic qualifications, but some dodges are subtler. As an example of the evasions, consider "birthers" (Americans who believe Obama's "real" birthplace is presidentially disqualifying), called upon to justify their ideological self-confidence enough to survive their beliefs' overwhelming rejection. Birthers may believe that, as such, antibirther beliefs epistemically discredit their adherents, but this argument is circular because the same ideological isolation discredits both belief and credential. Sophisticated birthers might invoke a subtler form of question begging, claiming vindication by other equally contentious positions—perhaps, adherents' "discernment" that Obama is Muslim—but these adherents' struggles against the stigma of intellectual isolation unwittingly prove their epistemic inferiority, despite the lesser absurdity of Muslim baiting compared to citizenship paranoia.

Leveraging credible beliefs to demonstrate adherents' expertise occasionally succeeds, but credentialing is more commonly based on direct grounds, as when experts' training vouchsafes their expertise against masses of disagreeing nonprofessionals. Also, experts reasonably disregard lesser experts, as Albert Einstein did Niels Bohr, who insisted Einstein was mistaken to reject quantum mechanics. Einstein replied he had earned the right to be mistaken. His demonstrated powers of physical intuition justified self-credentialing his opinion. Analogizing the credentialing process to averaging measurements of duration—with equally accurate clocks, the readings should be averaged, but a reading from an ancient 0-jewel wind-up clock should be overridden by one from an atomic clock.

Superior methods

Claiming superiority in method—in the manner of the Catholic Church—is a systematic way to bolster epistemic credentials and save an opinion from its fate as one of many. If the Church's claim that the Pope speaks for God were demonstrable, then taking your cue from priests would be more rational than relying on your cogitations.

Another bootstrapping method is Marxist sociological justification, which can be treated as an answer to demands for epistemic justification: under the agreement theorem, what justifies accepting Marxism when most intellectuals disagree? The Marxist answers that these opponents, however erudite, belong to (or identify with) an exploitative social class, blinding them to subversive truths. If the workers accept Marxist socialism, while the bourgeoisie espouses liberalism, conservatism, or reaction, the line-up reveals politics' class dependence, and the argument avoids circularity if independent historical evidence supports the bourgeoisie's epistemic inferiority. Thus, Marxism contains theoretical machinery adequate, in principle, to justify Marxists' intellectually isolated iconoclasm. No doubt this contributes to its endurance.

Equal credentials

Granting the Marxist claim that the main political divisions represent social classes differing in epistemic endowment, most political and religious disputes still would be between approximate epistemic equals. Republicans and Democrats vituperate with language proven lethal, without there being a rational basis justifying either's epistemic superiority. Marxist ideologues, too, disagree vehemently, although none occupy superior epistemic positions. The disputants' epistemic equality doesn't temper these disagreements, whereas it should among rational adherents.

Under-weighting others' beliefs in effect equates belief (all-things-considered position) with individual opinion (others' beliefs factored out) despite the rationality of differentiating them. Confusion about the distinct societal roles of belief and opinion explains this irrationality.

Next essay: The distinct societal functions of belief and opinion.