Economics of Religious Belief (and Epistemology Generally)

Please take this post with a thorough helping of salt. I am by no means an economist, and my exploration in this post is meant to be thought-provoking, not thorough convincing analysis.

It is often claimed that the religiosity of Americans is on a downward trend. While there are lots of reasons to be doubtful of this basic premise, a narrower context makes it much more convincing. Consider instead the premise that the religiosity of educated 20-30 somethings is on a downward trend. By religiosity, I mean religious belief, participation, and affiliation. This premise seems much more believable. I have no factual scientific research supporting this premise nor do I intend to perform such research. If anyone feels like enlightening me, feel free, but for my purposes here it is fine to merely assent to such a premise.

I take it that this premise is often asserted to give credence to a variety of non-theistic points of view. The premise-invoker is saying, essentially, "The majority of your peers disagree with you and agree with me. Furthermore, my numbers are growing. Why should I bother dealing/listening to the likes of you?" Without disagreeing with this general idea of reasoning, that a majority rule can be a proper reason for belief, I would like to provide a different defense.

People believe ideas for lots of reasons, and we perhaps give too much credence to the idea that truth is the primary one. There may be many other factors.

Consider the Law of Demand. This economic idea is simply that as price increases, demand decreases. Let's apply this rule somewhere it doesn't belong, like religiosity.

Our culture has gotten busier, more diverse, and just generally more complicated. People are involved with a myriad of activities with little time for thorough reflection. Our culture has many various religious beliefs. There are more areas of knowledge of which one is expected to have a basic grasp. All of these impose a cost on religious belief and religious exploration. Religiosity involves waking up and going somewhere on Sunday morning and staying involved with another social network. It at least involves taking religious claims seriously, attempting to understand them, and exploring varied views on important and complicated subjects of human nature.

So, perhaps religiosity has decreased simply because the 'cost' has gone up. In other words, the reason for a decreased religiosity may have little to do with a growing consensus that religious belief is untrue and/or irrational, but rather have more to do with other surrounding costs. THEN, in order to feel more justified about forming beliefs based on these other costs, people form beliefs about the truth or irrationality of religious belief.

In fact, applying this view to epistemology generally, I think the truth of an idea is perhaps only one small factor of belief for most people. So long as the belief is debatable and reasonable, as most metaphysical, political, and moral beliefs are, than the truth of it seems to impose little cost on my believing it. While the discussions in these areas at least superficially appears to be a debate about truth, one might think the real reasons for belief are related instead to one's family ties and emotions, happiness related to the belief, a sense of moral righteousness the belief may impose, and perhaps other side-benefits.

I'm left with 4 questions.

1. Would a more thorough version of this sketch suggest an adequate response to the secularization-premise invoker?

2. SHOULD people form their beliefs considering only the truth of said belief, or does it seem fine to form beliefs based on these other costs?

3. Is the narrow version of the secularization-premise correct? While the broader version seems to be unpopular now, the narrower version I have laid out here seems reasonable and often accepted.

4. Should I keep my nose out of any cross-disciplinary work in the future?

Peter Singer and a reductio argument against morality?

Yesterday, I was talking to someone who thinks it is morally permissible to consciously let a nearby child drown, for no other reason than preference (say, "I would prefer not to."). The reason given was that inaction is a morally neutral category. The argument for why inaction is a morally neutral category went as follows: If you can be blamed for inaction, then you can be blamed for going to the movies instead of donating to charity. But clearly it is not condemnatory for one to simply not give to charity. So inaction cannot be condemnatory. So it's okay to let a child drown.

I think many people have an intuition that something is wrong with Peter Singer's argument that we are acting wrongly by not directing large amounts of our assets to charity.

What do you think typically grounds this intuition, if anything? Is it that we cannot be blamed for inaction? Or is it something else?

My own view is that insofar as we have a set of good and bad choices at any moment, we are at least obligated to choose one of the good ones. And the virtuous person tries to choose as close to the best option as is reasonable, given resources, life plans, etc. I don't feel like fleshing out my whole view, which ends up being close to Singer's. But I am just wondering if any of the non-participating authors on this blog, or someone from the infinitely large set of our readership, has a view on the original position above. What is the moral status of inaction? If inaction is not a morally relevant category, is there anything at our disposal that shows letting a child drown to be wrong?

A word about the title of this post: It seems to me that Singer-like arguments are inescapable on deeply plausible assumptions regarding morality. What struck me about the person who thinks it's okay to let children drown is that the argument went in the other direction. Singer's conclusions were taken to be absurd, and so deeply plausible moral principles were abandoned!

Epistemic authority and our hypothetical selves

First I will discuss an interesting epistemological issue that arises in various guises. Then I will explain why I think I should become a vegetarian without justification.

There are situations when we seem to preference judgments we would make in different circumstances. Probably the most common cases involve forms of empathy. We often take arguments like "Imagine how you would feel if I did the same thing to you" to be compelling. In some of these cases the appeal is just emotional. But sometimes we seem to grant victims more authority. How we would judge a situation as a victim has priority over how we would judge a situation as, say, an aggressor.

Another less standard case involves our future selves. Generally, we take the judgments of our future selves to be more authoritative than our current selves. If someone can convince us that we will regret something when we are older, we are oftentimes compelled. If you were to find out that your future self disagrees with your current self about some issue, you would likely find the future belief compelling, or at least a very serious defeater for your current belief. It seems to me that one reason for these judgments is that we take our future selves to be in at least as good an epistemic position as our current selves, and very probably in a better epistemic position. This is because our future selves, barring cognitive deterioration, are taken to be like our current selves new and improved.

When it comes to straightforward factual beliefs, I think this intuition is relatively sound. Probably I will have a more nuanced and grounded view about, say, welfare programs when I am 20 years older. So if I could find out what my belief will be in 20 years, it would constitute a defeater for my current belief insofar as the two differ. In terms of preferences, however, giving priority to future selves is peculiar. It is not obvious to me, for example, that it is more important for 60 year old me to not have a job than it is for 20 year old me. This sort of issue commonly arises for people who get permanent tattoos. They are often accused of being shortsighted, since they allegedly won't want a tattoo at some unidentified later age. But who is to say that someone's 60 year old preference is more important than his or her 20 year old preference? I think there are interesting issues here to be explored, and I will pursue none of them.

I have discovered a new case of this sort. Specifically, there seem to be cases where we can know that we would be (justifiably) convinced of a certain proposition if we did the relevant investigation. I believe it is overwhelmingly likely that hypothetical me would find many arguments for becoming a vegetarian, even perhaps a vegan, convincing, if I were to read them. Were I to study the treatment of animals, the health effects of a vegetarian life style, the environmental effects of the meat industry, and so on, it seems to me that I would find the case overwhelming. But I do not want to spend very much time investigating this issue, because I want to read the New York Times instead.Yet, because I know I would be convinced by the vast literature, and unconvinced by fledgling counter-literature, I don't need to read it. It seems that I can justifiably skip to the conclusion I would have if I took the relevant epistemic path.

Is there anything wrong with this reasoning?

Note that I am not suggesting submitting to possible worlds where we are brainwashed. Although I can imagine paths to becoming convinced of any proposition, I don't take all of these to be epistemically authoritative. Furthermore, there seem to be hazy cases. For example, I'm not sure that reading all the relevant literature on philosophy of science would lead me to scientific realism. Therefore, I have to adopt positions as I do research. But I am convinced that if I read, say, all the literature on Creationism and Evolution, I would come out accepting the theory of evolution. So, I can just skip to the end and accept the theory, rather than go through the arduous process of reading popular biology.

I think the vegetarian case is like the evolution case. But it's not clear exactly why some cases are like this, and some are not. Is it based on our current predisposition? Is it based on some kind of view about the consensus of relevant experts? Will this post, unlike my previous two, elicit any comments at all?

The Problem of the Criterion

There is an upcoming conference on the "Problem of the Criterion." The conference organizers introduce the dilemma as follows:

To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are caught in a circle.

They also observe that only one book-length treatment has been given to this problem. I wonder if certain arguments which do receive much attention could count as special cases of the Problem of the Criterion. I'm thinking particularly of Alvin Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism" (stated succinctly here). Plantinga's argument seeks to show that the conjunction of standard evolutionary theory and naturalism provides a defeater for the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable. On the conjunction, the probability that our faculties are reliable is said to be either low or inscrutable.

I wonder if this argument could be construed as developing a special case of the Problem of the Criterion in the following way: the conjunction of evolutionary theory and naturalism precludes the possibility that we could distinguish appearance from reality or identify methods which could do so. This argument (if successful) would provide an additional reason beyond circularity for thinking the Problem of the Criterion is unsolvable (given evolutionary theory and naturalism).

There would then arise a Plantinga-style solution for the Problem of the Criterion, which would be any non-naturalistic view that when conjoined with evolutionary theory makes probable the reliability of our cognitive faculties. On Plantinga's view, theism provides good reasons to think our cognitive faculties are reliable. If we allow our cognitive faculties to stand in as a ridiculously general "procedure," as formulated above, then perhaps we've solved this particular epistemological chicken-egg problem.

But it seems to me that Plantinga's theory is in danger of falling victim to the basic thrust of the Problem. If we take God's existence to be the truth distinguished from reality, and our cognitive faculties as the reliable procedure, then how can Plantinga escape the accusation of circularity? Even taking for granted all of Plantinga's foundational claims, crucially the basicality of Christian theism, it seems that in the most general way our cognitive faculties are part of what produces Plantinga's theism. I suspect that Plantinga would say there is no circularity here, because justification in the basic way is not dependent upon arguments or other propositions, and therefore not dependent on the proposition that our faculties are reliable.

So is there a useful application of or solution to the Problem in Plantinga-esque arguments? Is the "evolutionary argument against naturalism" a special case of the Problem? Second, does the basicality of theism, conjoined with our reasons for thinking we have reliable cognitive faculties, constitute a circle?

Do we need defeater-defeaters?

In the previous post, Ben wrote about a good principle of epistemic humility, that although we must believe each member of the set of our beliefs, we should nevertheless believe the set to be, as a conjunction of all contained propositions, false. In other words, Ben can believe p, r, and q, but nevertheless believe -(p,r,q). This funny state of affairs is merely a moderately rigorous way of expressing the fact that we generally think we hold some false beliefs; we just don't know what those beliefs are.

Like the sultry muse he is, Ben reminded me of some thoughts I've had which are related to this subject. In epistemology the concepts of defeaters and defeasibility loom large. Defeasible beliefs (or propositions) are those that can be defeated. A defeater for some belief or proposition is generally thought to be some other belief, proposition, state, or whatever, which renders the original belief or proposition refuted, or at least counts towards its refutation. I'm not sure there are rigid edges here, and I'm not about to read this to find out, for fear of discovering my own thoughts to be obsolete.

Especially in apologetic contexts (say, when defending moral realism, theism, or utilitarianism), there seems to be an epistemic responsibility to conduct oneself according to at least the following guidelines (not comprehensive):

(1) One should address defeaters as one is made aware of them.

(2) If one cannot offer defeater-defeaters, the target belief is plausibly defeated. Abandon it.

(3) Defeaters of the objective, propositional sort are especially defeating - respond with extra-seriousness to them.

I think all of the above can be challenged. I'll just flirt with each of them briefly and see if anyone comments. I'll notate the criticisms respectively with letters (1a, 1b... etc.).

(1a) It could be that one is made aware of more defeaters than one could possibly handle, given multiple limitations (time, money, psychological tolerance, competing obligations...). Here we might say that the epistemic ought is blocked by a multiply realizable can't. So perhaps (1) can be given side constraints, but it seems like there are a burdensome number of constraints in this direction. Maybe the gloss "within one's abilities" will suffice. But then this is a rather weak sort of obligation! I have all sorts of more important things to do than, say, defeat defeaters.

(1b) It seems like not just any defeater can obligate us. Were I independently wealthy I could spend all my time coming up with defeaters, and then go around harassing responsible intellectuals with them ("Sorry guys, can't go to the movies, have to study tonight; that reclusive philosophy jackass just took advantage of my defeasibility again."). Something like this is actually occurs with Christian evangelists, political activists, and new atheists. So defeaters have to be compelling in various ways. But what makes them compelling enough to obligate us to counter-defeat them?

(1c) The whole obligation itself has a suspect aspect to it, which is that we know (think of Ben's post) that some of our beliefs are actually false. So any defeater of any of our beliefs could be a successful defeater of a false belief. Furthermore, given the likely falsehood of several of our beliefs, isn't it incumbent upon us to figure out which beliefs those are? But I think there is no such obligation. But if there is no such obligation here, why not? And whatever this reason is, wouldn't it mitigate our obligation to address defeaters?

(2a) Despite my many words so far, this is the objection most interesting to me. I almost think this should constitute the whole post. It will be a very common assumption that if a defeater is offered to me and then I do my best to address it, I am obligated to abandon my belief if no defeater-defeater is forthcoming. I've been starting to think that we're just kidding ourselves here. Although it seems unsavory to, for example, simultaneously find the problem of evil convincing but maintain Christian theism, I think we do a version of this all the time. I suspect that we are aware of any number of propositions contrary to our own such that we have no answer to them and they seem true to us. I think we reconcile things by supposing something like the epistemic humility discussed in Ben's post and above - surely we're missing something, even though we know not what. This is one reason why, for example, I maintain some form of moral realism. I can't see any promising way to, for example, defeat defeaters along the lines of "Our natural explanations of the universe are complete without spooky morals." But (along with other reasons for accepting moral realism) I just hold out for some relevant belief of mine other than belief in moral realism being false. Or, better for me, some proposition that makes the otherwise convincing defeater true might be false. So what do you think? Is it possible to be rational and simultaneously believe p and some defeater for p? Before anyone has a stroke, notice that a defeater for p is not the same as -p. Its relation to -p can be any number of things, as testified in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, linked above. But I'm trying to push this point for defeaters that are as close to -p as possible. I'm thinking of cases where we end up saying to ourselves, "If R, then -P. R. I believe P, so I'll just wait around here for a bit."

(3a) I wonder if this is really true, since there's something not straightforwardly logical/propositional about why propositional defeaters make it especially incumbent upon rational persons to abandon their defeated beliefs. If we take the abandonment of a defeated belief to be in some way volitional, I think we can understand my claim here. Certain complex beliefs (e.g. belief that the death penalty is justified) are volitional in the sense that we are deeply and consciously involved in seeking out evidence, weighing evidence, acting on our beliefs (e.g. with voting, arguments, maybe pulling levers, choosing cases to litigate, etc.). So it is that I think someone can, "despite the evidence," continue to think the death penalty is legitimate or illegitimate. So anyway, propositional or objective defeaters for these complex beliefs are supposed to inspire within us a certain tendency to abandon the defeated belief. But this is also what, say, a basically acquired belief is supposed to do. For example, someone is made to pull the lever himself, can't do it, and walks away feeling the force of a defeater for his pro-death penalty belief. There may be nothing to my objection here, since even though the goal of the two defeaters are the same, maybe we still should take the propositional, evidential, objective one more seriously. So focus on my (2a).

Is Knowing Each the Same as Knowing All?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preface_paradox

It is not uncommon that one might claim to believe that each individual assertion (P1, P2, P3, ... Pn) of a set is true, while not believing the whole, P, is true. The wikipedia article suggests at least one example, the author of an academic book, but one can think of several others. (If one struggles with other examples feel free to post a comment, and I'll write about several).

Wikipedia points out that this is likely not a paradox, and I agree. Rather, this is the appropriate kind of skepticism for all of one's beliefs.

It is increasingly common for people to say things such as, "This is merely what I believe." We are being trained, in order to avoid conflict, to avoid making statements about knowledge and truth. But surely most of us believe the things we say precisely because we believe they are true and that we are justified in believing them. This gives one the standard evidence for knowledge.

Skepticism about one's beliefs is valuable in our modern society, but being skeptical about each individual belief hampers discussion about what is true, precisely because no one is making any truth claims. Instead, skepticism in a sense like the Preface Paradox seems more appropriate.

In other words:

Speak in declarative sentences. Believe in truth. Speak with conviction. Make knowledge claims, not mere belief claims.

But,

Recognize that you are most likely, perhaps definitely, wrong about some things. Recognize your human fallibility.

What happens when our priors don't match up?

This topic has been bugging me recently, probably as a result of the interminable health care debates going on in Congress right now. Each party has certain ideological commitments that, if we grant that everyone is acting in good faith, suggest that Democrats and Republicans won't be able to agree on a healthcare reform bill that does anything useful in either direction. /end political commentary.

Politics aside, this question also dovetails nicely with Ben's post below. I think the reason we fall into the trap of Bulverism is because, if only subconsciously, we realize that logical argument can only take us so far. We can each hold totally coherent views on a subject such as religion, even if we disagree about some priors, such as which religion is the one to follow or not follow. We can argue about who is right until we're blue in the face, but these arguments are bound to end in question-begging territory, because they are arguments about what is good (or some other abstract concept) based on differing understood meanings of the word "good". If I think that good means "whatever the Flying Spaghetti Monster decrees", and you think that good means "whatever an ideal judge would decide", then unless we can agree that the Flying Spaghetti is an ideal judge, we are at an impasse. No clever reductio or overpowering logical argument can prove one definition of good correct, because logical arguments presuppose well-defined concepts.

Obviously, this is an old problem, which is why the field of metaethics can be kind of a mess to wade into. It's easy to find problems with each definition of good, but those problems only arise because we think that this particular definition of good is problematic. This is a pretty textbook fallacy in itself, so it seems pretty clear that two people who vary on such a fundamental level will always be arguing past each other. This differing definition will totally change how they view the world, and in some sense, we might even think that they inhabit different worlds. The problem becomes, how can we still have meaningful conversations with our differing definitions of certain terms?

One solution is to go the logical empiricist route and claim that all metaphysical claims are meaningless. Unfortunately, it seems that the articulation of the verification principle is itself not a verifiable claim, so the logical empiricists have just replaced one set of prior commitments with another. We have no more reason to believe the verification principle than we do the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Given that sort of impasse, the natural next move is to try to go in the other direction and probe at how a particular set of beliefs holds up as a worldview. If I both believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, and that pasta can never be the main constituent of a sentient being, then I believe a contradiction. Leaving aside the human mind's wonderful ability to handle cognitive dissonance and rationalize, this argument strategy usually fails about the things we most want it to succeed for. Religious tenets tend to live at the center of Quine's web (at least for those with strong opinions about religion), and so to be less subject to revision. All this argumentation will succeed in accomplishing is getting me to drop my (supposedly) rational view about pasta.

My explanation for Bulverism is that it is an expression of the above tactic. Consider what would happen if you held the following belief.

1. I hold each of my ideas because I considered it deeply and fully.

In this case, the Bulverism tactic of saying "Oh, you're only a Christian because your parents were Christian" would be an attempt to elicit some level of contradiction. Obviously, this is an easily disputed claim on it's own merits, but in this case, it doesn't constitute a fallacy, just a different level of analysis. The Bulveristic claim is not a refutation of the existence of the deity, but of the coherence of the worldview being held by the proponent of the deity. In other words, I don't want you to say "Aha, I'm a Christian because of my parents, therefore there is no God!", I want you to say "Aha, I'm a Christian because of my parents, and this means that I am not justified (in whatever way I define justification), in believing that there's a God." This suggests why Bulverism tends to be accepted for discussions about God, but not about isosceles triangles. It's a useful rhetorical device when the direct proof lies beyond the ability of two people to agree upon, but not about triangles.

This post is dragging on now, but one last point: Bulverism doesn't usually work, even in the above regard. People don't hold two-dimensional worldviews, and if they do, they have at least convinced themselves that the worldview is three dimensional. Given that, I'm out of moves. So in the comments, my question to you all is: how do we reconcile worldviews that differ based on differing definition and prior assumptions?