Chapter 4
THE WILL TO
BELIEVE
This
is rightly considered James's most distinctive and influential doctrine. Had
James looked as goofy as Kierkegaard and the street boys in Cambridge been as
mean-spirited as those in Copenhagen who followed Kierkegaard around and
taunted him with the shouts of "Either or, Either or!" James would
have been hounded by shouts of "Will to believe, Will to believe." He
wouldn't have minded, because at least he would have known that, unlike his
father, someone was reading his books. He expounded it with religious fervor throughout
his career whenever there was the slightest pretext for doing so. It seemed to
be innate in him, as were so many of his important doctrines. It gets defended
in his first major philosophical publication in1878, at the end of each of his
final two books, and in every major publication in between. When he was only 24
years of age, he gave expression to a proto-version of it in a letter to Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr. "But as man's happiness depends on his feeling, I
think materialism inconsistent with a high degree thereof, and in this sense
maintained that a materialist should not be an optimist, using the latter word
to signify one whose philosophy authenticates, by guaranteeing the objective
significance of, his most pleasurable feelings." (CWJ, 4, 147) The budding
idea is that one can be justified in believing some metaphysical
world-hypothesis because of the beneficial consequences of so believing.
This
doctrine, which allows us to believe, or get ourselves to believe, a
proposition upon insufficient evidence when doing so will have desirable
consequences, works hand and glove with his foregoing accounts of will and
belief in Chapter 2 and the conditions supplied in Chapter 3 under which they
are free. In what follows, the qualification "or get ourselves to
believe" will be dropped for the sake of brevity, and to simplify the
discussion we can imagine that each person is able to self-induce a belief in
any proposition, p, by ingesting a belief-in-p-inducing pill.
This is a sure fire way of self-inducing belief, unlike that of acting as if
you believe, which can be messy and chancy. (Since there are an infinite number
of propositions, each person's medicine cabinet will be quite crowded and
require that each pill, other than the one on the extreme left, be half the
size of its immediate left-side neighbor, which is the spatial analogue to a
"supertask.") Although belief is not identical with will, because
they involve different psychic attitudes in my amended version of James, it
resembles the willing state in having behavioral consequences as a result of
established neural pathways from the concerned part of the brain to the motor
organs. We are supposed to have the power, and the free power at that, to get
ourselves, directly or indirectly, into various belief states and thereby bring
it about that we overtly act in certain ways. Our free efforts to self-induce
belief are part of the crucial x factor we contribute to the cosmic
equation and which, like the want or presence of the nail in the parable, can
make a crucial difference in the future course of history for good or ill. At a
minimum, how we believe can have the most important consequences for our
future flourishing as human beings.
It
is at this point that the doctrine of the will to believe enters the story. We
have the power to control what we believe, be it directly or, so to speak,
through popping a pill, and what we believe can make a decisive difference in
whether or not we find the good life of self-realization. Now it often is the
case that there is some proposition for which there is little evidence one way
or the other but which would be beneficial for us to believe. James's most
important example of such a proposition is that we have a contra-causal free
will. It seems only reasonable that we should have every right to believe this
proposition, in spite of W. K. Clifford's universal admonition that "It is
wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient
evidence." (LE 186) Given that the title of his essay was "The Ethics
of Belief," it is clear that by "wrong" he means morally wrong.
Were he to have meant epistemically wrong, he would have been uttering the
empty tautology that it is epistemically wrong to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence, that is, that it is epistemically wrong to believe.
According
to Clifford and his scientistic cohorts there is only one type of justification
for a belief, that being an epistemic one based on evidence unearthed through
an empirical inquiry or a proof if the belief is a mathematical one. To believe
on any other grounds is a violation of our moral duty to measure up to our
essence of rationality.[1]
James, when he is espousing his will to believe doctrine, challenges Clifford's
univocalist account of belief justification. At these times, he claims that
there are two different ways to justify
believing a proposition: the epistemic way based on empirical
evidence and proofs; and the pragmatic way based on the desirable
consequences that accrue to the believer of the proposition. The former is
directed toward establishing the truth of the proposition, the latter to
establishing the desirability of believing that the proposition is true, quite
a different matter.
I
added the qualification "when he is espousing his will to believe
doctrine" because I will argue in the next chapter that James, like
Clifford, has a univocalist account of belief justification, only it is the
reverse of Clifford's, holding that the only justification for believing is
pragmatic, based on maximizing desire-satisfaction, with epistemic
considerations entering in only in a rule-instrumental manner as useful guiding
principles. This should not surprise the reader, since it already has been
established that James is firmly committed to both of these propositions.
1. We are always morally obligated to
act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over the other options available to
us.
2'. Belief is a free action.
Thus, we are not only morally
justified in believing a proposition on pragmatic grounds, we are morally
obligated to do so.
This
immediately raises the question, if James was so firmly committed to a
univocalist theory of belief justification why, when he was espousing his
will to believe doctrine, did he accept the dualistic account of
justification, and moreover, as will be seen, in a form that gives pride of
place to epistemic over pragmatic reasons? The answer is that James was wisely
following the principle of Minimal Ordinance enjoining us to use the weakest,
least controversial premises that are required to establish the desired
conclusion, since thereby we cut down on the risk of one of our premises being
false or rejected by our opponent. James is sweating with conviction that if he
only can get his audience to agree that they are morally permitted to believe
certain propositions upon insufficient evidence, especially that God and free
will exist, great benefits will accrue to them and their society. To win them
over he does not need to use the very strong, controversial premise that the
only justification for a belief is pragmatic, which almost everyone would
reject out of hand on either Cliffordian or mutivocalist grounds. All that he
needed was the weaker and therefore less challengeable premise that there are
both epistemic and pragmatic modes of justification of belief, with the former
taking precedent over the latter, thereby allowing pragmatic reasons to be
appealed to only when epistemic ones are of no avail. For the time being, James
is willing to work with a hierarchical dualism of justifications for belief
that gives a dominant position to epistemic reasons, namely
4. We are always morally obligated to
believe in a manner that is epistemically warranted, except when epistemic
reasons are not available.
The "except when epistemic reasons
are not available" qualification permits believing on the basis of the
will-to-believe doctrine so as to maximize desire-satisfaction when epistemic
reasons cannot be had. This goes a long way to placate those of Cliffordian
leanings in his audience.
James
even argues for the weaker conclusion that we are morally permitted to
believe upon insufficient evidence when doing so will have desirable
consequences rather than the stronger one that we are morally obligated
to do so, as is required by his casuistic rule.[2]
He must have realized that many in his audience would not grant him his
casuistic rule. At any rate, they shouldn't have because of the many powerful
objections that were advanced in Chapter 1. This one problem at a time approach
fits the spirit of James's claim that "sufficient to that day will be the
evil thereof." (PP 286)
Before
we get down to the details of his account, two different sort of
counter-examples to Clifford's universal prohibition will be presented so that
they can be set aside as not relevant to James's concerns. First, there is the
trust case in which a person is required to believe certain things about
another person in virtue of having a special relation to that person, even when
they lack adequate evidence for these beliefs. For example, spouses are morally
required to believe in the faithfulness of the other person, even when they
lack adequate evidence for this belief. Were they even to inquire into the
matter, say by hiring a private detective, it would place them outside the
trust relation and thus destroy the relationship. They have a duty not even to
inquire into the matter. Of course they might get to a certain point at which
they can't help but harbor suspicions; as Big Joe Turner used to sing,
"You came home in the wee hours of the morning and your clothes didn't fit
you right." It is then that the trust relation ends. James did not discuss
the trust case, but there is no doubt that he would agree that it is a counter-example
to Clifford; however, it is not a very telling one, because Clifford can easily
protect his universal prohibition against it by building in an ad hoc
restriction that excludes trust cases. Thus, trust cases are not telling
counter-examples, because they are too easily localized.
Much
of the recent discussion of the will to believe has concentrated on extreme
cases in which there is an overwhelming utilitarian justification for acquiring
an epistemically nonwarranted belief, either because doing so prevents an
horrendous outcome or brings about some exceedingly beneficial one. For
example, an eccentric billionaire might publicly promise to donate a billion
dollars to charity if Jones acquires the epistemically nonwarranted belief that
Cleopatra weighed 109 pounds when she died, or some overwhelmingly powerful
alien invader threatens to destroy the planet unless Jones acquires this
belief. Again, James would readily grant that a counter-example has been
unearthed but would find it of little interest for his purpose in formulating a
will to believe doctrine. In the first place, "extreme cases" are,
with very rare exceptions, counter-factual, and James, in general has little
concern with merely possible cases in his analyses, being satisfied if his
analysis fits the way things actually are. More important is that in the
extreme cases the realization of good consequences or prevention of bad ones is
completely external to the believer, being connected with his belief only via
the intercession of a third person, the billionaire or alien in the examples.
James's version of the will to believe is concerned with the personal or
existential dimension of belief, the manner in which it changes a person's
character and thereby their readiness to act in certain ways. There is a causal
theory of value underlying James's will to believe doctrine, according to which
the value of an outcome depends, at least in part, on how it is brought about.
For this reason, extreme cases can be left out of the discussion of James's
doctrine.
James's
intent is not just to produce some counter-examples to Clifford's prohibition.
If it was, he could have availed himself of the rather obvious trust and
extreme case counter-examples and been done with it. Rather, his aim is to
spell out the conditions under which in general we are morally permitted
to believe upon insufficient evidence. His dislike of doing philosophy in a
formalistic, by the numbers, manner kept him from explicitly listing all these
conditions in a neat package of numbered indented sentences, informing us which
of them are necessary and which combination of them are sufficient for being
morally permitted to believe without epistemic warrant. It will be argued that
things go best for James if he is taken as giving a set of sufficient but not
necessary conditions, although some individual members of the set are
necessary. A lot of work is left to the expositor in extracting these
conditions and determining their sufficiency and/or necessity. Thus there is
considerable room for alternative interpretations, though there are some
conditions that plainly are intended to be necessary.
James
begins his essay, "The Will to Believe," which is his most complete
and forceful exposition of the doctrine, by explicitly listing three conditions
that together comprise what he calls a "genuine option" to believe. A
person's option to believe a proposition at a certain time is a genuine
option just in case it is live, momentous, and forced.
Because a genuine option is dependent on variable psychological factors, it
must be relativized to a person at a time. What is live and momentous can vary
across persons as well across different times in a single person's life.
For
a proposition to be live for person at a time, it must then be a real
possibility for that person to believe it, as well as to believe its
contradictory. His mind must not be made up one way or the other. Thus, the
proposition, along with its contradictory, can be seriously entertained even if
it cannot win at that time uncontested occupancy of the believer's mind and
thereby qualify as a belief for James. To achieve this status will require some
work on the part of the believer in the way of making efforts to attend or
acting as if he believes (or popping the pill). James parries the
capriciousness objection to his account of free will, according to which a
person is just as likely to act out of as in character, given that our free
choices are undetermined, by pointing out that the range of one's free will is
limited to living options. Since a person of benevolent character cannot
seriously entertain the thought of doing some sadistic act, it is not a live
option for him
A
proposition is momentous for a person at a time when the consequences of
his believing or not believing it will have very important consequences,
relative to his personal scheme of values, supposedly at the time of his
decision to believe rather than at some future time. That an option to believe
is unique, pace what James says, does not alone qualify it as momentous.
My one and only chance to see Barry Manilow live is his farewell concert
tonight, but that alone hardly makes my option to see it momentous. Again,
there can be wide spread divergences among persons and a single person at
different times in respect to the momentousness of a given option.
An
option to believe is forced when the person will not wind up believing
the proposition in question unless he decides to believe it. No one, such as a
crazed brain surgeon or mad cyberneticist, is going to compel him to have this
belief regardless of what he might do. It is completely up to him whether or
not he acquires the belief. We might call the alternative in a forced option
that the chooser winds up with if no decision is made the "negative alternative."
Dated options, such as to accept a proposal of marriage by midnight tomorrow or
never see the man again, are good examples of forced options. A forced option,
like a unique one, need not be momentous, which would be the case if this
proposal were offered to a lesbian.
Several
supposedly astute and fair commentators have interpreted James as holding that
the three conditions for having a genuine option to believe are together
sufficient for having a moral right to believe upon insufficient evidence. This
will be shown to be a terrible distortion of the text. Once this perverse
strawman version is given, they have an easy time denigrating it as the will to
gullibility or wishful thinking. It licenses me to believe the propositions
that I am the Sultan of Wisconsin, the inventor of the sandwich, and the author
of The Critique of Pure Reason, if my psychology is such that they are
live and momentous for me and my option to believe them forced. James would be
the last person to agree that the pleasure I derive from believing them
justifies my doing so.
The
original culprit was Dickinson Miller: "The particular class of cases [for
James] in which we have 'a right to believe' was that in which the option
before our mind was (1) 'living', (2) 'forced', and (3) 'momentous'."[3]
(PA 286) A. J. Ayer, in a similar vein,
wrote, "To claim [as did James] the freedom to believe whatever one
chooses may be emotionally satisfying, but I should hardly call it
rational."[4] (OP 191)
Marcus Peter Ford, who is a very sensitive and imaginative interpreter, wrote:
"The 'right to believe' only pertains when a decision is 'forced' and
'momentous' and when it concerns 'live options.'" (WJ 32) What is
overlooked by these interpretations are
the further restrictions that James places upon a will to believe option. They
not only are stated explicitly but also inform all of his examples, making it
hard to understand how any attentive reader could miss them.
Of
these additional conditions, the one that is most important for responding to
the wishful-thinking objection is the requirement that the chooser cannot
determine at the time of his decision the truth-value of the proposition in
question on epistemic grounds. "Our passional nature not only lawfully may
[is morally permitted to], but must decide an option between propositions,
whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on
intellectual [epistemic] grounds," and, "In concreto, the
freedom [moral permission] to believe can only cover living options which the
intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve." (WB 20 and 32)
Sometimes James presents the epistemic requirement in a weaker way that would
license believing even in the face of significant evidence against the belief.
He speaks of "the right to believe in things for the truth of which complete
objective proof is yet lacking" and voluntary choice being permitted
when "objective proof is not to be had." (MT 138-9 and PP
1177. my italics) Herein the available evidence need not be neutral between the
truth or falsity of the proposition. Given that James wants to win over his
audience by giving the Cliffordian types as much rope as possible, he ought to
go with the stronger version, especially since it is satisfied by his most
cherished examples -- belief in free will and the good destiny of the world.
For these reasons, it is the one that will be operative in what follows. It
should be born in mind, however, that James's real position, the one he keeps
in the closet when he is trying to win over the Cliffordians, is that if the
option is of overwhelming momentousness to the believer, such as Kierkegaard's
option to believe in Christianity, the weaker version is operative: One is
permitted to believe in the teeth of quite powerful contrary evidence.
When
James says that the intellect of the person cannot settle the matter,
the "cannot" can be of either the in principle or weaker in
practice sort. In practice human neurophysiologists cannot verify that our
efforts to attend are not causally determined by brain events due to limits in
their powers of mensuration, but it is in principle possible that they do so,
for they, along with their instruments, could suddenly make like the incredible
shrinking man.[5] It is
important to realize that the epistemic undecidability concerns the chooser
alone, not other observers. It is conceptually impossible that the chooser, at
the time he is deliberating, verify what choice he will make and thereby the
occurrence of any event for which his choice is a necessary cause, since he can
deliberate only if he is in ignorance of what he shall choose; someone else,
however, could verify at that time what his choice will be by appeal to a well
founded inductive argument based on his past track record.
It
must be stressed that James's epistemically-undecidable-by-the-chooser-before-the-choice-is-made
requirement is not the weak requirement that at the time of the choice the
chooser, as a matter of fact, lacks adequate epistemic grounds or evidence for
determining the truth-value of the proposition, which could be realized if the
chooser made a point not to investigate the matter, like Clifford's dishonest
ship owner who makes a point not to investigate whether his ship is safe to
send to sea. Rather, it is the strong requirement that the chooser lacks
adequate evidence one way or the other after discharging his epistemic duty to
perform all of the relevant inquiries. Laziness, especially self-interested
laziness, will not enable the chooser to satisfy the epistemic-undecidability
requirement.
Another
question concerning epistemic undecidability that must get resolved concerns
whether there is a single method or criterion for determining when a
proposition is epistemically warranted that is common to all propositions,
regardless of their subject-matter. There are contemporary language-game
fideists who would contend that each language-game or doxastic practice -- normative rule governed human
practice for warranting beliefs -- such as a specific organized religion or one
of the branches of science, has its own unique ontology, along with its own
criteria of rationality and epistemic warrant for a belief. The criteria that
inform the different practices are incommensurable in the sense that each practice
is a self-contained normatively rule-governed activity that is immune from
criticism from without. Whether or not James agrees with these Wittgensteinian
language-game fideists does not admit of a simple yes or no answer. Chapter 7
will show that in regard to the ontology part of their thesis he is in
agreement, for what is real for James is relative to the assumptions of a given
practice or perspective, but in regard to the epistemic part he is not with
them. The ontological assumptions of different doxastic practices differ but
not their epistemic procedures for warranting belief. Since a choice cannot be
made between them by use of their shared epistemic procedures, we are morally
permitted to do so in the will-to-believe manner. Not only is there no
indication in the text that James believed that criteria for epistemic warrant
varied across practices, there is good evidence, based on his attempt to show
that existential claims based on mystical experiences are subject to the same
checks and tests as are those based on ordinary sense experience, which is a
subject for Chapter 10. He even said that "Science, metaphysics and
religion...form a single body of wisdom, and lend each other mutual
support." (SPP 20) Also, in regard to the seeming opposition between
common sense, science, and philosophy, James said that "There is no simple
test available for adjudicating offhand between the[se] divers types of
thought." (P 93) He did not say that each has its own unique epistemic
procedures for warranting belief.
James
not only explicitly states the requirement for epistemic undecidability for a
will-to-believe option, all of his many examples satisfy it, thus making it all
the more amazing that it could have been missed by some many commentators. The
stranded mountaineer who must jump across a chasm to get to safety and can
increase his chances of succeeding if
he believes that he has the capacity to do so, is not able, at that time,
to epistemically determine whether he has the capacity, though he can do so
after he has attempted the leap, though, if he misses, he'll have to do it very
quickly. The person who psyches himself up to lead the morally strenuous life
by believing the proposition that good will win out over evil in the long run
cannot epistemically determine its truth-value, since, in addition to it being
beyond our capacity to predict the direction history will take in the long run,[6]
the choices that he shall make, which is the crucial x factor
that he contributes to the cosmic equation, are not knowable by him in advance
of his choices. In contrast to these Jamesian cases, my epistemically
nonwarranted beliefs about being the Sultan of Wisconsin and the like are both
in principle and in practice epistemically determinable by me now; and,
furthermore, I have violated my epistemic duty by not performing adequate
inquiries -- to which my response is that since I am the Sultan of
Wisconsin, I have lackies to do the drudge work.
Four
conditions for a will-to-believe option have been unearthed so far from the
text. A person, A, is morally permitted to believe a proposition, p,
at a time T without adequate epistemic warrant if A's option to
believe is (1) live, (2) momentous, (3) forced, and (4) A cannot
epistemically determine at T the truth-value of p. The text gives
some but not decisive reasons to think that James required, in addition to
(1)-(4), that A's believing p helps to make p become true:
"There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a
preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help
create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith
running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into
which a thinking being can fall," and "In truths dependent on our
personal action, the, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly
indispensable thing." (WB 29 and 29) In the 1878 "Some Considerations
of the Subjective Method" he wrote that the subjective method, the name he
then used for the will to believe doctrine, "can only be harmful, one
might even say 'immoral' if applied to cases where the facts to be stated do
not include the subjective R as a factor," in which R is the contribution
that we make through the actions caused by our belief. (EPH 335)
What
is not completely clear from these quotations is whether the
belief-helping-to-make-true condition is intended to be necessary for any
will-to-believe option or is a feature of only some cases of this option. If
the latter interpretation is given, as it is by Elizabeth Flower (PA, I, 686),
Robert O'Connell (WJ 72) and James Wernham (WB 14), a person would be morally
permitted to believe a proposition if (1)-(4) were satisfied, even though his
believing made no difference to whether or not it is true, as would be the case
with his belief that there are Platonic Forms or that the God of traditional
Western theism exists. If his belief gives him pleasure, why deny him this,
even if his pleasurable belief state is completely disconnected from activities
in the workaday world?
I
favor the former interpretation. First, two of the quotations that were given
seem to support it. Furthermore, every example that James gave throughout his
career of a will-to-believe option involved a belief that played a causal role
in helping to make the believed proposition become true or, as will be shortly
seen, some other desirable proposition. The Alpine and the good-will-win-out
cases clearly satisfy the causal condition, as do all of his confidence
building cases -- the Alpine leaper, the ardent but somewhat unconfident
suitor, the person who wants to be liked, et. al. The reason James
became so preachy whenever he discussed free will is that he thought that if we
believed we had free will we would make the sort of all-out effort to attend to
an idea in difficult cases of conflict that would help to bring it about that
we do have free will. "If...free acts be possible, a faith in their
possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives birth them birth, will
increase their frequency in a given individual." (WB 84) It is very much
in the spirit of James's promethean pragmatism to have a causal requirement,
since the significance and value of belief in general are the worldly deeds to
which it leads, a thesis for which, as we saw, James gave both physiological
and normative reasons. Remember how he railed against sentimentalists and
aesthetes, including his own brother. Merely to be in a pleasurable belief or
esthetic state is not its own justification. There must be some behaviorally
rooted reason for choosing to get oneself into such a state. Thus, it would
violate the promethean spirit of James's pragmatism to justify an epistemically
nonwarranted belief solely in terms of its being a pleasurable belief state.
Furthermore, by having a causal requirement James has yet another way, in
addition to having the epistemic undecidability requirement, to protect his
doctrine against the wishful thinking objection. My ill-founded pleasurable
delusions of grandeur were ones that my believing could not help to make true.
Assuming
that James required that causal condition, there are some questions that need
to be answered. First, must P's belief be causally sufficient,
necessary, or both for making p true? The answer is none of the above.
James's examples, especially the good-will-win-out one, involve only the very
weak requirement that P's belief can help to make p true.[7]
The Alpine leaper's belief, obviously, does not have to be either causally
sufficient or necessary for his leaping successfully; for him to be permitted
to acquire the belief; it is enough that his believing increases the
probability of success. This is all that common sense, as well as James,
requires. Furthermore, this weak interpretation dovetails with James's
insistence that a very minor difference in the initial conditions can make the
crucial difference in the final outcome, as in the parable of the nail. For
these reasons I will include the weak version of the causal condition as a
fifth requirement for a will-to-believe option.
Adopting
this requirement requires, in turn, adopting yet another condition, namely,
that it is desirable that the believed proposition become true. This
requirement is assumed throughout his discussion, for James's will-to-believe
justification is a substitution of this argument form:
Doing x helps to bring it about that p.
It is desirable that p. Therefore,
It is morally permissible to do x.
in which "believing p"
is substituted for "x" throughout. Notice that the moral
permission in the conclusion is not qualified as prima facie, which
would make it subject to defeaters or overriders. If we knew only that p's
being true would satisfy some desires but not that it would maximize
desire-satisfaction, then, if we accept James's casuistic rule, we would have
to make this prima facie qualification. Since James's casuistic rule was
rejected at the end of Chapter 1 in favor of a vague, mixed bag rule that
included deontological factors along with desire-satisfaction, we will
interpret "desirable" according to the latter criterion, as we had
agreed to do. Thus, even if p's being true were to maximize
desire-satisfaction over its being false, this alone would render it only prima
facie morally permissible to believe p. Given James's strong
commitment to deontological ethical principles in many of his writings, though
not in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," James would agree
to this and thus would accept my deontological revision of his casuistic rule.
To
illustrate this, consider the case in which I promise to give Jones a revolver
but in the interim he turns into a homicidal maniac and has vowed to kill
Smith.
My giving Jones a revolver helps to bring it about that I keep my
promise.
That I keep my promise is desirable. Therefore,
I am morally permitted to give Jones a revolver.
Obviously, the permission must be
qualified as only prima facie, for were I to keep my promise and give
him a revolver it would result in the death of the innocent person Smith. This
deontological defeater is not overruled if it would maximize
desire-satisfaction to give Jones the gun: Smith could be a widely disliked
person whose death would maximize desire-satisfaction over his continuing to
live.
At
this point it will help the reader to pause for a recap of the six conditions
that have so far been unearthed from the text for a will-to-believe option.
Person A is morally permitted to believe proposition p without
adequate epistemic warrant at a time T if (only a sufficient condition is being given) the option to
believe p is: (1) live; (2) momentous; and (3) forced for A at T; (4) A cannot epistemically determine p's
truth-value; (5) A’s believing p helps to bring it about that p;
and (6) it is, all things considered, desirable that p become true.
In
fairness to those commentators who have not included the causal requirement for
any will-to-believe option it must be pointed out that sometimes James stated
his doctrine in a way that didn't justify believing an epistemically
undecidable proposition but only adopting it as a working hypothesis, as
we do in science when we select some untested hypothesis as a working
hypothesis for the purpose of setting up experiments or in everyday life when
we simply act as if the proposition were true. It will be shown that the causal
requirement is not applicable to some working hypothesis cases.
The
following quotations clearly speak for the working hypothesis version. Some of
them simply identify belief or faith with the adoption of a working hypothesis:
"Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis," and "To sum up,
faith and working hypothesis are here one and the same." (WB 79 and
EPH 337) Clifford's prohibition is now interpreted as prohibiting adopting as a
working hypothesis (acting as if you believed) an epistemically nonwarranted
proposition rather than believing it. "Suppose that, having just read the
'Ethics of Belief,' I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption
unverified by previous experience..." (WB 80) At the beginning of
"The Dilemma of Determinism," James states his intention "to
induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it [the doctrine of
Libertarian free will] true, and acting as if it were true." (WB 115)
Among the actions to be performed is publicly declaring that it is true, even
though you do not believe what you are saying. His presentation of the
"faith ladder" in the 1905 "Reason and Faith," which is the
final form taken by his will to believe doctrine, says that we are to treat the
proposition we desire to be true "as if it were true so far as my
advocacy and actions are concerned." (ERM 125) This very same faith ladder
gets repeated at the end of each of his final two books. (PU 148 and SPP 113)
James's
examples also reflect his sloshing back and forth between the belief and
working hypothesis versions of his doctrine. In "Some Considerations of
the Subjective Method" he uses the example of the Alpine climber who must
leap a chasm to get to safety. (EPH 332) What is required here to increase his
chances of success is good old-fashioned sweating with conviction belief that
he has the capacity to succeed, not just the adoption as a working hypothesis
that he does. But in the final paragraph of "The Will to Believe" he
has an Alpine example of a climber who is confronted with alternative paths and
must pick one of them if he is to save himself from freezing to death and has
no reason to prefer one of them over the others. Obviously, he must pick one of
them and journey along it, for to make no choice assures his death. The chances
of his success are in no way increased by his believing that the chosen path is
the right one. He only has to adopt it as a working hypothesis and thereby act
as if it is the right one by following it.
The
working hypothesis version of the will to believe does not require in general a
causal requirement. James himself recognized this when he wrote "And your
acting thus [as if you believed] may in certain special cases be a means
of making it securely true in the end." (PU 148. my italics) The "in
certain special cases" qualification implies that in some cases adoption
of a proposition as a working hypothesis does not help to make it true. By
adopting a proposition as a working hypothesis a scientist does not help to make
it true but only helps to discover that it is true. But "in certain
special cases," such as adoption of the hypothesis of Libertarian freedom
it does help to make it true, since by acting as if we were free in this sense
we help to bring it about that we are. James recognized cases in which
believing, in the full-blooded sense, can help in discovering that a
proposition is true. By believing that God exists, we increase the chances that
we shall have apparent direct nonsensory perceptions of God, such experiences,
as Chapter 10 will bring out, counting as evidence for God's existence.[8]
It
is plain that James operated with two quite different versions of the will to
believe. They are different because believing isn't the same as acting as if
you believe or adopting as a working hypothesis. James recognized this when he
gave us the act-as-if-you-believe causal recipe for self-inducing a belief,
since a cause cannot be identical with its effect. But why did he keep two sets
of books? It cannot be explained in terms of an evolution in his thinking, the
belief version being his earlier formulation and the working hypothesis version
supplanting it from 1905 on, for he ran them together throughout his career.
For example, "The Will to Believe," which gives prominence to the
believing version because of its heavy reliance on confidence and courage
building cases that require real, sweating-with-conviction type belief, also
endorses the working hypothesis version.[9]
The
most likely explanation is in terms of James's attempt to win over his audience
by being as accommodating as possible, but his weak, working hypothesis version
goes too far in that direction, so far that it trivializes his dispute with
Clifford. Clifford, being a man of science, is the last person who would want
to issue a prohibition against using working hypotheses, for he must have been
aware of their fruitfulness in furthering the progress of science. James is
abusing the principle of Minimal Ordinance that enjoins us to use the weakest
premises possible to support the desired conclusion, not to replace the desired
conclusion with one that trivializes what is at issue. Fortunately, there was
no need for James to engage in the trivial exercise of running through open
doors, for his exciting, belief version, when strengthened so as to meet
certain objections, which shall now be considered, is quite formidable.
Objections
The
first objection comes from that tireless critic of the will to believe,
Dickinson Miller. The chooser is supposed to get himself to believe a
proposition that he himself takes to be evidentially nonwarranted, but this is
impossible. "You cannot believe and yet in the heart of that very belief
be heroically facing the uncertainty of your whole position. Your state of mind
would not be belief, which is regarding something as fact, not as
uncertain." (PA 288) Miller is right that to believe a proposition is to
believe it is a fact, for a fact is a true proposition and one cannot believe a
proposition without believing that it is true; but, pace Miller, that
does not require that it is believed to be certain in the sense of supported by
overwhelming evidence. That there are so many anti-rationalistic theists of the
Kierkegaardian variety shows Miller's inference from take to be true (or
a fact) to take to be certain to be bogus. Miller is not alone in his
mischaracterization of belief. Many contemporary philosophers, such as Richard
Swinburne in Faith and Reason, wrongly claim that to believe a
proposition is to believe that its probability is greater than one-half
relative to the available evidence.
There
is a close cousin to Miller's objection that might fare better. The point is
not that one cannot believe without believing to be certain, but rather that if
one believes what he takes to be evidentally unfounded, he will not, pace
James, have his confidence and courage boosted so that he can act more
effectively in making the believed proposition true. The wrong response to this
objection is to find some procedure for making the believer forget that he
acquired his belief on the basis of a will to believe option; there could be a
second set of pills, neatly arranged in descending order of size from left to
right on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet, such that after one has
popped a belief-inducing pill he pops the appropriate one from the second shelf
that makes him forget the nonrational means by which he acquired this belief
and instead implants in his mind the false apparent memory of having acquired
it after a successful empirical inquiry. The problem with this way around the
objection is that the believer must deceive himself, which is bad enough, but
in the process destroys his own integral unity and winds up as a divided,
schizophrenic self. James's promethean quest to have it all will be found in
Chapter 11 to have this deleterious consequence and ways will be devised to
attempt to escape it. The ideal of an integrated, rational self is a powerful
one that deserves more respect than is accorded it by this drastic solution.[10]
A
better response is that human psychology is far more variable than this
objection envisions. Although it is true that there are some people who are so
constituted psychologically that they cannot realize the confidence building
benefits from a belief that they take to be evidentially nonwarranted, there are
many people whose psychology permits them to do so, such as our nonrationalist
theists. It has already been seen that a will-to-believe option is relative to
a person at a time because human psychology is variable in regard to which
propositions a person takes to be live and momentous belief options. All this
objection shows is that there is another psychological reason for relativizing
a will to believe option to a person at a time. A sixth condition could be added requiring that
(7) A's psychology at T is
such that he can realize the confidence and courage boosting benefits of a
belief that p, even if he takes p to be evidentally nonwarranted.
James's
will to believe is acquiring more and more epicycles, but I will not pause at
this point to give an explicit mounting of them, since even more are to come in
response to yet other objections. This next objection comes from James himself.
Why, he asks, can't someone act so as to help to make some desirable
proposition become true without actually believing it? His response:
Since belief
is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true,
necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be
true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action
required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from
that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure
superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a
piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. (WB 32)
James even goes so far as to claim that
there is no behavioral difference between suspending belief in R and
actually disbelieving it. "We cannot escape the issue by remaining
sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in
that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true,
just as certainly as if we positiviely disbelieve." (WB 26) The agnostic
must act "meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true." (WB
29-30)
This
is a disastrous response. By the "religious hypothesis" James here
means the proposition that
R. Good will win out over evil in
the long run.[11]
He claims that because belief is
measured by action, a person will act so as to help make R become true
by leading the morally strenuous life if and only he first believes that R
is true. Such benevolent behavior is "dictated,"
"required," or "inspired" by R. As an empirical
generalization about human psychology, this is false, since we know of many
people who do not believe R but nevertheless lead the morally strenuous
life.[12]
Underlying
James's response is the false assumption that for every proposition, p,
there is a set of actions, B,
such that a person believes p if and only if he performs or is
disposed to perform the actions in B. James even went so far as to claim
that there is no behavioral difference between suspending belief in R
and actually disbelieving it. This assumption fails to do justice to the
psychological variability among persons in respect to how their beliefs mesh
with their actions. Two persons can believe one and the same proposition but
act in radically different ways. Both could believe R but only one of
them act so as to help make it true. The person who sits on the sideline might
be made overconfident by his belief in R and think that his active
participation on the side of the good is not needed or he might have devilist
leanings and not want to see R become true. James's assumption of a
one-to-one correlation between belief and action is not able to distinguish
between believing the factual proposition that R is true and believing
the normative proposition that it is good that R is true. The person who
acts so as to help make R true could believe the latter but not the former.
There
is an easy way around this difficulty that consists in building in yet another
epicycle concerning the way in which a will-to-believe option must be
relativized to a person's psychological makeup at the time of the choice,
namely
(8) A knows at T that he
will act so as to help make p become true only if he first believe that p
is true.
Why must A know this fact about
his own psychology? The reason is that the conditions for having a
will-to-believe option are supposed to justify A's believing or
acquiring the belief that p. But what justifies a belief gives the
believer a reason for so believing, something that he could give in response to
the challenge to justify his belief. This requires that he be aware of this
reason or justification. This seemingly innocent point will be the basis for
the next objection.
Imagine
that A satisfies conditions (1)-(7) for having a will-to-believe
justification for believing that p is true. Among his reasons for this
belief is that only by so believing can he act in a way that will help to make
this desirable proposition become true. Thus, if we ask A why he is
toiling to help make p become true, among the reasons he will give is
that p will in fact become true. But that's an irrational reason for
trying to make p true. A relevant reason would be that it is good that p
become true. Because you believe that Jones will succumb to his cancer of the
liver hardly gives you a reason for acting so as to help bring this about.
Because
A has such an irrational reason for acting so as to make p true,
he does not do so as a rational, morally responsible agent, and, since
rationality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for acting freely, he
does not do so freely. This is a very serious matter, especially for the likes
of James who prize so highly being a free, morally responsible agent. Just
recall the emotional breakdown of 1870 that was occasioned by his doubts that
he was such an agent. The problem takes an especially virulent form with a
will-to-believe based belief in R, given the very extensive nature of
the actions and dispositions that are caused by this belief. Whatever good
might be realized by A's irrationally acting so as to make R true
is outweighed or defeated by his loss of or diminution in his freedom and moral
responsibility. At least these are my deontological intuitions and James's as
well, I believe.
The
irrationality objection, devastating though it is, is easily neutralized. All
that is required is to separate the proposition that A must first get
himself to believe from the one he thereby helps to make true. Thus, (7) must
be revised as
(8') A knows at T that he
will act so as to help make q become true only if he first believes that
p is true, in which q is not identical with p,
By separating p from q,
James can give a will-to-believe justification for believing in good old-time
theism, not just his pale moral substitute for it, R. A's
psychology at T could be such that he will act in the proper good-making
fashion so as to help R become true only if he first believes that the
God of traditional Western theism exists. Herein he would have a prudential
reason for acting benevolently, since he believes that God will reward him for
doing so. This may not be an admirable reason but it nevertheless is a rational
one. In the case in which a belief that God exists increases the believer's
chance of gaining evidence that God exists for his religious experiences, the
believer helps to bring about the desirable proposition that there is evidence
for the existence of God by believing that God exists.
There
is some textual evidence that James was on to the need to separate the believed
proposition from the one that it is desirable to make true, for he often
formulated his will-to-believe option in a way that separated them. Sometimes,
though not in "The Will to Believe," he separated them in the
confidence building cases. The proposition that the Alpine leaper must believe
to increase his chances of leaping successfully across the chasm is not the categorical
proposition that he will successfully make the leap but instead that he has the
capacity to do so, which is the conditional proposition that if he were
to attempt the leap, he would succeed. This is the proposition that he first
must believe in order to increase his chances of bringing it about that he
successfully makes the leap. When James says that "I wish to make the
leap, but I am ignorant from lack of experience whether I have the strength for
it" or the "ability for [this] exploit," he is making use
of this conditional proposition. (EPH 332. my italics) The leaper's belief that
he has the capacity to succeed, unlike the belief that he will in fact succeed,
is a rational reason for attempting to make it true that he leaps successfully.
The you-will-like-me case admits of the same resolution. A first gets
himself to believe the conditional proposition that if he acts in a friendly
manner, people will wind up liking him so that he can muster the necessary
courage and confidence to act in a friendly manner and thereby help to bring it
about that people will wind up liking him. His conditional belief is a rational
reason, though not the sole reason, for his acting in a friendly manner. Among
the other reasons must be the desirability of being liked by people.
James
flipflops in his manner of stating the common denominator of all religions. In
"The Will to Believe" he gives this categorical formulation:
"The best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the
things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the
final word," which I paraphrased as
R. Good will win out over evil in
the long run.
This is the proposition that A
first must believe so as to act in the sort of
good-making manner that will help to make R become true. This
interpretation is nailed down by his claiming with respect to propositions like
R that "There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all
unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming." (WB 29) Herein the
proposition that first must be believed and the one that is to be made true via
the belief are identical.
But
in his other writings he gives a conditionalized formulation of religion to the
effect that
R'. If we collectively exert our
best moral effort, then R (Good will win out over evil in the long run).
For instance, he writes: "Suppose
that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: 'I am
going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which
shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent
does its own 'level best.'." (P 139. my italics) This conditionalized
formulation of the religious hypothesis gets repeated at two places in his
lecture notes: "Meanwhile I ask whether a world of hypothetical perfection
conditional on each part doing its duty be not as much as can fairly be
demanded," and pluralism holds that "the world...may be saved, on
condition that its parts shall do their best." (ML 319 and 412) What A
does, accordingly, is to get himself to believe R' so that he will act
in the morally strenuous that will help to make R become true. Similar
considerations apply to a will-to-believe based belief in a metaphysical or
world-hypothesis. One believes in theism so that they can get themselves to
live in some desirable way.
Although
(8') goes some way to neutralize the irrationality charge, it has to go even
further. According to (8'), among A's reason for helping to make the
desirable proposition q become true is that p is true. But his
psychological makeup at T could be bizarre so that his belief that p
is true, although a causal factor in his acting so as to make q
true does not constitute a rational reason for so acting.[13]
For example, p could be the proposition that Verdi wrote Ernani
and q be R, and his psychology be such that he will act so as to
help make R become true only if he first believes p. Remember the
"Niagara Falls!" routine. Thus, when he is asked why he is living the
morally strenuous life so as to make R true, he will respond that it is
because Verdi wrote Ernani, thereby rendering his action irrational and
thereby not one for which he is morally responsible. Plainly, yet another
epicycle is required, namely,
(9) A's belief that p is
a rational reason for him to act so as to help make q become true.
It
is now time to pause and give an explicit recap of all the many conditions that
together are sufficient for being morally permitted to believe upon
insufficient evidence. A is morally permitted at time T to
believe an epistemically nonwarranted proposition, p, for the purpose of
helping to make true another proposition, q, IF
A's option at T to believe p
is:
(1) live;
(2) momentous; and
(3) forced.
And furthermore:
(4) A cannot
epistemically determine at T the truth-value of p;
(5) A’s believing p
can help A to bring it about that q;
(6) It is, all things considered, desirable that proposition q
become true;
(7) A's psychology at T is such that he can realize the
confidence and
courage boosting benefits of a belief that p, even if he takes p
to be
evidentally nonwarranted;
(8') A knows at T that he will act so as to help make q
become true only if
he first believes that p; and
(9) A's belief that p is a rational reason for him to act
so as to help make q
become true.
I
have italicized "sufficient" and put "IF" in block letters
to emphasize that conditions (1)-(9) are together taken to be sufficient but
not necessary for a will-to-believe option. The reason for not affirming the
necessity of (1)-(9) is to avoid the following universalizability objection.
Imagine that A has a brother, B, whose psychology exactly
resembles his except that A alone satisfies condition (8’) requiring
that the believer knows at T that he will act so as to help make q
become true only if he first believe that p. Because B is
sufficiently strong-willed that he does not need to have the confidence or
courage building belief in p in order to do his best to make q
become true, he is not morally permitted to believe p upon insufficient evidence
whereas the weaker-willed A is.[14]
This violates the principle of universalizability -- if A is morally
permitted (or forbidden) to perform an action in a certain set of
circumstances, then everyone in like circumstances is morally permitted (or
forbidden) to do the same. It is implausible to respond that B is not in
the same circumstances as A, since he has a stronger will; for someone's
being subject to a moral rule should not depend on whether he is weak-willed or
cowardly. A similar problem would result if p were live (or momentous)
for A but not B.
Because
conditions (1)-(9) purport to give only a sufficient condition, there is
a ready response to the universalizability objection. That B does not
satisfy these conditions does not entail that he is not permitted to believe p;
this would follow only if the conditions together were necessary. He can be
accorded the same moral right to believe p upon insufficient evidence as
is A, only he will not have to exercise this right because of his
stronger character.
Given
that a major concern of this chapter is to see how James's will-to-believe can
justify an epistemically nonwarranted belief in his doctrine of Libertarian
free will, it will be instructive to see how conditions (1)-(9) apply to it.
There are many people for whom it is a genuine option to believe the
proposition that they possess this sort of freedom. Let this be proposition p.
Because of limitations in our powers of mensuration -- we're too big and the
brain events are too small -- it cannot
be epistemically determined whether p is true or p is false,
thereby satisfying (4). Let q be the proposition that we exert our best
moral effort to attend to the idea of the morally good or right alternative in
a case of moral temptation. Certainly, it is desirable that q be true,
thus satisfying (6). There are persons, William James for example, whose
psychological makeup is such that they can believe that q is
epistemically undecidable and yet have their confidence and courage raised by
their belief in p, as (7) requires. By raising their confidence level
they are able to exert themselves in a way that will help to make q
become true, thus satisfying (5), and furthermore know this fact about
themselves, in accordance with the demands of (8’). (9)'s conditions are met
because their belief that p is a rational reason for their acting so as
to make q become true. A good reason for trying to get yourself to
attend to a difficult idea in a moral conflict case is that you have the
Libertarian sort of free will to do it. Believing that they have free will is
both a necessary cause and a rational reason for their attempting to exert
themselves to attend to the idea of the morally right alternative in a case of
moral conflict .
Summation
I
believe that James's reconstructed will-to-believe doctrine in terms of the
jointly sufficient set of conditions (1)-(9) for believing upon insufficient
evidence is a formidable doctrine that deserves our respect if not our
whole-hearted agreement. No doubt, if we put our minds to it, we could think up
additional objections, but there is reason to be optimistic that they can be
met, maybe by adding on some more epicycles. Some, including William James,
might not be happy with so many epicycles. His remark that "The
over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American
universities is appalling" might be directed against my reconstructed
version. (PU 13) If I were to be charged with making a crashing bore out of his
exciting doctrine, my response is that I am not to be blamed because the
universe is so complex. The price that he must pay for having a more defensible
version of the will to believe is that he no longer can neatly fit it into his
typical one hour lecture for a general audience. No more one night stands on
the lecture circuit. He'll have to stick around the visited campus for at least
a few days so he can give a whole series of lectures on the will to believe.
I
hope that I have adequately discharged my duty as a commentator to be both
unsparingly critical and as sympathetic and constructive as possible. James's
doctrine of the will to believe is one of the great contributions to the
history of philosophy, and it has been my intent to show its great importance
and resiliency. I have attempted to show that a slightly revised version of it
is quite plausible, and, moreover marshalable in support of our justification
for believing that we have his sort of contra-causal freedom of will. And, when this is combined with the outcome
of Chapter 2 -- that belief is an action -- we are justified in believing that
2'. Belief is a free action.
And when 2' is combined with James's
casuistic rule
1. We are always morally obligated to
act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over the other options available to
us.
it follows that
3. We are always morally obligated to
believe in a way that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other belief
options available to us.
The next two chapters will explore the
manner in which James utilized 3 in his analysis of belief-acceptance and
truth.