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It's also preposterous, for at least two reasons.
First, when we do something, we are also asserting that it is the right thing to do -- if we believed that something else was the right thing to do, we would do that thing instead. (This is a slight extension of Socrates' critique of akrasia -- acting against our own better judgment -- which Socrates asserts we are unable to engage in.) In a certain sense, whenever there are two possible courses of action and I select one while someone else selects the other, I am asserting that the other person is in error. (Obviously, this applies only to actions performed with intent. When we trip and fall down by accident, we are not also asserting that others should trip and fall down.)
Now, there's a difference between describing a state ("Yams are starchy tubers") and describing an action ("I destroy yams") because actions carry the implied assertion that acting otherwise is unreasonable or immoral.
I believe it would be an error to regard statements like "I am a Christian" as descriptions of states. There is a fundamental difference between statements like "I am a Christian" or "I am a Democrat" and statements like "I am a man" or "I am a Wisconsinite." When we belong to a group defined by its ideology, we do so with intent. This is why "I am a Zoroastrian" implies that it is wrong to be other than a Zoroastrian.
Now, the position I'm objecting to here is that people are free to have their beliefs as long as they don't criticize others for not holding those same beliefs. The first part of my objection is that we are already criticizing others, simply by virtue of disagreeing with them. But one is not compelled to accept the impossibility of akrasia as a premise, as I have done, or to accept that the implicit criticism is as significant as explicit criticism (stating aloud that "If you have sex with your boyfriend, you'll go to hell," etc.) as I have also done.
So, secondly, it's important to remember that what we're talking about here are beliefs about how one ought to act. But of course, we don't act in a vacuum -- we act in response to or as a result of states of affairs ("Yams are gross, so I will destroy them"), other actions ("Yams killed my father, so I will destroy them"), and the beliefs that we hold ("Yams are evil, so I will destroy them"). And, of course, the beliefs that we hold aren't just about objects in the world, but also about actions ("It is immoral to beat your kids").
It turns out that we hold lots of beliefs about how one ought to act as a result of our beliefs ("We must bear witness to the greatness of our Lord and Savior").
This is why it is impossible to suggest that a person should A) hold their beliefs, and B) be silent about their beliefs -- because some or many of their beliefs involve the call to speech. Personally, I get on people's nerves a lot because I just keep arguing -- but I am driven by the belief that to do otherwise, to allow someone to continue to be wrong, would be immoral on my part. Similarly, the adherents of many religions are required to proselytize or outwardly express their positions.
And here's some food for thought: the belief that "You can believe what you want, just don't push it on others" is an example of a belief about how one should act as a result of one's beliefs. It happens to be a very popular one, these days (that is, it's one that we love to push on people).
Telling people who disagree with you that they can think what they want as long as they're quiet about it is, at worst, profoundly hypocritical. At best, it is a stumbling into the Cretan paradox or pseudomenon: an assertion that undermines its own validity.
This has been running through my head ever since you mentioned you'd write a blog post about it. The arguments are more or less the same, the difference being that you're obviously more logical and coherent than I could ever be.
ReplyDeleteI sent most of this to Peter directly, but I'll post it here as well to add to the conversation.
ReplyDeleteOverall I'm in agreement with your assertion about "a belief about how one should act as a result of one's beliefs." We make judgments all the time, and the negative value judgment put on judgments is hilarious or annoying depending on the day.
What I wonder about is the assertion that making a judgment necessarily implies that you think the other person's judgment is wrong. For it to be so would mean that the person making the judgment is convinced that they have all the correct information to make the correct judgment. I tend to think of a judgment as individual and not universal. Of course I also tend to think that people operate in various frameworks of understanding. The conservative Christian roommate is asserting not only that your friend should modify her behavior, but also that she should adopt this particular Christian framework as a way of evaluating and making judgments. It's more than just "You're wrong." It's "You're wrong because your worldview is wrong." (Now, I could go off on a tangent here about how Christians should proselytize using the latter, not the former, but I'm sure you could fill that in yourself.) The judgment the roommate is making is framework dependent, so to try and convince someone that they are correct they'd have to convince them that their framework is correct.
Another important issue is that someone saying "Your behavior is wrong" is not the same as saying "You are a bad/unworthy/negative-adjective-of-choice person." I think people miss that fact. There was a recent explosion among some of my friends recently over someone saying "I think fanfic about real people is wrong." People heard that as an attack on them because they liked fanfic about real people, and it wasn't. It was an ethical judgment from one person that fit her frameworks of understanding. I think the people who say "You can have your beliefs, just don't push them," often mean, "Expressing your beliefs is an attack on me and my beliefs." Those things just are not the same thing.
I know this isn't terribly linear, and my worldview is, I suspect, more postmodern influenced than yours, but those are my thoughts as I try to pull my brain into the land of the living.
From Quine's Quiddities:
ReplyDelete"Loath though one is to kick a concept when it is down, it would be wasteful to pass over a curious and well-known paradox in which the concept of belief is enmeshed. To believe something is to believe that it is true; therefore a reasonable person believes each of his beliefs to be true; yet experience has taught him to expect that some of his beliefs, he knows not which, will turn out to be false. A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false. I, for one, had expected better of reasonable persons."
Belief, whether it is an act as I think it is or a disposition as Quine thinks it is, is already a heavily problematized notion. Regardless of what one understands belief to be, it seems difficult to come up with a notion of belief that does not include that contradictory beliefs are false.
Nietzsche does just that, but he does it by adopting a framework in which things like ethics, knowledge, and beauty belong solely to the individual. Our problem is that we'd like to have something a little more general, something that allows us to communicate with each other.
Of course, it's also difficult to see how one might convince someone else to accept a new framework. If the frameworks give rise to significantly beliefs, they are effectively incommensurable; so for someone to "switch sides," as it were, would require them to just believe.
I definitely agree with you that "Your behavior is wrong" and "You are a bad person" are very different things. The problem is that in our culture, in our framework, we are never properly taught that there's a difference between "I think you're wrong" and "I think you're stupid." And this is a problem in both directions: neither the person making the judgment nor the person whose behavior is being judged knows to differentiate between an indictment of the behavior and an indictment of the person.
To assert that one action is reasonable or moral is not to assert that each other action is irrational or immoral, only the ones that come into conflict with it.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, more often that not, being a Christian is not something that's done with intent. It's something they've been given, and by no means strictly voluntary, so it's only somewhat true that the actions and beliefs that result are intentional.
As for the paradox/hypocrisy, the assertion "You can believe what you want, just don't push it on others" is only said when the pushing is in some way hostile or harmful. I think saying "leave me alone" is sufficiently different from attacking someone's moral integrity that it escapes hypocrisy.
A) Right: when I choose one thing rather than another, I'm asserting that to have done otherwise would have been wrong. That I have to choose between these things --that they are mutually exclusive -- is testament to the fact that they conflict with each other.
ReplyDeleteB) My personal feeling is that people who approach being Christian (or whatever religion or ideology) as they would being a Wisconsinite -- as something accidental, something that just happens and doesn't require or admit of any input from them -- are, in a word, wrong. We all inherit a world, but we are nevertheless responsible for and involved in the way we shape it and ourselves.
C) My objection is not to those who say, "Leave me alone." It's to those who say, "You can have your beliefs as long as you don't express them." And that, in itself, seems to me to be both hostile and harmful.
C) No one's suggesting they keep their beliefs entirely secret, only that they not express them when it's a judgment on their character or otherwise somehow offensive. So it's equivalent to "Leave me alone" or "Don't express your contrary beliefs to me", not "Don't express your beliefs at all".
ReplyDeleteThat works, as long as you understand beliefs as being discrete entities. I think it makes more sense to approach beliefs as intrinsic parts of systems or ideologies, entailed by and entailing them. You're free to reject basic premises, of course, but that leaves you with a different discourse -- rejecting the idea of parallel lines still leaves you with a geometry, but it's one incommensurable with the Euclidian stuff we're used to.
ReplyDeleteAll that aside, the hypocrisy is ultimately in that the imperative, "Don't judge me, don't tell me you think what I'm doing is wrong" is itself an indictment of the other's words and actions -- a judgment and an assertion that the other is in error.
We don't have a different understanding of what a belief is, we disagree on what is meant by "You can have your beliefs, just don't push them on me". It's equivalent to "leave me alone". As such, it's an assertion that the person is acting wrongly by judging them [i]explicitly[/i], so it's only hypocritical if they say it out loud.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the case from which I began, it was being stated explicitly (to a third party).
ReplyDeleteI also don't feel like explicitness is necessary for it to be hypocritical. It is hypocritical to have the expectation that you will not be judged, coupled with the knowledge that you will judge anyone for violating that expectation.
I'm intellectually lazy, but I tend to think that talking about irrational belief systems (religion) in rational ways is a little bit nonsensical. Yes, I know the discussion still stands if you substitute (logic based belief system) for every reference to religion/Christianity, but it would also deflate my dig. I also like yams.
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