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But I Could Be Wrong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

George Sher
George Sher
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Rice University
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Extract

My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of liberal policies of toleration and restraint, but the relevance of these considerations to individual moral deliberation has received less attention. In Sections II through V, I shall argue that this combination of contingency and controversy poses a serious challenge to the authority of our moral judgments. In Section VI, I shall explore a promising way of responding to this challenge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 64 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2001

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References

1 One work in which the issue is discussed did not come to my attention until after this essay was written; see Cohen, Gerald, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), chap. 1.Google Scholar

2 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 17.Google Scholar

3 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 56–57.Google Scholar

4 As these examples suggest, I take morality to encompass only a set of duties that we owe to others and, by extension, a set of virtues and vices connected to these duties. As so construed, the realm of the moral excludes many forms of value.

5 Although the cases just mentioned all involve actual disagreement, essentially the same problem appears to arise in cases in which no one actually disagrees with me, but I know there is (or could be?) someone who would disagree if given the chance.

6 The point I am making here applies only to the form of skepticism that asserts that our current experiences (or beliefs about them) might have causes that have nothing to do with their truth. Only this form of skepticism has the same abstract structure as our current problem.

7 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), bk. I, sec. 7, p. 269.Google Scholar

8 Although this reasoning is seldom couched in singular terms, its collective counterpart appears to play a substantial role in supporting the cultural relativist's refusal to take sides when his own society's values conflict with those of other societies.

9 The parallel is not exact, but something roughly akin to this appears to happen whenever children are taught history or arithmetic by rote. Although the children are not given any reasons for believing what they are taught (and although they would form different beliefs if given different material to memorize), the reason they are asked to memorize precisely this material is that there in fact are good reasons for accepting it.

10 As was pointed out by several contributors to this volume, the authority of my empirical beliefs faces a challenge analogous to that faced by my moral judgments. As is the case with moral judgments, I disagree with others about various empirical matters, and for (just about) any empirical belief that I reject but someone else accepts, there is some different upbringing and set of experiences that would have caused me to accept that empirical belief.

Because I have taken the fact that a different background would have caused me to weigh the evidence in a way that supports your moral judgment rather than mine to undermine the authority of my own moral judgment, I can hardly deny that the fact that a different background would have caused me to weigh the evidence in a way that supports your empirical belief rather than mine is similarly subversive of the authority of my own empirical belief. However, there are several things worth noting here. First, very few of my actual empirical beliefs are disputed by thoughtful, conscientious people who have simply weighed the evidence differently. Second, when an empirical disagreement is of this nature—when, for example, you and I disagree about what to make of the evidence about the causes of a phenomenon such as intergenerational poverty—considerable diffidence on both sides is indeed in order. It is worth noting, too, that if those with whom I disagree have not merely assessed the shared evidence differently but either lack or are unresponsive to evidence I have—if, for example, they are members of a prescientific society that attributes diseases to spirits rather than microorganisms, or are creationists—then the fact that I would have their beliefs if I had their background does not undermine the authority of my own beliefs. Here I can see that, and why, my own background is the more favored. Taken together, these considerations suggest that the combination of controversy and contingency poses far less of a threat to the authority of my empirical beliefs than it does to the authority of my moral judgments.

11 Race/class/gender theory can be read as an attempt to show that all past reflection on our moral beliefs and habits of judgment has been subverted by a massive error—namely, our ignorance of the fact that those beliefs and habits merely rationalize the power of the privileged. However, even if this claim were true, it would not show that reflection cannot improve matters, since the aim of advancing the claim is precisely to unmask what has previously been hidden.