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Thesis Holding firm on religion and ethics while deferring on arithmetic is a failure of nerve

Ethan Mercer Contributor
· 6 replies · 314 views
Disagreement & expertiseAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticJewishAdam ElgaThomas Kelly#conciliationism#moral-disagreement#religious-disagreement#steadfastness
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Where it stands

Most people are conciliationists about arithmetic. If an equally competent friend gets a different answer to a sum, you check, and until you do, you are less confident. Almost nobody is a conciliationist about religion, ethics or politics. We know perfectly well that thoughtful, informed people disagree with us, and we hold firm anyway.

My thesis is that this asymmetry is mostly indefensible. If the bare fact of peer disagreement is evidence that you might be wrong when the topic is a restaurant bill, it is at least as strong when the topic is something harder. Harder topics should make us less confident, not more.

I know the two standard defences. First, arithmetic has an agreed method and a checkable answer, so disagreement signals error; contested domains have no such method, so disagreement signals less. Second, in contested domains you often have reason to doubt the other person is really your peer, because you have experiences or evidence they lack.

The first defence seems backwards to me: no agreed method means more room for error, not less. The second is available to everyone, always. Every single person in a disagreement can say "but I have experience they lack". A defence that anyone can use to never update is not a defence; it is an exit.

I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, so I'm used to being outnumbered. Make the case for steadfastness.

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6 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Dawit Gebremedhin

    For Fellow

    For, partly, from Gondar. The Hatata, the Ge'ez treatise attributed to Zera Yacob, has a well-known passage in which the author observes that people of different faiths each insist that theirs is the true one, that they cannot all be right, and that he must therefore examine them by reason. That is your argument, made in the seventeenth century, if the text is from the seventeenth century: some scholars argue it was written in the nineteenth by an Italian Capuchin, Giusto d'Urbino, others defend the traditional attribution, and I will not pretend it is settled.

    Either way, notice where the author ends: not in suspended belief but in his own reasoned faith in a Creator. Disagreement sent him to examine, not to split the difference.

    Helpful · 1

Against the thesis 3

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Against Fellow

    Against. I'm Catholic, and I take disagreement seriously; I'm in a philosophy and theology programme because of it. But I don't think my faith is a credence I computed from evidence that my peers also have. Part of it rests on experiences of prayer, on a life lived inside a tradition, on things that are hard to transmit. Thomas Kelly's total evidence view lets me count that. It doesn't let me ignore you. It does mean "move halfway" assumes we share all the evidence, and in religion we usually don't.

    1. Ethan Mercer

      Contributor

      Aoife, that's the most honest version of the second defence, and I respect it. But the person across from you, in a different tradition, has prayer and a life inside her tradition too. If your private evidence licenses you to hold firm, hers does too. So the two of you end up equally steadfast with equal justification, which is exactly the situation in which, about arithmetic, you would both be unsure.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Rabbi Eliana Gutman

    Against Fellow

    Against, from a tradition that has thought about this for two thousand years. The Talmud records the disputes between the schools of Hillel and Shammai and has a heavenly voice declare that both are the words of the living God, while the law follows Hillel. That isn't conciliationism: nobody split the difference. It isn't stubbornness either: the losing view is preserved and studied. It is a third option, holding firm in practice while keeping the other view alive as a serious possibility. I think that is what mature disagreement about deep things looks like.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Kwame Asante

    Against Fellow

    Against, with a technical point. Conciliationism faces a self-undermining problem: philosophers disagree about conciliationism itself. If the view is right, its own defenders should become less confident in it whenever a peer rejects it, which many do. Elga has a paper on exactly this and has to make conciliationism an exception to itself. A principle that must exempt itself from its own rule should make us wary of applying it everywhere else.

Other replies

  1. Ethan Mercer

    Contributor

    This has been the best pushback I've had. I'll revise. Kwame's self-undermining point is real, and Eliana's third option is more interesting than either side of the textbook debate: hold firm in action, hold loosely in belief, preserve the other view. Where I still stand: the "experience they lack" defence can't be used without granting it to the other side, so whatever we do, it can't justify confidence. Steadfast action, maybe; steadfast certainty, no.

    Helpful · 1