The Case For Moral Doubt
When you find yourself in a moral stalemate, where appeals to rationality and empirical reality have been exhausted.
I donât know if there is any truth in morality that is comparable to other truths. But I do know that if moral truth exists, establishing it at the at the most fundamental level is hard to do.
Especially in the context of passionate moral disagreement, itâs difficult to tell whose basic moral values are the right ones. Itâs an even greater challenge verifying that you yourself are the more virtuous. When you find yourself in a moral stalemate, where appeals to rationality and empirical reality have been exhausted, you have nothing left to stand on but your deeply-ingrained values and a profound sense of your own righteousness.
You have a few options at this point. You can defiantly insist that youâre the one with the truth â that youâre right and the other person is stupid, morally perverse, or even evil. Or you can retreat to some form of nihilism or relativism because the apparent insolubility of the conflict must mean moral truth canât exist. This wouldnât be psychologically satisfying, though. If your moral conviction is strong enough to lead you into an impassioned conflict, you probably wouldnât be so willing to send it off into the ether. Why would you be comfortable slipping from intense moral certainty to meta-level amorality?
Youâd be better off acknowledging the impasse for what it is â a conflict over competing values that youâre not likely to settle. You can agree to disagree. No animosity. No judgment. You both have dug your heels in, but youâre no longer trying to drive each other back. You canât convince him that youâre right, and he canât convince you, but you can at least be cordial.
But I think there is an even better approach. You can loosen your heelsâ grip in the dirt and allow yourself to be pushed back. Doubt yourself, at least a little. Take a lesson from the physicist Richard Feynman and embrace uncertainty:
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think itâs much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things. But Iâm not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I donât know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why weâre here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit; if I canât figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I donât have to know an answer. I donât feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell â possibly. It doesnât frighten me.
If Feynman can be so open to doubt about empirical matters, then why is it so hard to doubt our moral beliefs? Or, to put it another way, why does uncertainty about how the world is come easier than uncertainty about how the world, from an objective stance, ought to be.
Sure, the nature of moral belief is such that its contents seem self-evident to the believer. But when you think about why you hold certain beliefs, and when you consider what it would take to prove them objectively correct, they donât seem so obvious.
Morality is complex and moral truth is elusive, so our moral beliefs are, to use Feynmanâs phrase, just the âapproximate answersâ to moral questions. We hold them with varying degrees of certainty. Weâre ambivalent about some, pretty sure about others, and very confident about others. For none of them are we absolutely certain â or at least we shouldnât be.
While Iâm trying only to persuade you to be more skeptical about your own moral beliefs, you might be tempted by the more global forms of moral skepticism that deny the existence of moral truth or the possibility of moral knowledge. Fair enough, but what Iâve written so far isnât enough to validate such a stance. The inability to reach moral agreement doesnât imply that there is no moral truth. Scientists disagree about many things, but they donât throw their hands up and infer that no one is correct, that there is no truth. Rather, theyâre confident truth exists. And they leverage their localized skepticism â their doubt about their own beliefs and those of others â to get closer to it.
Holly Lawford-Smith
The moral sphere is different to the scientific sphere, and doubting oneâs moral beliefs isnât necessarily valuable because it eventually leads one closer to the truth â at least to the extent that truth is construed as being in accordance with facts. This type of truth is, in principle, more easily discoverable in science than it is in morality. But there is a more basic reason that grounds the importance of doubt in both the moral and scientific spheres: it fosters an openness to alternatives.
Embrace this notion. It doesnât have to mean acknowledging that you donât know and then moving on to something else. And it doesnât mean abandoning your moral convictions outright or being paralyzed by self-doubt. It means abandoning your absolute certainty and treating your convictions as tentative. It means making your case but recognizing that you have no greater access to the ultimate moral truth than anyone else. Be open to the possibility that youâre wrong and that your beliefs are the ones requiring modification. Allow yourself to feel the intuitive pull of the competing moral value.
Thereâs a view out there that clinging unwaveringly to oneâs moral values is courageous and, therefore, virtuous. Thereâs some truth to this idea. Sticking up for what one believes in is usually worthy of respect. But moral rigidity â the refusal to budge at all â is where public moral discourse breaks down. It is the root of the fragmentation and polarization that defines contemporary public life.
Some people have been looking for ways to improve the ecosystem of moral discourse. In a study, Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg1 demonstrated that when you reframe arguments to appeal to political opponentsâ own moral values, youâre more likely to persuade them than if you make arguments based on your own values. âEven if the arguments that you wind up making arenât those that you would find most appealing,â they wrote in The New York Times, âyou will have dignified the morality of your political rivals with your attention, which, if you think about it, is the least that we owe our fellow citizens.â
Affirming your opponentâs values is indeed worthy. But if there is a normative justification for utilizing Willer and Feinbergâs antidote to entrenched moral disagreement, it seems to be the presumption that you, the persuader, are the righteous one and just need a salesmanâs touch to bring the confused over to your side. Attempting to persuade others is inherent to moral discourse, but thereâs something cynical and arrogant about using their own moral values against them, especially when you donât hold those values yourself. Focusing solely on how to be the most persuasive also ignores another objective of moral discourse â being persuaded.
And the first step to being persuaded is doubting yourself.
Reference
1 Feinberg, Matthew; Willer, Robb (2015). âFrom Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influenceâ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Oct;41(12): 1-17.
