Latest news with #WesternPhilosophy
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Can you choose to believe something, just like that?
Some years ago, I was in a lively conversation with a software developer about arguments for and against God's existence. After discussing their merits and shortcomings, he paused – perhaps a little impatiently – and said, 'You know, these arguments really don't matter that much. I choose to believe in God. Believing is so valuable for my life.' But is that how belief works – can you simply choose to believe? People can, of course, choose to read certain sources, spend time with certain groups, or reflect on a certain matter – all of which influence their beliefs. But all of these choices involve evidence of some kind. We often choose which evidence to expose ourselves to, but the evidence itself seems to be in the driver's seat in causing beliefs. For much of the past 2,000 years, philosophers would have been perfectly comfortable with the software developer's claim that belief is a matter of choice. A long line of distinguished thinkers – from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and Saint Augustine of Hippo to French rationalist René Descartes and early feminist Mary Astell have held that people can exercise at least some control over their beliefs. Over the past half-century, however, 'doxastic voluntarism' – the idea that belief is under the control of the will – has been widely rejected. Most current philosophers don't think people can immediately believe something 'just like that,' simply because they want to. What beliefs someone ends up having are determined by the people and environments they are exposed to – from beliefs about a deity to beliefs about the solar system. As a philosophy professor myself, I've dedicated years of reflection to this issue. I've come to think both camps get something right. Some philosophers think that the nature of belief itself ensures that people cannot just choose what to believe. They argue that beliefs have a 'truth-aim' built into them: that is, beliefs characteristically represent reality. And sadly, reality often does not obey our wishes and desires; we cannot just decide to think reality is a certain way. No matter how much I may want to be 6 feet, 8 inches tall, reality will faithfully imprint it upon my consciousness that I am 5'11" every time I glance in the mirror or make an appearance on the basketball court. Were I to resolve to believe that I am 6'8", I would quickly find that such resolutions are wholly ineffective. Or consider another example. If belief were truly voluntary, I would gladly relinquish my belief that climate change is afoot – imagine how less worried I'd be. But I cannot. The evidence, along with the widespread agreement among scientific authorities, has indelibly impressed upon my mind that climate change is part of reality. Regardless of whether I want to believe or not believe, bare desire isn't enough to make it happen. Beliefs seem largely outside of our direct control. But if that's true, some rather alarming consequences seem to follow. It seems we had better stop blaming people for their beliefs, no matter how far-fetched. Suppose I believe a dangerous falsehood: that Bill Gates used the COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips in people, or that climate change is a hoax, or that the Holocaust is an elaborate fabrication. If belief is involuntary, it looks as though I am innocent of any wrongdoing. These beliefs just happened to me, so to speak. If beliefs are not voluntary, then they seem the spontaneous result of my being exposed to certain influences and ideas – including, in this case, conspiracy theory chat forums. Now, people can choose what influences they allow into their lives – to some extent. I can decide where to gather information about climate trends: a chat forum, the mainstream media, or the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I can decide how much to reflect on what such sources tell me, along with their motivations. Almost all contemporary philosophers think that people can exert this type of voluntary control over their beliefs. But does that mean I am responsible for the beliefs I arrive at? Not necessarily. After all, which sources we decide to consult, and how we evaluate them, can also be shaped by our preexisting beliefs. I am not going to trust the U.N. climate panel's latest report if, say, I believe it is a part of a global conspiracy to curtail free markets – especially not if I had many similar beliefs drummed into me since childhood. It gets difficult to see how individuals could have any meaningful freedom over their beliefs, or any meaningful responsibility. Research has led me to think that things are a bit less grim – and a bit less black and white. Philosopher Elizabeth Jackson and I recently carried out a study, not yet published, involving more than 300 participants. We gave them brief summaries of several scenarios where it was unclear whether an individual had committed a crime. The evidence was ambiguous, but we asked participants whether they could choose to believe the individual was innocent 'just like that,' without having to gather evidence or think critically. Many people in the study said that they could do exactly this. It's possible they were mistaken. Still, several recent studies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology suggest people can control some of their beliefs, especially in situations where the evidence is ambiguous. And that describes many of the most important propositions people are forced to consider, from politics and careers to romance: Who is the best candidate? Which path should I pursue? Is she the one? So, it looks like we have some reason to think people are able to directly control their beliefs, after all. And if the evidence for God is similarly ambiguous, perhaps my software developer was right that he could decide to believe. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Mark Boespflug, Fort Lewis College Read more: What is love? A philosopher explains it's not a choice or a feeling − it's a practice Lincoln called for divided Americans to heed their 'better angels,' and politicians have invoked him ever since in crises − but for Abe, it was more than words Stoicism and spirituality: A philosopher explains how more Americans' search for meaning is turning them toward the classics Mark Boespflug receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation.
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Alasdair MacIntyre obituary
In 1981, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has died aged 96, tore up the work he was then writing on ethics, and produced what became his best known book, After Virtue. In it, he excoriated current moral philosophy and, indeed, current morality itself, complaining that morality has been cut off from its roots in tradition, and, 'largely thanks to the Enlightenment project', has ceased to be coherent. No longer anchored in the Aristotelian notion that humans have a goal and function, or offering an account of how these are to be fulfilled, it divorces values from facts. Although calling a person, practice or action 'good' or 'bad' seemingly appeals to 'an objective and impersonal standard', said MacIntyre, there is none available. As he had already lamented in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis have failed to provide an adequate communal ideology. Describing himself as 'a revolutionary Aristotelian', he was also an enthusiast for the ethics of Aristotle's medieval follower, Thomas Aquinas. 'Forward to the 13th century,' was the motto jokingly attributed to him. But by reviving the sort of ethics that identifies 'the good' with human flourishing, MacIntyre aimed to lead us out of 'the new dark ages', presumably into a better future. He influenced the resurgence of virtue ethics and communitarianism (he denied espousing either), and the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment. Remarkable for the number of conflicting beliefs that he could, often simultaneously, embrace, he was both Protestant and Marxist in the 1960s, then rejected both creeds, and, in the 80s, became a Catholic; but he always retained his Marxist disgust at capitalism and at the alienation of modernity. MacIntyre was 52 when he wrote After Virtue. In A Short History of Ethics (1966), he he had already berated contemporary analytic philosophy for examining and interpreting moral concepts 'apart from their history', and portrayed how 'moral concepts change as social life changes' – from the Homeric era when to be agathos (the ideal for well-born men) was to be kingly, courageous and clever; through Aristotelian and Christian virtues, which also attuned ethics to an (albeit different) notion of essential human nature; through the Enlightenment's uprooting insistence on autonomous reason; to 20th-century emotivism, which makes ethics merely an expression of personal preference. In the late 70s, MacIntyre read the physicist Thomas Kuhn, who regarded scientific change as a series of 'paradigm shifts' rather than a line of progress, and this gave him, if not a Damascene conversion, then a clinching certainty as to what was so grotesque about 20th-century morality: rather than being settled in a particular ethical paradigm, we operate simultaneously or alternately with several incommensurable moral traditions. 'Imagine,' runs the opening of After Virtue, 'that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe', that science and science teaching have been deliberately abolished, and only charred pages, disconnected scientific terms and meaningless incantations remain. This, said MacIntyre, is our current moral situation. Like the 18th-century Polynesians who talked of 'taboos' to Captain Cook but were unable to say what they meant by that term, all we have are 'the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived'. This is why we regard moral argument as 'necessarily interminable'; we do not even expect to reach consensus. Should we prioritise human rights and/or the general happiness, individual choice and/or the general will, hedonism and will-to-power and/or compassion and self-abnegation? Aristotle's ethics in the 4th century BC had assumed that humans have a telos (function) as rational animals, said MacIntyre. Theistic beliefs – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – complicated, without essentially altering, the three-fold ethical scheme: designed to move us from 'human-nature-as-it-happens-to be' via moral education and moral principles to 'human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos'. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, however, in aiming to liberate us from superstition and authority, and to find a purely rational basis for ethics, had stripped the self of social identity and values of any claim to factual status. Thus morality became a set of inordinate commands and, ultimately, mere 'private arbitrariness'. The unembedded self – essentially 'nothing' – is now obliged to choose its own values. Admittedly, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism aimed to ground ethics in the 'natural' desire to avoid suffering and maximise pleasure. But 'human happiness is not a unitary simple notion', said MacIntyre, and John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures only highlighted utilitarianism's failure to 'provide us with a criterion for making our key choices'. MacIntyre was advocating a revised Aristotelianism in which morality is, once again, not a set of abstract, autonomously selected principles but a social narrative into which our own personal narrative fits. Bernard Williams, however, called After Virtue 'a brilliant nostalgic fantasy', arguing that the socially distinct moral self, rather than being a product of the Enlightenment, was already present in Plato and Christianity. MacIntyre's subsequent books constituted, it was said, An Interminably Long History of Ethics, and he himself quoted this with rueful amusement. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) reiterated that analytic philosophers purport to present 'the timeless form of practical reasoning', while actually just 'representing the form of practical reason specific to their own liberal individualist culture'. It is impossible, argued MacIntyre, to adopt a moral position except from within a particular tradition. This, since he offers no way of arbitrating between them, would seem to oblige him to say that any tradition would be as good as any other, and he has been accused of being a moral relativist. However, he said that competing traditions share some standards, so that anyone is able to apprehend problems in their own tradition and adopt rationally superior solutions from another, as Aquinas did in integrating Aristotelianism into Augustine's theology, ultimately becoming a better Aristotelian than Aristotle himself. MacIntyre converted to Thomism and Catholicism, attending mass virtually every day, but refraining from taking communion on account of having been divorced. Having refused to accept a concept of human nature independent of history, and of particular practices and traditions, MacIntyre ultimately extended his metaphysical grounding to include, in Dependent Rational Animals (1999), a biological one. He pointed out how the ethics of Aristotle, and later of Adam Smith, David Hume and other Enlightenment philosophers, failed to acknowledge the inevitability of suffering and dependence in human life. Their notion of the human was, at least implicitly, a healthy male; they effectively overlooked women, enslaved people, peasants and non-Europeans. MacIntyre advocated a more inclusive idea of what it is to be human, and an acknowledgment of 'our resemblances to and commonality with members of some other intelligent animal species'; dolphins, he insisted, being closely akin. Neither the modern nation-state nor the modern family, he argued, can provide the right sort of political and social association. What would? MacIntyre sometimes alluded to the cohesive aims of tiny fishing communities and gestured at the desirability of many small utopias. He undertook a three-year research project at London Metropolitan University into whether and in what ways Aquinas's 'conception of the common good of political societies might find application in the politics of modern societies' – the result of which was his last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). Born in Glasgow, Alasdair was the son of Eneas MacIntyre and his wife, Margaret (nee Chalmers), both Scottish doctors of Irish descent. Although brought up in London and educated at Epsom college, Surrey, he was proud of his grounding in the Irish-Scottish Gaelic oral tradition. While he was studying classics at Queen Mary College, University of London (1945-49), the surrounding poverty of the East End led him to become a fervent Marxist. His first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953), demanded a Marxist renewal of Christianity. Republished in a revised edition as Marxism and Christianity, it was sympathetic and sceptical about both. Even before the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he had left the Communist party, subsequently joining the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist group led by the notorious Gerry Healy. He was in frequent debate with the Marxist historian EP Thompson, who used to stick notes on the windscreen of MacIntyre's car urging him to publish his thoughts on socialist consciousness. After gaining an MA at Manchester University (1951), where he then taught the philosophy of religion, MacIntyre lectured in philosophy at Leeds University (1957-61), was a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1961-62), senior fellow at Princeton (1962-63), fellow of University College, Oxford (1963-66), and professor of sociology at Essex University (1966-70). As dean of students there he opposed the student unrest over the summary expulsion of three students who had shouted down a speaker from Porton Down (the research site for chemical and biological warfare). 'Ironically, [the university's] mistake was to be so liberal,' he said; and declared that it was because the students had 'no real practical injustices to fight against' that they 'had to rebel on ideological grounds like germ warfare and Vietnam which we were powerless to alter'. His attitude was considered disingenuous by some (after all, the university need not have invited the Porton Down speaker); to others, it was part of his characteristically contradictory and fastidiously tailored integrity. Partly due to these ructions, he moved to the US to become professor of history of ideas at Brandeis University (1970-72). He later held professorships at Boston, Vanderbilt and Duke universities, and finally at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1988-94 and 2000-10, then emeritus). MacIntyre disdained the class associations of Oxbridge, and loved his involvement with London Metropolitan, where he held a post from 2010 onwards. Before speaking at a conference there in 2007, he was handed pamphlets about a students' strike over a lecturer's contract, and he prefaced his paper with an impromptu diatribe in support of trades unions and workers' rights. The first to raise his hand after MacIntyre's paper was the Socialist Worker party leader Alex Callinicos, who accused him of not being a proper revolutionary. MacIntyre replied that he didn't know how to make a revolution, but it was clear that Callinicos didn't either. He is survived by his third wife, Lynn Sumida Joy, and by two daughters from his first marriage, to Anne Peri, and a son and a daughter from his second marriage, to Susan Willans. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre, philosopher, born 12 January 1929; died 22 May 2025
