When Does Believing False Things Make You Bad?

Epistemic status: confused

1

Lots of Christians think that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you go to hell. You have to do more than just believe in him—you have to be broadly on team Jesus, for “even the demons believe.” But unless you’re in one of those obscure African villages where you’ve never heard of Jesus, if you go to your deathbed not believing in Jesus, then it’s off to the lake of fire for you!

Here’s one common rejoinder that seems right: you don’t choose what you believe. If this is so, what you deserve can’t depend on what you believe. For you to be culpable for something, you have to choose it, but you don’t choose not to be a Christian. This certainly sounds plausible at first—but it conflicts with many other widely held beliefs.

Suppose that one held the view that minorities should be killed. They didn’t think that killing minorities was contrary to the moral law—quite the opposite. While they had no plans to kill minorities they had, much to their shock, after thinking carefully about the question, come to conclude that minorities should be killed. Most of us—myself included—would judge this person as culpable. So it can’t just be that a person is never culpable for wrong beliefs.

Here’s a plausible first pass at an answer to this puzzle: what matters isn’t the beliefs themselves but what they signal about your character. If you’re the kind of person who thinks minorities should die, you have ugly, regressive attitudes, and these make you a jerk. On this view, having wrong beliefs can either be bad if it inclines you to do bad things or if it signals that you’re a bad person. The belief that minorities should die seems to be both of those!

This account seems initially plausible but it has some uncomfortable implications (one of which we’ll see in the next section). We can easily gerrymander scenarios where all sorts of horrible beliefs don’t result in bad conduct and are a relatively isolated part of one’s web of beliefs. For example, suppose a person thinks that Jewish people prior to 1950 did not have souls, and as a result had no consciousness. Thus, the holocaust wasn’t bad at all because the victims were basically philosophical zombies. Such a view, we can imagine, would not affect how they treat modern Jews—for they think Jews gained souls in 1950. Thus, it’s hard to see how this could result in any bad actions against modern Jews. We can additionally imagine that this is a sincerely held belief and that they have no other beliefs we’d consider antisemitic. A lot of people would be inclined to judge this person. But it’s hard to see how this account would make sense of doing so.

A second worrisome implication is that this can’t rule out the Christian claim that people deserve to suffer for not believing in God. A Christian could similarly argue that those who don’t believe in God have a very bad belief. Their belief results in them not having a relationship with the perfect all-loving creator of the universe who died for them. If one is culpable for racist beliefs because those beliefs result in them taking bad actions, and failure to worship God is a very bad action, wouldn’t people be similarly culpable.

Perhaps to be blameworthy the belief has to be unjustified. Maybe what differentiates the racist from the non-Christian is that the racist is unjustified in their beliefs. But we can imagine that Christians are similarly unjustified. Even if it turns out that most non-Christians don’t adequately investigate the topic and that the historical evidence for Christ’s resurrection is mind-blowingly good, it still seems like non-Christians wouldn’t be significantly culpable. Maybe they’d be a bit culpable, but surely a lot less culpable than the racist. This seems so even if we imagine that a relationship with Jesus is of inestimable positive value.

2

What’s so bad about holocaust deniers?

I think they’re wrong, of course. But lots of people are wrong, and yet holocaust deniers are regarded as uniquely evil. Now sure, most people who deny the holocaust do so because they’re cartoonishly antisemitic, but, well, imagine that a person denied the holocaust just because, after looking at the evidence, they thought it didn’t support that the holocaust had happened. Such a person would be in gross error, but would they be evil?

The An Lushan rebellion in China killed about 13 million people. That’s a lot. But if a person denied this—thinking, for instance, that only a few hundred thousand people had been killed, on the grounds that the Chinese didn’t have enough swords to kill that many people in such a short time and that the swords werenm’t sufficiently bloodstained, and the swords that were bloodstained were used for delousing—they wouldn’t be evil. So it can’t just be that anytime a person denies that a lot of people died, they’re evil.

Perhaps the idea is that holocaust denial is bad because it signals that you’re antisemitic. Holocaust denial is bad in that it shows that you’re a bad person. But I don’t think this can be the full explanation—at least, if we want to preserve our intuitions. To see this, consider two otherwise identical antisemites, one of whom denies the holocaust, the other of whom thinks it happened. Assume they have the same sentiments towards Jews. I think a lot of people would think worse of the one who denies it. But in this case, we’ve stipulated that they have equally antisemitic attitudes.

Consider another case: imagine a non-anti-Semitic holocaust denier. This person loves Jews—maybe he’s even a Jew himself. But he just doesn’t think the holocaust happened. He doesn’t think there was any nefarious Jewish plot, just that historians badly bungled the numbers, so that the real number of people killed was closer to 100,000. Such a person would, of course, be wrong, but would this be a moral failing? Commonsense would seem to say yes: but then it’s hard to see, upon reflection, why they would be.

Notably, there is a big class of holocaust deniers that we don’t generally think is worthy of condemnation. Various people are skeptics about the external world: they think they’re brains in vats or something. We don’t think that such a view is evil, even though if the external world isn’t real, the holocaust didn’t happen. Perhaps this account can make sense of it—if holocaust denial is bad simply because it gives evidence that a person is anti-semitic, then this would explain why those who deny it for skeptical philosophical reasons related to denying the external world aren’t worthy of condemnation.

This account seems the most plausible overall. But it implies that there are many non-blame-worthy holocaust deniers. That’s a weird and uncomfortable implication that many wouldn’t want to stomach. It implies that if a non-anti-semite just considers the holocaust evidence and concludes that a revisionist position is right, then they wouldn’t be very blameworthy, while a non-Christian might be.

Thinking hard about this takes us to some uncomfortable places.

3

How bad are meat eaters?

Most people—even those who think that meat-eating is super wrong—don’t think the average meat-eater is especially culpable. Forgive them, for they know not what they do! But suppose we accept the earlier account, according to which one can be culpably ignorant if their ignorance is the kind of thing that’s irrational and leads to bad actions or signals something bad about one’s character. Well then it seems that meat eaters are pretty blameworthy.

Most people form their beliefs about meat eating in a flagrantly irrational way. Most give the topic fewer than five minutes of thought, before coming to ridiculously confident conclusions that they never reexamine. They do this even though lots of smart people, including many professional philosophers, argue that eating meat is the worst thing an ordinary person does by many orders of magnitude (and they’re right!)

If one is majorly culpable for having irrational beliefs that lead them to do bad things, then the average meat eater—even one who hasn’t thought much about the topic—is very blameworthy. They’re especially blameworthy because their false beliefs cause them to do such terrible things—like eating meat!

Still, something about this doesn’t seem right. We don’t normally think that nice old ladies who eat meat are very culpable, even if they act immorally by eating meat. Doing the wrong thing doesn’t necessarily make a person culpable.

Maybe this is just because our intuitions fail to track the severe wrongness of meat eating. We think that if a little old lazy was complicit in slavery, for instance, she’d be very blameworthy, even if she had been inculcated to think it was fine. So if meat-eating is as wrong as other super wrong things, then people who do it are very blameworthy.

4

I think all of this is kind of made up.

I don’t believe that people deserve things. I think that people are these vast mixes of good and evil—capable of both immense love and of grotesque evil. There are people who began their mornings by lovingly kissing their children, before going to work as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. Humans are not neatly divided into good and evil, but instead the line between evil and good runs through every human heart.

I don’t really think there’s a fact of the matter about which beliefs make you blameworthy. There are certain beliefs that are unfortunate to hold, certain beliefs that are irrational, and some that lead to immense destruction, but I don’t think there’s a precise method for determining if some belief makes you bad.

When things aren’t real, it’s easy to have a thousand-mile-up view of them. You can have a vague sense of which things make you bad if you don’t look too carefully at the details. But when one has to make precise such claims, they begin to implode, the entire edifice of precise judgments of praise and blame starts to unravel.

If you believe in desert, probably the best way to go is to accept the account that I gave before, that it’s bad to have beliefs if they incline to act wrongly or signal something about your character and are irrationally formed. Someone with that view should probably just bite the bullets—that a non-anti-Semitic holocaust denier wouldn’t be blameworthy at all, that irrationally rejecting Jesus could make one worthy of blame (though it certainly wouldn’t merit infinite punishment), and that the average meat-eater is very blameworthy.

Most people will reject these judgments. But I think they’ll do so for irrational reasons. Our intuitions running contrary to this come from social pressures, not genuine moral insight. Our moral intuitions are often overinclusive—concluding that because nearly every member of some category is bad, a particular member must be bad, even if it lacks the things that make the others bad.

This is, as I say, the best way to go if one believes in desert. But I think rejecting desert is more plausible. I don’t think one can be blameworthy for things they don’t choose, and one doesn’t choose their beliefs. But once we conclude that no sincere believer is blameworthy, we’ll have given up many of our most strongly-held desert-related intuitions.

I don’t think there are comprehensive judgments about the badness of people—that people are an eclectic mix of good and bad, not the kinds of things that merit precise amounts of blame. David Lewis captured it best:

Well - I've told you what to think ... He is a strange mixture of good and evil. That is what to think of him. Isn't that enough? Why do we need a simple, unified, summary judgement?

If there were a last judgement, it would then be necessary to send the whole morally mixed man to Heaven or to Hell. Then there would be real need for one unified verdict. I would be very well content to leave the problem of the unified verdict to those who believe in a last judgement. And they would do well to leave it to the Judge".