Why I Believe What I Do

Correcting against three common errors

Introduction

I have a rather idiosyncratic mix of beliefs. I believe there’s a God, and not just one of those wishy washy ones that made the world. No, I believe in a full-fledged, capital G, made the entire universe, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God—the very greatest conceivable being. But I also believe that, for instance, animal welfare should be taken very seriously—even the welfare of weird little animals like shrimp (I give about 100 dollars a month to the shrimp welfare project, which probably makes about 1.6 million extra shrimp deaths painless). If I had to make one of those dumb house signs, where people tendentiously display their political beliefs for public consumptio, it would probably say something like “in this house, we believe:”

• God is real.

• You should give a decent amount of your money to charities helping animals, especially shrimp.

• Eating animal products in normal circumstances is seriously morally wrong.

• Wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world.

• The foreign aid budget should be much higher than what it currently is, and people generally have strong obligations to give a lot to effective charities.

• PEPFAR shouldn’t be cut.

• One should be extremely cautious about radical reforms.

• Your existence gives you infinitely strong evidence that there are infinite people.

• Wokeness is very bad.

• Utilitarianism is true.

What is it that unites this eclectic mix of views?

I don’t think that there’s a single core feature that explains all that I believe. It would be irrational to have all of one’s views be based on a single broad philosophy. Your views on other subjects shouldn’t determine what you think about the minimum wage, for instance—you should look into the evidence specific to the minimum wage before coming to a view.

However, I think there are three major themes that explain the mix of views I have. Explaining these will hopefully make these views look a bit less random. Specifically, I think there are three very widespread errors; my views are united by attempting to guard against these errors.

Error 1: Not taking arguments seriously

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.

—Isaiah 1:18

The first major error: not taking arguments seriously. It’s infuriatingly difficult to convince people of conclusions by argument. For instance, even after I made a totally convincing argument for why you should give me lots of money, most of you didn’t. The outrage!

If you give people an argument for a conclusion that they don’t accept, it’s almost impossible to get them to engage with the argument. Often they simply respond by reiterating their preexisting views, as if repeating what they believe is a defense against a challenge to their views. Non-philosophers have an almost pathological aversion to engaging with arguments.

For example, I think that people don’t take seriously enough the arguments for the existence of God. Because they know lots of irrational religious people, when they hear an argument for God’s existence, they dismiss it, thinking it’s just one of those things that those crazy religious people believe. As a result, they don’t give the arguments for God’s existence a fair hearing.

I don’t mean to suggest I’m above this. I was an atheist for many years. When I look back at how I treated the arguments for God’s existence when I was an atheist, I think I was quite intellectually irresponsible. I adopted the soldier mindset rather than the scout mindset; I saw arguments for God’s existence as foes to be destroyed rather than tools for discerning the truth. Now that I’m a theist, I often catch myself internally adopting a soldier mindset in favor of theism; it’s hard to rid oneself of motivated reasoning.

Or to take another example, I think that your existence gives you infinitely strong evidence that there are infinite people. This conclusion sounds weird, but many different converging lines of argument point to its correctness. I can’t discuss all these in detail, so I’ll just point you in the direction of an article where I’ve laid out some of the main reasons to accept it.

People often criticize philosophers on the grounds that they’re so open minded that their brains fall out. I think this is opposite the truth; philosophers are too unwilling to accept arguments with weird conclusions. Despite the very decisive arguments for the self-indication assumption—the aforementioned view that your existence gives you evidence for the presence of many people—philosophers have mostly not accepted it. In my view, this is because philosophers cling far too dogmatically to their initial intuitions. They’re too unwilling to update their starting intuitions when they conflict with other, more robust intuitions.

Philosophers make a similar error regarding utilitarianism. The arguments against utilitarianism are simple and easy to state. The objections to utilitarianism are mostly not very complicated—they primarily involve pointing to scenarios where utilitarianism hold to judgments that are unintuitive. In contrast, the arguments for utilitarianism are much more complex. They typically involve relatively complicated connections between intuitive, but slightly abstract and confusing theoretical principles.

My thinking that this error is widespread explains many of my beliefs. I’m willing to follow arguments to weird conclusions, when many people are not. Now, this certainly could be an error—sometimes a person is so open-minded that their brain falls out. But I think this goes to explain why I hold some of the beliefs on the list—e.g. the belief in utilitarianism, the seriousness of wild animal suffering, God, and the self-indication assumption. I think I’m unusually willing to follow arguments to fairly bizarre places.

Error 2: Neglecting the interests of many

Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute

—Proverbs 31:8

The second core error: people routinely display far too little empathy and compassion. One’s moral circle is the collection that they care about. One of the lessons of history has been that most people have a moral circle that’s far too constricted. For nearly all of history, people have neglected the interests of those that we now consider obviously morally salient. Even just a few hundred years ago, Americans had so little concern for the interests of black Africans that they enslaved them.

It would be nice if we’d moved past ignoring the interests of lots of beings that matter. But as the historical record makes clear, it would be surprising if we did. Every generation thinks themselves enlightened, and looks back on the errors of the previous generations, even while carrying out similar errors.

There are also purely theoretical reasons to expect that we’d neglect the interests of huge numbers of creatures that matters. Most of our moral judgments are derivative on strong moral emotions—an action horrifies us, so we declare it wrong. But whether an event will be emotionally upsetting depends hugely on morally irrelevant factors, like what the victims look like. The factors responsible for generating strong emotions just don’t track what really matters about a problem—like how many people are affected by it.

Evolution gave us moral beliefs largely to foster cooperation. It programmed us to care little about harms to foreigners in distant lands. Thus, we have every evolutionary reason to expect our moral judgments to be out of accordance with what really matters.

In light of this, likely we commit constant and widespread error in neglecting the interests of certain beings, just as everyone before us in history has. Likely there are some groups whose interests we ignore, who really, truly matter. You could think we won the jackpot in regards to being morally enlightened, but that would be quite surprising and improbable.

On a totally separate note, every year we torture and kill tens of billions of creatures.

We pay little attention to their interests. They are forced to live a short, painful life in a cage where they can’t move and are constantly bombarded by filth and feces. Horrifying mutilation is common. They’re caged, castrated, and killed, in ghoulish factory farms. Every few years, factory farms produce more suffering than has ever existed in all of human history.

In my judgment, this is the primary moral crisis of our time. The scale of the brutality and injustice is staggering—death and torment at scales the Nazis could only dream of. Ethicists have, for quite some time, been sounding the alarm about these horrifying practices but to no avail; most people ignore these ethical pitches as preachy and then continue paying for the horrifying mistreatment.

Some of the weirder animals, like shrimp, are killed by the trillions. If their corpses were lined up, they would easily reach the moon. These creatures, according to our best evidence, can feel relatively intense suffering. Despite this, and despite almost total absence of argument, almost everyone ignores their interests.

This is pretty shocking when you take time to think about it. We kill trillions of beings of just one kind. Why do we do this—is it, perhaps, to produce medical innovation to end cancer? No, it’s because they taste marginally nicer than alternatives. And yet despite engaging in mass slaughter that eviscerates numbers ten times greater than the number of humans who have ever lived every single year, if you express even a jot of concern about this, you’re seen as the weird one.

It seems like by default, if we’re engaged in the mass slaughter of conscious beings, we need a really good reason. This is especially so if prior to slaughter, we subject the poor creatures to hellish conditions: crushing of their eyes, poor water quality, rampant disease, incredible overcrowding, and much more.

Now, it would be one thing if people, after carefully considered the arguments for caring about shrimp welfare, decided that they don’t hold up. But mostly they ignore these arguments. The arguments for caring about the meek, little animals are just not taken seriously. People engage in mass killing without giving it a second thought.

In light of the fact that:

1. There seem to be lots of creatures whose interests we neglect without good reason;

2. Nearly everyone in history has had a moral circle that’s much too constricted;

we should think that probably our moral circle is much too constricted. Our mass torture and murder of countless animals may not prompt much outrage or be salient to most people, but it matters greatly. We should be willing to go out on a limb and stick up for the rights of creatures, even when sticking up for their rights gets you weird looks.

There are lots of groups that we don’t take seriously. Foreigners, non-human animals in factory farms, wild animals, and so on. The only reason anyone seriously considered cutting PEPFAR was that they valued the lives of foreigners so little that they were willing to risk millions of deaths for the sake of tiny budget cuts. Absence of compassion is the scourge of the modern world—a scourge that allows rich westerners to spend money on themselves as children die, that allows them to chow down on the carcass of a tortured animal without a second thought. The worst actions are done because one is indifferent to the interests of their victims.

Nearly everyone in the West engages in actions that leave behind a lengthy trail of victims, whose interests they wholly ignore.

Error 3: Tribalism

The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him.

—Proverbs 18:17

The last common error: people are way too dogmatic and tribalistic. All too often, people sort the world into teams. They think of the people who agree with them politically as on their team, and thus are willing to defend even the most absurd extremes of their own side. The flourishing of wokeness, for instance, was largely because normie liberals were unwilling to respond harshly to genuine insanity from those who were ostensibly on their team.

Similarly, the craziness of MAGA came because Republicans saw anyone bashing the Democrats as in the right. The Republican party has become primarily built on opposing Democrats, rather than any set of values. As a result, Trump was popular because he opposed and pissed off liberals at every turn. Similarly, even people who were not on team MAGA originally were willing to defend Trumpian excess because they perceived him as being broadly on their team.

My core beliefs are the following: dogmatically defending your own side is widespread, people don’t take arguments seriously enough, and our moral circle is much too constricted, leading to profound injustice. When you take these seriously, it makes sense to be concerned about those whose interests we routinely neglect and to follow philosophical arguments to weird conclusions. The weird things I believe are, in large part, because I try to do precisely that!