HTML last revised 30th July, 2003.David Oderberg has recently (2000) pointed to an apparent conflict in "our" attitudes to seeking and possessing the truth: on the one hand, truth is thought a valuable prize, worth years of study or vast investments in pure research, on the other we extol "freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience",1 the right to be wrong and persist in error. Can we coherently have our epistemic cake and eat it?
Oderberg says "No". Adopting a form of natural law theory, Oderberg claims that the pursuit, acquisition, and possession of truth is a basic human good, that we therefore have a duty to pursue these things - which he construes as at least a duty not to obstruct or undermine them - so we have no right to adopt erroneous beliefs and persist in holding them. He draws an analogy with health: we have apparently a duty to maintain our good health, though there are a variety of optional means of so doing. I may not have a duty to jog, but I have a duty to do something or other to maintain health. The optionality in the case of truth arises from the range of truths that there are. We are not obliged to acquire them all, just those that are particularly pertinent to our other ends. But just as we have a duty to avoid undermining our health in any way, so we have a duty never to believe falsehood.
Oderberg considers an objection based on a person's having excellent, but as it turns out, misleading evidence for a particular belief. Hasn't the person a right to hold the belief in question? His answer is again negative, and appeals to an analogy with private property: I may have every reason to think this is my bag, but if it isn't then I do not have any right to take or keep it. I may not be guilty of theft in taking it, but Oderberg's point is that I do not have a right, any more than a person has a right to a false belief, even when they have not done anything wrong in coming to acquire it. (Of course there are other cases where one might be negligent in dealing with the relevant evidence, so that one's false belief or "formal theft" might itself be blamed.)
Oderberg also concedes that on occasion one may have a right not to know the truth, but he distinguishes that from a right to believe the false. His example requires us to suppose that believing erroneously that one has a good chance of recovery might itself improve a person's chances of recovery. So the patient here has a right not to be told the truth, but not a right to be lied to. One may agree that there is a distinction here, but the workings of Gricean rules of conversation surely make it almost impossible to maintain it in practice, if, that is, the question is ever raised between the patient and his care-givers.
But these cases clearly do not go to the heart of the conflict. Freedom of thought is more than making excusable errors or avoiding harmful truths. Oderberg discusses the issue in terms of "freedom of belief" where he wants to argue that, strictly speaking, belief is never free. The closest we get to it is "freedom of opinion" which is "the right of individuals to keep an open mind in matters where there is no certainty, where evidence points in different directions, and where people of intelligence and good will towards truth differ in their beliefs about some proposition or other" (p. 532). But, again, this is hardly what "we" actually espouse. We do not ask the Ecumenical Patriarch or our local ayatollah to "keep an open mind" on the strange doctrines they preach. Though, if Oderberg is right, that is what we should insist upon: given that the evidence is equivocal (at best), then in general2 our moral-cum-epistemic duty must be to withhold assent, not jump in at the deep end.
Lest it seem that Oderberg's position would lead him to impose truth on the unwilling heterodox, he insists that while there may not be a moral right to embrace falsehood, "there is indeed a moral right not to be coerced into embracing truth" (p. 532). Our rational nature requires the embrace of truth to be voluntary, the work of our own intellectual faculties, not an imposition. But he notes that this does not mean that people ought never to be "pressured" into thinking one thing rather than another. We do in fact seek to correct people's errors over a wide range of items, and we set up school systems that extend the coverage beyond what everyday life would usually require.
There is much that is disputable in Oderberg's position, too much for the confines of this paper. I want to focus on two issues where it would seem that Oderberg has overlooked possibilities that we seem to use in sustaining the kind of tolerance he is attacking. I do not now have the space to decide the question whether these strategies are in the end successful.
The first issue concerns the range of true propositions. We have seen that Oderberg recognises the variety of things that may be true and allows that this variety affects our putative duty. On the one hand, no one is obliged to pursue all truths, only those that are pertinent to his or her other ends. On the other, there are issues where the evidence points in different directions, so we ought to keep an open mind.
I have already indicated that we do not use the lack of conclusive evidence in the way Oderberg would have us do, or at least, not in all cases. What our practice involves is, surely, a more complex division of the cognitive arena. It is pertinent that Samuel Adams specified "private judgment in matters of conscience" (my emphasis). We do not give people much freedom to believe what they feel like about the ordinary world around them. Oderberg is right that we would put pressure on someone to think that two plus two equals four. When it is a matter of indifference and without obvious further consequences, no doubt we will let her say what she likes, but there are various socially instituted pressures to keep her conforming to everyday beliefs, especially when her idiosyncracies clearly affect her and other people.
But when we look at more specialised areas we find an apparently different picture. Within the group of people committed to X, there are also strong pressures to conform to X-type beliefs, but we can also find different groups espousing different and often incompatible views, X1, X2, ... that aspire to deal with "the same" portion of reality, but without much concern for adjudicating among them. One may think immediately of religious or spiritual concerns, but sociologically pretty much the same is true of schools of psychology, Chinese versus Western medicine, even compost-making.3 Induction into any of these traditions will almost inevitably involve considerable thought-policing, which will be presented as a concern for truth, as in the everyday case, but it will be a matter of "our" truth as against theirs. A few people may wish to stand somewhat outside particular traditions and enquire into their compatibility, others at the edges may fight heated wars, literally or metaphorically, with the opposition, but the point is that in general that is not the way in: we think and act locally, however global the implications. We start by learning Catholic or Hindu theology, not "natural religion".
If this is right, Oderberg's Aristotelian function of reason may need some re-description. It is more a matter of Kuhnian "problem-solving" than a metaphysically ambitious search for truth. Just as, to take one of his examples, there are often various ways to survive the next winter, so there are various ways of maintaining the vitality of an intellectual tradition such as literary criticism or theology, but we do not have to suppose that even the critical thought required for them is aiming at simple truth. (No doubt there are truths involved in coping with winter - how nourishing these nuts are - and in continuing an intellectual tradition - is this way of extending Aquinas' perspective to issues about the Internet consistent? - but in neither case do we need to suppose that human reason has a blanket concern for the whole truth.)
This thought can then be transposed to the apparently simple case of our everyday beliefs too. Here again we seek conformity and "disciplined" development. The raising of this latter to a metaphysically grandiose concern for truth is not required. It may reflect the interpretation given our cognitive life by those who reflect upon it, but, as we can easily see by noticing the conflicting views of the ultimate status of common sense on the part of philosophical reflection, we need not suppose that everyday reasoning is interested in truth, pure and simple. It is much more a matter of coping with winter and the other ills flesh is heir to. There may be greater convergence on everyday beliefs amongst disparate groups of people than on supernatural matters - indeed there is every reason to suppose there would be - so that, leaving aside their metaphysical/ontological construal, there is little scope for comparison among genuine alternatives. But that is no reason for thinking that we should assign truth rather than coping with our predicament as the natural function of our intellectual resources.
The fundamental difficulty for Oderberg's project is that to the extent that mankind by nature desires to know, the "knowledge" is of some kinds of truths but not of all.4 When we attend to differing construals of what in some sense is the same issue, again our general human interest is in some construals rather than the philosophically most defensible ones.
What is, perhaps, arguable is that this compartmentalised approach to the function of our rational faculties is inherently unstable. Within X, people aim at truth-as-X-portrays-it. Once they recognise other competing traditions it is difficult to find a rationale for not raising the wider comparative question, however easy it may be in practice. But its ease is surely a reason for thinking that we cannot press as hard as Oderberg would like on the supposed natural function of reason here. The natural condition is blinkered. Even within philosophy, whose self-appointed task is precisely such comparative evaluation, one more often finds parochial work within a tradition than an all-encompassing openness to all that there are or have been. Still, it is plausible to think that many traditions of self-understanding do encourage a recognition of the intellectual inescapability of these wider cross-tradition comparisons, and thus to some extent call for their own examination and possible undermining. (Another equally important source of instability is a questioning of the compartments themselves: why should we let X views off more easily than everyday beliefs?)
The second issue concerns the way Oderberg treats all parts of the human good as moral goods. To contrast intuitions, I have suggested (1995) that health, wealth, and education are typical of non-moral goods. As noted above, Oderberg thinks that on the contrary, health is something I have a right to and something I have a duty to maintain. One contrast may be acceptable to both sides: ceteris paribus (if the condition is not a result of culpable negligence, etc.) a person's ill-health, poverty, or lack of education is not something they should be blamed for.
But Oderberg wants to go further: X is part of the human good; so you have a right to X; so you have a duty not to undermine X and others have a duty not to interfere with your pursuit of X. We have seen that as regards health this means, for Oderberg, that each one of us should do something to preserve their health. But besides smoking and jogging (or the myriad other ways of positively harming or positively enhancing one's health) there is the possibility of not doing anything about it. Oderberg might want to assimilate this with pursuing by not harming, but we should not allow this identification. Just as we can sensibly distinguish wealth, poverty, and moderate sufficiency, so we should distinguish, when considering activity, between activities that are harmful, enhancing, or neutral to health. Just as one's financial situation is largely a matter of luck, so one's health or lack of it is better seen as a matter of luck. Oderberg's talk of rights here is potentially misleading since talk of rights often carries with it a suggestion that others have a duty of some sort to facilitate the exercise of any such right. On Oderberg's construal, if my right to health implies for you no more than your duty not to make me ill, that little5 is surely acceptable. But if it is seen as requiring more positive interventions on behalf of the ill and by everyone in their own case, then it seems to be more than a concern for the human good alone should countenance. People may prefer health to illness and no doubt social action should be guided by such preferences, just as people prefer to have more resources at their disposal rather than less. But that hardly makes socialist redistribution the only morally acceptable position for an Aristotelian.
If X is a good, we ought not to undermine X. But that does not amount to pursuing X in ordinary terms. The point about non-moral goods is precisely that we have no obligation to pursue them,6 though we may well have a duty not to destroy or undermine their pursuit by others. (We may yet have a right to moderate that pursuit. Socialist redistribution is not ruled out for an Aristotelian either.) Oderberg's persuasive redefinition of non-interference as pursuit obfuscates this matter. We have no reason to think that active pursuit of the truth is morally required if we agree that obstructing that pursuit is morally wrong.
Brandon, E.P. 1982, "Quantifiers and the pursuit of truth," Educational Philosophy and Theory, 14, 50-58.
Brandon, E.P. 1995, "The unjustifiability of education," Studies in Philosophy and Education, 14, 217-227.
Bruce, M.E. 1967 [1946], Common-Sense Compost Making: by the quick return method. London: Faber and Faber.
Nagel, T. 1987, "Moral conflict and political legitimacy," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16, 215-240.
Oderberg, D.S. 2000, "Is there a right to be wrong," Philosophy, 75, 517-537.
Silvers, A. 1998. "Formal justice" in A. Silvers, D. Wasserman, and M.B. Mahowald (eds.) Disability, Difference, Discrimination. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
1 Oderberg takes this indirectly from a speech by Samuel Adams in 1776.
3 At least, if I am to believe the proselytizing in Bruce, 1967 [1946].
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