Liberalism and Coerced Beliefs

On the Epistemic Source of Political Authority in a Liberal Society

Liberals (some of them at least) are uneasy with the conception of truth. The reason is that appeals to truth can hide an authoritarian stance. Suppose Ann and Brian are arguing about the course of action that they should follow. As it happens, their (collective) choice will potentially be coercive in the sense that it will interfere with their natural liberty to act as they wish. Suppose that there are two options, A and B. The latter is free from interference – Ann and Brian agree to not interfere with each other – but A isn’t. It forces one of them (or maybe both of them) to act in a certain way or to refrain from acting in a particular way. Now, suppose that in support of choosing A, Ann brings to the discussion the claim that some proposition p is true. Suppose that both Ann and Brian share some basic knowledge and normative reasoning such that if p is indeed true, then they ought to choose A, and assume that all this is common knowledge. Now, Ann’s claim that p is true is similar to what Daniel Dennett calls a “conversation-stopper.”[1] If p is true, there is nothing left to argue about. Option A should be chosen, and Ann and Brian should acknowledge that interference with their natural freedom is justified.

It is easy to see why liberals may be worried by such an authoritative appeal to truth. If truth trumps all other values and normative considerations, then it can be used to justify all kinds of interferences and coercion eventually undermining people’s freedom and interests. This was for instance a concern for John Rawls who was clear about the fact that moral truth is contrary to the idea of public reason:[2]

“Once we accept the fact that reasonable pluralism is a permanent condition of public culture under free institutions, the idea of the reasonable is more suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a constitutional regime than the idea of moral truth. Holding a political conception as true and for that reason alone the one suitable basis for public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division.”[3]

As I put it in a previous essay on this topic:

In essence, the main problem lies in the fact that appeals to truth may be divisive because they are authoritarians. Truth is exclusive… If q implies non-p and I assert that p is true, then I necessarily assert also that q is false. However, if you believe that q is true, then my assertion entails that you’re wrong. By claiming the authority of truth, I’m basically claiming authority, not (necessarily) over you, but over your beliefs. Claims of truth basically act as “conversation-stoppers”. If p is true, then there is nothing more to say. Either you change your mind and agree, in which case you have conceded in favor of my view; or you still insist on your view, but my appeal to truth suggests that it is inferior to mine. (Emphasis added)

Appeals to truth are made even more controversial with respect to public justification by the fact that while truth is provisory and can be disputed, to dispute it may require expertise and competence that most of those who are the target of coercive interferences don’t have. In the example with which I’ve started, suppose that Ann is a scientist with a particular expertise that gives credence to her claim that p is true. Brian doesn’t have this expertise and because of that, is unable to assess the claim. Brian can have a belief b on this, for sure (taking the form of a probabilistic assessment that p is true), but the degree of confidence he can put into this belief must be low. Now, consider the alternatives, assuming that Ann indeed has a particular expertise that makes her judgment about p more reliable than Brian’s. Either Brian acknowledges that Ann’s expertise gives her claim an epistemic authority or he doesn’t recognize Ann’s expertise. If the former, then Brian is basically delegating part of his freedom to determine what he should do to Ann despite (or because of) his ignorance about the truth-value of the claim that justifies this. If the latter, expertise is viewed as meaningless and appeals to truth are vacuous.

It is interesting that when making his claim that truth is incompatible with the idea of public reason, Rawls was mostly concerned with moral truth and not “scientific” truth. However, there is no sharp distinction between “scientific” and “moral” truth, at least from the subjective perspective of the individual. When you’re confronted with the claim that p is true, the fact that p is a proposition about an empirical or a “moral” fact doesn’t make much difference. The claim appeals to a form of authority and either you submit to it, or you choose to disregard it.

In the quote from my previous essay above, I’ve emphasized the expression “but over your beliefs.” What is at stake here is indeed the possibility that in a liberal society, political authority may extend to people’s beliefs. In a recent essay, Eric Schliesser rightly emphasizes the importance of “authoritated” beliefs in our life in general, i.e., “the non-expert held believer's endorsing or adopting the beliefs held by the relevant epistemic authorities (at a suitable level of simplification).” As Eric notes, it is barely possible to imagine living without holding such authoritated beliefs. This is obviously even truer when living in a society with an important division of labor. There are many things that we have to assume to be true because we don’t have the ability to assess ourselves their truth-value, or because it would just entail too high opportunity costs. So in those cases, we literally choose to believe that something is true or highly likely to be true.

This is fairly uncontroversial. The liberal discomfort with appeals to truth is however related to the fact that if truth can ground the authority to force others to act in a certain way, then it can also ground the authority to force people to believe something, or at least to publicly behave as if they were accepting that something is true. Let’s call that “coerced beliefs.” To many, the existence of coerced beliefs will appear problematic from a liberal perspective. Suppose that we agree with public reason theorists like Gerald Gaus or Kevin Vallier that a law and the exercise of coercion that it may entail are legitimate only if the law is supported by reasons that are at least intelligible to everyone.[4] This is a relatively weak demand. We don’t expect people to share the same reasons that support the law (as Rawlsians tend to require), but only that everyone acknowledges that everyone else has a reason that supports the law in a way that they can understand. The problem of coerced beliefs is that they are apparently not this kind of reason. After all, if you have no choice but to believe something (either because you have been indoctrinated or coerced to affirm the belief), it doesn’t seem to be a good ground for public justification. In the process of determining whether you and everyone else can justifiably submit to a coercive authority, you’re as a matter of fact already submitting to an authority (maybe the same).

Coerced beliefs are surely a form of authoritated beliefs, but not all authoritated beliefs are coerced beliefs. For instance, I literally choose to believe in scientific facts such as the Big Bang or natural selection. I undoubtedly have good reasons for that, but nobody is coercing me to hold these beliefs. Indeed, I could renounce them and continue basically the same life as my current one. This is actually a sign that we are living in a liberal society. A liberal, open society is precisely a society where people are ultimately free to believe what they want, even though most of their beliefs are authoritated as a matter of necessity. Hence, liberals may hope that coerced beliefs have no place in a liberal society.

In his aforementioned essay, Eric Schliesser does not explicitly distinguish between authoritated and coerced beliefs. As I understand him, however, he argues that coerced beliefs are hardly avoidable even in a liberal society. This is because legal (and thus political) authority is not only a “coordination device” but also a coercive device that materializes in particular in the function of the state as a machinery of record:

[This idea] can be found in Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, and Lippmann amongst others. This is the idea that the state is a machinery of record: it collects and disseminates immense data and records (births, deaths, marriage, property deeds, imports, exports, etc.) that it certifies as truth, or that can be regarded as true. (One can add measures and coins, etc.)   

I very much like this idea of the state as a machinery of record. I would add however a distinction between two kinds of facts that the liberal state may record. Following John Searle’s distinction between brute and institutional facts,[5] I would argue that a constitutive function of the state is not only to register but also literally to create institutional facts. In Searle’s analysis, institutional facts originate in performative speech acts. The fact my wife and I are married is true by virtue of the fact that a state official has literally said so. The fact that I’ve a property right on my house is constituted by the existence of an official document that says so. Brute facts, quite the contrary, are not created by such constituted rules. While they are ontologically objective in the same sense as institutional facts (a key insight of Searle’s account), their epistemic status is different. Whether a brute fact is true or not is independent of what people believe, while an institutional fact is true, in a way, only as long as we collectively agree that it is indeed the case.[6]

I think the distinction matters because, as far as the state is recognized as legitimate, coerced beliefs about institutional facts are unproblematic. I don’t have the choice to hold many beliefs about the institutional reality just because this reality is constituted by rules that the state has created. I may decide to no longer use Euro bills to buy stuff, but strictly speaking, I cannot decide to no longer believe that Euro is the legal money in my country. But this is not a problem as far as I grant that the political authority that creates this institutional fact is legitimate. Matters are different for brute facts because here the state does not create them. The truth value of brute facts is asserted through a collective epistemic endeavor (science, journalism) and the state may appropriate, in the course of public justification, these assertions. If the state is legitimate in doing so, that must be for different reasons than for institutional facts. My guess is that the crux of the justification lies in consequentialist considerations. If, in the midst of a pandemic, there are solid empirical indications that a vaccine may save a large number of lives, it might be right for the state to, in some sense, coerce people to endorse the corresponding belief and to consider that public justification may proceed on this basis. Maybe the state is even legitimate in going further by imposing that the relevant knowledge is taught at school and by sanctioning public dissent.

We see why this perspective can trigger liberal fears. As Eric notes in his essay, here as elsewhere, the state authority must be held in check to make sure that its appeal to truth remains compatible with other liberal commitments. That can only work however if epistemic authorities (academic institutions, newspapers) are themselves perceived as credible and legitimate truth-seekers. This is the condition for coerced beliefs to be legitimate. Otherwise, the state will always be suspected of making an instrumental and self-serving appeal to authoritarian claims of truth – something that is at the roots of all conspiracy theories. Appeals to truth are thus not illiberal. More importantly, an inability to appeal to truth in the public justification of laws and more generally the use of coercion is surely conducive to illiberalism.     

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[1] Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

[2] John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 765–807.

[3] Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 129.

[4] See for instance, Kevin Vallier, “In Defence of Intelligible Reasons in Public Justification,” The Philosophical Quarterly 66, no. 264 (July 1, 2016): 596–616.

[5] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Simon and Schuster, 1997).

[6] There are many things in Searle’s account that might be disputed. I think however that the institutional/brute facts distinction is relevant here.