Political Skepticism

On the Justification of Our Political Beliefs

Political disagreement tends to display a “radical” nature that is partly related to the fact that political beliefs and judgments are generally firmly held. This makes people unlikely to revise and compromise on them. I want to discuss here an argument in favor of moral skepticism that, I think, extends to political beliefs and their justification. If correct, the argument vindicates a form of “political skepticism.” Let’s consider first the argument for moral beliefs and then reflect about its implications in the political domain.

In his book The Evolution of Morality, the moral philosopher Richard Joyce asks his readers to consider what he calls himself a “slightly silly thought experiment:”

“Suppose that there were a pill that makes you believe that Napoleon won Waterloo, and another one that makes you believe he lost. Suppose also that there were an antidote that can be taken for either pill. Now imagine that you are processing through life happily believing that Napoleon lost Waterloo (as, indeed, you are), and then you discover that at some point in your past someone slipped you a ‘Napoleon lost Waterloo’ belief pill… Should this undermine your faith in your belief that Napoleon lost Waterloo?”[1]

Joyce’s answer is that “of course, it should.” The fact of learning that your belief about a historical event is due to you having taken a pill that causes you to have this belief doesn’t prove that the belief in question is false. However, it does indicate that your belief is completely unrelated to whether the event did happen. Your belief is caused by an event (you taking a pill) that is not causally related to Napoleon’s fate at Waterloo. Nor is there any reason to think that the two events are statistically correlated because they would be both causally related to a third, hidden event. It follows that, if offered the choice, you should take the antidote.

In this thought experiment, when you learn that your belief is caused by the fact that you’ve taken a pill, you discover that this belief is unjustified, i.e., you don’t have any good reason to have this belief.[2] Philosophers of mind generally characterize beliefs as “intentional states” with a “mind-to-world direction of fit.”[3] That means that beliefs should be assessed in terms of their truth-value, i.e., whether or not they reflect the world as it really is. Very often, our beliefs are false, and we have no way to know whether they are true. Therefore, what justifies a belief is not that it is true —a justifiably true belief is generally called “knowledge”— but that we have reasons to think that it might be true.

What are the kinds of reasons that can justify a belief? If you consider a historical event like Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, they must essentially be evidence-based. Maybe you’ve witnessed the Emperor’s defeat with your own eyes. Or maybe you’ve been told by someone you trust that Napoleon lost, added to the fact that you know that the Emperor was sent into exile soon afterwards. Or, as is the case for all of us living now, we just put our trust into official historical records and the work of historians. The point is, even if our belief is not directly causally related to what happened at Waterloo, we have good reasons to think that it is nonetheless due to what happened there.

As I shall explain below, things may actually be a bit more complicated, even with historical events. However, for a moment, set aside history and consider our beliefs about morality. In the book which I’ve quoted above, Joyce defends a particular account of what is known as “moral skepticism.” To understand the relationship with Napoleon’s example, substitute any moral belief (e.g., killing is wrong) for the historical event and, instead of taking the pill, suppose that you learn that all your moral beliefs are caused by evolution.

What it means exactly is that whatever you believe about what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, what is fair or unfair, and so on, is caused by the conditions under which our species has evolved. Suppose that it is indeed true that what we believe about morality is fully determined by genetic and, eventually, sociocultural factors. The analogy with the pill is clear. If you think that the wrongness of murder or racism has nothing to do with genetic and cultural evolution, but at the same time you acknowledge that what you believe about these issues is fully determined by evolution, then you should take the “antidote,” which here means that you should give up your belief. The problem is especially acute if you are a so-called “moral realist” who thinks that there are moral facts out there. In this case, except for an incredible coincidence, it’s highly likely that what you believe (caused by evolution) and what is really the case (moral facts) don’t coincide.[4]

I don’t want to go too much into the detail of the very complex debates over “moral skepticism.” There are obvious ways to dispute the claim that our moral beliefs are not justified. For instance, you can just reject the premise of the argument, namely that our moral beliefs are entirely caused by evolutionary history. After all, our moral beliefs have been changing significantly over our recent evolutionary history. Consider, for instance, how views about the wrongness of slavery or of the death penalty have changed over the past century. Also, to paraphrase the philosopher Peter Singer, the circle of morality has been expanding, with moral relationships being extended beyond the borders of the family and the tribe.[5] You can also argue that there are other reasons that support the justification of our moral beliefs, in the same way that you can maintain your belief about Napoleon if, on top of taking the pill, you’ve read serious scholarship about the First French Empire.

I want to emphasize, however, that what is true for morality is prima facie also true for our political beliefs, many of them being derived from our moral judgments. Our political beliefs are more generally tied to value judgments that we inherit not so much from our genetic evolutionary history as from our cultural background. Consider all the beliefs that we have about how society should be organized in general and what should be done in such or such circumstances. For instance, what is the appropriate political stance on free speech? Should we prefer the maximalist approach or the more regulated one that Europeans tend to defend?[6] Beliefs about this issue can surely be partially evidence-based. For instance, some studies may show that hate speech is likely to trigger political violence. The problem is that it is highly likely that other studies will suggest the contrary. To adjudicate between these two sets of results is already making a value judgment about what counts as proper “evidence.” In the case we can unambiguously show that a maximalist approach is conducive to political violence, we still have to demonstrate that this consideration overrides any other reason that we could have to nonetheless keep with it. Again, value judgments are unavoidable. Ultimately, our judgment on this issue is likely to be determined by contingent factors that go well beyond our exercise of reason.

Another source of political judgments comes from the way we understand and interpret history. Consider, for instance, the recent controversy in France about the French colonization of Algeria from 1830 to 1962. A French journalist has been massively criticized for making an analogy between the way the French authorities treated Algerians and the massacre that Nazis committed in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane during the Occupation. I don’t have the historical expertise to assess whether or not the comparison is fair. More importantly, however, is that even historical expertise is unlikely to be sufficient to make such an assessment. Debates over the French colonization more generally illustrate that our stance toward history is tied in a very complex way to judgments that do not depend on facts and evidence. This is because historical knowledge itself is based on value judgments that determine what historical events really matter and how they are connected in the broader historical nexus. Our “historical consciousness” cannot be separated from our political values and judgments, as Raymond Aron has argued in so many of his writings.[7]

Because all the sources that make up our political judgments (history, morality) are one way or another based on values that are shaped by contingencies that seem unrelated to their relevance or truth-value, we may conclude that skepticism —if not nihilism— is the only coherent response. Maybe we should swallow the “political pill” that would rid us of all our political certainties. This calls for a healthy dose of skepticism and humility. The limits of our political knowledge find their origins not only in the fact that the world is complex, uncertain, and changing. They are also tributary to the contingent nature of the values without which political judgments and actions would not exist.

However, if pushed too far, political skepticism risks giving complete free rein to those who are not interested in the justification of their beliefs. Self-interests and unreflected convictions will continue to motivate political judgments and actions and justify, at least from the perspectives of their authors, both coercion and domination. Therefore, what we need is a framework, a set of rules, within which healthy political skepticism, moderation, and prudence can be practiced and protected from the impatience of the more radical who refuse to acknowledge these virtues. Constitutional and pluralistic political regimes constitute such a framework. They at the same time limit what those in office can do based on their convictions and organize a competitive setup where different political beliefs and judgments have a decent chance to influence collective choices.

This framework is itself responsive to values, for sure. It is easy to point out that these values, too, are contingent. How can we have the certainty that a brutal, bellicose politics where others are treated either as friends or enemies is not the “right” conception of the political and that the correct political beliefs command a more authoritarian regime?

I have no definitive answer to this objection and the skeptical argument suggests that there is not. Or, we can search for a naturalist response, pointing out that only constitutionalism and pluralism can permit diverse human communities to strive and flourish. Or maybe we just better rely on a typical conservative argument. Constitutionalism and pluralism constitute the political tradition of the West. That it has emerged and existed for so long is in itself a good reason to try to preserve it because it is constitutive of our ways of life and how we deal with ultimately unjustified political convictions. These ways of life define who we are as individuals and communities and that givr them a special worth.

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[1] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (MIT Press, 2006), p. 179.

[2] Of course, assuming that you don’t have any other evidence-based reason to believe that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.

[3] John R. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004).

[4] An alternative for the moral realist is to argue that evolution “tracks the moral truth” or has selected for our ability to track the moral truth. This is highly dubious given what we know about biological evolution. See Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 127, no. 1 (2006): 109–66.

[5] Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, Revised edition (Princeton (N. J.): Princeton University Press, 2011).

[6] Let’s put aside the fact that nowadays no one, especially not in the U.S., is actually endorsing the maximalist approach. The Trump administration is just cynically promoting a kind of speech over another and attacking the E.U. for not promoting the one that they prefer.

[7] Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). Raymond Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2010).