Jan. 12, 2005

Belief and Morality

Why Evidence Trumps Faith

in the Public Arena

by Tom Flynn

Some of you know that I was not born a doubter ... a secular humanist ... a critical inquirer. I started out Roman Catholic - indeed, a conservative young Catholic, content to the point of smugness with the American Church before the Second Vatican Council. How strange it was, then, that one of the defining events on my odyssey from faith to doubt would be orchestrated by a Jesuit priest ... during my years at a Catholic university ... in a theology class.

When I attended Xavier University, the Jesuit institution in Cincinnati, Ohio, its core curriculum prescribed that each undergraduate undertake what amounted to a minor in philosophy and theology. We had a class in one discipline or the other, every single term.

If memory serves - a phrase I use cautiously when sharing a stage with Elizabeth Loftus - it was in my sophomore year that Father George Traub opened our theology class by presenting us with two relatively lengthy essays. The second was William James's famous lecture, "The Will to Believe." The first was an under-appreciated and altogether incendiary treatise drafted in 1876 by the short-lived English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford. Its title: "The Ethics of Belief."

Clifford and his essay are too little known, but not forgotten. Perhaps nowhere other than here, at a Center for Inquiry event, could I hope to find people who recall Clifford more fondly. For those unfamiliar, "The Ethics of Belief" presents an outspoken - even bombastic - defense of evidentialism, the view that it is morally binding to assent only to propositions for which we have satisfactory evidence. "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence," thundered Clifford.

Clifford had much to say to us about belief and morality. But first I should finish my story.

At age 19, I was suffering serious misgivings about the truth of my religion. I'd been brought up a proper Catholic, self-righteously convinced that all the religions other than my own were mere human inventions. Yet I was puzzled by how many other religions there were ... by how well they seemed to succeed in the world ... and most of all, by the peculiar way that lightning bolts didn't seem to fall on their houses of worship significantly more often than they did on Catholic cathedrals.

I was puzzled also by the flurry of changes that had moved through my own church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. I was beginning to wonder whether perhaps my own Roman Catholic faith was not simply one more mere human invention ... one more contraption of artifice and politics, rationalization and greed.

And of course I wondered at my own arrogance in asking such questions. Without really articulating it, I had been pondering how one can judge the veracity of one belief claim against another ... and indeed, whether morality has anything to tell us about which propositions we should - or should not - elect to dignify with our assent.

Clifford's blunt insistence that belief be given sparingly, and only in response to very particular sorts of evidence, struck me like a thunderclap. My first reading of Clifford stands alongside my first reading of Robert Green Ingersoll, twin landmarks along my journey toward unbelief.

I shouldn't need to tell you that this was not the effect my sophomore theology instructor had in mind. I later learned that Father Traub always opened this particular class by assigning Clifford and James. He expected that students would find Clifford harsh and barren, then flee to James's more indulgent philosophy like a favorite pillow at the end of a taxing day. Father Traub hoped, in other words, to nudge us into an unreflective, emotionally-grounded fideism ... perhaps with an eye to protecting our orthodoxy should he accidentally teach one of us something that might rock our foundational beliefs.

His script for the day's discussion already playing in his head, Father Traub asked whether everyone had completed the reading assignment. Seeing a satisfactory number of nods, he gave us a Cheshire-cat smile and said, "Well, after reading Clifford and James, what did you think?"

And by sheer happenstance, the first student he called on was me.

I don't recall exactly what I said, but I will never forget Father Traub's face. What I said was something along the lines of "Well, Clifford is obviously right. It clearly is immoral to take actions that may affect others while guided by beliefs that the evidence does not entitle us to hold. Clearly there are objective standards for evaluating the quality of evidence, and they must be more or less what Clifford says they are. As for this guy James, he's not only wrong, he's dangerous. It's bad enough that he's given up on the quest for truth, but now he wants us to throw away our standards the way he did and just say, 'Oh hell, believe what you like.'"

A few seconds later the good father managed to compose himself enough to say, "Um, anybody else?"

But I had set the tone for the discussion. The next two or three students to answer felt compelled either to say something good about Clifford or to say something meaningless. The period was half over before Father Traub could elicit a steady line of testimonies as to Clifford's flinty heartlessness and the compensating openness of James. I like to think I made it possible for perhaps one other student to think a howlingly unorthodox thought that day almost thirty years ago. After all, look where it brought me.

In the rest of my remarks today I'll offer a more thorough portrait of Clifford and his evidentialism - and a brief critique of James. I'll examine how much Clifford's epistemological severity really has to offer today's critical inquirers. And I'll offer a taxonomy of beliefs, arranging them into relevant categories that will suggest a strategy we can pursue in our debates with believers.

As critical inquirers, often we contend against believers in religion, pseudoscience, the paranormal, or socio-political utopianism - against persons I shall call credulists - on a broad range of moral and social questions. We insist that the marketplace of ideas must be open to all, as we should. But does this compel us to grant all opinions the same value? Can - or should - statements of unsupported opinion on religious, paranormal, or social topics, once stated, be accorded a lesser weight than statements of other kinds? Is there some uniform method by which statements can be assigned a greater or lesser gravity, based on the quality of the evidence that supports them? Can we make the case that it is right to do this? And can we do it without giving the impression that we are simply pleading on behalf of our own partisan, skeptical agenda? In other words, is it meaningful to talk about a morality of belief - and if so, what can we say about it?

Let's examine Clifford's argument. Pardon the sexism in the quotes I will be sharing - it was 1877, and Clifford was doing the best he could.

"The Ethics of Belief" opened with one of the most powerful word-pictures in philosophy. A ship-owner has reason to suspect that an older ship may no longer be seaworthy; he considers spending heavily to have the craft refitted. At length he succeeds in overcoming his doubts. He orders the vessel to sail as is. Surely "Providence ... could hardly fail to protect" one final shipload of poor immigrant families on their crossing to the new world.

The ship sets sail, and goes down in mid-ocean. There are no survivors.

"What shall we say of him?" Clifford asked of the shipowner. "Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men." And of the women and children, I might add. "It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts."

Next Clifford asked, what if the story had ended differently? What if, despite its frailties, the ship successfully completed its Atlantic crossing without loss of life? The owner would be no less guilty, Clifford announced, because even though the crossing turned out to be safe, he had no right to expect that outcome.

In Clifford's words, "The question of right and wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him."

I can't help thinking here of the growing debate over the actual role of weapons of mass destruction in triggering the recent war in Iraq. Supposedly Saddam Hussein had these weapons at his fingertips. They were the reason we had to attack at once, the international community be damned. And now that we control Iraq, how disturbing that we cannot seem to find them!

Each day, commentators of more and more mainstream orientations think the unthinkable - maybe the administration lied. Maybe it knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, but used the fear of them as a goad for a cynical war.

Imagine that the day after tomorrow, purely by accident, our forces find some weapons of mass destruction. Hey, it could happen. And President Bush will point to them and say, "See, that's why we went to war!"

But if Bush didn't know before the war that those weapons existed - or if he chose not to investigate fully, because the unsubstantiated fear that the weapons might exist served his agenda - then even if we stumble upon enough WMDs to sterilize the Persian Gulf, it will not exonerate the president. Paraphrasing Clifford, the question of right and wrong has to do with the origin of Bush's belief, not the matter of it ... not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether Bush had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.

Handy guy, this Clifford. We shall hear more of him.

As "The Ethics of Belief" reached its midpoint, Clifford had assigned each of us a harrowing responsibility. We are to exercise peerless vigilance so that our belief never be misplaced.

In swaggering tones, Clifford declared: "Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will ... is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and open questioning. It (that is, belief) is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it. ...Whoso would deserve well of his fellows will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away."

Clifford wasn't finished. He added, "Every time we decide to let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. ... But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent. ... If I let myself believe on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by that belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong toward Man, that I make myself credulous."

At least he lets you know where he stands.

Next, Clifford considered what authority we should demand before assenting to a proposition. He gave as one example a dispute between a Muslim and a Buddhist, each contending that his religion was the true one - each of whose arguments would of course ring false to Clifford's largely Christian audience. Clifford gave what was for his time a fairly sophisticated treatment of comparative religion. For me as a college sophomore who was just beginning to wrestle with the puzzles linked to the existence of so many creeds, Clifford's exposition was electrifying.

At the end, Clifford developed several principles by which persons should morally govern their beliefs - standards of inference not unlike those a Carl Sagan might have supplied in our own time. He closed his essay by summarizing them, thus:

"We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know." Today we know this idea as the principle of uniformity.

"We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it."

"It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence, and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, it is worse than presumption to believe."

Who was William Kingdon Clifford? Clifford was a prodigy - a professor of applied mathematics at University College London, a student of Darwin, an outspoken atheist, and, at age 29, the youngest man ever to join the Metaphysical Society, an exclusive London debating club whose members included William Gladstone, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Robert Green Ingersoll called him "one of the greatest men" of the nineteenth century.

Clifford delivered "The Ethics of Belief" to the Metaphysical Society on April 11, 1876. The lecture was thereafter published in the influential journal Contemporary Review, as Metaphysical Society papers usually were.

Contemporary Review's editorial director, Alexander Strahan, was a pious man. He was so outraged at the blows Clifford struck against traditional beliefs in "The Ethics of Belief" that he resigned when he was unable to prevent it from being published.

Two years after delivering "The Ethics of Belief," William Kingdon Clifford was dead of tuberculosis. He was 33.

Though Clifford was gone, his essay kept on making waves.

Influential 19th century unbelievers have a way of inspiring disproportionate counter-blasts from the credulist camp.

Robert Green Ingersoll is little remembered except by freethinkers, but everyone knows the devotional epic former New Mexico governor Lew Wallace penned as his rejoinder to Ingersoll's agnosticism: Ben-Hur. Yes, we have Ingersoll to blame, however indirectly, for Charlton Heston.

In a similar vein, Clifford helped to inspire what may be the most influential single discourse to shape twentieth and twenty-first century patterns of belief.

Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" inspired a muscular rebuttal by William James, his 1896 essay "The Will to Believe." Perhaps modern philosophy's most respectable celebration of impulsive assent, "The Will to Believe" lay the groundwork for the explosion in credulity that rocked twentieth-century thought. What did it consist of? Primarily, in James's words, a "defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced."

Believers sometimes accuse secular humanists of holding a morality of "If it feels good, do it." I know few humanists for whom that is true. But I know plenty of eager credulists whose principle is, "If it feels good, believe it." Pardon the expression, but their patron saint is William James.

In plain terms, James strove, more or less by sheer bluster, to establish a fundamental human right to believe without evidence. Millions took him up on it. James was seized upon by neo-Romantics and anti-intellectuals, much as Nietzsche was first lionized, then distorted, by the ideologues of the Third Reich.

The impact of "The Will to Believe" has been immense - and to my mind, largely insidious. The West's dalliance with Eastern religion, the New Age movement, postmodernism, alternative medicine -- it all might have turned out so differently if not for "The Will to Believe."

Clifford has received the attention of critics closer to our own time. In the 1960s Roderick Chisholm argued that Clifford had overlooked possible situations where a person may have a moral duty to accept a proposition he or she does not know to be true. For example, a person may have an obligation to assume that members of his or her own family are faithful or honest even if substantiating information is unavailable. I don't find this terribly convincing, at least not summarized this briefly, but Chisholm's comments have been respectfully received by many philosophers.

The late Richard Gale criticized Clifford more cogently. To Gale, Clifford's argument was a particularly tendentious specimen of act utilitarianism, calling on every person to doubt at a virtuoso level, lest a single act of credulity blemish society beyond repair. Admittedly, that line about "a stain which can never be wiped away" was over the top.

Timothy Madigan, a former editor of Free Inquiry, has offered another critique: Clifford simply demands too much of too many. It is one thing to exhort intellectuals and scientists to "guard the purity of (their) belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care." But Clifford proposes this as an obligation for everyone, at every time. Surely that sets the standard too high.

Clifford has a response to that. He quotes an imaginary opponent: ""But,' says one, 'I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions ...' Then," says Clifford trenchantly, that person "should have no time to believe."

Still, can everyone from every educational background, in every walk of life, continually indulge the impulse to doubt? Madigan believes this is asking too much, and suggests that Clifford should be understood as making a speculative sort of moralistic exhortation, steeped in the Biblical vocabulary and florid imagery that were the common coin of Victorian rhetoric. Madigan believes that Clifford was spinning a creative fiction, employing a mode that early twentieth century thinker Hans Vaihinger would call "The philosophy of 'as if.'" On this view, Clifford used hyperbole to help his audience intuit how much better the world might be if everyone strove to exercise doubt more systematically than they might otherwise.

I am prepared to walk further with Clifford than any of these critics. For me, aside from its occasional flamboyances, "The Ethics of Belief" sets out an impressive intellectual and, yes, a moral case for evidentialism. By extension, Clifford offers a case for all that we stand for at the Center for Inquiry.

I contend that belief without empirical justification is inherently morally illicit. The immorality lies in the adverse effects that the credulist may have upon the world, upon other humans, when he or she acts on an unjustified belief. That is to say, it is not in the act of believing without evidence, but rather in the willingness to act upon unjustified belief, that moral hazard lies.

Following from this is one additional proposition: far from being negative or constricting, doubt is inherently moral. Twentieth-century philosopher George Santayana said no less in 1923, in prose only slightly less florid than Clifford's: "Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer."

This all seems simple enough, until we remember that most humanists and skeptics are ardently committed to freedom of thought and expression. Isn't this sort of intellectual pluralism diametrically opposed to a Cliffordian conviction that the real world has characteristics that can make one choice morally better than another in ways that independent observers can agree about?

The appearance of contradiction between pluralism and ethical objectivism is at first glance powerful. After all, in the hands of absolutists, firm adherence to the outside world and its demands as they interpret them can often lead to authoritarian oppression. Consider medieval Christianity, with its feudally-regimented afterlife and the stultifying social structures it helped to shape. Consider Marxist-Leninism under Stalin, a quasi-religious utopian system in which the inevitable withering of capitalism and dictatorship of the proletariat in the future were held to justify brutality toward tens of millions of human beings in the present day. Consider even the cult that surrounded Ayn Rand. Though it primarily reflected Rand's domineering personality, its rhetoric claimed to value a commitment to the world of reality - literally, "Objectivism" - above all else. So there can be no question that a pure commitment to live by the demands of the outside world ... as one understands them ... can have decidedly toxic consequences.

But excess in the other direction is little better. Consider postmodernism as understood by naive undergraduates. For them, there are no objective outside standards binding upon all inquirers. We are free to imagine, to believe, and to proclaim whatever we want. No point of view is superior to another. Indeed, it's impossible even in theory to establish any valid way of evaluating contending worldviews. Under this model there is no march of history, just a clatter of metanarratives that all have equal value. As time goes on, one metanarrative may command greater assent than others, but that tells us nothing of its truth; it signals only that its supporters played the games of power and influence better than others.

Granted, this is a naive undergraduate caricature of postmodernism. But then, naive undergraduates are the largest category of postmodernists. And a climate has developed in which if a contemporary critical inquirer criticizes any religious, spiritual, pseudoscientific, or quack medical practice on moral grounds, the response is likely to be, "That's not fair! We thought you were a good pluralist! How dare you impugn the morality of others just because their beliefs differ from yours?" Taken to its extreme, that view would make any kind of epistemic or moral evaluation impossible.

We critical inquirers wish to defend free expression, but we also wish to uphold reasonable, objective epistemic and moral standards. Can we do both? Can the apparent conflict between pluralism and objectivism be overcome? I would say yes.

In part, we can overcome the conflict between free expression and epistemic objectivity by recognizing that they do not hail from precisely parallel domains of discourse. Our commitment to free expression is primarily political; our commitment to epistemic objectivity is primarily methodlogical. The concepts these two commitments encompass are so different in their nature and context that we may never arrive at a wholly satisfactory way of describing their intersection.

Having offered that caveat, let me nonetheless submit that I think we can go a long way toward upholding freedom of thought and an objective ethical evidentialism in the same thrust by recognizing varying categories of belief, to which we can assign varying epistemic and moral weights.

I offer a taxonomy of beliefs, categorizing them according to their evidential support and their moral implications.

At the lowest level, a belief may be nothing more than an innocuous proposition about reality, unsupported by evidence yet also unlikely to predispose its holder toward behavior that has significant moral consequences. Consider the proposition that the moon is made of green cheese. Obviously, this is not supported by the evidence. Also obviously, believing that the moon is made of green cheese puts one no closer - nor, for that matter, any further away - from pursuing a course of action that carries moral implications.

"Green-cheese-ism" has no underpinnings and no ethical entailments. It carries - and deserves - only the weight of an unsupported assertion. I propose to call the belief in propositions of this sort assertional. Assertional beliefs, so long as they remain only assertional, are inconsequential, harmless, and very, very common.

I should admit that in saying this I am departing from Clifford. Clifford denied the possibility of any belief that, if held, had no implications for future behavior. He said, "Nor is that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. ...If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future."

With due respect to Clifford, I cannot agree. First, as in the case of "green-cheese-ism," we can easily imagine genuinely held beliefs that do not predispose toward specific actions.

Secondly, as my presentation continues, the concept of "mere assertion" will become the basis of a strategy for responding to intellectual opponents whose arguments rely upon unjustified beliefs. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, what is really going on here is that we are confronting one of those disjunctions previously-mentioned between political and methodological discourse. Our commitment to freedom of inquiry is a political recognition that in a society of human beings, room must be made for people to follow their thoughts where they lead. Room must be made even for people to be hideously wrong, so long as the effect of those errors is not too catastrophic. This is a human necessity which Clifford's epistemology method cannot encompass. At the end of the day, I believe we must make more room for the idea of assertional belief than Clifford did because we share a political commitment to preserve a domain where thought can move freely without regard to outcomes.

Having defined assertional belief, let's move on to a form of belief that, once held, is likely to alter our likelihood to perform or refrain from morally significant actions.

For example, consider the proposition that abortion is murder. Randall Terry, founder of the radical pro-life action group Operation Rescue, used to tell his followers, "If you believe that abortion is murder, act like it." Some did - notably James Kopp, recently convicted for the murder of abortion provider Barnett Slepian in Amherst, New York, where the Center for Inquiry - International is located.

Antony Flew has written of motivating belief, and that is the term I will apply here. A motivating belief is assent to a proposition whose content alters our probable behavior in morally significant ways. Note carefully that its power to motivate has nothing whatever to do with whether it is true.

How can we know a belief is true? We can have substantial confidence if we have assented to a proposition that enjoys powerful evidential support of the kind that lends itself to intersubjective validation, that is, verification upon scientific principles. Flew calls belief on such grounds evidencing belief, and I will accept that nomenclature here.

Our taxonomy consists of assertional beliefs, which may or may not be true but do not influence our moral behavior; of motivating beliefs, which may or may not be true but do influence our moral behavior; and now of evidencing beliefs, which almost certainly are true. If an evidencing belief is well supported by the evidence, does that alone tell us anything about the likely behavior of one who holds it? I don't think so. Surely one can imagine an evidencing belief that does not motivate its holder toward or away from any morally significant action. For example, there is copious evidence that noble gases like neon do not participate in chemical reactions. But it's hard to imagine an act with moral implications that I might be more or less likely to perform just because I understand the behavior of noble gases.

Equally, one can hold a well-supported belief that does incline one toward or away from a particular moral course. For example, if I hold a small number of well-grounded beliefs regarding architecture, human psychology, and the behavior of fire, I can easily form the conclusion that to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater is a deeply immoral act.

We have seen that evidencing beliefs may or may not also be motivating. And motivated beliefs may or may not be supported by evidence. I would submit that one of the principal challenges facing the human community today is the challenge posed by beliefs which are motivating but not evidencing. If there is a unique social role for us to play as critical inquirers, it is that as humanists and skeptics, as critics of extreme medical claims, and the like, we specialize in analyzing and solving the challenges posed by what might be called "rogue" motivating beliefs.

How shall we evaluate motivating beliefs? How can we smoke out the rogues?

First, I could evaluate the belief on grounds of internal consistency, that is, by inquiring as to whether it displays coherence with other beliefs that I have previously accepted. If I did that, I would be weighing my motivating beliefs by the axiomatic rules that govern private cognition. But clearly this standard does not go far enough.

I do not interact with others in a realm of private cognition. I encounter them in an apparently objective outside world, where effect seems to follow cause according to physical laws whose terms are discoverable by scientific inquiry. By comparing my own observations against those of others and testing my conclusions experimentally, I can take advantage of powerful checks and balances that protect me against inadvertent error.

I have no similar protections in the realm of private cognition. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of private cognition is the absence of systematic reality-checking and error detection. Let's enumerate just a few of the ills that private cognition is heir to, as identified by contemporary figures in the Center for Inquiry movement. Stewart Elliott Guthrie has demonstrated the astonishing extent to which we anthropomorphize, ascribing human qualities to inanimate objects and lifeless processes. James Alcock, Pascal Boyer, and Owen Flanagan have shown how easily we impute higher-order intent to simple creatures or to the nonliving world. Elizabeth Loftus, Richard Ofshe, and others have plumbed the frankly shocking extent to which human memory is unreliable, a holographic approximation rather than the archival record we once assumed. A small army of researchers has unraveled the puzzle of how the brain constructs visual experience, which turns out to be a many-layered process fraught with opportunities for failed attention, misinterpretation, and outright illusion.

Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and Flanagan, among others, have forced us to contemplate the disquieting conclusion that even the self, the apparent agent at the seat of our primary interface with the world, may be at best a metaphor, at worst a functionally useful illusion that our brains create for themselves.

This is only a partial list, but the message should be clear. The domain of private cognition is a tangle of metaphors, approximations, rough guesses, and algorithmic reconstructions. The Cartesian confidence embodied in the phrase "I think, therefore I am" is cruelly misleading. Indeed, there may be few things that any of us can be less sure of than the accuracy, propriety, and veracity of our sensory experience and our private thoughts. No wonder we need intersubjective error checking. No wonder the scientific method, which streamlines the application of intersubjective validation to the quandaries of our lives, is so powerful.

And no wonder, as Clifford would say, that we should be so cautious about what we believe without adequate, external, objectively validated evidence.

Can we formulate a general rule for assessing the morality of belief? I would propose the following. First, mere opinion - the act of assenting to this or that proposition - is morally neutral. If an idea is unlikely to predispose me toward action that affects the world of shared experience, then my decision whether or not to assent to that idea carries no moral freight. The proposition that the moon is made of green cheese is merely an assertional belief. It may be foolish for me to adopt it, but my decision to do so has no morally evaluable consequences.

By contrast, a motivating belief concerns a proposition whose content, if accepted, will likely predispose me toward a course of action with morally evaluable consequences. If I believe that abortion is murder, I might blockade a clinic or attack an abortion doctor. If I believe that the Bible forbids blood transfusions, I might refuse life-saving care for my child in the event of a traumatic accident. Motivating beliefs can have morally positive outcomes, also - if I believe that education is valuable, I may decide to offer moral or financial support to an exceptionally bright young student.

The problem is that some propositions almost necessarily lead the people who accept them into action because of the nature of their content. To accept them at all is, all but inevitably, to accept them as motivating beliefs. To name just one example, religious beliefs usually fall into this category. Most familiar creeds include some absolute justification for accepting them.

If one sincerely believes almost any body of religious propositions on its own terms, one can scarcely avoid taking morally significant actions on the basis of that belief.

It is temptation of this sort against which critical inquiry offers the surest protection. As critical inquirers, we are well prepared to detect - and point out - when beliefs that merit nothing more than the status of assertion have become illicitly, immorally motivating ... when they have, so to speak, "gone rogue."

And we can raise special alarm concerning systems of belief abroad in society whose content will compel almost anyone who assents to their propositions will to act in accord with them, even if they are unsupported by evidence.

Religion, paranormal belief systems, utopian sociopolitical systems such as Communism - belief complexes like these almost always act as motivating beliefs. Therefore for any person to accept a body of propositions of this type without first subjecting it to detailed scrutiny is - let's not mince words - an immoral act. The credulist is immoral in his or her practice of epistemology.

So, how should we respond? As advocates of freedom of thought and expression, we must defend the right of others to embrace beliefs without evidence. But we also have the right - and, I would argue, the obligation - to protest when beliefs others are entitled to only as assertions become potential platforms for morally significant actions.

The moment when beliefs "go rogue" is the moment when an unsubstantiated assertional belief morphs into an unsubstantiated motivating belief. When this occurs, it's time for us to blow the whistle and say, "Stop! All you can do with that belief is to assert it. It lacks the epistemic support to be applied with any greater effect. If you apply it more broadly than that, then you are behaving immorally."

Hence the value of Clifford. Whatever his excesses, Clifford firmly demonstrates why the believer who has chosen to accept not merely an assertional belief, but a motivating belief without compelling evidence courts grave moral risk.

This brings us, finally, to the stance which critical inquirers should adopt when we engage credulists in debate in the public arena. We must always be prepared for our opponents to defend their positions with statements of assertional belief. And we must always stand ready to defend their right to express those beliefs, so long as their statements remain confined to the realm of assertion.

Every contender has the right to convey his or her opinion or preference, so long as it is presented as such, without making any claim that it is an objectively truthful description of reality, without making any claim that it justifies any morally significant course of action. But we know that, more often than not, our opponents will not stop there. They will reinterpret their assertional belief as a motivating belief ... as justification for some morally significant course of action even if these is no good warrant to accept the belief at all.

To accept beliefs that necessarily imply actions with moral consequences -to embrace an unsupported motivating belief while anticipating that one might act according to its precepts is, in Clifford's phrase, "always and everywhere" immoral.

This does not mean that critical inquirers should demand that credulists not be heard. Far from it. But we must reserve the right - and we should never sidestep the obligation - to step in when an unsupported motivating belief is expressed, and to urge all who listen to assign that statement no greater weight than a mere personal assertion. Because that is all it is. When an opponent offers a motivating belief as evidence, we should say that this no different than saying that the moon is made of green cheese. It is no different than saying, "I like blue." It is a statement about the speaker's opinions, not a statement about the world.

A conservative Christian may join the debate about cloning and declare that cloning is impermissible because only God can create a human life. We can acknowledge that person's right to hold and state that opinion, but note that it is not a real argument, because its epistemic weight depends on an unsupported belief that participants in the debate are under no obligation to share.

We can respond, "Thank you for stating your preference, but why should anyone who does not believe in God exactly as you do be swayed by it? Further, on what grounds should your unsubstantiated personal preference justify limiting the freedom of others to explore cloning technology?"

When critical inquirers engage credulists in public debate, we need never feel that our commitment to freedom of thought and expression compels us to accept moral relativism. We can object in the strongest terms - Cliffordian terms - to unsubstantiated beliefs that predispose toward morally negative outcomes. And we can do this consistently.

Unquestioned - or inadequately questioned - belief must always be challenged. As Dag Hammarskjold once quipped, "If not us, who?"

Following the example of Clifford, not that of William James - following, ironically enough, the example that I learned in my Jesuit-led theology class - we critical inquirers regularly apply high standards of scrutiny to extraordinary claims. To my mind, this justifies us in arguing - if, one hopes, sparingly - that the critical inquirer's reluctance to believe is morally superior to the credulist's unquestioned belief.

by Tom Flynn and the Council for Secular Humanism. Tom Flynn is editor of FREE INQUIRY magazine and author of the books THE TROUBLE WITH CHRISTMAS, GALACTIC RAPTURE, and NOTHING SACRED.

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