Rambling thoughts: Beliefs ground actions; actions do not ground beliefs

"History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief."

-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

A professor of mine pushed back against my idea (not that I'm the first to come up with it) that moral facts are a kind of epistemic fact; i.e. moral facts are facts about what we ought to believe about what we ought to do. More specifically, moral facts are facts about the weight of the external reasons for doing or refraining from a morally contextualized action, or about the weight of the external reasons for believing that doing or refraining from a morally contextualized action would make things on the whole better, would fulfill some kind of necessary moral obligation, would demonstrate one's virtue, or some combination thereof (depending on the normative theory the actor has in mind at the time of the action).

(So the weight of reasons is something discovered, not invented. If reasons are external, then consequences, actions, and virtue can all generate reasons for acting, and in that sense I agree with normative pluralism. But really I think reasons from action and reasons from virtue cash out consequentially, and in that sense I agree with consequentialism.)

(Side note: I'm open to the idea that all actions are morally contextualized. One might think that prudential reasons are not moral reasons. For example, you have prudential reasons to make a certain chess move given your desire to win the chess game, but you have no moral reasons to make that move or any other move, or to play or not play chess in the first place. But you might think that we have a moral obligation to maximize flourishing, and it may just so happen to be that you playing chess, and playing to win, maximizes flourishing at some time.)

He suggests that if believing is a kind of doing, a kind of an action, then epistemic facts are moral facts. That is, the fact of what you believe (so really, doxastic facts) determines whether you believe in something good or evil; i.e. there are moral facts about what beliefs are good or evil. Moral facts come first.

But that opens up a mystery: What could these moral facts be? What are they composed of?

One reason for locating moral facts in epistemic facts is that it doesn't face this mystery. The wrongness of evil actions is really the same wrongness as believing in false beliefs. 

But we don't think of believing in false beliefs as necessarily evil, and yet we do feel that evil actions are evil, so how could the wrongness of both be the same? The answer is that not all false beliefs are morally contextualized. If I falsely believe the square root of 9 to be 6, then that probably won't significantly affect the real moments of real flourishing real people really have, or would have. But if I falsely believe that some race is inferior to mine, then that's an evil belief because not only is it false and/or irrational, but it's morally contextualized; consequences, action, and virtue are at stake with that kind of belief in a way they are not at stake with innocuous false beliefs.

Put simply, you can be wrong, and you can be wrong in a way that hurts yourself or others. It's the latter kind of wrongness that we call evil.

Another problem: Why think believing is a kind of doing? I could see this if someone were a doxastic voluntarist and believed that we choose our beliefs. But I think doxastic involuntarism is true; we do not choose our beliefs.

It seems to me that beliefs ground actions, not the other way around. And thus evil beliefs ground evil actions; or morally-contextualized-false-beliefs ground morally-contextualized-false-actions. If actions depend on beliefs, then why not think actions that depend on irrational beliefs as irrational actions? And if that irrationality threatens to hurt people and cause needless suffering, then why not call these irrational actions evil?

Some people might say that a person cannot control the consequences of their actions, and so it's not fair to call an action evil when the person performing the action had good intentions and cannot be blamed for not seeing the future. But I don't believe in free will, so I don't believe in moral blame anyway. I do think a kind of critical blame is okay whereby we acknowledge the lower or high quality of a person's organism (i.e., it's okay to praise or curse someone for their talents or irrationality respectively), but hating the person per se (i.e. the soul or self) does not make sense when the person per se is merely along for the ride and has no control of their brain structure or circumstances.

In other words, my consequentialism does not lead to the unfair judgment of actions as evil in terms of blame, because I don't believe any moral blame is fair to begin with. (Certainly there is causal blame, but that's not the same as moral blame. Rats helped cause the spread of plague, but we don't morally blame the rats in the sense that we think their spreading the plague says something about the moral character of the rats.)

Certainly, intentions matter, though I would argue that intentions matter exactly for consequentialist reasons. If someone has bad intentions, then we can expect them to be a future cause of evil. But if someone has good intentions, then it's merely a fluke that some of their actions have poor consequences. Of course, if someone has good intentions but is incompetent, and their incompetence is causing problems, then they will naturally be removed from positions of responsibility. So even when we don't treat a person as evil for causing problems, we still treat them as a cause of problems (we exterminate rats even when we don't blame them).

What makes an action evil, on my view, just is the fact that the reasons to perform the action are outweighed by the reasons to not perform the action. "Evil" basically means "irrational and pertaining to consequences, intentions, and virtue"; in other words, "irrational and morally contextualized". This parallels the epistemic side: What makes a belief irrational is the fact that the reasons to believe that belief are outweighed by the reasons to refrain from believing it. People blamelessly believe wrongly just as they blamelessly act wrongly. In some cases those beliefs or actions tell us something about the rationality of the person (but the person never chooses to be irrational; they simply are that way); in other cases those beliefs or actions only tell us about the extenuating circumstances of the person.

What about non-propositional beliefs and actions? Animals act, and yet animals don't seem to have beliefs.

One option is to say that non-propositional beliefs are indeed a kind of belief. Animals certainly hold some kind of regarding attitude. Animals regard this area as their territory, or this moving thing as a source of food. These non-propositional regardings ground the animal's actions. Ditto for human infants, or know-how knowledge. If I know how to play a song on the piano, the actual playing of the song is largely a non-propositional effort. And yet, there is still a kind of regarding that takes place; I regard this note as the right note to play at this moment.

Another option is to say non-propositional beliefs don't exist; animals have no beliefs of any kind, and yet they have actions. Thus, there are actions not grounded in belief, but grounded in instincts or biological processes. It would just follow that these actions are non-rational; they cannot be rational or irrational, and thus cannot be good or evil. (They can be good or bad in the sense of beneficial vs harmful.)

But almost all human actions are belief-based, even if the belief is implicit and subconscious.