“As I pondered these things, I came to a decision. In a moment, I declared to the center of my being, ‘I will be a seeker of truth.’ I decided to follow reason and evidence wherever they might lead me.”
—Joshua Rasmussen[1]
Question: What does it mean to be a truthseeker? How can you tell whether someone is a truthseeker?
Answer: To be a truthseeker is to be a person who makes an honest and serious—even costly—effort to maximize their true beliefs and minimize their false beliefs – a person who prioritizes seeking truth above other pursuits, such as money, status, inclusion, safety, comfort, or entertainment – a person who feels a longing for truth and deeply, even desperately—even obsessively—wants to believe what’s true. You can tell whether a person is a truthseeker by their intellectual virtue. The greater the evidence of someone’s intellectual virtue, the greater the evidence that this person is a genuine truthseeker.
1.1 Ten intellectual virtues
When it comes to doing philosophy, where do we start? We could start with what philosophy is, or how to tell whether a belief is rational, or what the metaphysical preconditions necessary for the possibility of philosophical knowledge are. One answer is to start with psychology, the psychology of the kind of person who cares about philosophical truth.
If features of our psychology prevent us from uncovering and giving up our false beliefs—and we most certainly do have false beliefs—then the fight for truth was lost before it began. This is the problem of being epistemically stuck. To illustrate, let’s say there is a person who desperately wants there to be an afterlife, and despises the idea that when we die we cease to exist forever. Furthermore, this person is strongly convinced that near-death experiences are powerful evidence that an afterlife is real. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that near-death experiences are not good evidence for an afterlife, and this person is guilty of motivated reasoning. The question is, what would it take for this person to prevent themselves from being stuck in their false belief? What attitudes could this person adopt to maximize their chances of escaping error, discovering what’s true, and changing their mind?
Intellectual virtues are features of our character that help us uncover and give up false beliefs, and help us obtain true beliefs. If you want to maximize your true beliefs and minimize your false beliefs, then you should strive to be intellectually virtuous. Below I review ten intellectual virtues: passion for truth, humility, honesty, bravery, discipline, imagination, empathy, civility, sensitivity, and independence.
1.1.1 Passion for truth
This virtue involves curiosity, wonder, and love of wisdom. The truthseeker is intellectually starving, equipped with a voracious appetite for truth. It is difficult to hit what you are not aiming for; the truthseeker aims for truth.
But in life we aim for many things: money, approval from others, ego gratification, comfort, entertainment, and so on. Often the pursuit of these things takes precedent over the pursuit of truth. It’s tempting to defend our worldviews not because we desire truth, but to protect beliefs we want to be true, or to signal our virtue, to appease our tribes, or because we don’t want to be embarrassed having been wrong all this time. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.2 Humility
The truthseeker acknowledges that his[2] worldview is not perfect. He knows there is much for him to learn, that he has false beliefs waiting to be uncovered. He is open-minded and willing to be shown wrong. He does not double down when shown wrong but changes his mind. He tests his own worldview for weaknesses knowing there’s always room for improvement, and lets go of beliefs that he can no longer defend, even beliefs that are near and dear to him. The truthseeker takes an interrogative approach: instead of defaulting to strong declarations with unreasonable certainty, he asks questions like someone curious who wants to learn, someone excited more by the ideas themselves than by the satisfaction of being right. And even when he is right, the truthseeker does not gloat but delights in sharing his insights with others.
Humility includes intellectual asceticism[3], which involves not taking on intellectual projects you are not suited to take on. This means, I say, in abstaining from writing and professing when you should be reading and learning.
It’s tempting to act like others can learn from us while we already know everything, to assume our debate opponents have no insights to offer us, to refuse to concede good points just because they oppose our views, or to go through life as if our worldviews are perfect. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.3 Honesty
The truthseeker is honest with himself about what he really believes and why he really believes it. The real reasons why we believe something can only be examined when brought to light. The truthseeker cultivates self-honesty through deep, often painful introspection. Facing ugly truths is one of the most difficult things a person can do, especially ugly truths about reality as a whole or about oneself. But the truthseeker faces the truth all the same, and accepts it when reason takes him there.
The truthseeker is open about his desires and the bias emitting from them. The truthseeker does not ignore his feelings, but records them. If he doesn’t know how he feels, then he records that. Whatever the truth is, that’s what the truthseeker is after. This allegiance to truth carries over to conversations with others; the truthseeker doesn’t lie to score points in a debate. If he is unsure of something, he says he is unsure. If he is afraid of something, he says he is afraid.
It’s tempting to avoid looking ourselves in the mirror and being candid with ourselves. If we do something evil, or demonstrate poor character, or make a mistake, it’s tempting to rationalize what we did so we don’t have to face painful truths about ourselves. It’s tempting to not admit our desires out of fear of exposing our bias. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.4 Bravery
The beliefs we want most to be true may turn out false. Often these are beliefs tied to our identities: the self-conceptions to which we cling for comfort, inclusion, and self-esteem. The truthseeker seeks out opposing views and is willing to risk discovery of the falsehood of his deeply desired beliefs, even the beliefs that ground his identity.
The world of truthseeking is a battlefield. It’s competitive, dramatic, emotional, and scary. The truthseeker is a brave soldier who marches past the fear, willing to risk his identity for the truth. Those who have converted from one worldview to another are those whose previous identities were slain on the battlefield of truth, only for a new identity to take place. But this new identity cannot claim victory and leave the battlefield; it too must continue fighting by engaging in opposition material – books, papers, debates – anything that exposes you to arguments against your beliefs, or to arguments in favor of views contrary to your own.
It’s tempting to run away from opposition material, to engage only in those works that support your beliefs. Instead of taking both sides into account, it’s tempting to stack the evidence that supports your beliefs while ignoring the evidence that challenges your beliefs. It’s tempting to skim over the arguments against you and come to hasty rebuttals instead of engaging in the arguments seriously and carefully. It’s tempting to protect your identity at the cost of truth. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.5 Discipline
This virtue includes intellectual perseverance and responsibility.[4] The truthseeker takes responsibility for building their own worldview instead of outsourcing this work to parents, pastors, friends, gurus, authors, or academics. Instead of giving up in the face of philosophical difficulty, the truthseeker perseveres in the goal for truth. Go the hard way, Wittgenstein tells us.[5]
The truthseeker remains a lifelong student, putting in the effort to learn new arguments and evidence, to clarify concepts and organize thoughts, and to explicate one’s truthseeking journey. It would be strange for someone to claim to desire truth and proceed to spend zero hours doing truthseeking. The truthseeker puts in the hours. Truthseeking takes exertion, focus, and time to read, re-read, write, re-write, and think things through.
Truthseeking is deeply difficult. When a problem is difficult to solve, it’s tempting to ignore the problem or dismiss the problem as a non-problem. It’s tempting to hand-wave opposing arguments instead of doing the harder work of updating your beliefs in light of them. It’s tempting to oversimplify complex issues, to seek easy answers to difficult questions. It’s tempting to deem an issue settled instead of putting in the effort to continually test ideas. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.6 Imagination
In the analytic tradition of philosophy, philosophical discourse follows a pattern. Philosophical questions are taken to be questions of meaning: What does it mean to have justified beliefs? What does it mean for something to exist? What does it mean for something to be God? To answer questions like these, a definition is offered: Something is a chair if and only if it has four legs. Thinkers can then point to something that has four legs and yet is not a chair (e.g., a cat), which would show that this analysis of the concept of chair fails.[6] The other way this analysis could fail is if we could point to something that is a chair and yet has fewer or more than four legs (e.g., a beanbag chair). We can easily show counterexamples on both sides, showing that this analysis of chair doubly fails.[7]
Imagination is core to theorizing in philosophy and science. Different theories have us imagine the world in different ways. Thought experiments have us exercise our imagination to test theories. Our beliefs, theories, and worldviews are objects of imagination. Christians, for example, imagine the world being a certain way: God created the universe, Adam and Eve, and incarnated as Jesus to die for our sins to enable restoration of the broken relationship between God and humanity. Naturalists, on the other hand, imagine the world differently: The universe began to exist uncreated out of necessity, or always existed necessarily, and the nature of fields and their excitations caused stars and planets to form, life to emerge from chemical interactions, and humans to arrive as products of a long process of natural selection.
Without imagination, you won’t be able to see things from multiple angles and entertain alternative explanations; you won’t be able to place yourself in the shoes of a fellow truthseeker, to picture the world how they picture it and see if their picture of things is more illuminating than your own. This naturally leads into the topic of intellectual empathy.
1.1.7 Empathy
The truthseeker puts himself in the shoes of others and tries to make the most sense possible of the world through their eyes, steelmanning rather than strawmanning their views. The truthseeker tries to understand and accurately represent the beliefs of his opponents, extracting whatever intellectual beauty that can be found therein. The consummate truthseeker constructs the most powerful versions of all positions and compares them to see which view is best. The consummate truthseeker is so skilled at steelmanning that he can argue against his own worldview more effectively than his opponents can, and can argue for his opponents’ worldviews more effectively than they can, while still showing why his view is preferable.
It’s tempting to assume that someone thinks differently than you because they are confused or mistaken, and not because they see something you have yet to see. It’s tempting to ignore the real reasons someone disagrees with you and to attack a strawman. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.8 Civility
This virtue is related to sportsmanship, tact, kindness, charity, and productive dialogue. Philosophy is dialectical, meaning that doing philosophy well requires being in back-and-forth conversations with others, either through the exchange of writings or live conversation. If you have insights that others could benefit from, how are they to encounter these insights if not by engaging in conversation with you? And the same applies the other way around: How do you expect to benefit from the insights of others unless you read their work or listen to them speak? You can test your own arguments through the tools of philosophy, but, arguably, the truest test is to see what impact your arguments have on others. When other thinkers, especially experts in the relevant area, test your arguments, what do they find?
But if philosophy is dialectical in this way, then this means that it is of utmost importance to be a good dialectical partner. The truthseeker speaks truth in love and respect, not in hatred. Just as we protest when evil motivations are misattributed to us, we too ought not misattribute evil motivations to others. We should be charitable to our interlocutors and not assume the worst interpretation of what they say. Has hatred against you ever changed your mind? Why would you expect your hatred to change the minds of others? If you want truth, then you want productive conversations. Insults, accusations, and hostile tones are counterproductive. Because counterproductive conversations are a waste of time, it’s best to avoid such situations when possible, to ignore rather than engage with intellectually vicious interlocutors.
Because of the competitiveness of truthseeking, there is tension. We should show sportsmanship rather than barbarity in that tension. We should show composure rather than distress, excitement towards others and their progress rather than condescension, and excitement to learn rather than haughtiness. For productive conversation, it helps to establish points of agreement, to build common ground, to view interlocutors as fellow truthseekers, and to view disagreement not as an opportunity to defeat someone and prove your strength, but for mutual growth and self-improvement.
While failures of civility, and failures of intellectual virtue more generally, abound in disagreements, perhaps the most egregious mistake you can make is to assert yourself as a greater authority than your opponent over what your opponent believes, thinks, or feels. When someone asserts themselves as a greater authority than you over what your beliefs, thoughts, feelings, intentions, or experiences are, there is nothing to do but stay away and take solace in your understanding. It’s important to remember that just because you are a genuine truthseeker, that doesn’t mean everyone is.
1.1.9 Sensitivity
The truthseeker is thoughtful, careful, and meticulous, painting with fine strokes, not with a broad brush. While philosophy has us zoom out and look at life and the universe as a whole and look at the big picture and put things into perspective, philosophy also has us zoom in, dig into the weeds, and try to be precise and rigorous about what we believe and why. Sloppy thinking is of no interest to philosophers, but, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Joshua Rasmussen, analytical surgery describes the practice of the sensitive philosopher.
The sensitive thinker:
pulls concepts apart and identifies important distinctions;
is sensitive to the relevance of a question, argument, or piece of evidence to the inquiry at hand;
is sensitive to reasons, to the pressure arguments place on his beliefs;
is sensitive to the challenges involved in believing rightly and to the consequences of failing to believe rightly, and as such feels an internal ache and pull towards testing and improving his beliefs.
The sensitive thinker exercises intellectual caution, for example by being sensitive to the ethical implications of his inquiry.[8] Concluding too quickly and too confidently in someone’s guilt before eliminating alternative explanations has led to innocent people being accused for crimes they did not commit, or judged for sins they did not commit.
The truthseeker is called to walk an intellectual tightrope, continuously recalibrating and rebalancing his approach to inquiry, expecting difficulties and surprises when trying to hone in on the exact truth. Broad, oversimplified thinking is advantageous because it is fast and easy while powerful enough for grasping the basic truths conducive to our survival, but grasping abstract, philosophical truths requires slow and careful thinking, revisiting and re-analyzing arguments, and stretching one’s thinking by reading diverse thinkers.
It’s tempting to be distracted by questions irrelevant to the inquiry at hand, to ignore the intellectual and ethical concerns others have over the positions we defend, to be stubborn and inflexible in our thinking, to view things in simple binaries when the truth is often multifaceted and found between extremes, within the synthesis of paradoxical beliefs, or through a radical revision of traditional thinking. It’s tempting to be overly cautious at the expense of progress. The truthseeker resists these temptations.
1.1.10 Independence
A teenager is pressured to go along with the religious beliefs and practices of their parents, lest they incur their parents’ wrath. You can win favor with your parents and stay in their good graces by speaking and behaving in a way that matches with their beliefs. When your survival depends on your parents’ support, you may, without even realizing it, change your speech and behavior in at least subtle if not major ways. But if you had your own place to stay, a source of support independent of your parents, you could freely speak your mind and live your life knowing that you are immune to whatever wrath that comes.
But we merely switch our dependence from parents to employers. Can we speak our minds or behave freely without worry of losing our jobs, or having our workplaces become hostile? We guard ourselves to avoid the risk of becoming disliked and ostracized. Important topics become taboo, and the things of life that we ought to speak about the most, we end up speaking about the least.
Financial independence is an intellectual virtue. As the famous quote goes (my paraphrase), don’t expect a person to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.[9] There are a few ways in which this is true. The first has been mentioned: psychologically, because humans are so strongly programmed to seek survival at all costs, we can subconsciously allow our words, thoughts, and behaviors to be molded by survival pressures. We speak and act not from a place of truth, but from a place of survival. Over time, our thought patterns are shaped by our jobs, or by selection effect: only a person who thinks a certain way remains at the job—drinking the Kool-Aid is easy when you like the taste.
The university is meant to be a bastion of truthseeking. But the people within universities may succumb to the same pressures of money, ego, and tribalism found in any other social structure. Even places reserved for truthseeking are not free from pressures against truthseeking.
Many truthseekers have been crushed by their refusal to lie and tow the party line. It’s tempting to do and say whatever it takes to survive. The truthseeker resists even this temptation.
1.2 Ben’s Virtue
Because Autism and Philosophy is a book about truthseeking, it’s important for the reader to have some idea of whether the author is a genuine truthseeker. If I weren’t writing this book from a spirit of truth, then its contents would be immediately suspicious. Philosophy not written from a spirit of truth is arguably not worth reading. By assuring my reader that I am a genuine truthseeker, I assure that I am the right kind of person to be writing on these sorts of topics. I easily can be mistaken in my analysis at any point, but if I am it won’t be because my heart is in the wrong place; conversely, if I am right in my analysis at any point, this won’t be surprising if I am a genuine truthseeker.
I think the fastest way to tell whether someone is a genuine truthseeker is (1) whether this person engages in opposition material, and (2) whether this person has changed their mind in significant ways because of their truthseeking efforts.
I am an ex-Christian who has prayed to God many times saying “All I want is to be with you.” I am a pro-theist, meaning that I want God to exist, and I am a pro-Christian at least in the sense that I’d prefer to live in a world created by a perfect being who loves us and created us within the context of a grand story. Arguments for naturalism and against Christianity were my opposition material, from which I ran away. But at some point my desire for truth overcame my fear. I eventually recognized that, as a Christian, the most intellectually virtuous thing I could do is gather the challenges to Christian belief that I personally found most challenging. If I can answer these challenges, then my faith would emerge strong and confident, and I would grow all the closer to God. If my faith were defeated, then I would at least not be saddled with beliefs that I wouldn’t keep had I seriously investigated them, and perhaps I would even be closer to possessing the treasure of truth.
I fully expected this project to reveal the beauty and brilliance of Christianity, but instead the challenges to Christian belief proved too heavy, and I could not carry that planetary weight. There is an effort to faith, an effort to holding on to a belief not because of arguments or evidence—not really—but because of desperate desire. I could not sustain both that effort and the ordinary efforts of everyday life.
I believed, with certainty, that God exists and that God raised Jesus from the dead. Now I am virtually certain of the opposite. I believed that life without God is absurd; now I believe that this is certainly false (see Chapter 19). I believed in angels, demons, heaven, and hell, and now I don’t. I believed that the Bible was the Word of God, inspired and inerrant. Now I don’t. I believed that hell was essential to lasting justice. Now I believe that hell is logically incompatible with a perfect being (see Chapter 15). I believed that morality depends on God; now I don’t (see Chapters 5 and 6). I believed that I had felt the presence of God in prayer, but now I have a different interpretation of my religious experiences (see Chapter 11). I believed that our universe couldn’t be explained without God, and now I believe that our experiences of evil cannot be explained with God.
Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne acknowledges the virtue of the person who changes their worldview:
. . . I greatly admire people who [had] a certain worldview and then [came] to have certain important life experiences or [were] exposed to certain arguments and suddenly abandoned it and [gave] up that view and adopted a different one, and I think [that] these are highly rational people . . . [10]
I would add that it’s one thing to change your mind, and another thing to lose beliefs you want more than anything to be true, as it was in my case. An advantage of having the psychology of an ex-Christian is that I can excitedly read both Christian and non-Christian philosophy. Because I want the universe to have been created by a perfectly loving being, I welcome arguments for Christianity and for the existence of God. But because my truthseeking efforts have left me convinced that Christianity is false and that God does not exist, I can also welcome arguments against Christianity and against the existence of God. As a pro-theist ex-Christian I benefit from detachment: I feel no pressure to automatically agree or disagree with an argument just because it supports this or that side. I can judge arguments on their own merit, not on whether I like their conclusion. I find myself disagreeing with atheists almost as much as I do theists.
Atheists will say that humans start off as atheists, and so Christians who lose their faith deconvert. But as soon as I was able to form memories and beliefs, I believed so effortlessly that God exists and that Christianity is true that the possibility of these not being true didn’t enter my mind until I was 12, and I was horrified by the thought. God was more real to me than I was to myself. By the time I was 18 years old, my dream was to write a book proving that God exists and that Christianity is true. Ironically, all these years later, I have written a book arguing that the reasons to disbelieve in the existence of God and to disbelieve in the truth of Christianity far outweigh the reasons to believe.
In a paradoxical way though, this book is very Christian. Most non-Christians do not have enough respect or interest in the idea of God or in Christianity to spend the time and effort it takes to write a book like this; only someone who cares deeply about these things, someone for whom this is personal, can write something like this. For the Christian, the most important thing in life is union with God, and seeking union with God requires figuring out your relationship to God, to morality, and to the afterlife. By writing this book, I am still keeping with this directive.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I take this quite literally; I would find it unbearably painful to not be granted the opportunity to, at least to some minimal extent, test my worldview and seek better versions of my worldview. I think this in part comes out of my Christian upbringing, where what you believe here and now gets you into heaven or hell for the rest of eternity. Believing what’s true could, for all I know at the outset, be infinitely consequential for me. On the other hand, if my death means the permanent cessation of my existence, then for all I know at the outset, this implies that life is absurd, and life being absurd, for all I know at the outset, implies that the most rational thing to do is to choose death. Because eternity is at stake, and so is my very identity, self-worth, what it means to be a good person, and why we should live at all, I can’t imagine finding anything more important than truthseeking.
1.3 What is virtue, anyway?
“The foundation of critical thinking is virtue”, writes Joe Schmid.[11] When building a worldview, the principles of critical thinking is an obvious place to start, and yet starting with the principles of critical thinking means starting with virtue. It would be nice then if we could have some understanding of what virtue is. If we are to aim at becoming more virtuous, then we should know what it is we are aiming at.
The first thing to say is that virtues are character traits or states of character, which means virtues describe the kind of person a person is. Brave, generous, patient – these are qualities that can describe someone.
The second facet of virtue is that one becomes virtuous by repeated actions. Aristotle says, “men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts”[12], and “states of character arise out of like activities.”[13]
Clarification 1: I just said that virtues describe persons, but here virtues are describing actions. What gives? Answer: Virtuous actions just are the actions that a person with that virtue would do.[14] So it’s not a matter of merely comparing one action to another to see which is virtuous, but comparing one action to another in the context of why the person is doing the action. Aristotle says:
. . . the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately.[15]
This reveals that, for the third facet of virtue, the same action can be virtuous or not depending on context. We can imagine someone running away from battle. This could be an instance of cowardice, or a rejection of rashness, or a protest against an unjust war. So the same action—running away from battle—can be virtuous (or at least non-vicious) or vicious (or at least non-virtuous).
Clarification 2: If a virtuous person is the kind of person who performs a virtuous action, and a virtuous action is the kind of action a virtuous person would perform, then isn’t that circular? Which comes first, the virtue of the person or the virtue of the action?[16] Answer: The virtue of the person comes first. What matters is the context in which the action is performed, not the action itself, and so this means that the internal state of the agent is what determines whether the action is virtuous.
Clarification 3: But if that’s right, then how could it be that we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions? Here’s where a modification to the second facet is in order. But let’s first clarify what kind of a state of character a virtue is. Virtues are dispositions; as Aristotle says, “in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said . . . to be disposed in a particular way.”[17]
There are different theories of what a disposition is, but the following account suffices for now: a disposition of mine is a collection of facts about me that together ground the truth of a modal fact about what I would do were I placed in certain circumstances. So if I’m brave, then I would do the brave thing given the opportunity.
Often dispositions are framed in terms of probability: If I am brave, then I will probably do the brave thing given the opportunity. On this account, someone can be highly brave in the sense that there is a 99% chance that this person will do the brave thing. But let’s say I see this person behaving cowardly. I say, “What a brave person!” Someone turns to me and says, “Are you being sarcastic?” I would say, “No, you see this person truly is brave, because they had a 99% chance of doing the brave thing, but here they got unlucky and the 1% chance won out.”
So I reject the probabilistic account of dispositions because (1) it implies that someone who is actively being cowardly could accurately be called brave, (2) by what mechanism does someone’s probabilistic disposition “win out”? – and (3) even if you had an answer to that question, an action, to be genuinely virtuous, cannot be virtuous purely by a chancy mechanism – the mechanism must be principled (i.e., non-arbitrary) and found within the agent themselves.
But there is an intuition within the probabilistic account that I agree with. A person can be disposed to be brave in some situations but not in others. No one is perfectly virtuous, so this is true across all virtues, across all persons. So it’s true that a person will sometimes be brave and sometimes fail to be brave, given enough opportunities. Different situations call for different kinds of, or higher degrees of, bravery. A person might have some of these braveries and lack others. The more brave a person is in general, the higher the percentage of situations in which they would do the brave thing.
Clarification 4: But doesn’t this imply that if someone is disposed to be brave, but the opportunity to be brave never arrives, then we could accurately call this person brave despite them having never demonstrated bravery? Similarly, we call someone generous for the money they have actually given, not for the money they would give if they had it. Here I say it’s an epistemic problem: you don’t know whether someone is disposed to be brave unless they demonstrate their disposition through action. When we call someone generous, we mean that they are evidently generous, and their actions are the evidence.
Clarification 5: Returning to the question of how can virtuous action make us virtuous if the virtue of the person comes first: a person is virtuous first because they have a good will and understanding, and by that good will and understanding they perform actions colored by this context. These virtue-colored actions are what I mean by ‘virtuous action’.
Because your good will and understanding can be subconscious, your virtuous actions can be automatic, i.e., without deliberation. But there are moral crossroads or junctures of character formation where you are pulled in two different directions and you agonize over a choice: you want to cheat on the test but you also want to be the kind of person who does things the right way. By choosing to do the right thing, you train your brain to fight through the difficulty of being virtuous. By building up a precedent of virtuous action for yourself, you are more likely to default to a virtuous course of action in the future. Your dispositions are composed of facts about you, especially facts about your past actions and the choices made at moral crossroads.
We’d expect, then, for vicious actions to build up a vicious character. While this is often true, facing the consequences of your vicious actions can also increase your understanding, enabling future virtuous action. Conversely, doing the right thing and being punished for it can warp your understanding, making it less likely that you do the right thing in the future.[18]
Really, virtue is built up through life experience, and that includes making mistakes. But it’s useful to think: If I am the kind of person to give only half an effort in this class, then when the time comes to do the real work my classes are preparing me for, won’t I give only half an effort then as well? And so if I want to give a full effort later, I should give a full effort now. We can apply this to rationalizing evils: If I am able to make excuses for my minor moral failings, then what is stopping me from making excuses for slightly larger moral failings, and so on until I am able to rationalize major moral failings? And so if I want to be a person of integrity in large matters, I should be a person of integrity in small matters too.
I said, for the third facet of virtue, that the same action can be virtuous or vicious depending on context. This is why, for the fourth facet of virtue, actions are only genuinely virtuous when they are done under the right conditions. If an action appears virtuous, but the inner state of the agent is one of ill intent or misunderstanding, then the action is virtuous in appearance only. And so a virtuous action, to be genuinely virtuous, i.e., the kind of action a genuinely virtuous person would perform, must be performed with the right intent—a good will—and with right understanding.
Philosopher Matthew Shea affirms virtue as involving a good will:
Being virtuous involves having a good will: a will that wills, desires, chooses, and acts in accordance with what is truly good. Willing the good, having the other aspects of one’s character integrated around a good will, and acting in accordance with it, are necessary conditions of virtue.[19]
Plato, through Socrates, affirms virtue as involving understanding: “Courage, for example, when it is not wisdom but like a kind of recklessness: when a man is reckless without understanding, he is harmed; when with understanding, he is benefitted.”[20]
The fifth facet of virtue is that virtue is connected to our feelings – whether we feel the right emotions, to the right degree, and whether we feel rightly happy or rightly miserable. Aristotle says:
. . . he who stands his ground against things that are terrible and delights in this or at least is not pained is brave, while the man who is pained is a coward. For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains . . . we ought to have been brought up . . . so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought . . . virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains. This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is inflicted by these means . . .[21]
What makes you happy or miserable will dispose you accordingly, so it’s no surprise that virtue would be concerned with pleasures and pains. On one hand, virtue is disconnected from pleasures and pains because it is exactly the pain of doing the right thing, or the pleasure of doing the wrong thing, that helps explain failures of virtue. But the existence of vicious pleasure and vicious pain is consistent with, and indeed goes hand-in-hand with, the fact that pleasure is virtuous when it is connected to doing what’s right and that pain is virtuous when connected to doing what’s wrong; a virtuous person enjoys the thought of doing what’s right and is pained at the thought of doing what’s wrong. Virtue ethicists and deontologists say we should maximize virtue or moral goodness over pleasure, but if pleasure is connected to virtue in the way just described, then maximizing virtue will maximize (virtuous) pleasure anyway. Non-naive utilitarianism says the same: we ought to maximize virtuous pleasure, i.e., the kind of pleasure that leads to further goodness and doesn’t lead to pointless or excessive harm later on.
On emotions, Aristotle says:
. . . both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.[22]
This leads into the sixth facet of virtue, which is that each virtue lies between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. Aristotle says:
. . . both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues.[23]
The excess is an excess of what, exactly? And the deficiency a deficiency of what? Aristotle says emotion:
With regard to feelings of fear and confidence courage is the mean; of the people who exceed, he who exceeds in fearlessness has no name (many of the states have no name), while the man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward.[24]
‘Bravery’, to me at least, evokes not an absence of fear, but the ability to overcome one’s fear to do the right thing. Likewise, cowardice is not feeling too much fear, but giving into your fear and failing to do what’s right. However, if a man were excessively afraid of a spider, then that excess of fear betrays a failure to understand the real danger of the situation. Socrates says something similar in his dialogue with Protagoras: “‘So, can we conclude that cowardice is ignorance of what is and is not to be feared?”’ . . . “‘So the wisdom about what is and is not to be feared is courage and is the opposite of this ignorance?’”[25]
Clarification 6: How can bravery be both a lack of fear and an overcoming of fear? A virtue is, thus far, a character trait that describes a particular way in which a person has a good will and understanding. A vice, then, is a character trait that describes a particular way in which a person fails to have a good will and/or fails to have understanding. We can connect this to emotion in the following way: By having a good will and understanding, you feel the right emotions to the right degree. Someone who lacks a good will and/or lacks understanding feels the wrong emotions to the wrong degree. This makes sense of both the intuition that bravery is in some sense a lack of fear and in another sense the overcoming of fear: If I understand the goodness of defending my village from raiders, and I see the risk of pain and death, I feel both fear and confidence – fear in response to the risk, and confidence in the goodness of protecting my community. A brave person, by their good will and understanding, feels this confidence strongly enough to overcome their fear. To be cowardly is to understand both the goodness of protecting others and how you could protect others if you chose to do so, but, by having less good will than desire for self-preservation, feel more fear than confidence and thus fail to do the right thing (i.e., do nothing or run away); or, feel more fear than confidence by lack of understanding of the real danger. (We might say that cowardice proper is the former kind, with the latter being timidity or anxiousness. Think of the bunny or deer that runs away from you, not understanding that you are a friend.)
Clarification 7: For Aristotle, the excess or deficiency is relative to us and our circumstances: “Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this—the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us.”[26] The appropriate amount of fear to feel differs from situation to situation. In some situations, the appropriate amount, i.e., the amount you would feel if you understood the real danger of things, is no fear at all. E.g., I do not fear the sniper outside my house waiting to shoot me as soon as I step out, because I have no reason to believe there is such a sniper. But bravery involves an overcoming of fear, and so fearlessness, while not a positive virtue, is a negative virtue in the sense of demonstrating a lack of vice, such as cowardice (or a lack of anxiousness or paranoia).
Clarification 8: For any virtue there won’t always be the same vices on either side. Following the third and fourth facets, the vice will depend on context. To illustrate, consider the virtue of generosity: If you share your wealth out of a desire to help others, and out of an understanding of how sharing in the way you do will in fact help, you are generous. If you understand how sharing would help, but out of a deficiency of desire to help others fail to share, then you are greedy. But what would an excess of generosity be? Maybe laziness if you give your money to whoever asks and can’t be bothered to first vet the legitimacy of their needs – or self-sabotage if you give more than you can afford – or guillability if you fall for scams – or spinelessness if you see how certain family members will only use the money in selfish ways but you don’t know how to stand up for yourself – or cruelty if you know the person will use the money to harm themselves or others – or vanity if the motivation behind giving is primarily to improve your reputation.
Virtue is not a simplistic rejection of extremes, because, as Aristotle says, “what is intermediate is in a sense an extreme”.[27] You cannot have an excess of willing the good, nor can you have a deficiency of bigotry. While it’s true that the same action, stripped of context, can be virtuous or vicious, some actions, desires, or attitudes have their context built-in. While homicide can be virtuous or vicious depending on context, murder is by definition unjustified homicide, and thus vicious.
The seventh facet is that virtue is connected to goodness itself. Virtues are good for a reason. What that reason is will depend on your metaethics. Some say that virtue is intrinsically good, or that virtue is good because it makes us excel in what we are, or because it imparts moral praiseworthiness. My view is that virtue is good because it leads to good consequences. Socrates says, in his dialogue with Meno, “. . . all that the soul undertakes and endures, if directed by wisdom, ends in happiness, but if directed by ignorance, it ends in the opposite?”, with Meno answering “That is likely.”[28] Virtue is good because it ends in happiness, and vice is bad because it ends in misery.
The virtuous person has a good goal or aim in mind. The virtuous person in the broadest sense has the broadest good goal: to maximize goodness and minimize badness in the world. More narrow virtues aim for more narrow goods: the intellectually virtuous person has the goal of obtaining epistemic goods like important true beliefs. The confident person has the goal of avoiding the harmful consequences of being insecure and being arrogant.
Clarification 9: If virtue is connected to good consequence, then does virtue need to lead to success? Consider the heroic actions of the conspirators behind Operation Valkyrie, the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler. By all appearances, risking one’s life to save the world from a genocidal, megalomaniacal dictator is a highly brave and commendable act. But the operation failed, revealing a lack of understanding, somewhere along the way, on the part of the conspirators.
This points to three ways someone can fail to be virtuous: by failing to have a good will, by failing to understand the goodness and badness of things, and by failing to understand how to bring about an instance of goodness or avoid an instance of badness. If having a good will means intending what’s truly good for all people, then even a good will depends on an understanding of the goodness and badness of things. We might include within having a good will an element of empathy and caring about the pain and happiness of others, but someone who understands the goodness of the happiness of others and the badness of the pain of others will care, and this understanding is made possible by empathy. We can also include within good will the aiming towards a good goal, but again, someone who understands the goodness and badness of things will aim towards good goals.[29] So a good will just is the will a person has when that person understands the goodness and badness of things. If this is right, then there are two ways to fail to be virtuous: by failing to understand the goodness and badness of things, and failing to understand how to bring about that goodness or avoid that badness.
We might call both of these understandings wisdom, with the former being moral wisdom and the latter practical wisdom. The morally wise person sees what is good, and the practically wise person sees the steps needed to take to bring about that goodness without falling into error. We have a saying: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This points to the truth that having a good will is not enough; you must have practical understanding.[30] If you don’t, the consequences of your actions can be disastrous, in which case you lose much of the praiseworthiness you otherwise would retain. We often remark how there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity, because we understand that risking one’s life without good reason is foolishness. We also often remark how difficult it can be to tell whether someone is acting out of malice or stupidity, because the consequences are often the same in either case (Hanlon’s Razor comes to mind). So while the Valkyrie conspirators understood the goodness of eliminating Hitler, they didn’t quite understand how to bring it about. While their good will is praiseworthy, surely their actions would have been all the more praiseworthy had they succeeded in their efforts. So while being fully virtuous requires success, one can still be partially virtuous in failure.
Tying this to intellectual virtue: I may intend to believe all significant true beliefs and not believe any significant false beliefs, but to succeed in this I need practical insights into what it takes to achieve this good goal. An intellectually virtuous person succeeds in improving their worldview because they understand how to go about improving their worldview. Without the success component, there is nothing that explains why virtue is worth having. When virtue is partially praiseworthy, this is because it is partially successful—succeeding to have a good will while failing to have practical understanding (or succeeding to have a will that is partially good).
Clarification 10: Do I need to benefit from my virtue to satisfy the success component? Answer: If I am harmed needlessly, then that exposes my lack of understanding. But if even my death is necessary for a greater good, and if we remember that a virtuous person enjoys being virtuous, and feels a great pain at the thought of failing to be virtuous, then this enjoyment and avoidance of pain is highly beneficial to me. For the virtuous person, dying with a clean conscience is preferable to living as a monster. But even setting that aside, the good consequences of my virtue needn’t include me as a benefactor for those consequences to be good. Tyler Shultz helped expose the fraud of Theranos, persevering through extreme legal and social pressures to back down. Richard Sipe helped expose the systemic child abuse and coverup of the Catholic Church and was shunned by the Church for it. The badness of the pain Shultz and his family went through—or that Sipe went through—does not eliminate the goodness of helping save medical patients from deception—or of helping prevent further Church abuse. Often virtuous people are punished, not rewarded, for their virtue by vicious institutions. But vice in response to virtue does nothing to undermine that virtue. If anything, that vice serves only to highlight that virtue.
The eighth facet of virtue is that virtue is different from skill or faculty. While a skill is built up through repeated actions like virtue, and requires practical understanding like virtue, skills may or may not be used with a good will.
In some sense all virtues are intellectual—they all involve understanding. This runs us into another circularity problem: to arrive at true beliefs, I need to be intellectually virtuous. But to be intellectually virtuous, I need understanding. But to have understanding, I need to already have true beliefs. The solution is to realize that to arrive at truth I first need faculties, not virtues, such as intelligence. If we are concerned with any trait that causes one to believe what’s true, then that will include both virtues and faculties. But if we are concerned with traits that involve moral and practical wisdom and balanced emotions and actions, then we are concerned with virtue.
Intelligence, a multifaceted concept in its own right, is tricky to define and often operationalized as the ability to score high on standardized tests. But for my purposes the following definition suffices: Intelligence refers to mental powers; the greater the number of your mental powers, and the greater the magnitude of each power, the greater your intelligence. Mental powers include perceiving differences between things, solving puzzles, making jokes, playing music, remembering, reasoning, imagining, reading, and writing. Perhaps one of the most basic mental powers is understanding, which is something like the power to see the truth of something. I see that if A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C, and thus I understand that if A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C. I see that if I put my hands here and here on the piano keys in such and such manner, then I will have successfully played Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor, and thus I understand how to play the song. I see that the word ‘legend’ means, among other things, a key or decoding guide, usually a chart explaining the symbols on a map, and thus I understand this meaning of the word ‘legend.’ This shows that there are different kinds of sight: sight of truth, how-sight, and sight of meaning (though perhaps one or more reduces to the other). However, a better conception of understanding, perhaps, is that the power to see the truth of something should be called sight, direct awareness, intuition, grasping, apprehension, or acquaintance, and understanding is the combination of this power with exposure to that which is understood. Do I understand that if A equals B and B equals C then A must equal C unless I am exposed to this idea? No, and so while understanding requires the power to see the truth of something, it is not that power itself. But how can I be exposed to this idea without seeing its truth?
Let’s call the power to see the truth of something sight. As mentioned, wisdom is the understanding of the goodness and badness of things (moral wisdom), or the understanding of how to bring a good thing about or avoid a bad thing (practical wisdom). If this picture of things is right, then wisdom is sight combined with exposure. Thus, from intelligence (and exposure) comes wisdom, and from wisdom comes virtue. On this view wisdom is not virtue, but the understanding that makes virtue possible.
Skills were differentiated from virtues on the basis that a skill does not necessarily accompany a good will. Faculties likewise do not necessarily accompany a good will, with wisdom as the exception. A good will just is the will someone has when they have moral wisdom. This explains why moral wisdom is morally praiseworthy when understanding is usually not morally praiseworthy by itself. This applies to faculties too: We might acknowledge someone’s intelligence, but we only admire or praise them when they use that intelligence for good ends.
Clarification 11: How then can imagination be an intellectual virtue, if it’s really a faculty? Here I concede that it’s not quite right to say that imagination per se is an intellectual virtue; rather, the use of one’s imagination to come up with arguments and counterexamples, to steelman opposing views, to picture reality being a certain way—these uses of one’s imagination is intellectually virtuous. This becomes clear when we entertain nefarious uses of imagination: One could use their imagination to plan out a robbery, to strategize committing adultery without getting caught, or to invent an effective torture device. While these may be undeniably imaginative, they are not virtuous.
In the Meno and Protagoras, Socrates explores the question of whether virtue can be taught. With these distinctions in hand, we can answer this in the following way: Sight, as a faculty, cannot be taught, though one’s faculties can be exercised like a muscle and strengthened, and one’s faculties can atrophy if neglected. Teachers provide in the classroom a sort of intellectual gym where students exercise their intellectual muscles. While the faculties that ground virtue cannot be taught, the exposure component of understanding can be taught in a number of ways. Because virtue is connected to consequences, the consequences of our actions (or the actions of others we see or hear about) reveal, retrospectively, the presence or lack of understanding behind the action. Often we can deduce the presence or lack of a good will as well. Moral exemplars, as found in stories or in real life, teach us by example. Because virtue is about balance, being virtuous is complex, like threading a needle, and we need to see it in action to understand. This is a core reason why stories are so important to us.
The ninth facet of virtue is that whether someone ends up being virtuous is a matter of luck. Because there are so many ways to fail to be virtuous, and so few ways to succeed, failures of virtue are inevitably more common than successes. Aristotle says, “. . . it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited . . . and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way.”[31] The rarity of virtue is explained by necessity and entropy. Whether someone ends up virtuous in this or that way is a function of the circumstances one happens to be in.
The tenth facet of virtue is that virtue imparts praiseworthiness and vice imparts blameworthiness.
Clarification 12: But if it’s true that whether we end up virtuous in this or that way is merely a matter of our life circumstances, then how can we be blamed or praised? I will reserve the deeper discussion of free will to Chapter 10. But in short, we praise the goodness of something, and criticize the badness of something, regardless of what explains that goodness or badness. So just because a virtuous person did not choose to have the faculties necessary for virtue, that does not take away the goodness of their virtue, and just because a vicious person did not choose to be surrounded only by vicious people, destroying any chance of them developing virtues themselves, that does not take away the badness of their vice. Even if we do not attribute the person as the cause of their virtue or vice, and thus do not praise nor blame the person per se, but we do acknowledge (i.e., praise or criticize) the goodness or badness of what the person has, whether the person has good or poor understanding.
Capturing the most essential facets into a succinct definition, a virtue is a character trait that describes the particular way in which a person has a good will, borne out of an understanding of the goodness and badness of things, and practical wisdom, which is the understanding of how to bring good things about and avoid bad things, and because of these understandings feels the right emotions to the right degree, motivating actions that further a good goal.
1.4 Questions
1.4.1 - Is Rationality the Master Intellectual Virtue?
Michael Huemer says that rationality is the most important intellectual virtue, and so is objectivity. He writes:
Intellectual virtues are character traits that help us form beliefs well, particularly traits that tend to help you get to the truth and avoid error in normal circumstances. Rationality is the master intellectual virtue, the one that subsumes all the others. . . . But there is another intellectual virtue that is also extremely important . . . objectivity. . . . The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires . . . [32]
Given what has been said so far, does it make sense to call rationality and objectivity intellectual virtues? Huemer clarifies what he means by rationality:
What is it to think rationally? . . . It is, for example, to accept the conclusions that one has good reason to accept, to avoid contradicting oneself, to avoid invalid deductive inferences or uncogent non-deductive inferences, to avoid reasoning circularly, and so on.[33]
If we are thinking of rationality as a faculty, such as the power to grasp logical concepts, then rationality will only be an intellectual virtue if we are thinking of intellectual virtues as any trait that causes us to end up with true beliefs. But in that case, I would say that intelligence is the mother of all intellectual virtues, because intelligence subsumes all mental powers. But if we differentiate virtues from faculties, then rationality qua faculty is not an intellectual virtue. But rationality as defined by Huemer here appears to involve applying our faculties in a general way so as to reason rightly in a broad sense. Of course intellectual virtue is involved with reasoning rightly in a broad sense, and thus in this sense rationality includes intellectual virtue, but in this case rationality doesn’t give rise to intellectual virtue, intellectual virtue gives rise to rationality. But “accepting conclusions that one has good reason to accept” sounds to me like sensitivity to reason, and so rationality in this sense is intellectual sensitivity.
Normally, I would think of passion for truth as the foundational virtue, because it is out of a love of truth that all the other virtues follow. Or at least, only someone who loves truth would care about the other intellectual virtues. But I can see the argument that someone will have a passion for truth only if they are sensitive to the reasons why they ought to love truth, and so intellectual sensitivity is the foundational virtue. If this is right, and if by rationality we mean intellectual sensitivity, then rationality is the master intellectual virtue.
What about objectivity? Huemer says of objectivity: “Dogmatism [closed-mindedness] is probably the most common kind of failure of objectivity. Dogmatic people . . . When given strong reasons for doubting their opinions, they don’t doubt; they confidently cling to those opinions.”[34]
Here sensitivity to reason applies again, but so does intellectual humility and passion for truth. Someone with a passion for truth doesn’t want to believe out of convenience or wishful thinking; they want the truth even when the truth is inconvenient. Someone who is humble is open to the idea that their beliefs are false, and thus is not dogmatic. Someone who is sensitive to reason grasps the force of the arguments against their beliefs. Additionally, someone who is emotionally and socially independent isn’t too reliant on their beliefs turning out to be true.
1.4.2 - What is more important, believing what’s true or being happy?
In Chapter 5 I defend the view that only happiness (good feelings) can be intrinsically good. Even virtues are not intrinsically good on my view, but are extrinsically good because they lead to happiness, and indeed virtue is essential to living a life of optimized happiness (i.e., virtue is essential to flourishing).
But consider what T. Ryan Byerly says about love of intellectual excellence (a virtue I include within passion for truth):
. . . what is incompatible with the love of intellectual excellence is seeking knowledge only for instrumental reasons . . . . The one who loves intellectual excellence, by contrast, appreciates the intrinsic value of intellectual goods. He takes the courses of his major not principally to get a good job but because it is satisfying as an inquirer to discover the significant truths attainable through focused study of a discipline.[35]
What’s intrinsically valuable here is the satisfaction, the good feelings, that the student experiences from learning. I agree that the right kind of student is the one who finds learning itself to be enjoyable, and who doesn’t take enjoyment only from the thought of what gainful employment might follow from taking a class.
It’s surprising that Byerly says this when he also says:
Someone who contemplates the nature of human beings or the origins of the universe contemplates objects of inquiry far more worthy than that which is contemplated by someone who wants to count the grains of sand on the sea shore . . . [or who] spend[s] their very best intellectual efforts learning about the details of the latest Hollywood gossip . . .[36]
Byerly says that some knowledge is intrinsically more valuable than other knowledge, but it’s mysterious what makes some knowledge more intrinsically valuable than other knowledge. I take the intuition that some knowledge is more valuable than other knowledge to reflect the fact that knowledge is not intrinsically valuable at all. The reason why profound knowledge is more valuable than trivial knowledge is because our happiness does not depend on trivial knowledge but does depend on profound knowledge. What else could possibly explain why some knowledge is worth more than other knowledge?
A quick test shows the truth of this: Would it be valuable to me to know the gruesome details of a particular crime scene or trauma surgery, or what eating and digesting a meal looks like from inside the body, or the details of someone’s disturbing fever dream? Or how about knowledge of what a third-degree burn feels like? We might refer to this as grotesque knowledge. Not only is grotesque knowledge not intrinsically valuable, but the physical pain or the pain of the disgust and discomfort I would feel being exposed to grotesque knowledge would be intrinsically disvaluable. Truths that are irrelevant to me, like how many balls of violet yarn there are in the state of North Dakota, lack intrinsic value as well. Not all knowledge is worth seeking; not all truths are treasures.
But what am I saying when I say that some truths are more important than others? Am I saying that truthseeking is subordinate to a greater goal of seeking happiness? But isn’t it part of being a truthseeker to value truth over happiness?
Because only happiness is intrinsically good on my view, truthseeking is indeed subordinate to the more fundamental goal of being happy and not being miserable. I agree with Cicero when he says that “The entire end and aim of philosophy is the attainment of happiness”.[37] That might sound anti-intellectual, as if I would be willing to give up true beliefs to be happy. Wasn’t the loss of my Christian faith supposed to show that I am someone who is willing to give up comforting beliefs for the sake of less comforting, but true, beliefs?
The point is that my psychology is such that the thought of believing what’s true makes me happy, and the thought of believing what’s false makes me unhappy. Of course I am not made happy by unimportant truths like how many grains of sand there are on some beach, nor am I made miserable at the thought of having false but trivial beliefs.
We want truth, but we also want happiness. The worry is that if we place happiness in higher priority to truth, then it sounds like we would be willing to believe what's false just to be happy. But here’s a thought experiment, the sort of which I first heard from philosopher Liz Jackson: An evil Djinn visits you and gives you a deal. Either be stuck with a low-stakes false belief, like the false belief that Abraham Lincoln was the first US President, or something you really don’t want to happen will happen – say, you will die. Obviously we should be willing to be stuck with the low-stakes false belief to avoid the worse consequence. It's true that we should choose to be stuck with the low-stakes false belief to avoid the worse consequence, and valuing truth means valuing truths of this sort. If you value truth, then you should value the truth that believing what’s true doesn't matter to an infinite degree. Adding an inconsequential true belief to our stock of true beliefs is not worth it if the price is too high, and the same applies with respect to removing an inconsequential false belief from our stock of false beliefs. What we actually care about is being happy and not being miserable, and it just so happens that believing what's true tends to be extremely important for that goal.
Another example: I want God and heaven to exist, but I'm convinced that God and heaven don't exist. If I'd be happier believing in God and heaven, and if happiness comes before truth, then why don't I choose to believe in God and heaven anyway? The answer is that I can't believe! The problem of evil and the challenges to Christian belief make it impossible for me to believe. We see this in ordinary grieving: As painful as it is to believe that a loved one has died, it would be even more painful to try to force oneself to pretend otherwise and live in a delusional kind of way.
For some of us, we love truth so much that we’d take ugly-but-important truths over beautiful lies any day. Truth makes us happy, so because happiness is the ultimate goal, discovering what’s true effectively becomes an ultimate goal too.
Under the intellectual virtue of independence I mentioned that truthseekers sacrifice survival for the sake of seeking truth. I think this is true to a point, and yes, in extreme cases I would rather die than go along with horribly false beliefs, like the belief that it’s okay to kill innocent people. But when truthseekers sacrifice comfort for truth, it’s not because truth comes before comfort, but because believing what’s false is the greater discomfort for the truthseeker. Truthseeking often comes at a significant and painful opportunity cost, but missing out on truthseeking is the greater pain for the truthseeker.
1.4.3 What are the greatest obstacles to intellectual virtue?
Ignorance and stupidity remain the ultimate causes of all human problems, and as part of that most people lack the privilege of being surrounded by paragons of virtue who would influence them for the better. There is a lack of access to, or awareness of, philosophical books and papers and, critically, a lack of social pressure with respect to one’s philosophical education. Because there is so little external pressure to pursue philosophy, and usually pressure in the opposite direction, those who pursue philosophy must be profoundly internally motivated.
This highlights two key obstacles to intellectual virtue: survival pressures and tribalism, and both of these go hand-in-hand. If you want people to be a certain way, then pay them to be that way. If you want people to be virtuous, then reward virtue with survivability – with money, housing, healthcare, or what have you. But virtue and survival come apart in many cases, and in many cases vice and survival come together. We look around and marvel at the lack of virtue we see in the world, but it’s easy to explain why things are this way: no one gets paid to be virtuous, and in many cases being virtuous is pragmatically disadvantageous. In many cases being vicious is pragmatically advantageous. Vice is thus selected for and virtue is selected against, and so it’s no surprise that we see so much vice and so little virtue.
Plato writes:
The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture. Moreover, if certain diseases befall it, they impede our search for the truth. It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions . . . and all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy.[38]
If someone is wealthy, healthy, and retired, then they have the time to read, think, and write on intellectual issues. They are in a position to increase their intellectual virtue. If someone is employed, with children, and busy, then they won’t have the time or energy to improve their worldview. Philosophy is best done slowly, I’ve heard it said, but life isn’t slow; life is short, and survival pressures force us to live quickly.
The fundamental limitations of human life are antagonistic to philosophical pursuits, so it’s not surprising that society would be organized around these limitations. Nearly all jobs do not require the worker to improve their worldview, and instead require workers to stagnate in their intellectual development, and even regress in their virtue. Doing well at a job can require a worker to believe in the ideology of that particular workspace, an ideology that includes false beliefs. Or, the social environment of a workspace can influence a worker’s thinking for the worse. In short, jobs come with tribalism, and tribalism is acid to truthseeking.
"Tribalism is the dogmatic and weaponized adherence to the principles and beliefs of a social, political, or ideological group”, writes Joe Schmid.[39] Michael Huemer says:
The human mind is not really designed for discovering abstract, philosophical truths. Our natural tendency is to try to advance our own interests or the interests of the group we identify with . . . naturally, when we do this, we form all sorts of false beliefs, because reality does not adjust itself to whatever is convenient for our particular social faction.[40]
Social groups form narratives and pressure those around them to go along with those narratives or be exiled and lose out on the material and emotional benefits that belonging to that group grants. As a result, people refrain from speaking honestly out of fear, or say things not because they are true but because they are a Shibboleth, a signal of one’s worthiness of inclusion in the tribe. Belief can be genuine, again because of a selection effect or because of the brainwashing effects of the echo chamber, or disbelief can be hidden as members inauthentically go along with their tribe to avoid excommunication. We see this in politics, in religion, in families, in friend groups, and in workspaces – for where two or three are gathered, tribalism is among them.
But we should avoid the us-versus-them mentality that might arise from this very discussion – us truthseekers versus those failing to seek truth.[41] We are never ideal truthseekers ourselves, and what it means—and what it takes—to be an ideal truthseeker is still not fully known. Humility on our part remains essential. Furthermore, it would be silly to regard others as either totally “on the side of truthseeking” or totally not. In reality, people’s intellectual virtue is spotty and spectral. When I was a Christian I certainly lacked intellectual bravery – which is why I cowered from atheist writings – but clearly I had enough virtue to test my faith and eventually come around to reading the other side, and to change my mind and give up even my deepest, most desired beliefs about my own nature and the nature of the universe. When someone is willing to engage with arguments opposing their beliefs, and has changed their mind in significant ways over the years because of this sort of engagement, then this is a strong sign that this person is the right kind of person for the pursuit of truth.
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