1.2: A Role for Reason

Many important issues seem very difficult to settle. We may wonder whether any observations or research or arguments could show that medical aid in dying, abortion, capital punishment, a flat income tax, or the use of marijuana are right (or wrong, as the case may be). There are three ways to avoid wrestling with such difficult issues.

1. We can simply refuse to think about such questions at all.
2. We can embrace some view that furnishes quick and simple answers to these questions.
3. We can choose faith, rather than reason, as our avenue to answering these questions.
4. We can decide that such questions cannot be answered, on the grounds that beliefs about things like morality and religion are simply subjective.

We will consider these in turn.

I Don’t Want to Think About It

If we adopt the first option, simply refusing to think about difficult topics, we drift through life like robots. This isn’t a good way to live; one way to see this is to ask yourself whether you want to raise your children so that they turn out this way. Moreover, difficult decisions sometimes must be made, and it is a good thing for us to have a voice in those decisions that affect us. Finally, there are cases where we simply can’t avoid making a hard decision, cases where tuning out and doing nothing have terrible consequences.

Dogmatism: The True Believer

The dogmatist is a true believer in some theory or doctrine. The key feature of true believers is not what they believe, but how they believe it. True believers are not open minded; they wouldn’t let anything count as evidence against their beliefs. True believers’ views provide a set of principles and categories, and they interpret all evidence in terms of them.

It is possible to be dogmatic about all sorts of things. Countless people have been dogmatic about their political views. Many Marxists, Nazis, and others were so certain of their views that they were willing to murder millions of people to translate their theory into practice. One can also be dogmatic about religious views. True believers tend to see things as all black or all white, and so they often think that most questions have simple answers. They are often uncompromising, and sometimes feel that those who disagree with them are not just wrong, but evil – enemies that must be conquered. Sometimes the resistance to the enemy is peaceful, but history shows that it can also be very bloody.

Faith

Some beliefs that are not based on reason and evidence are based on faith. Faith may have its place, but we need to be cautious. Since faith only comes into play when we stop engaging with reason and arguments, it can be applied equally to any position on any issue, and even to opposing sides of the same issue. The existence of aliens, life beginning at conception, getting an A in your critical thinking class – faith can be used to justify anything. While faith can be very important to people, we should remember that the strength or intensity of a person’s faith has no bearing on the likelihood that the belief is true. The faith of those who truly believe that they belong to the master race can be just as strong as the faith of the most devout theist.

Relativism: Who is to Say?

In the face of such difficulties, some people adopt the view that values are subjective. It’s “all relative;” and “who’s to say” what’s right and wrong? According to this view, issues of morality are like issues of etiquette. Many people agree that we shouldn’t eat peas with a knife and, similarly, many agree that we should help those in need. But this is just an opinion shared by people in our culture or society. There are no objective facts about such matters, and other societies might, with equal legitimacy, adopt quite different views.

Relativism can seem appealing because it offers an easy answer to the difficult questions about right and wrong: we don’t have to wrestle with them, because they are subjective, simply matters of opinion or taste. It can also seem an attractively tolerant view. Live and let live; we have our views, other groups have theirs, and since there is no fact of the matter about what is right, we should just leave each other alone.

It is possible to extend this relativistic stance to issues besides values. Indeed, an extreme relativist might claim that everything is relative, that there are no objective facts at all. But this more extreme version of relativism is incoherent. If everything is relative, then the very claim “everything is relative,” is relative too. The claim “everything is relative” can be true for some people and false for others, and there is no fact of the matter about which group of people is correct. The claim undercuts itself.

Relativism about values doesn’t collapse as easily as the more extreme relativism, but it sounds much better in theory than it does in practice. It is easy to say things like, “Well, that’s a question about values, and those are just subjective,” but very few of us would accept the following implications of this view:

1. Since there is no objective answer to questions about right and wrong, it’s fine for your grade in this course to be determined by tossing the final exams down a flight of stairs and basing the grade for each exam on the distance it travels before landing.
2. Since everything is relative, it doesn’t really matter what your children grow up believing.
3. Since values are subjective, who are we to say that flying airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center is wrong?
4. Since values are relative, varying from one culture to another, who is to say that the Nazis were wrong to kill millions of Jews? It might be wrong-for-us, but it was right-for-them.

Tolerance and Open-mindedness

Relativism may sound like a nice, tolerant view, but it really isn’t. The claim that we should tolerate others is itself a claim about values, and it cannot be defended by the claim that there really are no (objective) values. Worse, the consistent relativist must grant that intolerant societies (like Nazi Germany) are no more wrong about things than any other society. In the end, according to the relativist, it’s just a matter of taste or opinion whether tolerance is a good thing or not. The claim that there are objective truths does not mean that we have cornered the market on them. In some cases, the truth may be unknown, and in some cases other cultures might be much nearer the mark than we are. But relativism wouldn’t allow this. If others can’t be wrong, then they also can’t be right, and so there really isn’t any sense in which we can learn from them.

Fallibility: Commitment with an Open Mind

Most people are neither full-fledged true believers or full-fledged relativists. There are various intermediate positions, but one that fits especially well with a commitment to free, independent, critical reasoning is called fallibilism. The fallibilist believes that virtually all our views are fallible – they could turn out to be false. But this does not mean that all our beliefs are equally well supported or equally good. A fallibilist acts on the best reasons and evidence they can get, while remaining open minded and willing to change their views if new evidence or arguments require doing so. This often means living with uncertainty, but that is just the human condition.

A free society that is open to dissent makes critical reasoning much easier. In a society where open discussion is allowed, different viewpoints can be aired. Without free expression, the scope of our thoughts will be limited; we will be exposed to fewer novel ideas, and our sense of the range of possibilities will be constricted. Since no one has cornered the market on truth, we should beware of those who would set themselves up as censors to decide what the rest of us can say and hear.