The much-anthologized essay of W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (first published in 1877) is often read in ignorance of its background, and this study of Madigan is useful for correcting this. Clifford was an activist for the liberation of people from “the spirit of superstition”, and as Madigan points out, was the driving force behind “The Congress of Liberal Thinkers”, whose first president Professor Huxley remarked: “Freethinkers are no longer to be simply bullied” (p.44). In an address to this Congress that Madigan terms “vintage Clifford”, the latter lays down what he terms the moral basis of skepticism: “1, its revolt against mythology; 2, its revolt against the priestly organization of the churches.” (p.45) What he has in mind in the first point is the “wicked” belief in eternal damnation, and so far as concerns the second point, it is the dissent from common morality that is encouraged by the church. Clifford advises of Christian adherents: “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not her plagues.” This sounds extreme but recent events such as 9/11 and the sexual abuse scandals in the church have led to emotional pleas for dissent from religion not unsimilar to that of Clifford with Belgian Catholics writing letters to their bishop to be “de-baptized”.

The example Clifford uses to illustrate the ethics of belief is well-known. A ship owner allows a vessel badly in need of repairs to nonetheless go out to sea. The owner dismisses from his mind any doubts as to its seaworthiness. The ship, laden with passengers, goes down in mid-ocean, killing all aboard. (p.73) Clifford holds the owner morally culpable and would be so even if the ship had not sunk: he has failed to meet the normal requirements of good judgment. This is not just a private matter but a failure in the person’s powers of self-control: what determines the owner’s beliefs are simply how it feels to him (good, since he will benefit financially from not doing repairs) and not the evidence and this furthermore has knock-on effects on society to the extent that such action is imitated by others.

Clifford concludes that it is “sinful” to hold a belief not supported by the evidence. Much of the subsequent debate focuses on the grounds for this, what is termed “evidentialism”. Madigan summarizes first Clifford’s nineteenth century critics (Chapter Four), including James and Pierce, and then contemporary interlocutors (Chapter Five) amongst whom are C.S. Lewis, Walter Kaufmann, J. L. Mackie, Alvin Platinga, Richard Rorty. Madigan argues Clifford fails to distinguish epistemological warranty from the ethical question and proposes (Chapter Six) as interpretive framework an ethics of virtue and character, taking the powers of intellect as prime subject matter.

It is a useful study but more as giving a first summary of the issues and the debates associated with it, rather than an in-depth argument for his own take on it. The virtue approach, for example, calls for careful analysis of the shortcomings of ethics of the ancient Greeks in response to a normative monocultural context and the response of later commentators, for example Aquinas who asked, at the beginning of the process of secularization of European thought, for the justification of making moral effort in cultivating the virtues. This in turn leads to questions regarding the source of our ultimate commitments, and the focus on “belief in” rather than “belief that”, the former answering to the larger question about how to live our lives, of which the latter question, what to believe, is a sub-section. What is missed in Madigan is this properly religious context for the question of the ethics of belief, questions as Karen Armstrong argue are issues of mythos rather than logos. For apart from this latter kind of knowledge there is, for example, that of our own capacities to be self-critical. In thinking of the latter as only the “precondition of belief-formation” rather than qualifying as an item of possible knowledge itself (p.83) Clifford seems to put an arbitrary barrier to the scope of rational inquiry. By bringing in such a wide range of commentators Madigan goes some way toward unpacking what is involved in critically interrogating this arbitrariness.

© 2011 Patrick Giddy

Patrick Giddy, School of Philosophy and Ethics, UKZN, writes about himself: “I teach philosophy at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. My areas of research include neo-Aristotelianism, in both its Alisdair MacIntyre and Bernard Lonergan guises, and philosophy of religion. Some recent publications have to do with development ethics, character, and professionalism.”