However, believing something is a lot easier than unbelieving. I will show this throughout the course of this paper. It is important to note that before we begin to delve in to what beliefs are we must answer an important question on how beliefs are accumulated and carried out. What entitles us to believe? Could it be sincerity, justification or truth? The answer is only truth, concrete fact that has been arrived at through logic and reason alone, it is self-justifying in this sense. Beliefs have a moral obligation to be based on truth; this is because they contribute to the overall social fabric of society.What I mean by this is if you were to hold a false belief, there would be bad consequences and the eventual weakening of your critical powers to be able to assess unjustified belief systems.
As you begin to accumulate false beliefs you become credulous, the danger in becoming credulous is that it weakens you ability to reason and may eventually lead towards the path of disaster for yourself and others who may share your beliefs or be affected by them. In the following example, it will become evident that there lies a moral obligation to the truth.Without it, a person creates the foundation for undesirable consequences. It is your friend’s birthday at a bar.
You drove there to celebrate, after a night of heavy drinking everyone is making his or her way home. You chose, instead of having someone drive you home or taking a cab, to get in to your vehicle and drive home. You know that drinking and driving is morally wrong, you are morally obliged not to do it, yet you chose otherwise. There exists a doubt in your mind. It is now that moral accountability and belief (in your ability to drive safely) come at a crossroad.
However, by choosing to believe in a lie you have acquired a false belief. Assume you got away with it tonight. As you set out another night, you look back at past occurrences when you have gotten away with it and simply put your “faith in to providence”. This self-perpetuating cycle will eventually become your unmaking. For arguments, sake let us say everyone was to assume your role catastrophe would ensue.
This is the hidden danger in holding unjustified beliefs, as you continue along this path you are detracting from the social fabric of society.No matter how many times you have gotten away with putting your life and the lives of others in the hands of faith you are morally accountable, the question of right and wrong has to do with the origin of the belief whether you had a right to believe on such evidence as was before you. The duty applies to belief itself. In the previous example, the belief in the ability to drive drunk has put the driver’s life in danger and that of anyone else on the road. William Clifford’s allegory of the ship owner arrives at the same moral of the drunk driver allegoryHere Clifford illustrates the power of false beliefs.
Clifford uses the analogy of a ship-owner who had sent an unworthy vessel on to the seas. he knew that it was in a rundown condition in need of many repairs and these doubts were constant in his mind prior to had set sail, however he fooled himself in to believing that because it survived so much in the past he could place trust in fate. He dismissed any doubt in his mind and it was in this way that the acquired a comfortable and sincere conviction and sent the families to their death, surely he wished them well but that no longer mattered.Just as you drove drunk that night the ship-owner must be held accountable for the deaths of those men because he had no right to believe on the evidence as it was before him, instead of listening reason and logic he did the opposite opposite. He had worked himself into the frame of mind of disbelief.
Therefore, one must always be conscious of what they believe. Question everything thoroughly, perhaps not with the same manic frenzy as Descarte, but enough so that your beliefs do not affect you negatively or those around you. After all, beliefs are not private they are shared.
