Is There a Moral Right to Beliefs?

Public debates in our societies are marked by appeals to tradition, religion and even manipulative uses of ‘post-truth’. This book argues that the antidote to such tendencies can only be public reasoning. We can find the resources to build what I call the public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as free autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs. An ethics of belief is a set of epistemic and moral rules that inform the beliefs that we bring to the public forum and make possible discussion and confrontation on a terrain that is adequately public. The epistemological aspects cannot be severed from the political commitments that motivate public justification in the first place. An ethics of belief shields us against two temptations: on the one hand, to abandon reason and claim that all sorts of beliefs and opinion should weigh into public reasoning; or, on the other, to appeal to objective reasons only, independently of whether people recognise them as such or not.

The Value and Limits of Academic Speech: Philosophical, Political and Legal Perspectives. Routledge., 2018

Suppose that there are two competing views, both of similar plausibility, but both of which entail that the other view is not only wrong but utterly wickedly so. It is not difficult to find real-life approximations. Consider the clearest case: those who support abortion choice often tend to think that their opponents have the contemptible view that women should not have basic autonomy over their own body, while those who oppose abortion choice think that their opponents have the contemptible view that women should be allowed to kill their own children. I argue, firstly, that some such disputes – where both sides are liable to hold views which, if wrong, are wicked – are sincere, and secondly, that there is no theoretical reason within moral epistemology why they should be obviously soluble. That is, there may be some such dilemmas in which a sincere agent has a considerable degree of agnosticism. There are a number of implications of the fact that moral epistemology has this uncomfortable structure. The first is that it is extremely unlikely that all morally wicked views are obviously wrong or implausible – and especially unlikely that all morally wicked views are obviously implausible to all sincere agents. This has a further implication uncomfortable for many: that some morally abhorrent views are nevertheless plausible, or even probable (given limited evidence sets). This should not surprise us too much: most of us have probably held views we later thought to be abhorrent. It is possible that we were simply being irrational at those times – but it is also possible that some of us simply lacked some of the relevant evidence or had different intuitions which were not demonstrably false. In any case, why assume the current zeitgeist is entirely immune to the same limitations that have pervaded human moral thought for so many centuries? And if we are not, then it is likely that even the ethical elite largely hold to some abhorrent views – and perhaps on matters in which they think precisely the alternative is abhorrent. A second implication is that it should prompt us to re-examine any moral discourse which divides people into the essentially decent and the wicked. Sincere agents likely, in some cases, hold abhorrent views, and they should not thereby be discounted as thoroughly wicked or bigoted people on those grounds alone. Likewise, holders of wicked views are not necessarily culpable for their doing so. So there should also be greater sympathy and openness to those with ostensibly wicked views on account of their plausible sincerity. These two main sets of implications – about the plausibility of some abhorrent views and about those who hold them – jointly generate one final, and most salient, implication. That is, they generate substantive reason to preserve a relatively liberal conception of academic freedom. There are many practical and theoretical reasons for preserving academic freedom (in a broad sense), no doubt. But the recognition that the geometry of moral knowledge itself draws a fine – and sometimes evidentially or rationally indeterminate – line between the morally abhorrent and the morally obligatory should give us very strong reason to do so. For there are a number of reasons to engage in an academic way with sincere disputants who seem to us to hold contemptible views. The first is that such engagement is good for them. As described, it is possible that such disputants are still otherwise reasonably good people. And in that case, we ought to help them come around to the more probably correct view – for their own sake and for others (indeed, this is probably true even if they are not otherwise good people – but their being otherwise good is extra motivation). Simply banning their view from discussion is more likely to breed resentment, and is a great injustice to them if they are, in fact, correct. The second, more pressing reason is that such engagement is good for the pursuit of truth. This was captured most favourably by JS Mill (1859, 33): Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. For Mill (and I think he is probably right), the chance that the minority opinion-holder is right is an obvious reason in favour of free speech: convincing the academic community thus would be a great service to it, and probably to the whole world if it should be accepted more widely. But even if it is wrong, Mill suggests, our knowledge is edified, since the nature of its wrongness helps to illuminate the truth. Suppose, for example, we are appalled by Jeff McMahan’s view that infanticide is morally permissible, and that he is wrong. Nevertheless, his work on the topic is extremely sophisticated, and his discussion may help us to navigate moral territory better. Suppose we think he is right, for example, that certain psychological connections in an agent (which he thinks is an embodied mind) give that agent some interests to be respected, but find that his arguments elsewhere are lacking. This gives us considerable reason to rethink our attitude towards animals and the harmful ways in which we treat them. Locating our disagreement most precisely gives us moral and practical clarity in other domains, and so serves truth. Even cases where our disputant is most obviously wrong – say, in denying the Holocaust – thinking about what exactly is so contemptible about such a position (it could be the result of culpable ignorance or intellectual laziness, or it could be subconscious racism, or it could be simply correlated with antipathy towards Jews, and so on), prompted by such discussions, may help us in other areas of ethics. So truth, too, is served. Finally, returning to the possibility that our disputant is correct, it helps all of us. For it might just correct our views and might, indeed, prevent us from committing heinous acts on the basis of them. Of course, this will be very unlikely in some cases. And it might be that our views are relatively harmless even if false, and so we are playing a low risk game. But there is always at least the risk of the injustice of moral carelessness and wrongful condemnation. One might wonder, given this final consideration, whether an additional or alternative criterion might be used for academic censorship: particularly, that of plausibility. There are a number of reasons why this might not be so simple. First, there is the problem of arbitration. Who decides how implausible a view is? Sincere experts might disagree, and in any case it is not commonplace for experts in relevant fields to be in charge of policy on academic freedom. What we would need is for the view to be implausible to all sincere agents, and this simply casts the net too wide to generate much more than minimal restrictions on academic claims. Secondly, showing that a view is implausible in the first place will require some engagement with it, and so some academic engagement with implausible heinous views is necessary to begin with. There is, moreover, the problem of new evidence and arguments: it is always possible that new arguments may overturn even a very implausible view, and unless we are prepared to countenance those arguments, we cannot reasonably maintain that no strong counter-arguments to our position exist. The problem is that once we have accounted for these (e.g. by finding cases where all sincere agents do agree), there will not be much left to censor – and it is particularly unlikely that reasonable censorship will line up with what many contemporary activists are attempting to censor (for example, debates on abortion or transgenderism). For it is not plausible that there are no intelligent, sincere, informed agents who hold to conservative positions on the foremost of these social issues. In short, a view’s being appalling is not good reason to think it is also extremely improbable. This warrants greater informal sympathy and a hearing for sincere agents expressing contemptible views, and moreover it recommends that such hearings extend to the academy.

The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration, 2022

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the question of whether respect for persons requires toleration of the expression of any extremist political or religious viewpoint within public discourse. The starting point of my discussion is Steven Heyman and Jonathan Quong’s interesting defences of a negative answer to this question. They argue that respect for persons requires that liberal democracies should not tolerate the public expression of extremist speech that can be regarded as recognition-denying or respect-denying speech – that is, speech or other expressive conduct that expresses viewpoints that explicitly reject that all persons should be regarded and treated as free and equal persons or citizens. According to Heyman and Quong, recognition-denying speech falls outside the scope of the right to participate in public discourse (i.e. what it is a right to). In contrast to Heyman and Quong, one can argue that a strong case can be made for viewpoint neutrality on the basis of what can be called a libertarian or Nozickean status-based theory of rights. According to this theory, toleration in a liberal democracy requires respect for the status of persons as thinking agents, and respect for thinking agents and their sovereignty over their own mind requires viewpoint neutrality – that is, a basic right to participate in public discourse as speakers and listeners free from state-imposed viewpoint-based restrictions. All persons should have a basic right to express, hear and consider any viewpoint within public discourse. This doctrine of viewpoint neutrality requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any viewpoint within public discourse, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views.

University of St. Thomas Law Journal 3 #1 (2005): 75-91, 2005

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2019

Hate Speech and the Concept of Hate Crimes: Acts of Perception and Compulsory Social Conformism?, Faculty of Law – Kicevo, University “St. Kliment Ohridski” - Bitola., 2020

The absence of universally accepted definition and the subjective nature of hate makes hate speech open to abuse. 'Hate speech' labeling can be used to effectively silence unpopular views. Instead of being persuaded through open discussion, individuals are being constrained and coerced through social conformism. For a true diversity to flourish and be authentic, differences between different opinions, including mutually excluding claims, must be allowed on principle. Otherwise, diversity that relativizes actual differences becomes its own contradiction. Free and uncoerced speech is the standard against which one can detect hate speech. Examining this dilemma through biblical lenses the authors consider Volf's model of public faith and Guinness's concept of a civil public square as sustainable alternatives against either the totalitarian saturation of public life with a single religion or the secular exclusion of all religions from public life.

2021

This is the introduction for the special issue on a comparative study of the right to freedom of thought across several jurisdictions including the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA as well as the regional jurisdictions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

2018

Deep moral disagreements must sometimes be worked through, rather than around. In The Ethics of Disagreement, I first examine a particular case in which a deep disagreement must be worked through, and then draw on work in philosophy of mind and epistemology to set the philosophical foundations for two approaches to deep disagreements that promise to help us make our way more virtuously through them. Illiberal persons resist liberal values, and so also liberal justice, but liberals cannot in good conscience simply overlook their commitment to liberal justice to accommodate disagreement with the illiberal. Insofar as we do insist on liberal justice, however, illiberal persons become subject to coercive legislation whose justificatory merits they are not positioned to appreciate. Liberal political theorists often dismiss concerns about this justificatory alienation of illiberal persons as irrelevant to the legitimacy of liberal legislation. However, in "The Liberal Duty to Deliberate with the Illiberal," I argue that our own liberal commitment to political autonomy militates against such a dismissal. I contend that liberal theorists have only been able to coherently dismiss worries about illiberal vi DEDICATION To Grace Monsma, Mavis Moon, Sandro Yee, Judy Vander Veen, and the congregation of San Jose Christian Reformed Church, for teaching me the value of truth …and love.

Report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, 2021

This study examines the theoretical scope and potential violations of the first right in article 18 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: freedom of thought. Drawing on international jurisprudence, scholarship and the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, it first examines four proposed attributes of this right: (a) freedom not to disclose one’s thoughts; (b) freedom from punishment for one’s thoughts; (c) freedom from impermissible alteration of one’s thoughts; and (d) an enabling environment for freedom of thought. Second, the report highlights potential violations of the right across seven diverse fields: torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; surveillance; coercive proselytism, anti-conversion and anti-blasphemy efforts; intellectual freedom and education; existing and emerging technologies; mental health; and conversion practices. Finally, the study makes key recommendations to multilateral, State and various non-State actors on how to respect, protect and fulfil the right to freedom of thought. It encourages the United Nations human rights system to further clarify the freedom’s scope and content, including through a general comment.