Pressuring people to violate conscience

If you pressure someone to act against their deeply-set moral beliefs, then your pressure is an action which, if successful, results in:

1. the person’s changing their deeply-set moral beliefs, or

2. the person’s acting against their deeply-set moral beliefs.

Our experience of life shows that (2) is rather more likely than (1). People rarely change their deeply-set moral beliefs, but they act against them all too frequently.

But it is wrong to act against one’s moral beliefs. Moreover, acting against one’s moral beliefs is more likely to be culpable than other wrongdoings. For in other wrongdoings, there is always the possibility of being inculpable due to ignorance. But when one acts against one’s moral beliefs, that excuse isn’t available. There is still the possibility that one is insane or that fear of the pressure has taken away one’s free will, but it seems very plausible that most of the time when someone acts against their deeply-set moral beliefs, they are culpable.

Thus, if you pressure someone to act against their deeply-set moral beliefs, there is a very significant chance—bigger than 25%, it is reasonable to estimate—that if you succeed, you will do so by having gotten them to act culpably wrongly. But we should have learned from Socrates that there is nothing worse in life than culpable wrongdoing. Thus the pressure risks a greater than 25% chance of imposing a harm worse than death on the person being pressured.

There are times when it is permissible to impose on someone a 25% risk of death, but that requires very grave reasons indeed, and one should go to great lengths to avoid such an imposition if at all possible. One requires even graver reasons to pressure someone to go against their deeply-set moral beliefs, and one should go to greater lengths to avoid such an imposition.

Remark 1: Here is a kind of a case where it is easier to justify pressure. The harm in violating a mistaken conscience is two-fold: (i) doing wrong, and (ii) culpably so. But now suppose that in fact the person is objectively morally obligated to perform the action they are being pressured to. In fact, let’s suppose the following: the person has a particularly grave objective obligation to ϕ, but they mistakenly believe they have a mild or moderate obligation not to ϕ. Then we may imagine that if they ϕ, they culpably violate a moderate moral obligation, but if they refuse to ϕ, they inculpably violate a grave moral obligation. Which is better? Is it more destructive of one’s moral character to inculpably violate a grave obligation or to culpably violate a moderate one? This is not clear. So in a case like that, pressure is a lot easier to justify.

Conversely, where pressure is hardest to justify is where there is no objective moral duty for the person to perform the action they are being pressured to.

Remark 2: Does it make any difference whether the deeply-set moral beliefs are religious in nature or not? My initial thought is that it does not. In both cases, we have the grave harm of being pressured to wrongdoing, and likely culpable wrongdoing. But on reflection, there can be a difference. Our lives as persons revolve around significant interpersonal relationships. Damaging the deepest relationships between persons requires extremely strong justification. That is why, for instance, we do not (with some exceptions) require spouses to testify against each other in court. But in the fact the deepest relationship in a person’s life is their relationship with God. And to go not only against morality but against what one takes to be the will of God imposes particularly nasty damage on that relationship. Thus when the person cognizes the action they are being pressured to take as not only wrong but contrary to the will of God, the harm that befalls them in doing the action is especially grave. Note that for this harm, it is not necessary that the action be contrary to the will of God—it is enough that the agent believes that it is.

I mean the argument in the previous paragraph to depend on the fact that the person really is in a relationship with God, and in particular that God really exists. I am not talking of the merely subjective harm of thinking that an imaginary relationship is harmed. The extent to which that argument can be extended to people whose religion is non-theistic takes thought. One might hope that these people are still having a relationship with God in and through their religion, and then a version of the point may well apply.

Is it permissible to fix cognitive mistakes?

Suppose I observe some piece of evidence, attempt a Bayesian update of my credences, but make a mistake in my calculations and update incorrectly. Suppose that by luck, the resulting credences are consistent and satisfy the constraint that the only violations of regularity are entailed or contradicted by my evidence. Then I realize my mistake. What should I do?

The obvious answer is: go back and correct my mistake.

But notice that going back and correcting my mistake is itself a transition between probabilities that does not follow the Bayesian update rule, and hence a violation of the standard Bayesian update rule.

To think a bit more about this, let’s consider how this plays out on subjective and objective Bayesianisms. On subjective Bayesianism, consistency, the Bayesian update rule and perhaps the constraint that the only violations of regularity are entailed or contradicted by my evidence. My new “mistaken” credences would have been right had I started with other consistent and regular priors. So there is nothing about my new credences that makes them in themselves rationally worse than the ones that would have resulted had I done the calculation right. The only thing that went wrong was the non-Bayesian transition. And if I now correct the mistake, I will be committing the rational sin of non-Bayesian transition once again. I have no justification for that.

Moreover, the standard arguments for Bayesian update apply just as much now in my new “mistaken” state: if I go back and correct my mistake, I will be subject to a diachronic Dutch Book, etc.

So, I should just stick to my guns, wherever they now point.

This seems wrongheaded. It sure seems like I should go back and fix my mistake. This, I think, shows that there is something wrong with subjective Bayesianism.

What about objective Bayesianism? Objective Bayesianism adds to the consistency, update and (perhaps) regularity restrictions in subjective Bayesianism some constraints on the original priors. These constraints may be so strict that only one set of original priors counts as permissible or they may permissive enough to allow a range of original priors. Now note that the standard arguments for Bayesian update still apply. It looks, thus, like correcting my mistake will be adding a new rational sin to the books. And so it seems that the objective Bayesian also has to say that the mistake should not be fixed.

But this was too quick. For it might be that my new “mistaken” posteriors are such that given my evidential history they could not have arisen from any permissible set of original priors. If so, then it’s like my being in possession of stolen property—I have posteriors that I simply should not have—and a reasonable case can be made that I should go back and fix them. This fix will violate Bayesian update. And so we need to add an exception to the Bayesian update rules: it is permissible to engage in a non-Bayesian update in order to get to a permissible credential state, i.e., a credential state that could have arisen from a permissible set of priors given one’s evidential history. This exception seems clearly right. For imagine that you are the mythical Bayesian agent prior to having received any evidence—all you have are your original priors, and no evidence has yet shown up. Suddenly you realize that your credences violate the objective rules on what the priors should be. Clearly you should fix that.

Thus, the objective Bayesian does have some room for justifying a “fix mistakes” exception to the Bayesian update rule. That exception will still violate the standard arguments for Bayesian update, and so we will have to say something about what’s wrong with those arguments—perhaps the considerations they give, while having some force, do not override the need for one’s credences to be such that they could be backtracked to permissible original priors.

Considerations of mistakes gives us reasons to prefer objective Bayesianism to subjective Bayesianism. But the objective Bayesian is not quite home free. Consider first the strict variety where there is only one permissible set of original priors. We have good empirical reason to think that there are about as many sets of original priors as there are people on earth. And on the strict version of objective Bayesianism, at most one of these sets of original priors is permissible. Thus it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that my original priors are permissible. Simply fixing my last mistake is very unlikely to move me to a set of posteriors that are correct given the unique set of permissible original priors and my evidential history. So it’s a matter of compounding one rational sin—my mistake—with another, without fixing the underlying problem. Maybe I can have some hope that fixing the mistake gets me closer to having posteriors that backtrack to the unique permissible original priors. But this is not all that clear.

What about permissible objective Bayesianism? Well, now things depend on our confidence that our original priors were in fact permissible and that no priors that generate our new “mistaken” posteriors given our evidential history would have been permissible. If we have a high enough confidence in that, then we have some reason to fix the mistake. But given the obvious fact that human beings so often reason badly, it seems unlikely that my original priors were in fact permissible—if Bayesianism is objective, we should believe in the “original cognitive sin” of bad original priors. Perhaps, just as I speculated on strict objective Bayesianism, we have some reason to hope that our actual original priors were closer to permissible than any priors that would generate our new “mistaken” posteriors. Perhaps.

So every kind of Bayesian has some difficulties with what to do given a miscalculation. Objective Bayesians have some hope of having an answer, but only if they have some optimism in our actual original priors being not too far from permissibility.

It is interesting that the intuition that we should fix our “mistaken” posteriors leads to a rather “Catholic” view of things: although doubtless there is original cognitive sin in our original priors, these priors are sufficiently close to permissibility that cognitive repairs make rational sense. We have depravity of priors, but not total depravity.