The ethics of alien beliefs

Abstract

People do not always really believe what they take themselves to believe [1]. A person may sincerely say that a certain racist belief is definitively false, but still hold such a belief. When asked what she believes about something, it is likely that she simply expresses her opinion about the issue in question, and this reveals what she takes herself to believe, but not necessarily what she really believes. In some cases, however, a person may adopt a kind of a third-person point of view. Instead of expressing her opinion, she may report the belief she has in light of convincing evidence concerning her behavior and other attitudes. It follows that sometimes a person may report having a belief which conflicts with her better judgment – her opinion. “Many people have completely unjustified racially biased beliefs and, judging from my behavior, I must admit that I have them myself.” In these cases the person’s (evidential) beliefs are not apparent to the person in the normal way, and are not judgment-sensitive (or reason-responsive) in a way that they are supposed to be [2]. Beliefs of this kind can be called alien beliefs. They are beliefs that fail to be sensitive to the person’s regular processes of introspection and evaluation and are known by her merely through behavioral and psychological evidence that she has noticed about herself, or learned about herself from others [3]. When a person is aware of her beliefs in this way, she is not committed to their truth or overall acceptability; she has not endorsed them as true [4]. To have an alien belief of this sort is to realize that one has conflicting beliefs, with some (the “alien” ones) being very oddly related to oneself. Most or all people have unnoticed beliefs that conflict with their sincere opinions, but the unnoticed beliefs of this sort are not ”alien” in the relevant sense, as they do not appear as alien to those who have them.