According to Plato, moderation is about self-rule regarding our desires. Aristotle might take that in the direction of finding balance in and among our desires. But what are desires? Essentially, desires are impulses to act seeking a state of satisfaction. An individual desire needs moderation in the sense that we find the right balance — the Goldilocks principle of finding “just right.” And collectively, our desires need moderating, because desires so often compete with each other for our attention (and action). Again, moderation applied to our desires collectively enables us to find balance.
But think about the impulse to believe something: There’s at least a general similarity to desiring, with its impulse to act to achieve satisfaction. When we have an impulse to believe, we have a sort of drive to form a belief that ends in a sense of being settled or even certain — which is a kind of satisfaction, too.
Now, if you’re involved in some way with professional philosophy, you’ll recognize that I’m riding roughshod over the enormous volume of philosophical ink that’s been spilt over the analysis of belief. I accept responsibility, and in my defense, let me say this: There’s a lot more to be unpacked about belief (and epistemic states generally), but my goal here is to get down and dirty with how we actually conduct our believing — which we don’t learn from a philosophy anthology. Most of us form beliefs on impulse, as I’ve described, and for “reasons” that don’t check the epistemological boxes. So, we could wait to talk about excellences of mind until we’re all on the same page about epistemology. Or we could start before we run out of Time. I vote for starting where we are.
Now back to moderation: We can think of deliberative excellences like humility as a way of moderating the impulse to believe and its consummation in a settled state of conviction. An individual impulse to believe needs moderation to find an appropriate balance between too much and too little confidence (among other things). Now think of competing impulses to believe, both inside yourself and in your social environment. Not only do you have impulses to believe that may conflict with each other; you also encounter others with their own impulses to believe that conflict with yours. As is the case with desires, managing competing impulses to believe is a job for moderation.
The two most significant challenges for deliberative moderation are inner incoherence and other people’s beliefs. Think for a moment: Do you hold conflicting beliefs about something? Most of us have inconsistent beliefs lurking in the epistemic shadows, and there’s a practical cost: Namely, how do we decide what to do about them! When we find ourselves in situations in which inconsistent beliefs are pushing us in opposite directions, we experience indecision and anxiety until we work out where to go next — which requires us to ask what we do believe. Note that this is more than a problem of calculation. Deciding how to implement action in harmony with one belief is calculation; deciding how to decide among competing beliefs requires a whole set of additional deliberative skills, including adjudication among the competing beliefs. Which opens the door to exactly the sort of more nuanced discussion of what grounds belief in the first place.
I’m tempted to say this is a never-ending process for rational animals, because it’s hard to get completely clear on everything we believe and why on a good day — let alone when we’re experience disorientation at inconsistent beliefs. Since a state of complete “belief harmony” is out of reach for our kind, we need the next best thing: Striving for excellences of mind, including deliberative excellences that guide us through inconsistency.
Other people’s beliefs are also epistemic danger zones. Think about our visceral reaction to another person’s belief:
In the first stage of our excellence challenge, we’ve looked at the confidence continuum regarding our own belief formation. To help with this other side of deliberative moderation, let’s turn our attention to empathy. Not sympathy: We don’t want to compare notes on belief-states. Rather, we want to look beneath the belief to the impulse itself: the motive behind the belief.
- If we agree, we tend to jump on the belief uncritically. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s deliberative overconfidence.
- If we disagree, we tend to reject it without further consideration and — most dangerous of all — we double down on whatever belief of our own that the other person’s belief conflicts with.
If immediately rejecting the belief of a fellow rational animal merely because it conflicts with our own beliefs sounds like arrogance, it’s because it is. And since truth tends to play for both teams, we can’t really afford to be arrogant — or complacent — if we care about seeking truth. Deliberative empathy draws our attention away from mere agreement or disagreement, and helps us track a belief to the motivation of the believer. This is a very difficult skill to master, as it involves putting ourselves into the other believer’s perspective — which ultimately means gaining an appreciation of what the world looks like to another rational animal.
If you’re thinking this sort of “worldview empathy” is risky, you’re right: an ample amount of deliberative courage is just what we need. But we can also settle some of the anxiety by noting that understanding is not the same state as believing. It may be difficult to differentiate at first, but it is possible to achieve a deeper understanding of another person’s belief and belief-motivation without accepting it as your own. If so, then is that risky feeling real, or is it a sort of anticipatory anxiety?
Sorry: It’s real. When you open yourself to deliberative empathy, you also open yourself to changing your mind. That’s a state I like to call growth. It can be scary, and it can be hard. But the alternative is either giving up believing anything or thinking that you have the Last Word on Truth, neither of which is a viable option for a rational animal.
To strive for the excellence of deliberative moderation requires attention to individual beliefs and to the belief ecosystems in which we live. We’ve spent some time thinking about how to strive for a balance of confidence about our beliefs. In the next few weeks, let’s focus on how to find that balance in our belief ecosystem.