Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [52]
In short, I have powerful social, psychological, and practical reasons to believe in the merits of green tea. The gist of the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint is that I myself can’t believe that these reasons contribute in any significant way to my conviction that green tea is good for me. Instead, I must believe that this conviction is based on the facts: in this case, on the physical (rather than emotional, financial, or familial) benefits of green tea. In other words, I must believe that I believe it ’cuz it’s true. As the philosopher Ward Jones said, “It simply does not make sense to see myself as both believing that P is true”—where “P” stands for any proposition—“and being convinced that I do so for reasons having nothing to do with P’s being true.”
Viewed in a certain light, the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint can appear self-evident, or even circular. Of course we have to think our beliefs are true: that’s what it means to believe them. Fair enough. But one of the strengths of philosophy lies in looking closely at the self-evident—and when you look closely at the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint, you see the origins of some of the most important aspects of our relationship to wrongness. Specifically, you begin to see why we are so convinced that our own beliefs must be right, and why we feel no need to extend that assumption to other people.
So let’s look closely. The ’Cuz It’s True Constraint has several stipulations, the first of which is that it applies only to beliefs I currently hold. I can readily concede that beliefs I used to hold weren’t based on the facts—that, say, my conviction about adulterers burning in eternal hellfire was just a product of my evangelical upbringing, or that my stint with the International Socialist Organization was just a way to rebel against my conservative parents. What’s more, once I’ve rejected a belief, I can often only perceive the self-serving reasons I believed it, and can no longer recognize any evidence for it as rationally compelling.
The second stipulation of the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint is that it applies only to specific beliefs—not to my entire set of beliefs, nor to how I feel about the nature of believing in general. As I already mentioned, most of us can acknowledge, in the abstract, that beliefs are influenced by all kinds of non-objective factors. We can even go further and admit that, at this very moment, some of our own beliefs are doubtless swayed by such factors as well. It is only when we are confronted about a specific and active belief that the constraint kicks in. Ask me whether I think my beliefs in general are affected by personal biases and I’ll say sure. Ask me about the fidelity of my girlfriend or the safety of my health regimen or the accuracy of the data I just published in that prominent journal, and—ah, well, I assure you that I believe in those things not because they are comforting or convenient, but because, by God, they are true.
Finally, consider the most important stipulation of the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint. This is the one suggested by the “first person” part of its proper name: it applies only to our own beliefs, not to those of other people. Nothing about the constraint prevents me from thinking that Ellen believes in God to ameliorate her fear of death, or that Rudolf opposes gun control because his father sits on the board of the NRA, or that you believe behaviorism is baloney because your entire tenure committee does, too. On the contrary, we impute biased and self-serving motives to other people’s beliefs all the time. And, significantly, we almost always do