I do my best to be mindful of when I hold beliefs and not opinions. Beliefs are conclusions I make without evidence, based on my feelings. Opinions are the conclusions I come to based on thinking through the evidence available to me. When I do notice myself believing rather than thinking, I make it my business to explore evidence and scrutinise my beliefs so that I could test their internal validity. After that, I either maintain or reject them.
The latest of my forays into the domain of my skull has involved my belief in the inherent value of human life. I am not sure when I started having this presumptious belief, but its unsteadiness became clear to me while I was listening to a podcast on abortion. The guest, Dr. Calum Miller, was a pro-life medical doctor. The hosts were both pro-choice comedians. While these descriptors are quite propagandistic, one thing stuck out. Dr. Miller boldly asserted, “Well, the starting premise is a belief in the inherent value of life. We can agree on that.” I am not sure whether I was particularly sleep-deprived or just keen on playing the devil’s advocate, which happens because that is how my personality works, but the first thought I had was “Is it? Must we?”
As I lay in the dark, pillow bent into the most comfortable shape possible, it dawned on me that I did not have any reason to maintain this belief. I was begging the question, and that is a no-go for fundamentals as a rationalist! There is no objective reason to conclude that human life is inherently valuable. We happen to prefer ourselves because that’s what genes have evolved to do. But, to look at the vastness of the universe and think that we, as specks of dust on an inconspicuous planet, are valuable, seems juvenile. This is also often a tool used to justify otherwise immoral things. Any good intentions that underpin this idea should not really count if the idea itself is faulty.
Do I have any idea of what should count? Nope. But just as I had no objective reasons to believe in gods when I became an atheist, and just as the absence of objective reasons did not render life meaningless, I think that if we put our heads together, we could come up with sensible principles. It really all depends on where we start our moral reasoning, and that depends on temperament, as Johnathan Haidt has shown. Circular reasoning, for sure, but in the end, I think the great Tim Minchin said it best. We’re just f***ing monkeys in shoes!
What do you think?
Her Caribbean Legal Musings 