Let's Read! William Kingdom Clifford, 1879, "The Ethics of Belief"

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Let's Read! William Kingdom Clifford, 1879, "The Ethics of Belief"

Рет қаралды 882

Күн бұрын

Here is a link to the paper: www.people.bra...
For more about Clifford, see Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.o...
This paper is influential enough that there is a whole topic named after it, which you can learn more about at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford...

Пікірлер: 9

@darrellee8194 19 күн бұрын

Gracias. I believe you are a gentleman and a scholar. This video is my warrant.

@alexc.1661 Жыл бұрын

Hey Kenny! Just wanted to say a huge thank you for this video! It is a great format -- reading and explanation. I absolutely love it. I was assigned this paper for a philosophy class. Now, thanks to you, I understand what's going on there.

@keaswaran0 Жыл бұрын

Always glad to be of help!

@dubbelkastrull 7 ай бұрын

47:11 verification 1:23:06 bookmark

@darrellee8194 19 күн бұрын

19:28 Speaks to modern day social media. Please don't retweet or repeat things you don't know to be true.

@rodolfo9916 2 жыл бұрын

The problem with saying that it is ethically wrong to believe in things that are not based on evidence is that it pressuposes the existence of a ethics based on evidence. But it seems to me that there is no ethics that does not start from axiomatic presuppositions that don't have evidence for. The most famous person who defends the existence of an evidence-based ethics is Sam Harris and his argument basically goes like this: All sentient beings avoid suffering, Therefore, we ought to reduce suffering in the aggregate. But note that the conclusion does not follow from the premise, this argument would only be valid if we add the following premise: All sentient beings avoid suffering, We ought to reduce the aggregate amount of what all sentient beings avoid, Therefore, we ought to reduce suffering in the aggregate. But what is the evidence for the proposition "We ought to reduce the aggregate amount of what all sentient beings avoid"? If you accept it, you will already be believing something without having any evidence for.

@keaswaran0 2 жыл бұрын

I think it's important to draw a distinction here. One question is whether there is any evidence for an ethical theory. Another question is whether there is an ethical obligation to respect the evidence. Clifford is arguing for the latter, but doesn't explicitly consider the former question. Your point, illustrated with some discussion of Sam Harris, is that the former question is actually unclear. I think we could raise a similar objection to Clifford, or Kant, or anyone who believes that ethical theories depend on objective facts that we could logically reason about.

@rodolfo9916 2 жыл бұрын

@@keaswaran0 You are right, one can propose "we have an ethical obligation to trust evidence" even if he think that ethics purely based on evidence doesn't exist. What would be self contradictory is to propose "we have an ethical obligation to ONLY believe in things based on evidence" if he think that ethics purely based on evidence doesn't exist.

@darrellee8194 19 күн бұрын

It isn't true that we don't have "evidence" for our axioms. There evidence is in every consistent theorem derived from the axioms that have practical application. Evidence in the fact that we don't derive false theorems. We lack proof our axioms because there are so fundamental there is no way to prove them. Most of them are taken to be "self-evident" For example, take Goldbach conjecture (every even number > 2 is the sum of 2 primes) to be an axiom. We have literally billions of examples of evidence and no defeaters.