Lord, Help Me Believe the Good News, But Not Yet

The Role of Skepticism in the Moral Life

Can skepticism be productive in our moral lives? Details on our forthcoming book club are at the end for paid subscribers.

Skepticism: Doubt’s Better Cousin

The philosopher Stanley Cavell is one of the philosophers that people who I deeply respect have found great solace in. But I confess to not loving Shakespeare enough, and not having the free time, to travel far down Cavell’s road. His contributions to philosophy rest mainly in what is called “ordinary language philosophy”, the notion that philosophy is large part a linguistic exercise, and that metaphysical claims, such as they are, are disclosed through inquiry into how we navigate the world with our words.

For Cavell, claims about goodness or rationality are put forward with a sense of what is meant, and further teased out through conversation, with skepticism helping us here. On the one hand, skepticism, Cavell says, can be used to avoid others, to doubt their claims and move on, but skepticism has the positive function that I use below: to enter deeper into a place where there seems to be disagreement. Skepticism just happens, and we can either turn toward the one we doubt or away from them in that moment.

In other words, skepticism is different than doubt, in that doubt has a sense—based on something outside the conversation—that what’s being said is wrong. Skepticism, by contrast, takes at face value the claim that’s being made—that the person saying these words is capable of saying things that they mean—even if it’s not clear how they mean them. It’s the difference between a default of untruthfulness and a default of truthfulness; skepticism presumes there’s something here, even if it’s not clear just what yet.

Skepticism is a way, in other words, of us being able to say that we want to be in relation with someone, but we’re not sure just what it will look like yet. It’s a leaning kind of posture as opposed to a distancing one, and thus requires a different sort of approach. It’s a hopeful kind of approach, I think, because it emphasizes keeping going, of staying with a disagreement, because we presume that if we’re joined together in relationship and talking about serious things, there must be something here.

One of the only stained glass I’ve ever seen depicting Jesus teaching the temple elders. If ever there was a Scriptural picture of good skepticism, this is it. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Doubt, Skepticism, and Sloth

Whatever else it might do for understanding the foundations of the world, I find this approach heuristically with my students, who will frequently use imprecise and fuzzy language in their thinking. “When you say that God is good, what do you mean?”, I’ll ask. Or this week, to one of my undergraduate students, “I’m not sure what you mean when you say that your mother’s addiction prevents her from being rational. Can you unpack that for me?”

I’m teaching an undergraduate Christian Ethics course for the first time this semester, and started off with a diagnostic exercise that I’ve found useful: give them a case study, and ask them to puzzle it out, being aware of what resources they use and how they work to a resolution. I’ve been doing this long enough that it’s fair to say that most students are consequentalists, and that you can almost see it sweating out of them: they mostly think about moral decisions in terms of maximizing positive effects, “win-wins” as they put it, with a great deal of agnosticism about what counts as a good win.

The case relies on testimony: inhabitants of a town claiming to be sick because a company is polluting the river. The contaminant in question is in fact in the river, but its links to illness, and indeed, its status as a contaminant is unclear. More than one group, rather than doing the assigned interrogation of what sources they’d use, pulled up at the off-ramp of doubt: “how do we know they’re telling the truth? Why should we believe the company/ the townfolk?”

At first, I was dumbfounded until I realized that what they were doing was the flipside of what most of my other students were doing: grasping for some empirical metric that would resolve the question without having to reach for the language of values. They’ve mostly bought into the fact/value dichotomy, which means that ethics for them belongs to the realm of opinions and feelings, not to the realm of things-we-can-argue-about-intelligently. For these students, skepticism wasn’t about whether or not you can resolve the case, but whether or not testimony could bear truth better than cold, hard science.

The problem is that our facts are always already value laden: the things we take to be important about any situation are determined by the values we hold. When I’m looking at my office to determine what’s the next best thing to do, I never clean out my fridge, because I take my mini-fridge to be there mostly to be functional, not pristine. Likewise, when I look at a complex social question, like immigration, there are some concerns and facts that I bracket out and don’t pay attention to because I don’t take them to be morally serious objections, like whether or not people are afraid of people from other cultures: you can be afraid of people from other cultures if you want, I suppose, but it’s not something that you build a moral response around.

But my students in question didn’t get past that point, at least not yet. The problem here is that if it’s irrefutable data that you’re looking for, you’ll always find someone willing to provide counter-facts. And so, they never got to the point of asking how they might address the situation because they didn’t trust anyone in the story. They remained stuck watching the problem unfold, perhaps caring about it, but not knowing how to get beyond their doubt.

One Cheer for Skepticism

If my students had been skeptics instead of doubters, they might have been able to propose a way forward, rooted in the notion that when a person makes a claim, they are telling us something that requires us to respond, to ask questions, and to be curious, but not to get stuck on whether or not the testimony tells you everything.

Skepticism, in its good form, provides a way of cultivating humility, it seems, for humility presumes that we are not the only thing in the world, but that there are elements to the world that need to be heard. For only by hearing can we respond, make judgments, and offer an account of ourselves to their question.

To be a good skeptic, one must be willing to be wrong, to assume that unclarity can become more clear. It asks us to rise from the sloth of doubt and to say “We will hear you more on this matter”. It’s how we move ever more quickly toward the Kingdom of God: by hearing, being perplexed by what we hear, and continuing on anyway.

Book Club Announcement: The clamoring for Ivan Illich’s Shadow Work wasn’t unanimous, but pretty close! So, it’s back to Illich, and to his little treatment on how labor and finance swamped our world, creating a situation where we demand to have monetary value for everything.

Details for the Zoom are here: