He explains that ‘The Will to Believe’ is an essay on the "justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced." Many understand James as defending a kind of fideism - the idea that faith is in some sense independent from (and sometimes perhaps even opposed to) reason. James originally delivered ‘The Will to Believe’ as a lecture in 1896, and published it soon afterwards. William James disagrees with Clifford and defends a non-evidentialist theory : which holds that we may be rational in holding a belief even if we don't have sufficient evidence for it. If there is not sufficient rational evidence for a religion (which Clifford thinks there isn’t), then it is immoral to believe in one. He extrapolates this argument to all beliefs, including religion. Of course, the ship sinks, taking all the crew and the passengers with it.Ĭlifford argues that the owner is responsible for their deaths, and it was immoral to believe the ship was seaworthy without sufficient evidence. He wonders whether it is still seaworthy, but because the repair costs are so high, he convinces himself to believe the ship is in working condition, and sends it off. To demonstrate his argument, Clifford uses the example of an owner of a very old ferry. In his most famous essay, ‘The Ethics of Belief,’ Clifford argues that belief without sufficient evidence is always immoral. In ‘The Will to Believe,’ James is partly responding to Clifford's The Ethics of Belief (1877) in which Clifford defends an evidentialist theory of truth: that you can only rationally hold a belief if there is enough evidence to support it, and you should only be as confident in the belief as your evidence warrants.Ĭlifford grew up a devout Christian, but later became an atheist and an outspoken critic of religion.
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