Belief and value

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about believe, meaning, and value. This is due in part to the fact that I’ve recently read William James’s Will to Believe, and just today read Bertrand Russell’s Free Man’s Worship. I found James’s essay particularly interesting and entertaining—James is a great writer, with many highly amusing metaphors (“The pancakes, butter, and syrup of nature seldom leave the plates so clean”). I also found his point an important one. In his opinion, it is acceptable to believe things without concrete evidence in special cases where one is forced to make a choice between two beliefs and has a personal stake in the option. James calls a choice to believe in spite insufficient evidence “willing to believe”. I shall call it faith, as it’s shorter and easier to write. Examples that he gave of things that were candidates to be believed in this way were religious and moral truths. Personally, I feel that religion often strays too far into matters of fact to be confirmed in the way that James suggests. I don’t believe that we should accepts things such as the Genesis story by faith, nor do I believe that we should use faith to bolster a belief in a God with lists of attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience.

But are there not some propositions that one might justifiably believe to be true before evidence presents itself? It’s a trickier issue that it might appear to be at first glance. Although ones gut reaction is to balk at the idea of believing in anything without evidence, there are a few scenarios where one might be quite tempted to “will to believe”. Specifically, I think that matters of value are likely candidates for propositions to be believed without evidence. Why? Well, first of all, I’m not sure whether it is even possible to confirm empirically whether a human life is more valuable than a bowl of porridge, and I’m certainly not waiting to find out before I believe that it’s true. Although I am opposed to believing anything without justification in justification is to be had, I will make an exception where value is concerned. It is, as James calls it, a forced option. Whether or not we believe other lives have value matters now. We don’t have the luxury to wait and see whether or not it is scientifically confirmable.

Is it possible to “scientifically” confirm whether things have value? I’m not sure. I don’t think that matters of value are in the domain of science as ordinarily conceived—matters of value seem different than chemistry, biology, or even psychology. But is value in the domain of science if “science” is taken in its philosophical sense—all things that can be gleaned off experience? Suppose for a second that one cannot tell from experience whether or not things have value. Then how in the world is it that one first becomes acquainted with the notion that some things have value? It seems to me that the belief that things have value is based on some sort of feeling, and feelings, of course, are things that are experienced.

But how does one go from acknowledging certain feelings about things to concluding that things really do have value? I’m not at all sure how this step is to be taken. Yet, as I have before stated, I don’t think that value is something that one can afford to be unbiased about, because it is of so direct and drastic a consequence.