essay of belief system

Belief Systems: Definition, Characteristics & Examples

A belief system is a structured set of principles or tenets held to be true by an individual or larger group. It can contain aspects such as morality, life purpose, or empirical reality (Uso-Domenech & Nescolarde-Selva, 2016).

Belief systems are fundamental to human existence. By studying them, we can gain critical insight into the underlying causes behind both individual and societal actions, values, and perceptions.

Belief systems tend to shape our individual code of conduct. For example, the ethical principle of “do no harm” paves the base for medical professionals’ conduct (Wattenberg, 2019).

Furthermore, these systems extend beyond personal ethics, providing a backbone to cultural groups and shaping significant aspects, including politics, law, and cultural norms . For example, broad constructs such as democracy or justice are underpinned by a cultural group’s shared beliefs and norms.

The Origins of Belief Systems

The genesis of belief systems is multifaceted. It traces back to our earliest human ancestors trying to make sense of the world around them.

Examples include:

• Explaining Natural Phenomena: Oftentimes, belief systems spring from the desire to explain natural phenomena (Converse, 2006). Early societies utilized faith to provide reasons for natural occurrences, such as storms or earthquakes. For instance, the ancient Greeks believed in the God Poseidon, whom they saw as the cause of earthquakes and other seismic events.
• Social Structure and Control: Belief systems also stem from the human need for social structure and control (Kinder, 2006). Early societies established rules and expectations concerning each member’s behavior. This led to principles that were passed down from generation to generation, creating a communal belief system. Japanese culture, for instance, has a deeply ingrained belief known as “giri” or familial obligation , which dictates social interactions and responsibilities (Kinder, 2006).
• Experience and Context: They can also be shaped by experience, cultural context , and education. What we learn from our parents, teachers, and life experiences significantly influence our perceptions, beliefs, and values (Converse, 2006). A person who grew up during the civil rights movement in the United States, for example, may have formed strong beliefs about racial equality due to their experiences during that time. Each of these factors, individually or combined, contributes to the creation and development of belief systems.

Types and Examples of Belief Systems

1. religions.

Religions are complex systems of beliefs that shape an individual’s or group’s spiritual worldview. They typically embody questions about the nature of the divine, the afterlife, and moral standards (Schipper, 2015). For example, Christianity holds the belief in a monotheistic God and emphasizes principles of love and forgiveness.

Examples: Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Janism

2. Philosophical Systems

Philosophical systems consist of frameworks that strive to answer life’s fundamental questions. They deal with concepts such as existence, reality, knowledge, values, and morality. A case in point is existentialism, which focuses on individual freedom, choice, and subjective meaning (Popkin, 2018).

Examples: Existentialism , Utilitarianism , Stoicism, Nihilism, Rationalism, Empiricism

3. Political Ideologies

These are belief systems that govern political views and shape how societies should be organized. They dictate the distribution of power, rights, and resources among the population (Wattenberg, 2019). For instance, liberalism places a high importance on individual rights and freedom , advocating for a democratic system and equality of opportunity.

Examples: Liberalism , Conservatism , Socialism , Fascism , Anarchism

4. Economic Systems

These belief systems define how societies produce, distribute and consume goods and services. They guide the economic policies a country adopts and how it manages its resources (Popkin, 2018). Capitalism, for example, is centered on private ownership of resources and a free market for distribution and consumption.

Examples: Capitalism , Socialism, Communism , Mixed economies , Market economies

5. Scientific Paradigms

These influence our understanding and interpretation of natural and physical phenomena. Constituting specific theories, methods, and standards of practice, they shape scientific investigation and discovery (Rutjens & Brandt, 2018). The theory of evolution, for example, guides biologists and paleontologists in their interpretation of fossil records and genetic studies.

Examples: Theory of Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Newtonian Physics, Plate Tectonics, Germ Theory of Disease

Influence of Belief Systems on Human Behavior

Belief systems fundamentally influence human behavior . They essentially define our perception of what is right or wrong, shaping our actions in alignment with these views.

Belief systems shape moral behavior (Brandt, 2022). For example, most religions have guidelines on ethical conduct (known as “commandments” in Christianity or “precepts” in Buddhism), which influence followers’ behavior. Believers are urged to adhere to these principles, significantly impacting decision-making and conduct.

Belief systems also affect how we go about our days (Rutjens & Brandt, 2018). Our morning routines, our choice of transportation, even the food we eat, are all influenced by deeply rooted belief structures. For example, a person with a belief system focused on environmental sustainability might choose to cycle to work and follow a vegetarian diet.

Likewise, belief systems influence our social behavior (Wattenberg, 2019). They guide our approach towards fairness, justice, and interpersonal relationships. A person who values fairness may eschew discriminatory actions, promoting diversity and inclusivity in their spheres of influence.

Positive and Negative Effects of Belief Systems

While belief systems help cultures develop norms of behavior, shared identities, and frameworks for action, they can also be restrictive and cause in-groups and out-groups.

Below is a summary of key aspects of belief systems, and their positive and negative impacts:

Summary of Key Points

• Belief systems underpin individual, societal actions and values.
• They influence personal ethics, politics, and cultural norms.
• They’re developed to explain various things, such as natural phenomena, the origins of the universe, and personal experience .
• Main types of belief systems include religions, philosophical systems, political ideologies, economic systems, and scientific paradigms.
• Belief systems can positively shape behavior, offer identity, and help form cohesive societies.
• However, they can also divide societies and cause people to engage in immoral actions.

Brandt, M. J. (2022). Measuring the belief system of a person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Converse, P. E. (2006). The nature of belief systems in mass publics (1964). Critical review, 18 (1-3), 1-74.

Kinder, D. R. (2006). Belief systems today. Critical Review, 18 (1-3), 197-216.

Popkin, S. L. (2018). The factual basis of “belief systems”: A reassessment. In The Nature of Belief Systems Reconsidered (pp. 279-300). Routledge.

Rutjens, B. T., & Brandt, M. J. (2018). Belief systems and the perception of reality: An introduction. Belief systems and the perception of reality , 1-10.

Scanes, C. G., & Chengzhong, P. (2018). Animals and Religion, Belief Systems, Symbolism and Myth. In Animals and Human Society (pp. 257-280). Academic Press.

Schipper, E. L. F. (2015). Religion and Belief Systems. Cultures and disasters: Understanding cultural framings in disaster risk reduction , 162-71.

Uso-Domenech, J. L., & Nescolarde-Selva, J. (2016). What are belief systems?. Foundations of Science, 21 , 147-152.

Wattenberg, M. P. (2019). The changing nature of mass belief systems: The rise of concept and policy ideologues. Critical Review, 31 (2), 198-229.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Essay About Beliefs: Top 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

To write an essay about beliefs, you need to know the different beliefs people hold; continue reading this article for examples and prompts to help!

Beliefs are a person’s perception of what they believe to be true. However, not everybody’s belief system is accurate. Beliefs are not necessarily religious or spiritual. It can also be political, philosophical, or societal. Our beliefs are formed early based on our environment – what we are told, heard, observed, and experienced. Below are essay examples to help you understand other writers’ viewpoints about beliefs.

1. Christianity Beliefs in The Exorcism of Emily Rose by Penny Silva

2. a personal believe that god does not exist by lauren trauscht, 3. my beliefs by patrick of shrewsbury, massachusetts, 4. irrational beliefs by vincent bridges, 5. my ethical beliefs by blanche allen, 1. your thoughts about the definition of belief, 2. what influenced your belief on a certain subject, 3. an experience that shaped your beliefs, 4. thoughts about the role of religion, 5. your personal political beliefs, 6. your stand on gender identity, 7. opinions about the connection between social media and suicide, 8. the belief system of millenials.

“This means that she believes it is a fact that if there is a God, there is a devil, and if there is a devil, there is God.”

Silva’s essay discusses the movie “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” – a film based on the true story of Anneliese Michel. It’s about a court case concerning the death of a girl. She was either possessed by a demon or was suffering from a severe mental illness.

Viewers of the movie are free to believe what they think happened to Emily as it demonstrates the apparition of both the devil and the However, divine. Silva believes that it’s a must-watch if one wants to understand the accurate interpretation of the works of evil.

“…how could anybody keep up on the Bible for thousands and thousands of years? The stories in there had to have gotten mixed up… if there is a God, then who created God? ”

Trauscht’s many questions about a divine existence lead him to believe there is no God. The author shares these reasons in a simple essay about his beliefs.

“ I have no stronger link to anything else in this world than my family… This belief … was something that was one hundred percent infused in me through my parents.”

The author grew up a family-oriented person, and there’s nothing more important to him than his family. He believes he is today because his parents influenced his life. His belief made him a better person.

“I can always distract myself from negative, judgmental thoughts by simply telling myself, “STOP!” Then replace my blaming, complaining, or excusing with something positive. Wisely choosing the thoughts that occupy my mind and avoiding automatic, negative thoughts that undermine my self-esteem will also help.”

Bridges shares his experience with irrational beliefs that made him think negatively, which affected his behavior and self-esteem. He also talks about how he overcame his irrational beliefs when someone believed in him until he finally started to believe in himself, turning the negative thoughts into positive ones.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about religion .

“In a way, ethics are like a set of rules that govern human behaviors and serve as a basis for right conduct principles.”

Allen argues that we have a different understanding of ethics and how we use it in our everyday lives. He says fairness is one of the ethics he applied in his life. Before concluding, he considers the good and bad effects. He believes ethics should be used to reach a fair decision.

8 Writing Prompts on Essay About Beliefs

After reading the examples above, you now better understand what beliefs are. Below are prompts that can help you in writing your essay.

If you want to properly convey your reasons why you believe in a topic, here is a guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Since all of us may have varying ideas about the definition of beliefs, you can write an essay about your understanding of what belief is all about. You can also provide answers to the following questions: Is belief something you unconsciously developed or something you consciously made? Do you agree that some of your beliefs may not be authentic? 

Many factors can influence why we think what we think. This includes our environment, what we hear and see, and our observations and experiences. 

Pick a particular belief you have and relay to your readers how you came to consider it as fact. You can also talk about something you didn’t believe before, then tell your audience how you came to support it.

If a particular experience forced you to develop a belief about something consciously, you could explore it via your essay. For example, you grew up not believing in God, but due to a near-death experience where you were forced to pray and were saved, you finally accepted that there is an existing God. 

Or, if you previously believed in God but suffered a painful death of a loved one, you start to question His existence. There are so many experiences out there that may have contributed to what we believe in today. Feel free to write them all down.

You might have heard adults complaining about the morality of the youth today. Does the decreasing interest of young people in religion have to do with moral degeneration? Explain your thoughts about the relationship between religion and morality. 

Your political beliefs have to do with what you consider a prosperous country. “Success” can be defined as a booming or not-so-great economy, but one where the citizens are happy, safe, and accessible. Discuss why you favor a particular political system, including aspects that you want to change.

Gender identity is an ever-controversial subject that still divides many groups today.

However, it also has many subtopics you can focus on. For example, some parents would let their minor children undergo procedures and treatments to change their sex, believing they are supporting their child’s decision. Do you agree with the parents’ beliefs, or would you instead want the parents to wait for the child to be of legal age before undergoing such a procedure?

If you want to expand your knowledge on diversity, here are 21 essays about diversity for students and writers .

With social media’s popularity, cyberbullying also increased. Research found that children and people below 25 years old cyberbullying victims are twice more likely to present suicidal behaviors and self-harm. The same study also found that bullies or perpetrators risk experiencing suicidal ideation and self-harm. What is your opinion on this matter, and do you believe that social media has to do with it? Do parents also have liability on this matter?

During challenging times, more people seek God. However, during the pandemic, millennials in the US-led the shift away from religious organizations. If you belong to the Gen Z or millennials, what’s your stand on this matter? 

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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13.1 What Is Religion?

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between religion, spirituality, and worldview.
• Describe the connections between witchcraft, sorcery, and magic.
• Identify differences between deities and spirits.
• Identify shamanism.
• Describe the institutionalization of religion in state societies.

Defining Religion, Spirituality, and Worldview

An anthropological inquiry into religion can easily become muddled and hazy because religion encompasses intangible things such as values, ideas, beliefs, and norms. It can be helpful to establish some shared signposts. Two researchers whose work has focused on religion offer definitions that point to diverse poles of thought about the subject. Frequently, anthropologists bookend their understanding of religion by citing these well-known definitions.

French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) utilized an anthropological approach to religion in his study of totemism among Indigenous Australian peoples in the early 20th century. In his work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), he argues that social scientists should begin with what he calls “simple religions” in their attempts to understand the structure and function of belief systems in general. His definition of religion takes an empirical approach and identifies key elements of a religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (47). This definition breaks down religion into the components of beliefs, practices, and a social organization—what a shared group of people believe and do.

The other signpost used within anthropology to make sense of religion was crafted by American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) in his work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz’s definition takes a very different approach: “A religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (90). Geertz’s definition, which is complex and holistic and addresses intangibles such as emotions and feelings, presents religion as a different paradigm , or overall model, for how we see systems of belief. Geertz views religion as an impetus to view and act upon the world in a certain manner. While still acknowledging that religion is a shared endeavor, Geertz focuses on religion’s role as a potent cultural symbol. Elusive, ambiguous, and hard to define, religion in Geertz’s conception is primarily a feeling that motivates and unites groups of people with shared beliefs. In the next section, we will examine the meanings of symbols and how they function within cultures, which will deepen your understanding of Geertz’s definition. For Geertz, religion is intensely symbolic.

When anthropologists study religion, it can be helpful to consider both of these definitions because religion includes such varied human constructs and experiences as social structures, sets of beliefs, a feeling of awe, and an aura of mystery. While different religious groups and practices sometimes extend beyond what can be covered by a simple definition, we can broadly define religion as a shared system of beliefs and practices regarding the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena. And yet as soon as we ascribe a meaning to religion, we must distinguish some related concepts, such as spirituality and worldview.

Over the last few years, a growing number of Americans have been choosing to define themselves as spiritual rather than religious. A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that 27 percent of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious,” which is 8 percentage points higher than it was in 2012 (Lipka and Gecewicz 2017). There are different factors that can distinguish religion and spirituality, and individuals will define and use these terms in specific ways; however, in general, while religion usually refers to shared affiliation with a particular structure or organization, spirituality normally refers to loosely structured beliefs and feelings about relationships between the natural and supernatural worlds. Spirituality can be very adaptable to changing circumstances and is often built upon an individual’s perception of the surrounding environment.

Many Americans with religious affiliation also use the term spirituality and distinguish it from their religion. Pew found in 2017 that 48 percent of respondents said they were both religious and spiritual. Pew also found that 27 percent of people say religion is very important to them (Lipka and Gecewicz 2017).

Another trend pertaining to religion in the United States is the growth of those defining themselves as nones , or people with no religious affiliation. In a 2014 survey of 35,000 Americans from 50 states, Pew found that nearly a quarter of Americans assigned themselves to this category (Pew Research Center 2015). The percentage of adults assigning themselves to the “none” category had grown substantially, from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014; among millennials, the percentage of nones was even higher, at 35 percent (Lipka 2015). In a follow-up survey, participants were asked to identity their major reasons for choosing to be nonaffiliated; the most common responses pointed to the growing politicization of American churches and a more critical and questioning stance toward the institutional structure of all religions (Pew Research Center 2018). It is important, however, to point out that nones are not the same as agnostics or atheists. Nones may hold traditional and/or nontraditional religious beliefs outside of membership in a religious institution. Agnosticism is the belief that God or the divine is unknowable and therefore skepticism of belief is appropriate, and atheism is a stance that denies the existence of a god or collection of gods. Nones, agnostics, and atheists can hold spiritual beliefs, however. When anthropologists study religion, it is very important for them to define the terms they are using because these terms can have different meanings when used outside of academic studies. In addition, the meaning of terms may change. As the social and political landscape in a society changes, it affects all social institutions, including religion.

Even those who consider themselves neither spiritual nor religious hold secular, or nonreligious, beliefs that structure how they view themselves and the world they live in. The term worldview refers to a person’s outlook or orientation; it is a learned perspective, which has both individual and collective components, on the nature of life itself. Individuals frequently conflate and intermingle their religious and spiritual beliefs and their worldviews as they experience change within their lives. When studying religion, anthropologists need to remain aware of these various dimensions of belief. The word religion is not always adequate to identify an individual’s belief systems.

Like all social institutions, religion evolves within and across time and cultures—even across early human species! Adapting to changes in population size and the reality of people’s daily lives, religions and religious/spiritual practices reflect life on the ground . Interestingly, though, while some institutions (such as economics) tend to change radically from one era to another, often because of technological changes, religion tends to be more viscous , meaning it tends to change at a much slower pace and mix together various beliefs and practices. While religion can be a factor in promoting rapid social change, it more commonly changes slowly and retains older features while adding new ones. In effect, religion contains within it many of its earlier iterations and can thus be quite complex.

Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Magic

People in Western cultures too often think of religion as a belief system associated with a church, temple, or mosque, but religion is much more diverse. In the 1960s, anthropologists typically used an evolutionary model for religion that associated less structured religious systems with simple societies and more complex forms of religion with more complex political systems. Anthropologists noticed that as populations grew, all forms of organization—political, economic, social, and religious—became more complex as well. For example, with the emergence of tribal societies, religion expanded to become not only a system of healing and connection with both animate and inanimate things in the environment but also a mechanism for addressing desire and conflict. Witchcraft and sorcery, both forms of magic, are more visible in larger-scale, more complex societies.

The terms witchcraft and sorcery are variously defined across disciplines and from one researcher to another, yet there is some agreement about common elements associated with each. Witchcraft involves the use of intangible (not material) means to cause a change in circumstances to another person. It is normally associated with practices such as incantations, spells, blessings, and other types of formulaic language that, when pronounced, causes a transformation. Sorcery is similar to witchcraft but involves the use of material elements to cause a change in circumstances to another person. It is normally associated with such practices as magical bundles, love potions, and any specific action that uses another person’s personal leavings (such as their hair, nails, or even excreta). While some scholars argue that witchcraft and sorcery are “dark,” negative, antisocial actions that seek to punish others, ethnographic research is filled with examples of more ambiguous or even positive uses as well. Cultural anthropologist Alma Gottlieb , who did fieldwork among the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire in Africa, describes how the king that the Beng choose as their leader must always be a witch himself, not because of his ability to harm others but because his mystical powers allow him to protect the Beng people that he rules (2008). His knowledge and abilities allow him to be a capable ruler.

Some scholars argue that witchcraft and sorcery may be later developments in religion and not part of the earliest rituals because they can be used to express social conflict. What is the relationship between conflict, religion, and political organization? Consider what you learned in Social Inequalities . As a society’s population rises, individuals within that society have less familiarity and personal experience with each other and must instead rely on family reputation or rank as the basis for establishing trust. Also, as social diversity increases, people find themselves interacting with those who have different behaviors and beliefs from their own. Frequently, we trust those who are most like ourselves, and diversity can create a sense of mistrust. This sense of not knowing or understanding the people one lives, works, and trades with creates social stress and forces people to put themselves into what can feel like risky situations when interacting with one another. In such a setting, witchcraft and sorcery provide a feeling of security and control over other people. Historically, as populations increased and sociocultural institutions became larger and more complex, religion evolved to provide mechanisms such as witchcraft and sorcery that helped individuals establish a sense of social control over their lives.

Magic is essential to both witchcraft and sorcery, and the principles of magic are part of every religion. The anthropological study of magic is considered to have begun in the late 19th century with the 1890 publication of The Golden Bough , by Scottish social anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer . This work, published in several volumes, details the rituals and beliefs of a diverse range of societies, all collected by Frazer from the accounts of missionaries and travelers. Frazer was an armchair anthropologist, meaning that he did not practice fieldwork. In his work, he provided one of the earliest definitions of magic, describing it as “a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct” (Frazer [1922] 1925, 11). A more precise and neutral definition depicts magic as a supposed system of natural law whose practice causes a transformation to occur. In the natural world—the world of our senses and the things we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch—we operate with evidence of observable cause and effect. Magic is a system in which the actions or causes are not always empirical. Speaking a spell or other magical formula does not provide observable (empirical) effects. For practitioners of magic, however, this abstract cause and effect is just as consequential and just as true.

Frazer refers to magic as “sympathetic magic” because it is based on the idea of sympathy, or common feeling, and he argued that there are two principles of sympathetic magic: the law of similarity and the law of contagion. The law of similarity is the belief that a magician can create a desired change by imitating that change. This is associated with actions or charms that mimic or look like the effects one desires, such as the use of an effigy that looks like another person or even the Venus figurine associated with the Upper Paleolithic period, whose voluptuous female body parts may have been used as part of a fertility ritual. By taking actions on the stand-in figure, the magician is able to cause an effect on the person believed to be represented by this figure. The law of contagion is the belief that things that have once been in contact with each other remain connected always, such as a piece of jewelry owned by someone you love, a locket of hair or baby tooth kept as a keepsake, or personal leavings to be used in acts of sorcery.

This classification of magic broadens our understanding of how magic can be used and how common it is across all religions. Prayers and special mortuary artifacts ( grave goods ) indicate that the concept of magic is an innately human practice and not associated solely with tribal societies. In most cultures and across religious traditions, people bury or cremate loved ones with meaningful clothing, jewelry, or even a photo. These practices and sentimental acts are magical bonds and connections among acts, artifacts, and people. Even prayers and shamanic journeying (a form of metaphysical travel) to spirits and deities, practiced in almost all religious traditions, are magical contracts within people’s belief systems that strengthen practitioners’ faith. Instead of seeing magic as something outside of religion that diminishes seriousness, anthropologists see magic as a profound human act of faith.

Supernatural Forces and Beings

As stated earlier, religion typically regards the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena. Put simply, a supernatural force is a figure or energy that does not follow natural law. In other words, it is nonempirical and cannot be measured or observed by normal means. Religious practices rely on contact and interaction with a wide range of supernatural forces of varying degrees of complexity and specificity.

In many religious traditions, there are both supernatural deities, or gods who are named and have the ability to change human fortunes, and spirits, who are less powerful and not always identified by name. Spirit or spirits can be diffuse and perceived as a field of energy or an unnamed force.

Practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery manipulate a supposed supernatural force that is often referred to by the term mana , first identified in Polynesia among the Maori of New Zealand ( mana is a Maori word). Anthropologists see a similar supposed sacred energy field in many different religious traditions and now use this word to refer to that energy force. Mana is an impersonal (unnamed and unidentified) force that can adhere for varying periods of time to people or animate and inanimate objects to make them sacred. One example is in the biblical story that appears in Mark 5:25–30, in which a woman suffering an illness simply touches Jesus’s cloak and is healed. Jesus asks, “Who touched my clothes?” because he recognizes that some of this force has passed from him to the woman who was ill in order to heal her. Many Christians see the person of Jesus as sacred and holy from the time of his baptism by the Holy Spirit. Christian baptism in many traditions is meant as a duplication or repetition of Christ’s baptism.

There are also named and known supernatural deities. A deity is a god or goddess. Most often conceived as humanlike, gods (male) and goddesses (female) are typically named beings with individual personalities and interests. Monotheistic religions focus on a single named god or goddess, and polytheistic religions are built around a pantheon, or group, of gods and/or goddesses, each usually specializing in a specific sort of behavior or action. And there are spirits , which tend to be associated with very specific (and narrower) activities, such as earth spirits or guardian spirits (or angels). Some spirits emanate from or are connected directly to humans, such as ghosts and ancestor spirits , which may be attached to specific individuals, families, or places. In some patrilineal societies, ancestor spirits require a great deal of sacrifice from the living. This veneration of the dead can consume large quantities of resources. In the Philippines, the practice of venerating the ancestor spirits involves elaborate house shrines, altars, and food offerings. In central Madagascar, the Merino people practice a regular “turning of the bones,” called famidihana . Every five to seven years, a family will disinter some of their deceased family members and replace their burial clothing with new, expensive silk garments as a form of remembrance and to honor all of their ancestors. In both of these cases, ancestor spirits are believed to continue to have an effect on their living relatives, and failure to carry out these rituals is believed to put the living at risk of harm from the dead.

Religious Specialists

Religious groups typically have some type of leadership, whether formal or informal. Some religious leaders occupy a specific role or status within a larger organization, representing the rules and regulations of the institution, including norms of behavior. In anthropology, these individuals are called priests , even though they may have other titles within their religious groups. Anthropology defines priests as full-time practitioners, meaning they occupy a religious rank at all times, whether or not they are officiating at rituals or ceremonies, and they have leadership over groups of people. They serve as mediators or guides between individuals or groups of people and the deity or deities. In religion-specific terms, anthropological priests may be called by various names, including titles such as priest, pastor, preacher, teacher, imam (Islam), and rabbi (Judaism).

Another category of specialists is prophets . These individuals are associated with religious change and transformation, calling for a renewal of beliefs or a restructuring of the status quo. Their leadership is usually temporary or indirect, and sometimes the prophet is on the margins of a larger religious organization. German sociologist Max Weber (1947) identified prophets as having charisma , a personality trait that conveys authority:

Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. (358–359)

A third type of specialist is shamans . Shamans are part-time religious specialists who work with clients to address very specific and individual needs by making direct contact with deities or supernatural forces. While priests will officiate at recurring ritual events, a shaman, much like a medical psychologist, addresses each individual need. One exception to this is the shaman’s role in subsistence, usually hunting. In societies where the shaman is responsible for “calling up the animals” so that hunters will have success, the ritual may be calendrical , or occurring on a cyclical basis. While shamans are medical and religious specialists within shamanic societies, there are other religions that practice forms of shamanism as part of their own belief systems. Sometimes, these shamanic practitioners will be known by terms such as pastor or preacher , or even layperson . And some religious specialists serve as both part-time priests and part-time shamans, occupying more than one role as needed within a group of practitioners. You will read more about shamanism in the next section.

One early form of religion is shamanism , a practice of divination and healing that involves soul travel, also called shamanic journeying, to connect natural and supernatural realms in nonlinear time. Associated initially with small-scale societies, shamanic practices are now known to be embedded in many of the world’s religions. In some cultures, shamans are part-time specialists, usually drawn into the practice by a “calling” and trained in the necessary skills and rituals though an apprenticeship. In other cultures, all individuals are believed to be capable of shamanic journeying if properly trained. By journeying—an act frequently initiated by dance, trance, drumbeat, song, or hallucinogenic substances—the shaman is able to consult with a spiritual world populated by supernatural figures and deceased ancestors. The term itself, šamán , meaning “one who knows,” is an Evenki word, originating among the Evenk people of northern Siberia. Shamanism, found all over the world, was first studied by anthropologists in Siberia.

While shamanism is a healing practice, it conforms to the anthropological definition of religion as a shared set of beliefs and practices pertaining to the natural and supernatural. Cultures and societies that publicly affirm shamanism as a predominant and generally accepted practice often are referred to as shamanic cultures . Shamanism and shamanic activity, however, are found within most religions. The world’s two dominant mainstream religions both contain a type of shamanistic practice: the laying on of hands in Christianity, in which a mystical healing and blessing is passed from one person to another, and the mystical Islamic practice of Sufism, in which the practitioner, called a dervish, dances by whirling faster and faster in order to reach a trance state of communing with the divine. There are numerous other shared religious beliefs and practices among different religions besides shamanism. Given the physical and social evolution of our species, it is likely that we all share aspects of a fundamental religious orientation and that religious changes are added on to, rather than used to replace, earlier practices such as shamanism.

Indigenous shamanism continues to be a significant force for healing and prophecy today and is the predominant religious mode in small-scale, subsistence-based societies, such as bands of gatherers and hunters. Shamanism is valued by hunters as an intuitive way to locate wild animals, often depicted as “getting into the mind of the animal.” Shamanism is also valued as a means of healing, allowing individuals to discern and address sources of physical and social illness that may be affecting their health. One of the best-studied shamanic healing practices is that of the !Kung San in Central Africa. When individuals in that society suffer physical or socioemotional distress, they practice n/um tchai , a medicine dance, to draw up spiritual forces within themselves that can be used for shamanic self-healing (Marshall [1969] 2009).

Shamanistic practices remain an important part of the culture of modern Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic, particularly their practices pertaining to whale hunting. Although these traditional hunts were prohibited for a time, Inuit people were able to legally resume them in 1994. In a recent study of Inuit whaling communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, cultural anthropologists Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten (2013) found that although hunting technology has changed—whaling spears now include a grenade that, when aimed properly, allows for a quick and more humane death—many shamanistic beliefs and social practices pertaining to the hunt endure. The sharing of maktak or muktuk (whale skin and blubber) with elders is believed to lift their spirits and prolong their lives by connecting them to their ancestors and memories of their youth, the communal sharing of whale meat connects families to each other, and the relationship between hunter and hunted mystically sustains the populations of both. Inuit hunters believe that the whale “gives itself” to the hunter in order to establish this relationship, and when the hunter and community gratefully and humbly consume the catch, this ties the whales to the people and preserves them both. While Laugrand and Oosten found that most Inuit communities practice modern-day Christianity, the shamanistic values of their ancestors continue to play a major role in their understanding of both the whale hunt and what it means to be Inuit today. Their practice and understanding of religion incorporate both the church and their ancestral beliefs.

Above all, shamanism reflects the principles and practice of mutuality and balance, the belief that all living things are connected to each other and can have an effect on each other. This is a value that reverberates through almost all other religious systems as well. Concepts such as stewardship (caring for and nurturing resources), charity (providing for the needs of others), and justice (concern and respect for others and their rights) are all valued in shamanism.

The Institutionalization of Religion

Shamanism is classified as animism , a worldview in which spiritual agency is assigned to all things, including natural elements such as rocks and trees. Sometimes associated with the idea of dual souls—a day soul and a night soul, the latter of which can wander in dreams—and sometimes with unnamed and disembodied spirits believed to be associated with living and nonliving things, animism was at first understood by anthropologists as a primitive step toward more complex religions. In his work Primitive Culture (1871), British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor , considered the first academic anthropologist, identified animism as a proto-religion, an evolutionary beginning point for all religions. As population densities increased and societies developed more complex forms of social organization, religion mirrored many of these changes.

With the advent of state societies, religion became institutionalized. As population densities increased and urban areas emerged, the structure and function of religion shifted into a bureaucracy, known as a state religion . State religions are formal institutions with full-time administrators (e.g., priests, pastors, rabbis, imams), a set doctrine of beliefs and regulations, and a policy of growth by seeking new practitioners through conversion. While state religions continued to exhibit characteristics of earlier forms, they were now structured as organizations with a hierarchy, including functionaries at different levels with different specializations. Religion was now administered as well as practiced. Similar to the use of mercenaries as paid soldiers in a state army, bureaucratic religions include paid positions that may not require subscribing to the belief system itself. Examples of early state religions include the pantheons of Egypt and Greece. Today, the most common state religions are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Rather than part-time shamans, tribal and state religions are often headed by full-time religious leaders who administer higher levels within the religious bureaucracy. With institutionalization, religion began to develop formalized doctrines , or sets of specific and usually rigid principles or teachings, that would be applied through the codification of a formal system of laws. And, unlike earlier religious forms, state religions are usually defined not by birthright but by conversion. Using proselytization , a recruitment practice in which members actively seek converts to the group, state religions are powerful institutions in society. They bring diverse groups of people together and establish common value systems.

There are two common arrangements between political states and state religions. In some instances, such as contemporary Iran, the religious institution and the state are one, and religious leaders head the political structure. In other societies, there is an explicit separation between religion and state. The separation has been handled differently across nation-states. In some states, the political government supports a state religion (or several) as the official religion(s). In some of these cases, the religious institution will play a role in political decision-making from local to national levels. In other state societies with a separation between religion and state, religious institutions will receive favors, such as subsidies, from state governments. This may include tax or military exemptions and privileged access to resources. It is this latter arrangement that we see in the United States, where institutions such as the Department of Defense and the IRS keep lists of officially recognized religions with political and tax-exempt status.

Among the approximately 200 sovereign nation-states worldwide, there are many variations in the relationship between state and religion, including societies that have political religions, where the state or state rulers are considered divine and holy. In North Korea today, people practice an official policy of juche , which means self-reliance and independence. A highly nationalist policy, it has religious overtones, including reverence and obeisance to the state leader (Kim Jong Un) and unquestioning allegiance to the North Korean state. An extreme form of nationalism, juche functions as a political religion with the government and leader seen as deity and divine. Unlike in a theocracy, where the religious structure has political power, in North Korea, the political structure is the practiced religion.

Historically, relationships between religious institution and state have been extremely complex, with power arrangements shifting and changing over time. Today, Christian fundamentalism is playing an increasingly political role in U.S. society. Since its bureaucratization, religion has had a political role in almost every nation-state. In many state societies, religious institutions serve as charity organizations to meet the basic needs of many citizens, as educational institutions offering both mainstream and alternative pedagogies, and as community organizations to help mobilize groups of people for specific actions. Although some states—such as Cuba, China, Cambodia, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union—have declared atheism as their official policy during certain historical periods, religion has never fully disappeared in any of them. Religious groups, however, may face varying levels of oppression within state societies. The Uighurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic group of some 10 million people in northwestern China. Since 2017, when Chinese president Xi Jinping issued an order that all religions in China should be Chinese in their orientation, the Uighurs have faced mounting levels of oppression, including discrimination in state services. There have been recent accusations of mass sterilizations and genocide by the Chinese government against this ethnic minority (see BBC News 2021). During periods of state oppression, religion tends to break up into smaller units practiced at a local or even household level.

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The Ethics of Belief

The “ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and psychology.

The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief-formation, belief-maintenance, and belief-relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong (or epistemically irrational , or practically imprudent ) to hold a belief on insufficient evidence? Is it ever or always morally right (or epistemically rational , or practically prudent ) to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence, or to withhold belief in the perceived absence of it? Is it ever or always obligatory to seek out all available epistemic evidence for a belief? Are there some ways of obtaining evidence that are themselves immoral, irrational, imprudent?

Related questions have to do with the nature and structure of the norms involved, if any, as well as the source of their authority. Are they instrumental norms grounded in contingent ends that we set for ourselves? Are they categorical norms grounded in ends set for us by the very nature of our intellectual or moral capacities? Are there other options? And what are the objects of evaluation in this context—believers, beliefs, or both?

Finally, assuming that there are norms of some sort governing belief-formation, what does that imply about the nature of belief? Does it imply that belief-formation is voluntary or under our control? If so, what sort of control is this? If not, then is talk of an ethics of belief even coherent?

1.1 Origins of the debate

1.2 the ethics of belief before the 19 th -century, 2.1 kinds of norms: prudential, moral, epistemic, 2.2 structures of norms: hypothetical vs. categorical, 2.3 degrees of reflective access, 2.4 relations between doxastic norms, 3.1 the nature of belief, 3.2 the aim(s) of belief, 3.3 knowledge as the norm of belief, 3.4 belief-control, 4.1 strict vs. moderate, 4.2 synchronic vs. diachronic, 4.3 evidence and its possession, 5.1 prudential evidentialism, 5.2 moral evidentialism, 5.3 epistemic evidentialism, 6.1 practical non-evidentialism, 6.2 conservative non-evidentialism, 6.3 fideistic non-evidentialism.

• 7. The Ethics of Acceptance

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, 1. the ethics of belief: a brief history.

The locus classicus of the ethics of belief debate is, unsurprisingly, the essay that christened it. “The Ethics of Belief” was published in 1877 by Cambridge mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford, in a journal called Contemporary Review . At the outset of the essay, Clifford defends the stringent principle that we are all always obliged to have sufficient evidence for every one of our beliefs. Indeed, the early sections of “The Ethics of Belief” are so stern that William James would later characterize Clifford as a “delicious enfant terrible ” who defends doxastic self-control “with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice” (1896, 8).

James's more permissive view—initially a commentary on Clifford presented to the Philosophy Clubs of Yale and Brown, then published as “The Will to Believe” in 1896—has become a kind of companion piece, and together the two essays constitute the touchstone for later discussions.

Clifford's essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a story and a principle. The story is that of a shipowner who, once upon a time, was inclined to sell tickets for a transatlantic voyage. It struck him that his ship was rickety, and that its soundness might be in question. Knowing that repairs would be costly and cause significant delay, the shipowner managed to push these worries aside and form the “sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy.” He sold the tickets, bade the passengers farewell, and then quietly collected the insurance money “when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales” (1877, 70).

According to Clifford (who himself once survived a shipwreck, and so must have found this behavior particularly loathsome), the owner in the story was “verily guilty of the death of those men,” because even though he sincerely believed that the ship was sound, “he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.” Why did he have no such right? Because, says Clifford, “he had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts” (1877, 70). After making this diagnosis, Clifford changes the end of the story: the ship doesn't meet a liquid demise, but rather arrives safe and sound into New York harbor. Does the new outcome relieve the shipowner of blame for his belief? “Not one jot,” Clifford declares: he is equally guilty—equally blameworthy—for believing something on insufficient evidence.

Clifford goes on to cite our intuitive indictments of the shipowner—in both versions of the story—as grounds for his famous principle:

(Clifford's Principle) “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

Despite the synchronic character of his famous Principle, Clifford's view is not merely that we must be in a certain state at the precise time at which we form a belief. Rather, the obligation always and only to believe on sufficient evidence governs our activities across time as well. With respect to most if not all of the propositions we consider as candidates for belief, says Clifford, we are obliged to go out and gather evidence, remain open to new evidence, and consider the evidence offered by others. The diachronic obligation here can be captured as follows:

(Clifford's Other Principle) “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to ignore evidence that is relevant to his beliefs, or to dismiss relevant evidence in a facile way.” (Van Inwagen 1996, 145)

There might be at least two kinds of diachronic obligation here: one governing how we form and hold beliefs over time, and the other governing how we relinquish or revise beliefs over time. If someone violates such a diachronic obligation by “purposely avoiding the reading of books and the company of men who call in question” his presuppositions, Clifford warns, then “the life of that man is one long sin against mankind” (1877, 77).

Despite the robustious pathos, it is not clear in the end that Clifford's considered position is as extreme as these two principles make it sound. In the later part of his essay Clifford puts forward a view about what it is for evidence to be “sufficient” that suggests a more moderate stance. Still, the story about the shipowner together with the sternly-worded Principles turned Clifford into the iconic representative of a strict “Evidentialist” position in the ethics of belief—the position, roughly, that we are obliged to form beliefs always and only on the basis of sufficient evidence that is in our possession. (For more on the notion of “evidence” and the varieties of Evidentialism, see §4-§5 below).

James's Non-Evidentialist alternative to Clifford is far more permissive: it says that there are some contexts in which it is fine to form a belief even though we don't have sufficient evidence for it, and even though we know that we don't. In fact, James and many of his “pragmatist” followers claim that sometimes we are positively obliged to form beliefs on insufficient evidence, and that it would be a significant prudential, intellectual, or even moral failure to do otherwise. “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” (1896, 11).

As permissive as this sounds, however, James is by no means writing a blank doxastic check. In “The Will to Believe” he lays out a series of strict conditions under which an “option” counts as “genuine” and believing without sufficient evidence is permitted or required. For instance, the option must be between “live” hypotheses—i.e. hypotheses that are “among the mind's possibilities” (thus, belief in the ancient Greek gods is not a live option for us these days). There must also be no compelling evidence one way or the other, the option must be “forced” such that doing nothing also amounts to making a choice, and the option must concern a “momentous” issue. In the absence of those conditions, James reverts happily to a broadly Evidentialist picture (see Gale 1980, 1999, Kasser and Shah 2006, and Aikin 2014). (For more on the varieties of Non-Evidentialism, see §6 below).

The phrase may be of 19 th -century coinage, but there were obviously ethics of belief well before Clifford and James. Descartes says in the Meditations that when forming a judgment, “it is clear by the natural light that perception of the intellect should always precede ( praecedere semper debere ) the determination of the will” (1641, 7:60). In the context of a search for certain knowledge ( scientia ), Descartes maintains, we have the obligation to withhold assent from all propositions whose truth we do not clearly and distinctly perceive (clear and distinct perceptions themselves, by contrast, will produce belief ineluctably). In other contexts, it may be both permissible and prudent to form a mere “opinion” ( opinio ) whose truth we do not clearly and distinctly perceive. Even then, however, we are obliged to have some sort of evidence before giving our assent. Thus Descartes advises Elizabeth that “though we cannot have certain demonstrations of everything, still we must take sides, and in matters of custom embrace the opinions that seem the most probable , so that we may never be irresolute when we need to act” (1645, 4:295, my emphasis).

Locke's ethics of belief is at least as strict: in the search for scientific knowledge as well as in all matters of “maximal concernment,” Locke says, it is to “transgress against our own light” either to believe on insufficient evidence, or to fail to proportion our degree of belief to the strength of the evidence. In his discussion of “Faith” in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke famously moralizes:

He that believes without having any Reason for believing, may be in love with his own Fancies; but neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and Errour. (1690, 687)

To form a belief about important matters without possessing sufficient evidence—or to believe anything with a degree of firmness that is not proportioned to the strength of our evidence—is to misuse our faculties and court all manner of error. It is also, for Locke, to contravene the will of our “Maker.” Given his divine command theory of ethical rightness, it thus appears that such behavior will be morally as well as epistemically wrong.

By contrast, Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant anticipated James by emphasizing that there are some very important issues regarding which we do not and cannot have sufficient evidence one way or the other, but which deserve our firm assent (on practical grounds) nonetheless. (For more on Pascal and Kant on Non-Evidentialism, see §6.1 below).

2. Doxastic Norms

This last point makes it clear that there may be different types of norms governing practices of belief-formation, and that these will correspond to different types of value. The ethicist of belief will thus need to specify the type of value she is invoking, why and how she thinks it can ground doxastic norms, whether it is the only kind of value that does that, and (if not) what the priority relations are between norms based in different kinds of value.

Clifford and Locke, as we have seen, claim that the issue of whether we have done our doxastic best is an epistemic one and also (given a few further premises) a moral one. James, on the other hand, focuses on the important role played by prudential value in the ethics of belief, saying in one passage that Clifford's Principle not only puts us at “risk of losing the truth” and thus of violating an epistemic norm, but that it articulates an “insane logic”—an “absurdity” that guarantees prudential disaster (1896, 25). The general idea is that if something is beneficial, and believing that p will help us achieve, acquire, or actualize that thing, then it is prima facie prudent for us to believe that p . This will be true even if we lack sufficient evidence for the belief that p , and even if we are aware of that lack.

Consider for example someone who reads in the psychological literature that people are much more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis if they firmly believe that they will survive it. Upon being diagnosed with the disease himself, and in light of the fact that his goal is to survive, it will be prudent for this person to believe that he will survive, even if he knows that he (and his doctors) lack sufficient evidence for that belief. James refers to such cases as ones “where faith in a fact can help create the fact” (1896, 25).

Someone might suggest that the patient's knowledge that his “faith helps create the fact” itself counts as a kind of evidence in its favor. If this is right, then the case would not be in tension with Clifford's Principle after all. But other cases can be used to make the same point: Pascal famously argues that it is required by prudential rationality that we believe in God, even though we lack sufficient evidence for that belief, and even though such belief would play no role in “creating” the fact that it describes (Pascal 1670).

Here’s a non-religious example: suppose that you would like to retain a good relationship with your teenage son, and you are aware that this requires believing the best of him whenever possible. You also have some moderate but not compelling olfactory evidence that he is using drugs in the house when you are away (in response to your queries, he claims that he has recently taken up transcendental meditation, and that the funny smell when you come home is just incense). Suppose too that you know yourself well enough to know that your relationship with your son will be seriously damaged if you come to view him as a habitual drug-user. This suggests that you would violate a prudential norm if you go ahead and believe that he is. In other words, it is prudent, given your ends, to withhold belief about the source of the aroma altogether, or even to believe, if possible, that he is not smoking pot but rather burning incense in your absence.

On the other hand, if you regard the occasional use of recreational drugs as harmless fun that expresses a healthy contempt for overweening state authority (in some states, at least), then it might be prudent for you—confronted with the telltale odor—to form the belief that your son has indeed taken up the habit in question. Either way, the recommendation here aims at a kind of prudential or pragmatic value, and not at the truth per se . (For some recent arguments in favor of prudential evidence for belief, see Reisner 2008 and 2009; for arguments against, see Adler 2002 and Shah 2006).

In addition to being sorted according to the type of value involved, doxastic obligations can be sorted according to their structure . The main distinction here is between hypothetical and categorical structure.

Prudential norms usually have a hypothetical structure: if you have prudential reason to survive the disease, and if believing that you are going to do so will help you achieve this end, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that you are going to survive. Likewise, if you want to protect your relationship with your son, and if believing that he is deceiving you and taking drugs will damage your ability to trust him, then you are prima facie obliged to withhold that belief.

Put more generally: if you have a prudential end E , and belief that p is likely to make E obtain, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that p . The obligation will be particularly powerful (though still prima facie ) if E cannot be achieved other than through belief that p , and if you are (or should be) aware of that fact. (For more on hypothetical norms generally, see Broome 1999 and Schroeder 2005)

The structure of moral and epistemic norms can also be construed hypothetically in this way. The ends in question will presumably be doing the morally right thing or promoting the moral good , on the one hand, and acquiring significant knowledge or minimizing significant false belief , on the other (see Foley 1987). Achieving these ends clearly does involve an increase in well-being on most conceptions of the latter.

However, because these ends are putatively set for us not by a contingent act of will but rather by our nature as morally engaged, knowledge-seeking beings, some philosophers regard them as categorical rather than instrumental imperatives. In other words, they take these norms to say not merely that if we want to achieve various hypothetical ends, then we have the prima facie obligation to believe in such-and-such ways. Rather, the norms say that we do have these ends as a matter of natural or moral necessity, and thus that we prima facie ought to believe in such-and-such ways.

Note, however, that the most general prudential end—something like surviving , say—may be thought to have an equal claim to the title of a “necessary” end: it is set for us by our nature as living members of a species that has evolved through natural selection. And so by the same logic it might be taken to underwrite a categorical—albeit still prudential—norm of belief, especially in life-or-death cases such as that of the cancer diagnosis above.

So far the norms involved in the ethics of belief have been characterized without attention to reflective access requirements. A reflective access requirement has to do with the subject’s own reflective awareness of some of the relevant facts.

In order to see how such requirements can play a role, consider the following prudential doxastic norm:

(A) If S has end E , and if S's believing that p is likely to make E obtain, then S has a prima facie prudential obligation to believe that p.

This is a purely objective or ‘unreflective’ account of the prudential obligation in question: it is simply concerned with whether the subject in fact has a certain end and whether in fact the belief that p is likely to lead to the accomplishment of that end. If (A) were the right way to articulate obligations in the ethics of belief, then we would have far more prima facie doxastic obligations than we realize.

Reflective or ‘subjective’ components can be added to norms in order to make the results more plausible:

(B) If S knows that she has an end E , and if S knows that believing that p is likely to make E obtain, then S has a prima facie prudential obligation to believe that p .

(B) is towards the top of the scale in terms of reflective access requirements: S has to know that he has E and that believing that p is likely to make E obtain . As a sufficient condition for having a doxastic obligation, it may be acceptable, but most ethicists of belief will not want to make the reflective knowledge necessary in order for there to be genuine prima facie prudential obligations.

Intermediate positions would replace “knows” in one or both parts of the antecedent of (B) with something weaker: “is in a position to know,” “justifiably believes,” “is justified in believing,”, believes, and so on.

Note that an ethicist of belief who wants to include a reflective access requirement in a doxastic norm would need to do so in a way that doesn't generate an infinite regress. Note too that the norms we considered above govern the positive formation of belief. An account of the plausible conditions of reflective access may be somewhat different for norms of maintaining, suspending, and relinquishing belief (for suspending, see Tang 2015 and Perin 2015).

Another closely-related debate has to do with the types of value that can generate doxastic norms and obligations. Value monists in the ethics of belief argue that only one type of value (usually some kind of epistemic value) can generate such norms. A prominent kind of monism, often called “veritism”, says that truth is the fundamental doxastic good: its value is not grounded in knowledge or anything else (see Pritchard 2011, Gardiner 2012, Ahlstrom-Vij 2013).

Other more permissive accounts go beyond the three types of value considered above—prudential, moral, and epistemic—to suggest that there are other types that can generate doxastic obligations as well. Perhaps there are aesthetic norms that guide us to beliefs that have some sort of aesthetic merit, or that make us qua subjects more beautiful in virtue of believing them. There may also be social norms that govern beliefs we form in our various communal roles (as lawyers, priests, psychiatrists, friends, parents, etc. (regarding the doxastic obligations of friends, see Keller 2004, Stroud 2006, and Aikin 2008)) and political norms that govern beliefs we form as citizens, subjects, voters, and so on (here see the second half of Matheson and Vitz 2014).

It's an interesting and open question whether such aesthetic, social, or political norms could be cashed out in terms of epistemic, moral, and prudential norms (e.g. perhaps being someone's lawyer or being someone's friend underwrites certain moral or prudential norms of belief regarding his or her innocence). In any case, the three types of underlying value considered above are the ones most frequently discussed under the rubric of the “ethics of belief.”

Norms, and types of norms, can be related in different ways. According to the interpretation of Clifford presented above, there is a strong connection between the epistemic and the moral types: the fact that there is an epistemic norm to believe always and only on sufficient evidence entails that there is an analogous moral norm. The reasoning here seems to be as follows:

(P1) We have an epistemic obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs; (P2) We have a moral obligation to uphold our epistemic obligations; (C) Thus, we have a moral obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs.

This formulation keeps the types of values distinct while still forging a link between them in the form of (P2). But of course we would need to find a sound sub-argument in favor of (P2) (see Dougherty 2014).

In some places, Clifford seems simply to presume that epistemic duty is a species of ethical duty. That would make sense of why he thinks it just obvious that the shipowner is “equally guilty”—regardless of whether the ship sinks. Elsewhere Clifford defends (P2) by reference to our need to rely on the testimony of others in order to avoid significant harm and advance scientific progress. No belief is without effect, he claims: at the very least, believing on insufficient evidence (even with respect to an apparently very insignificant issue) is liable to lead to the lowering of epistemic standards in other more important contexts too. And that could, in turn, have bad moral consequences.

Elsewhere still Clifford seems not to recognize a distinction between epistemic and moral obligations at all (see Van Inwagen 1996, Haack 1997, Wood 2002, and Zamulinski 2002 for further discussion of Clifford on this issue).

It was noted earlier that one way to read Locke is as arguing for (P2) via the independent theoretical premise that God's will for us is that we follow Evidentialist norms, together with a divine command theory of moral rightness (see Wolterstorff 1996). But Locke can also be read as primarily interested in defending (P1) rather than (P2) or (C) (see Brandt Bolton 2009).

A virtue-theoretic approach, by contrast, might defend (P2) by claiming not that a particular unjustified belief causes moral harm, but rather that regularly ignoring our epistemic obligations is a bad intellectual habit, and that having a bad intellectual habits is a way of having a bad moral character (Zagzebski 1996, Roberts and Wood 2007).

In addition to using theoretical arguments like these, ethicists of belief can connect doxastic norms by appealing to empirical data. If we discover through investigation that it is on the whole prudent to be morally good, then prudential norms may be able support some of the moral norms. Similarly, if we discover that following moral norms of belief reliably leads to the acquisition of knowledge, then there may be a track-record argument that goes from epistemic norms to moral norms (this would effectively be an empirical argument in support of (P2) above). And if we empirically find that adhering to epistemic norms also promotes the moral good, then there will be an argument from the moral to the epistemic.

Finally, norms and types of norms can be in outright tension. The prudential norm recommending belief that your son is not smoking pot when you're gone conflicts with the epistemic norm to follow your perceptual evidence. Likewise, the moral norm to believe the best of others is often tragically in tension with the epistemic norm to believe what the evidence supports, with the prudential norm to believe whatever it takes in order to get ahead, and so on.

Tension or conflict can also exist between doxastic obligations of a diachronic sort. The epistemic norm to gather as much evidence as possible may conflict with the prudential norm to believe in such a way as to save time and effort (example: the fastidious boss who never hires anyone until he has investigated a candidate's entire past, called every reference, and confirmed every qualification). It also conflicts with the moral norm not to believe on the basis of evidence gathered in an immoral fashion (example: the doctor who gathers evidence about human diseases by performing inhumane experiments on prisoners).

Ethicists of belief who are not value monists often claim that there is a way of ordering norms or types of norms in terms of the relative strength or relative ease with which their claims on us can be defeated. This means that in a given situation there will be a determinate answer about what one ought to believe “all things considered.” Others argue, however, that at least some of the norms are incommensurable, and that in many cases there will simply be no answer to the question of what it is right to believe all things considered (Feldman 2000). Still others think that one category of norm collapses into another and that this can give us an all things considered conclusion (for discussion of whether epistemic rationality collapses into prudential rationality, for example, see Kelly 2003)

In sum: a full-blown ethics of belief will say something about the axiological sources of the different types of norms, about the inferential relations between them, about their temporal range (synchronic/diachronic) and about what to do when norms conflict. (See Broome 1999 and Kolodny 2005)

3. Belief, its Aims, and Our Control Over It

Questions about what belief is and how it is formed have typically played a marginal role in the ethics of belief debate. There is agreement among most analytic philosophers that belief is (roughly) a dispositional, affirmative attitude towards a proposition or state of affairs. To believe that p is to take it that p is true—to take it that the state of affairs described by the sentence “ p ” obtains. Note that this doesn't mean that the subject explicitly believes the proposition that p is true , however, since the latter is a different and higher order belief (mere belief that p doesn't require possession of the concept of “truth”, for instance, whereas the belief that p is true does). It is also widely agreed that the majority of our beliefs are not occurrent at any given time, and that belief comes in degrees of strength, confidence, or firmness.

After this, however, agreement breaks down. Representationalists regard beliefs as structures in the mind that represent the propositions they affirm—usually in something like a mental language (see Fodor 1975 and the entry on language of thought ). Behavioralist-dispositionalists regard beliefs as dispositions to act in certain ways in certain circumstances (see Braithwaite 1932–1933). Eliminativists regard talk of “beliefs” as designating convenient fictions that we ascribe to people in folk psychology (see Churchland 1981 and the entry on eliminative materialism ). Primitivists think of beliefs as basic mental states which do not admit of analysis. And so on. There is also a big controversy regarding whether the most fundamental concept here is of degrees of belief (or credences).

This disagreement about the nature of belief has (thus far at least) not been taken to impinge on the ethics of belief debate in significant ways. Of course, eliminativists and behavioralists will have to say that doxastic norms—if there are any—apply at bottom to non-doxastic states. Still, modulo those kinds of changes, these and other ontological analyses of belief seem compatible with many different accounts of its ethics.

By contrast, theories about the aim or goal of belief typically have an immediate and substantive impact on conceptions of its ethics, and can be used, in particular, to answer questions about the relative importance of various norms, whether there are “all things considered” obligations in a given situation, and so on (see Velleman 2000, Wedgwood 2002, Steglich-Peterson 2009, and the essays in Chan 2013 for general discussion; see Côté-Bouchard forthcoming for a critique of the move from aim of belief to doxastic norm).

A few philosophers and psychologists argue that simply acquiring significant truth while avoiding significant falsehood is the only aim of belief, and thus that any doxastic obligations will be structured accordingly (see David 2001). Others argue that there are important aims in addition to, or even in lieu of, the aim of truth-acquisition—aims that can underwrite other doxastic norms (Velleman 2000, Sosa 2000, Sosa 2003, Gibbons 2013). A common candidate here, of course, is knowledge itself (see Williamson 2000, Pritchard 2007, Simion et al. 2016 and the entry on the value of knowledge ), but some authors claim that justification (Adler 2002, Gibbons 2013) and/or doxastic “virtue” is the aim (Zagzebski 2004, Sosa 2011, Wright 2014), while still others plump for a more structurally complex aim such as “understanding” (Kvanvig 2003, Kvanvig 2009, Grimm 2012). (Note, though, that other authors argue that understanding doesn’t even involve belief (Hunter 1998; Dellsén forthcoming)).

As mentioned earlier, in cognitive science and evolutionary biology, it is often assumed that the aim of belief (as well as of almost every other process) is something like “survival.” There are ongoing disagreements, however, about the extent to which that is correct and, even if it is, whether it is necessarily or even contingently connected to the aim of truth-acquisition (Stich 1990, Plantinga 2002, Street 2006).

A very different kind of candidate for the aim of belief would be something like pleasure broadly-speaking, or perhaps “feeling at home in the world.” If one of these is the aim, then the norms it underwrites might at times lead away from truth. For example: suppose Smith is the sort of guy who feels great pleasure when he believes that everyone he knows thinks highly of him, and pleasure is an aim that underwrites a doxastic norm. Then Smith has a prima facie obligation to believe that his friend Jones thinks the world of him.

This is clearly one of the places where debates about psychological strategies such as self-deception, “bad faith,” wish-fulfillment, “irony,” and the like become germane in the ethics of belief (see Wisdo 1991, Wisdo 1993, Mele 2001, Wood 2002, and the entry on self deception ). If the aims of belief can plausibly be regarded as wide enough to include truth-neutral states such as pleasure or “feeling at home in the world,” and if these aims can underwrite genuine norms, then Evidentialism as characterized below clearly delivers a far-too-narrow characterization of its ethics.

We have seen that our conception of the aim of belief can influence our conception of doxastic norms. But it can also affect the extent to which parallels can be drawn between the ethics of belief and the ethics of action generally. If one adopts “value monism” in the ethics of belief (whether it be veritism of some other kind of value), then there will be a strong parallel to monistic consequentialist theories in the ethics of action (DePaul 2001).

A remaining difference between consequentialism in epistemology and in ethics, however, is that a belief’s success at achieving its aim is typically evaluated by epistemologists all at once in the moment it is formed, whereas in the case of an action, subsequent consequences are relevant to the evaluation of its moral rightness, and many of these consequences won’t be known (if at all) until much later (for an extended comparison of these two kinds of consequentialism, see Briesen 2017). That said, it is possible to imagine a diachronic ethics of belief according to which truth is the sole aim of belief, but we evaluate particular beliefs not just on whether they are true but also on their ability to enable or produce the subsequent acquisition of other true beliefs.

If we have a theory according to which the aim of belief is complex, however, then parallels to the ethics of action become more complicated. An ethicist of belief who holds that acquiring significant truth in the right way is the aim of belief, and analyzes the “rightness” of a belief-forming practice in terms of its ability to lead to truth, may find that the relevant parallel is to rule-consequentialism. By contrast, the view that the aim of belief is simply to believe in the right way , regardless of whether that “right way” reliably leads to signficant truth, looks like the analogue of a deontological position in ethics that emphasizes the intentional following of right principles rather than the achievement of some aim external to the act itself. Whether or not these parallels are illuminating, and whether a view in the ethics of belief constrains our options in the ethics of action, is still an open question (see Kornblith 1983, Dougherty 2014).

There are many other variations here. It seems possible to defend the view, for instance, that we ought only to believe on sufficient evidence—as the Evidentialists teach—but that our conception of the aims of belief might provide further and more determinate necessary conditions for permissible belief. It is also possible to argue that the aim of belief makes it the case that we have practical reasons for thinking that only epistemic reasons can license belief (Whiting 2014).

Finally, it may be possible to defend the view that belief by its nature has no specific aim, but is rather a state that can constitute or lead to any number of different goods. If that is right, then we obviously cannot look to the aim of belief to underwrite an account of its ethics.

We have already seen that some theorists take knowledge to be the (or at least an) aim of belief. Some philosophers go further and say that knowledge is also the norm of belief - that is, that any belief that does not also count as knowledge is impermissible or irrational or vicious or defective. Put another way: knowing that p is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for permissibly (rationally, virtuously) believing that p.

One argument for the claim that knowledge is the norm of belief seeks to infer that result from the claim that knowledge is the aim of belief. The aim generates the norm, and any belief that fails to achieve the aim also fails to obey the norm. Perhaps the most prominent argument along these lines starts with the related claim that knowledge is the “norm of assertion ”—i.e., that we ought not assert a proposition if we don’t know it (see Williamson 2000). But if that’s the case, and if belief is the “inner” analogue of assertion, then it looks as though we also ought only to believe a proposition when the belief counts as knowledge. The debate then has to do with whether knowledge really is the norm of assertion, and, if so, whether “belief” is an inner analogue of assertion in such a way that the norm carries over (see Sutton 2005, Huemer 2007b, Bach 2008, Goldberg 2009).

One reason that this position can seem counterintuitive is that an important role that norms often play is that of guiding action. The principle that we should only believe what we know is not a very helpful action-guiding norm, since we often don’t know what we know (according to most epistemologists, at least). Of course, if I adopt this norm, and know that I don’t know that p, then I’ll see that I shouldn’t believe that p either (this negative formulation is what Williamson uses in 2000, 256). But, again, most epistemologists do not think we are typically able to tell, from the inside, whether we would know the proposition in question if we believed it. And yet that ability seems to be presupposed by the idea that this is an action-guiding norm. Another objection to the idea that knowledge is the norm of belief is more intuitive: knowledge seems to most of us like a different sort of accomplishment than belief, or even justified belief, or (after Gettier) even justified true belief. It is one thing to say that we acquire the concept of belief by looking at paradigm cases of knowledge and then subtracting different elements from them (for instance: “justified belief would be just like knowledge but without truth”). It is quite another to say that no belief can count as properly formed unless it also counts as knowledge (for more on all this, see Benton, Other Internet Resources)

A third foundational issue related to the nature of belief has to do with whether or not belief-formation is in some way voluntary or under the control of the will. This issue, too, has an effect on the ethics of belief. Many philosophers and psychologists have concluded that belief is a more or less involuntary response to perceived evidence. But if a behavior isn't ‘up to us’ in any important sense, then it is hard to see how we could be responsible for performing it (see Alston 1989 for an influential argument along these lines).

In response to this “doxastic involuntarist” challenge , some philosophers argue that we do have direct control over at least some of our beliefs (Ginet 2001, Weatherson 2008), or that we at least have control over which beliefs are suspended or relinquished (Rott forthcoming). Others develop a kind of hybrid view that allows certain kinds of belief-formation to count as free and ‘up to us,’ even if they are also caused in us (see Steup 2000, Ryan 2003). Some explicitly reject any parallel between free will and free belief (Wagner forthcoming). Still others focus on the fact that we can be praised and blamed for beliefs (as well as actions) that are not under our control, even if there are no obligations on belief-formation. (Adams 1985, Hieronymi 2006, Southwood and Chuard 2009).

Yet another response, compatible with many of those list above, involves an account of indirect ways in which belief-formation counts as voluntary and thus susceptible to normative evaluation (e.g., Pascal 1670, Feldman 2000, Audi 2001, Yee 2002, Leon 2002, Audi 2008b). Another option is to take the doxastic involuntarist challenge to motivate a new focus on positive propositional attitudes that are by definition voluntary – “acceptances,” for instance (see Cohen 1992, Bratman 1992, Engel 2000, Audi 2008a, and §7 below). Finally, some ethicists of belief seek to argue that there are some obligations on direct belief-formation while also absorbing the putative empirical datum that much of it is not under the control of the will (see Feldman and Conee 1985, Feldman 2000, Adler 2005, Hieronymi 2006 and 2008).

4. Evidentialism: an overview

Evidentialism of some sort is far and away the dominant ethic of belief among early modern and contemporary philosophers alike. The central principle, as mentioned earlier, is that one ought only to base one's beliefs on relevant evidence (i.e. evidence that bears on the truth of the proposition) that is in one's possession. Many Evidentialists (Locke, Hume, and Clifford, for example) add the condition that the amount of evidence in one's possession must be proportioned to one's degree of belief, and that one should only firmly believe on the basis of “sufficient” evidence (where “sufficient” involves the evidence being strong enough for the belief to count as knowledge if true). Some also add one of the reflective access requirements mentioned above: for instance, that we ought to know (or being a position to know, or justifiably believe, or be justified in believing) that we have evidence for the original belief or even that the amount of evidence we have is sufficient (for a survey of these positions and their critics, see the essays in Dougherty 2011).

Once a principle along these lines has been chosen, the relative strictness of a given Evidentialist position will be a function of how many exceptions it allows. The strictest sort of Evidentialist—Clifford, at least on standard readings—says that the principle holds “always, everywhere, and for anyone” (though note, again, that Clifford himself qualifies this later in his essay). There are problems with such a strict position, however, including the threat of the infinite regress that arises if the strict Evidentialist also requires that we believe that we have sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs.

In contrast, moderate Evidentialists take their principles to be exceptionable; thus they allow that there are some circumstances in which subjects are rationally permitted to form beliefs in the absence of sufficient evidence. They might hold that the Cliffordian view applies, say, to the beliefs formed by a military pilot about the location of a legitimate bombing target in the midst of a residential area, or the beliefs formed by a government health official regarding the efficacy of a pharmaceutical trial, at least insofar as these beliefs lead to morally or prudentially significant actions. But at the same time they might think it permissible to abandon these strict standards in ordinary contexts where not much is at stake—for instance, the everyday belief that there is still some milk in the fridge. If the number of exceptions is very large, then the position ends up looking more like one of the Non-Evidentialist positions described below. As a result, the boundary between a very moderate Evidentialism and full-blown Non-Evidentialism can be quite blurry.

As difficult as it is to defend strict or thoroughgoing Evidentialism, it is even harder to defend the view that Evidentialism is in appropriate in every domain. The cases of the pilot and the health official are ones in which the subject's beliefs (largely as a result of the actions to which they lead) simply must, we think, meet some very high standards of evidence. Accordingly, at least some sort of moderate or context-specific Evidentialism seems overwhelmingly plausible.

We have seen that the distinction between strict Evidentialism and moderate Evidentialism is quite sharp but that the line between moderate Evidentialism and Non-Evidentialism is rather blurry. Perhaps the best place to make a distinction between moderate Evidentialism and full-blown Non-Evidentialism is over whether a subject can be not only permitted but also obliged to form a belief on insufficient evidence (or, depending on the reflective access conditions, on what she takes to be insufficient evidence) in certain situations. An ethicist of belief who affirms this, it seems reasonable to say, has thereby abandoned even the most moderate form of Evidentialism and moved into the Non-Evidentialist camp (see §6 below).

It was noted earlier that doxastic norms can be either synchronic or diachronic. Clifford's Principle itself is articulated as a synchronic norm, but in the later portions of the “Ethics of Belief,” he is more concerned to articulate diachronic principles regarding evidence-collection and evidence-assessment. It is from these portions of his discussion that we get “Clifford's Other Principle.”

Many early ethicists of belief modeled their accounts on deontological ethical theories that tend to formulate principles synchronically. Recently, however, virtue epistemologists have emphasized what they take to be the diachronic character of our fundamental doxastic obligations, and suggest that synchronic principles requiring sufficient evidence for a belief at a time are plausibly viewed as underwritten by more fundamental diachronic principles enjoining the cultivation of virtuous intellectual character (Zagzebski 1996, Roberts and Wood 2007, Sosa 2007, Audi 2008b).

Crucial to any theory in the ethics of belief—and especially an Evidentialist theory—will be some account of the nature of evidence itself. Some philosophers construe evidence in terms of demonstrative proof, others in terms of objective and/or subjective probability, and others simply in terms of anything that belief is responsive to (see the entry on evidence ). A fully articulate Evidentialism will also provide an account of how evidence supports belief (see the entry on the epistemic basing relation ), and of what it is to have or possess such evidence.

It will also, perhaps, say something about whether there can be evidence (arguments) in favor of having a belief that p or bringing about the belief that p , in addition to evidence in favor of p itself (see Reisner 2008). It will presumably also have something to say about disagreement between epistemic peers, and the impact that such disagreement can have on our conception of the doxastic norms, especially if the disagreement is not based on a difference in evidence (van Inwagen 1996, Kelly 2005). Finally, it might take a stand on the more general issue of how higher-order evidence interacts with first-order evidence. For example: in the case of peer disagreement, knowing that a peer disagrees with you is a piece of higher-order evidence regarding your first-order belief.

With respect to reflective access conditions, it was noted earlier that Evidentialists cannot require that a rational subject always base beliefs on sufficient evidence that she knows or justifiably believes she has, for fear of an infinite regress. If that is correct, then another less demanding sort of principle must be in the offing, one according to which at least some beliefs can simply be held on the basis of sufficient evidence, regardless of whether the subject has any beliefs about that evidence.

On the issue of evidence-possession generally: if we regard evidence as wholly constituted by mental states (experiences, beliefs, memories, etc.), then an account of what it is to “possess” evidence will be relatively straightforward—we must simply have these mental states. If evidence is not merely in the head, so to speak, then the possession condition in Evidentialist norms may turn out to be quite complex. What is our evidence for the belief that “it's raining”? Is it our awareness or experience of something, such as the street's being wet? Or is it simply the street's being wet? When asked why we believe that it is raining, we typically say something like “because the street is wet.” Is this merely shorthand or does it say something about the nature of evidence? (For arguments that extra-mental facts in the world often constitute evidence, see McDowell 1994 and Ginsborg 2007; for further discussion see Williamson 2000 and Dancy 2000, ch.6).

5. Varieties of Evidentialism

In light of the fact that there are different types of value underwriting different types of obligation, there must also be different types of Evidentialism: prudential, epistemic, and moral at the very least.

Strict prudential Evidentialism doesn't enjoy much of a following; indeed, as with most strict forms of Evidentialism, it is hard to see how it could be motivated. Perhaps it is prudent in general to follow one's evidence, but there will always be cases in which prudential considerations push in the direction of playing fast and loose with the evidence. Wouldn't it be better for the grief-stricken widower to believe that his wife is enjoying life in heaven, or for the devoted spouse to fight off the belief that her husband is unfaithful, even though she regularly finds lipstick on his collar?

One move that the prudential Evidentialist can make in response to such objections is to adopt the doxastic analogue of rule consequentialism. Even if there are particular cases in which it is imprudent to follow one's evidence, the general rule that one should believe on the basis of, and in proportion to, sufficient evidence in one's possession produces the best distribution of prudential outcomes overall.

This kind of moderate prudential Evidentialism can handle a lot of common counterexamples, but there is still the concern that entire classes of beliefs—rather than individual instances—violate the principle and yet seem to produce more beneficial overall results. For instance, wouldn't it be better all around if each of us were as a rule to think more highly of one another's worth, intentions, and capacities than our evidence actually supports?

In response, it might be claimed that the source of the prudential value of always believing on sufficient evidence is that it tends to result in our having knowledge. If that were right, then there would be a clear connection between prudential and epistemic norms (see §2.4 above and §5.3 below). The challenge for such a position, however, is to show that justification or knowledge adds something of genuine prudential value that mere true belief lacks.

Strict moral Evidentialism is unlikely to be attractive to anyone but the most zealous Cliffordian. In its more moderate forms, however, moral Evidentialism is much more attractive and widespread. “You simply shouldn't believe that about your friend!”—expressed in a context where the friend's disloyalty is not conclusively supported by the evidence—sounds to many ears like the expression of a plausible moral obligation (see Wood 2002, ch. 1–3).

Moral rightness and wrongness is analyzed in many different ways, of course; a moral Evidentialist will presumably either adopt one of those analyses and develop her position accordingly, or show that the ethics of belief swings free of debates between deontologists, consequentialists, virtue theorists, and the like. No matter which theory of moral rightness and wrongness she adopts, however, there will be the usual questions to settle about whether there are thresholds of harm beyond which Evidentialist principles are suspended, even in a deontological context, about whether the fundamental objects of moral appraisal in the doxastic context are acts or rules, and about whether there is a ‘unity’ to the moral as well as the intellectual virtues. Again, it is an open and interesting question whether these issues need to be dealt with differently in an ethics of belief than they are in an ethics of action.

By far the most influential and widespread variety of Evidentialism is epistemic (see Chisholm 1957, Adler 2002, Conee and Feldman 2004, Shah 2006). The central thesis of epistemic Evidentialism is that the norms of evidence governing belief are somehow based in the nature and aims of theoretical reason itself. To believe on insufficient evidence is at bottom an epistemic failure—a failure to use our cognitive faculties in such a way that we are likely to acquire significant knowledge and avoid significant unjustified belief. Some philosophers in this tradition also defend Locke's proportionality thesis according to which our degree of belief must be in proportion to the strength of our evidence (see White 2005).

A major challenge facing proponents of epistemic Evidentialism is to find an adequate motivation for it: if there are not sufficient prudential or moral grounds for the obligation to believe on sufficient evidence, then what is the source of its normativity? In response to the challenge, epistemic Evidentialists take a number of different tacks. Some argue that the norms are underwritten by necessary, conceptual truths. On this view, the very concept of belief reveals that it is a truth-aimed attitude that is only properly formed on the basis of sufficient evidence in the possession of the subject. Thus an attitude that is not formed in this way is either not a genuine belief at all, or at best a deficient instance of it (see Adler 2002, Textor 2004).

Other epistemic Evidentialists argue that doxastic norms arise not from analysis of the concept of belief, but rather from reflection on the fact that our belief-forming faculties are simply set up to be sensitive to evidence. The faculties of perception, memory, testimony, introspection, reasoning, and so on, typically generate beliefs on the basis of sufficient evidence, and we usually regard these faculties as malfunctioning, maladjusted, or misused when they generate beliefs in other ways. Pieces of apparent evidence—epistemic reasons, broadly-speaking—reliably provide us with important information about the world, and we have evolved to be sensitive to such reasons in our quest to survive and flourish.

Note that the epistemic Evidentialist does not hold that the acquisition of significant truth—even truth that promotes survival—is the only relevant consideration in this region: our belief-forming faculties are not mere thermometers or motion-detectors. The idea is rather that, as evidence-sensitive believers, we don't merely want to believe significant truths; rather, we want to have good grounds for taking propositions to be true, and to base our belief on those grounds (Feldman 2000; though again see David 2001). This putative fact is then taken to underwrite a norm: we ought to seek not just true belief but knowledge , or, more specifically, we ought to seek widespread significant knowledge without widespread significant error . To seek knowledge in this way is, among other things, to seek to have sufficient evidence for true beliefs and to base them on that evidence.

Another kind of defense of epistemic Evidentialism says that the central Evidentialist principle—that we ought to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence that is in our possession—is not an analytic truth drawn from the concept of belief, and not a ‘functional norm’ arising from reflection on the way our faculties are set up or designed, but rather a synthetic principle that we simply rationally intuit in the course of reflecting on concepts and thought-experiments. This approach seems coherent and in some ways attractive, though it has not found many defenders in the literature.

6. Varieties of Non-Evidentialism

We have already seen that there are any number of ways in which one can fail to be a strict Evidentialist. One might hold, for instance, that belief need not always be based on evidence (though of course the moderate Evidentialist could agree with that), or that belief requires evidence but its degree needn't be proportioned to the strength of the evidence, or that belief requires evidence but need not be based on that evidence, or that belief requires that there be evidence even if the subject doesn't possess that evidence. No doubt there are other ways as well, and the question of whether a particular philosopher counts as an Evidentialist will ultimately hang on how Evidentialism itself is construed.

Most important for present purposes, however, is to note that the fact that someone is not a prudential Evidentialist, say, does not entail that she is a Non- Evidentialist for prudential reasons—or for any other reasons. Indeed, she might still be an Evidentialist, but for moral or epistemic rather than prudential reasons. As I will use the term, being a Non-Evidentialist with respect to a certain domain of beliefs requires, as a necessary condition, that one is not an Evidentialist of any sort about that domain of beliefs.

I suggested earlier that a natural place to draw the line between moderate Evidentialists and Non-Evidentialists about a domain of beliefs rests on the question of whether belief on the basis of insufficient evidence is ever reasonably required . Are we ever obliged to believe, even in the absence of sufficient evidence? Strict and moderate Evidentialists will say no, Non-Evidentialists will say yes. Naturally, the reasons that motivate this putative requirement will be different according to different types of Non-Evidentialism. Here the focus will be on the three main types of Non-Evidentialism that are prevalent among contemporary philosophers: Practical Non-Evidentialism (which includes what is sometimes called “pragmatism”), Conservativism, and Fideism.

As noted above, William James famously sniffs at the impracticable stringency of Clifford's Principle, advocating instead the more liberal policy that we sometimes have the “right to believe” even when we lack sufficient evidence (and even when we know that we lack it). In places, James goes further and suggests that in certain cases—especially cases involving religious and moral belief—it is not merely permitted but positively commendable or even required that we believe on insufficient evidence.

When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait —acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true—till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and sense working together may have raked in evidence enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. (1896, 11)

We saw earlier that there are difficult conceptual and psychological problems facing an ethics of belief that says, quite strictly, that we must always and only believe what is prudentially beneficial. Thus while pragmatism is sometimes characterized casually as the view that we should believe whatever “works,” most self-described pragmatists are very careful to specify the conditions under which a subject can reasonably depart from, ignore, or go beyond her evidence (see pragmatism ). These conditions typically involve the absence of really compelling evidence; thus, as James reminds his reader, pragmatic belief is not simply wild-eyed believing “what you know ain't true” (1896, 29). Pragmatists also typically require the existence of some sort of exigency or “passional” interest on the part of the subject that makes suspension of belief in that context impossible (or at least exceedingly ill-advised). We saw earlier how James defines a “genuine option” in an effort to specify these conditions.

The emphasis on the “primacy of the practical” in James was clearly anticipated by earlier ethicists of belief. Blaise Pascal famously argues in the Pensées that wager-like reasoning should lead us to set the goal of believing in God; thus his focus tends to be less on the moral or epistemic and more on the prudential motives for belief (Pascal 1670, Hájek 2003, Jordan 2006; see also the entries on Pascal , Pascal's Wager , and pragmatic arguments and belief in God ). For Immanuel Kant, by contrast, considerations that can justify belief (or faith) in the absence of sufficient theoretical evidence are typically (though not exclusively) moral . If, for instance, there is no sufficient evidence one way or the other for a certain proposition p (the proposition, say, that the human will is incompatibilistically free), and if one has set a moral end that requires one to take a stand on the truth of p , and if any evidence that one does have points in the direction of the truth of p , then one is permitted (and sometimes even required) to take p to be true. This ‘taking-to-be-true’ (German: ‘ Fürwahrhalten ’) is thereby justified on “moral” rather than “theoretical” grounds, and it counts as “belief” ( Glaube ) or “acceptance” ( Annehmung ) rather than “knowledge” ( Wissen ) (Kant 1781/1787, Chignell 2007).

A convenient label that captures both broadly pragmatist and broadly Kantian theories is Practical Non-Evidentialism , where the pragmatic/prudential and the moral are the two main species of “practical” value (for more on moral reasons for belief and whether they count as evidence see Pace 2010; for a survey of the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief see Reisner 2017).

Conservatism (sometimes also called dogmatism , though the latter is usually thought to be a view about perceptual belief in particular; see Pryor 2000, White 2006) is the view that one is prima facie justified in believing that p if in fact one does believe that p (Harman 1986, Owens 2000). Another version of it says that one is prima facie justified in believing that p if it seems to one that p is true (Huemer 2007a) or at least perceptually seems to one that p is true (Pryor 2000). In order to be all things considered justified on either of these conservatisms, one must be aware of no undefeated defeaters for p . But the absence of undefeated defeaters for p , even if one is aware of it, is not positive evidence for p , and any “impulsional” urge towards p or seeming that p is true is not the kind of evidence that Evidentialists think we should seek (see Conee and Feldman 2004, ch. 3; for impulsional evidence see Plantinga 1993, 192). So on at least most accounts of what “evidence” is, conservatism is an important kind of Non-Evidentialism according to which some justified beliefs—the immediately justified ones—are not based on sufficient evidence.

Conservatism is regarded by some philosophers as a useful tool against skepticism (Christensen 1994, Huemer 2007a), and its “dogmatic” flavor is sometimes made more palatable by combining it with various moderate or localized Evidentialisms. Thus, for example, conservatism about beliefs that go into the foundation of our knowledge structure (including beliefs about basic mathematical or moral truths) might very naturally be combined with a kind of Evidentialism about beliefs that are not in the foundation (for more on foundationalism in epistemology, see foundationalist theories of epistemic justification ).

Note that conservatives need not say that any of the beliefs we have are infallible or incapable of being undermined. Indeed, they might be quite open to the fallibilist thought that our current justified beliefs can be defeated (either rebutted or undercut) by new evidence. So the view doesn't promote belief that is “dogmatic” or “conservative”in some disparaging sense: it says merely that some beliefs that we have, or some “impelling” beliefs, needn't be based on positive evidential (or practical) support in order to be justified (Harman 1986, Lycan 1988, Chisholm 1989, McGrath 2007).

A third Non-Evidentialist position in the ethics of belief, similar to but distinct from dogmatism, is sometimes called fideism , though it needn't have anything to do with religious doctrine in particular. According to the fideist, we can legitimately hold propositions on faith without having any evidence for them, without feeling impelled towards them, and even in the face of strong evidence against them (note that this is just one way of defining “fideism,” see the entry on fideism for others). Someone might hold on the basis of faith, for instance, that there has been at least one bodily resurrection at some point in the past, even though he has never witnessed such a thing first-hand, and his best scientific, testimonial, and everyday inductive evidence constitutes a powerful case against it.

Fideism of this radical sort is not itself required by most religions, but is typically associated with religious thinkers like Tertullian in the ancient period (perhaps unfairly: see Sider 1980), and Kierkegaard (1846) in the modern (also perhaps unfairly: see Evans 1998). Apart from wearing its irrationality on its sleeve, fideism is vulnerable to psychological objections about the lack of direct control over belief. If belief just is an attitude that necessarily responds to perceived evidence with a positive ‘direction of fit,’ it is hard to see how a well-functioning subject could believe that p in the face of strong evidence that not-p . Consider someone who has normal sensory faculties and who, despite strong perceptual and testimonial evidence to the contrary, repeatedly declares—without claiming to have any hidden evidence—that there is, say, a huge abyss opening up in front of him. It would take a very long time for us to become convinced that he really believes that there is an abyss in front of him. But if, in the end, we are convinced by his actions and speech that he has this belief, and we know that his sensory faculties are functioning properly, then we will probably think the belief is the product of an undesirable and partly involuntary state such as self-deception, wish-fulfillment, or paranoia. We won't think that he has simply chosen to believe.

A more moderate sort of fideism would say that we are permitted to form a “faith”-based belief only if the evidence regarding the proposition in question is not compelling either way, or is absent altogether. Only under those circumstances can we (directly or indirectly) make a “leap of faith” into belief (Adams 1987). Typically, however, those who have recommended “leaps of faith” have cited pragmatic or moral grounds for those leaps, and so given the taxonomy we have so far, they would ultimately count as practical non-Evidentialists rather than bona fide fideists.

If, on the other hand, the claim is that in the complete absence of practical or theoretical reasons in favor, a subject is still permitted to adopt a certain belief, then the view seems to have abandoned aspirations to developing a principled position, and is no longer obviously an “ethics” of belief. This is not a knockdown argument against that kind of fideism, of course: it may be that such a fideist can give reasons to think that trying to formulate an ethics of belief is an ill-conceived project in the first place.

A final alternative for the fideist is to admit that he is not really focused on belief at all, but is rather trying to make room for another kind of positive propositional attitude that is not guided by evidence. Many philosophers and religious people who embrace the fideist label construe “faith” (Latin: fides ) as something different from belief—hope, perhaps, or something like “acceptance” (see §7 and the entry on fideism ). On such a conception, faith that p might very well be able rationally to co-exist in the same psychology with a lot of evidence for not-p .

7. The ethics of acceptance

This last point shows that Evidentialism about belief—even of a strict and uncompromising sort—can be combined with Non-Evidentialism about some other positive, categorical propositional attitudes in order to make it seem less stern (see Audi 2008a for a list of possible meanings of “faith”). Perhaps the most prominent candidate here is acceptance conceived as a positive categorical attitude towards a proposition that is by definition voluntary and figures significantly in our deliberation, action, argumentation, and assertion. Some philosophers focus on the role that acceptance plays in scientific inquiry, theory-construction, and decision theory (van Fraasen 1984, Stalnaker 1987, Cohen 1992). Others focus on the role that it plays in ethical, juridical, religious, and everyday contexts (Bratman 1992, Cohen 1992, Alston 1996, Audi 2008a). A warning is in order here: acceptance is typically a technical notion and characterizations of its nature and ethics differ radically in the literature. There is also some dispute about whether acceptance is able to play the various roles that its advocates intend (Radford 1990, Maher 1990, Moore 1994).

The ethicist of belief who wants to soften or supplement her view by appealing to some notion of permissible acceptance would need to say what acceptance is, how the two sorts of attitude differ, what sorts of norms govern each, and how they interact in a single subject. One of the main advantages of a hybrid view like this is that acceptance is usually taken to be by definition voluntary, and thus it is much easier to see how a genuine “ethics” (complete with praise and blame ascriptions) could be built around it. As we saw earlier, a notion of acceptance (as “faith”) is the sort of thing that a fideist might want to appeal to against those who say that one can't just decide to believe that p in the face of strong opposing evidence. A moderate fideist, by contrast, might argue that we are only permitted to accept that p if we lack strong evidence about p either way. This is still consistent with our having weak evidence for not-p , and even a (weakly held) belief that not-p .

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• –––, 2004, “Epistemic value and the primacy of what we care about”, Philosophical Papers , 33: 353–377.
• Zagzebski, Linda and M. Depaul (eds.), 2007, Intellectual virtue: Perspectives from ethics and epistemology , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Zamulinski, Brian, 2002, “A re-evaluation of Clifford and his critics”, Southern Journal of Philosophy , 40: 437–457.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Benton, Matthew, Knowledge Norms , entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Ethics of Belief , PhilPapers site, maintained by Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, University of Aarhus.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Marian David and Avishai Margalit for discussion, and Robert Audi, Anthony Booth, Rik Peels, Lu Teng, Nico Silins, and René van Woudenberg for helpful comments on earlier drafts. He also thanks Noam Weinreich for his help with updating the 2016 version of the entry and generating the bibliography.

He also thanks Cambridge University Press for permission to re-use a few paragraphs from his portion of the essay “The Ethics of Religious Belief: A Recent History,” in (Dole and Chignell 2005).

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Essay on World Religions And Belief Systems

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100 Words Essay on World Religions And Belief Systems

World religions.

There are many different religions in the world, each with its own beliefs and practices. Some of the major religions include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.

Belief Systems

A belief system is a set of beliefs that a person or group of people holds to be true. Belief systems can be religious or secular. Religious belief systems are based on the teachings of a particular religion, while secular belief systems are not based on any particular religion.

Diversity of Religions

The diversity of religions in the world is a reflection of the different ways that people have tried to understand the meaning of life and the universe. There is no one right way to believe, and people should be free to practice the religion that they feel is right for them.

It is important to be tolerant of people who have different religious beliefs. Tolerance means respecting the beliefs of others, even if you do not agree with them. Tolerance is essential for creating a peaceful and harmonious world.

250 Words Essay on World Religions And Belief Systems

What are world religions.

World religions are belief systems that have a large number of followers all over the world. They offer rituals, ceremonies, and practices to help people connect with the divine or ultimate reality. World religions include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.

Christianity:

Christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and revolves around the belief in a triune God consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah who came to Earth to save humanity from sin. Christianity emphasizes love, forgiveness, and compassion.

Islam is founded on the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and centers around belief in one God, Allah, and his messenger, Muhammad. It highlights the importance of submission to God’s will, known as Islam, and adherence to the Five Pillars of Islam. Muslims strive to live a life of devotion, prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Hinduism is a complex and diverse belief system with no single founder. It originated in India and encompasses a variety of traditions, philosophies, and practices. Hinduism places great emphasis on dharma, or righteous living, and the concept of reincarnation, where the soul passes through a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Buddhism, founded by Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, originated in India and focuses on the pursuit of enlightenment or nirvana. It emphasizes the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as ways to overcome suffering and achieve liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Judaism is the oldest monotheistic religion, dating back to the Hebrew patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It revolves around the belief in one God, Yahweh or Jehovah, and the sacredness of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. Judaism emphasizes ethical behavior, ritual observance, and the covenant between God and the Jewish people.

500 Words Essay on World Religions And Belief Systems

World religions are belief systems that have a large number of followers all over the world. They often have a long history, and they have shaped the cultures of the regions where they are practiced. Some of the largest world religions include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Belief Systems of World Religions

Belief systems of world religions are the sets of beliefs and practices that are followed by the members of that religion. These beliefs and practices can be about things like God or gods, the afterlife, and the meaning of life. They can also include things like rituals, ceremonies, and festivals.

Similarities among World Religions

Even though world religions have different beliefs and practices, they also share some similarities. For example, many religions believe in a higher power, or God. They also often have a sense of community and belonging. Additionally, many religions have a code of ethics that their members are expected to follow.

Differences among World Religions

Of course, there are also many differences among world religions. These differences can be in their beliefs about God, the afterlife, and the meaning of life. They can also be in their rituals, ceremonies, and festivals. These differences can sometimes lead to conflict between different religious groups.

Importance of Understanding World Religions

It is important to understand world religions because they play a major role in the lives of many people around the world. They can help to shape people’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. They can also give people a sense of community and belonging. By understanding world religions, we can better understand the people who practice them and build bridges between different cultures.

World religions are belief systems that have a large number of followers all over the world. They often have a long history, and they have shaped the cultures of the regions where they are practiced. Belief systems of world religions are the sets of beliefs and practices that are followed by the members of that religion. They can be about things like God or gods, the afterlife, and the meaning of life. Even though world religions have different beliefs and practices, they also share some similarities.

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What are Belief Systems?

• Published: 14 January 2015
• Volume 21 , pages 147–152, ( 2016 )

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• J. L. Usó-Doménech 1 &
• J. Nescolarde-Selva 1  

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In beliefs we live, we move and we are [...] the beliefs constitute the base of our life, the land on which we live [...] All our conduct, including the intellectual life, depends on the system of our authentic beliefs. In them [...] lies latent, as implications of whatever specifically we do or we think [...] the man, at heart, is believing or, which is equal, the deepest stratum of our life, the spirit that maintains and carries all the others, is formed by beliefs... (Ortega y Gasset)

We know that the human being is a social animal. This is a common fact. Moreover, the human being is defined as a rational being. It is clear and nobody can deny that human creations include logic, mathematics, philosophy, science, and jurisprudence. These are all products of rationality or abstract thought. Nevertheless, human sociability goes further that the sociability of an animal herd. Societies were founded, cohere, develop, degenerate and die based on their belief systems. Reason cannot prove the beliefs it is based upon. Beliefs arise through experience. Experience needs previous beliefs and reason to be assimilated, and reason needs experience to be formed, as beliefs need reason as well. Beliefs, reason and experience, are based upon each other. Context is dynamic, and formed upon beliefs, reason and experience. This is where relative understanding lies. As relative understanding is independent of our context, it is also dependant on our beliefs, reasoning, and experiences. Contexts are dynamic because they are changing constantly as we have new experiences and change our beliefs and our ways of reasoning.

The use of the term “belief system” can be highly confusing. Psychologists, political scientists and anthropologists tend to use the term in rather different senses. There is some network of interrelated concepts and propositions at varying levels of generality, and there are some processes by which a human or a computer accesses and manipulates that knowledge under current activating circumstances and/or in the service of particular current purposes. Belief systems are structures of norms that are interrelated and that vary mainly in the degree in which they are systemic. What is systemic in the Belief system is the interrelation between several beliefs. What features warrant calling this stored body of concepts a belief system? Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of Reality. Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually, “make sense” of the world around us. Perceived Reality is constructed by means of systems of signs, being affected and being changed by means of Belief systems. A subject cannot understand a sign without talking about a system that is learned socially and that allows him to make sense of perception. In the same way, the classification of signs in closed typologies can be deceptive, since the status of the sign depends strongly on the form in which the sign is used within the Belief system. A signifier can nevertheless be iconic in a belief context and be symbolic in another context. From this we can see that people are capable of constructing all manner of individual beliefs by which they tell stories about how the world works. As humans, we tend to use all these belief systems in varying degrees to cope with events in our lives. Ultimately we need the world to make sense . Therefore, those areas where that “sense of reality” is most challenged will tend to be the areas in which the most controversies exist.

Moreover, these signs are not rational. The species Homo sapiens developed so-called belief systems. These sets of beliefs are reinforced by culture, theology, and experience and training as to how society works cultural values, stereotypes, political viewpoints, etc. Beliefs are often considered as convictions or as religious beliefs, but as scientists there are also philosophical beliefs relating to the sphere of daily life. If a stimulus is received, it may be interpreted through the belief system to be whatever the belief system might lead the recipient to rationalize. A belief system need have no basis in reality so long as it consistently provides adequate explanations. It takes us to define a human being like Homo religious .

1 Characteristics of Belief Systems

Belief systems have the following properties, and through them social significance. Some characteristics of belief systems are:

Personal commitment is one of most observable and interesting features of an ideology. If it were not for the fact of personal commitment, belief systems could not have strong social consequences, and the study of social systems would not be so interesting.

Belief systems have an existence that is independent of their committed believers . The believers do not wholly contain the belief system; in fact, they are unlikely to be aware of more than a small part of it and, knowingly or unknowingly, they must take the rest of the belief system on faith.

Psychological mechanisms such as cognitive congruence may help explain individual commitment, but they do not necessarily explain the connectedness of a belief system in human society.

The life span of a belief system is potentially longer than the life span of believers.

Belief systems vary almost infinitely in substantive content.

The boundaries of a belief system are generally, although not always, undefined. Collections of beliefs do not generally have neat boundaries.

The elements (concepts, propositions, rules, etc.) of belief systems are not consensual. That is, the elements of one system might be quite different from those of a second in the same content domain. And a third system may be different from each. Individual differences of this kind do not generally characterize ordinary knowledge systems, except insofar as one might want to represent differences in capability or complexity. Belief systems may also vary in complexity, but the most distinctive variation is conceptual variation at a roughly comparable level of complexity. An interesting sidelight on the consensuality question is whether a belief system is “aware,” in some sense, that alternative constructions are possible. For cognitive science, the point of this discussion is that nonconsensuality should somehow be exploited if belief systems are to be interesting in their own right as opposed to knowledge systems. Belief systems often appear to have clear boundaries when the separation is really between social groups.

Belief systems are in part concerned with the existence or nonexistence of certain conceptual entities . God, motherland, witches, and assassination conspiracies are examples of such entities. This feature of belief systems is essentially a special case of the nonconsensuality feature. To insist that some entity exists implies an awareness of others who believe it does not exist. Moreover, these entities are usually central organizing categories in the belief system, and as such, they may play an unusual role which is not typically to be found in the concepts of straightforward knowledge systems.

Belief systems often include representations of alternative worlds , typically the world as it is and the world as it should be. Revolutionary or Utopian belief systems especially have this character. The world must be changed in order to achieve an idealized state, and discussions of such change must elaborate how present reality operates deficiently, and what political, economic, social (etc.) factors must be manipulated in order to eliminate the deficiencies.

Belief systems rely heavily on evaluative and affective components . There are two aspects-to this, one ’cognitive’; “the other “motivational.” Belief systems typically has large categories of concepts defined in one way or another as themselves “good” or “bad,” or as leading to good or bad outcomes. These polarities, which exert a strong organizing influence on other concepts within the system, may have a very dense network of connections rare in ordinary knowledge systems. From a formal point of view, however, the concepts of “good” and “bad” might for all intents and purposes be treated as cold cognitive categories just like any other categories of a knowledge system.

Belief systems are likely to include a substantial amount of episodic material from either personal experience or (for cultural belief systems) from folklore or (for political doctrines) from propaganda.

The content set to be included in a belief system is usually highly “open.” That is, it is unclear where to draw a boundary around the belief system, excluding as irrelevant concepts lying outside. This is especially true if personal episodic material is important in the system. Consider, for example, a parental belief system about the irresponsibility and ingratitude of the modem generation of youth. Suppose, as might very well be the case, that central to this system is a series of hurtful episodes involving the believer’s own children. For these episodes to be intelligible, it would be necessary for the system to contain information about these particular children, about their habits, their development, their friends, where the family lived at the time, and so on. And one would have to have similar conceptual amplification about the “self” of the believer.

Beliefs can be held with varying degrees of certitude . The believer can be passionately committed to a point of view, or at the other extreme could regard a state of affairs as more probable than not. This dimension of variation is absent from knowledge systems. One would not say that one knew a fact strongly. There exist some examples of attempts to model variable credences or “’confidence weights” of beliefs and how these change as a function of new information. A distinction should be made between the certitude attaching to a single belief and the strength of attachment to a large system of beliefs.

2 Elements of Belief Systems

The following elements are listed in the order that would be logically required for the understanding a belief system. This does not imply priority in value or in a causal or historical sense.

Values Implicitly or explicitly, belief systems define what is good or valuable. Ideal values tend to be abstract summaries of the behavioral attributes which social system rewards, formulated after the fact. Social groups think of themselves, however, as setting out various things in order to implement their values. Values are perceived as a priori, when they are in fact a posteriori to action. Having abstracted an ideal value from social experience, a social group may then reverse the process by deriving a new course of action from the principle. At the collective level of social structure, this is analogous to the capacity for abstract thought in individual subjects and allows great (or not) flexibility in adapting to events. Concrete belief systems often substitute observable social events for the immeasurable abstract ideal values to give the values immediate social utility.

Substantive beliefs (Sb ) They are the more important and basic beliefs of a belief system. Statements such as: all the power for the people, God exists, Black is Beautiful , and so on, comprise the actual content of the belief systems and may take almost any form. For the believers, substantive beliefs are the focus of interest.

Orientation The believer may assume the existence of a framework of assumptions around his thought, it may not actually exist. The orientation he shares with other believers may be illusory. For example, consider almost any politic and sociologic belief system. Such a system evolves highly detailed and highly systematic doctrines long after they come into existence and they came into existence for rather specific substantive beliefs. Believers interact, share specific consensuses, and give themselves a specific name: Marxism, socialism, Nazism, etc. Then, professionals of this belief system work out an orientation, logic, sets of criteria of validity, and so forth.

Language It is the logic of a belief system. Language L of a belief system is composed of the logical rules which relate one substantive Footnote 1 belief to another within the belief system. Language must be inferred from regularities in the way a set of substantive beliefs is used. The language will be implicit, and it may not be consistently applied. Let Sb be a substantive belief. We propose the following rules of generation of belief systems:

An argument is formed by the sum of two characteristics: (a) hypothesis, that is to say, so what is this physical and social reality? And (b) goal: we want this society to reach its “perfection” (utopia).

Perspective The perspective of a belief system or their cognitive map is the set of conceptual tools. Central in most perspectives is some statement of where the belief system and/or social group that carries it stands in relation to other things, specially nature, social events or other social groups. Are we equals? Enemies? Rulers? Friends? Perspective as description of the social environment is a description of the social group itself, and the place of each individual in it. The perspective may be stated as a myth. It explains not only who subjects are and how subjects came to be in cognitive terms, but also why subjects exist in terms of ideal values. Meaning and identification are provided along with cognitive orientation.

Prescriptions and proscriptions This includes action alternatives or policy recommendations as well as deontical norms for behavior. Historical examples of prescriptions are the Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the Lenin’s What is To Be Done or the Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Deontical norms represent the cleanest connection between the abstract ideas and the concrete applied beliefs because they refer to behavior that is observable. They are the most responsive conditions in being directly carried by the social group through the mechanisms of social reward and punishment.

Ideological Technology Every belief system contains associated beliefs concerning means to attain ideal values. Some such associated beliefs concern the subjective legitimacy or appropriateness of d-significances, Footnote 2 while others concern only the effectiveness of various d-significances. For example, political activists and organizational strategy and tactics are properly called the technology of the belief system. Ideological Technology is composed of the associated beliefs and material tools providing means for the immediate or distant (Utopian) goals of a belief system. Ideological Technology is not used to justify or validate other elements of a belief system, although the existence of ideological technologies may limit alternatives among substantive beliefs. Ideological Technology commands less commitment from believers than do the other elements. A change in Ideological Technology ( strategy ) may be responsible for changes in logical prior elements of a belief system. Ideological Technology, like belonging to the Structural Base (Usó-Doménech and Nescolarde-Selva 2012 ; Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech 2013a , b ) and having a series of prescriptions concerning doing can influence the life conditions of believers, thus forcing an adaptation in the belief system itself. Eurocommunism in Western Europe gives to a good historical example. Ideological Technology may become symbolic and it can cause more fundamental differences between belief systems and, therefore, be a source of conflict. Conflicts between anarchists and Communists in the Spanish Civil War or the ideas of Trotsky and those of Stalin in the USSR are examples. Much blood has been shed between Muslims and Hindus over the fact that their religions have different dietary restrictions (deontical prohibitions).

3 Conclusions

Conflict between two groups, including war, may be defined as a battle between belief systems . Symbols emerge strongly in such conflicts: they may be revered objects like stones, writings, buildings, flags or badges; whatever they may be, they may symbolize the central core of belief system. When people become symbols, the real person may become obscured behind the projected symbolic image or person. Organizations develop their own in-house culture and belief system, too, which leads them to act and behave in ways that might not seem entirely rational to an outsider. Then: (a) Conflicts are not over Ideological Technology but over what symbolizes technological difference. (b) Substantive beliefs are understood only in terms of ideal values, criteria of validity, language and perspective. (c) A Believer is usually better able to verbalize substantive beliefs than values, criteria, logical principles or orientation, which is apt to be the unquestioned basis from which he proceeds. (d) Ideal values, criteria of validity, language and perspective may have been built up around a substantive belief to give it significance and justification.

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28 december 2021.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09824-y

Substantive beliefs constitute the axioms of the system, while many derived beliefs will constitute their theorems.

The denotative systemic significance (d-significances) is the significance of the absolute beings. The concept of denotative systemic significance coincides with the concept of relative beings.

Nescolarde-Selva, J., & Usó-Doménech, J. L. (2013a). Topological structures of complex belief systems. Complexity , 19 , 46–62. doi: 10.1002/cplx.21455 .

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Nescolarde-Selva, J., & Usó-Doménech, J. L. (2013b). Topological structures of complex belief systems (II): Textual materialization. Complexity , 19 , 50–62. doi: 10.1002/cplx.21476 .

Usó-Doménech, J. L., & Nescolarde-Selva, J. (2012). Mathematic and semiotic theory of ideological systems. Editorial LAP . Germany: Sarrebruck.

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Change in Belief System Essay

Introduction.

Every person has a set of beliefs in life that determines their actions and decisions. These beliefs are either constructive or destructive depending on the effect they have on the believer’s outlook on life and the world. People develop beliefs from many sources. For instance, many people take up values that are instilled in them by their parents and guardians who act as role models and mentors. However, as they grow and develop their mental faculties, they start doubting and reviewing certain beliefs. Their life experiences, friends, and exposure to reality are some of the factors that contribute to such shifts in belief and attitude towards diverse occurrences in life.

Change in one’s belief system affects every aspect of life because the process of developing new viewpoints and turning them into convictions is critical. The conviction that destiny is determined by external factors is a common belief that many people hold. In my childhood, I believed that external forces such as society, the environment, family background, and the economy are the determinants of one’s destiny. However, different life experiences disabused me of that viewpoint later in life. Currently, I accept as true that destiny is predominantly determined by internal factors such as personal responsibility, discipline, grit, will, self-control, purpose, and persistence.

My perspective changed when I joined a high school where students are expected to be more responsible and accountable. Working on assignments, managing finances, finding passions and hobbies, creating relationships, resisting peer pressure, and managing time are critical factors that determine success in high school. I realized that external factors such as rules, school policies, teachers, and peer pressure had little influence on my life.

Factors such as self-control, discipline, focus, and willingness to work hard had a greater effect on my life. The view that destiny is determined by external factors was largely due to a lack of experience and knowledge regarding the recurrent dynamics of life. As a child, I had no means of testing the validity of the belief because my parents provided for all my needs. However, reality dawned on me after joining high school.

I had to start taking care of myself because of the transition from childhood to adulthood. For instance, I had to learn how to manage money and time well. The economy and rate of unemployment had little effect on my financial situation because it was primarily dependent on how well I spent money, the willingness to create a spending plan, and the readiness to prioritize my needs. On the other hand, academic performance was not determined by school policies and regulations but by the willingness and readiness to work hard in order to achieve my goals.

In high school, success is primarily determined by the individual rather than the effect of external influences on the individual. I learned this after several experiences that included failed friendships, poor academic performance, huge debts, poor health outcomes, and bad influence from peers. Initially, I thought that these outcomes resulted from factors such as inflexible school schedules, ineffective regulations and rules, inadequate time, bad friends, and harsh economic times. However, after receiving several warnings from the school’s management, I realized that change was inevitable.

The change involved a shift in the belief that external factors were responsible for my predicament. I was the main cause of the numerous failures and therefore changing my beliefs was the most potent route to achieving success. I had the freedom to choose friends and decide how to spend time and money. I started budgeting, scheduling time, and choosing friends wisely. These changes had exceptional outcomes that proved that internal factors were the main determinants of one’s destiny in life.

Stopping to think that destiny is determined by external factors has affected how I think about my other beliefs and ideologies. I have developed a habit of reviewing them often in order to determine their implication on my daily life. In addition, the experience has ameliorated my rationality because of the need to form personal opinions and convictions on different matters. Many of the ideas that I hold were picked up in childhood through observation and instruction. However, I have come to realize that most of them are limiting and narrow with regard to their ability to expand my thinking and outlook on life.

Ceasing to embrace that conviction has enabled me to develop new values that include personal responsibility, accountability, patience, determination, and purpose. These values affect the social, financial, psychological, and spiritual aspects of my life. In order to achieve one’s dreams, it is important to be deliberate, focused, and persistent. External factors play a role in determining one’s destiny. However, the aforementioned internal factors play the greatest role.

Embracing the belief that destiny is determined by external factors absolves individuals from personal responsibility and accountability because human beings have little or no influence on such factors. I have learned to deal with external factors through the sound application of proper principles in order to ensure that such realities do not compromise the attainment of my goals.

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A fight has commenced over Capital One’s effort to acquire Discover, a deal that would birth an enormous credit card company rivaling Visa, Mastercard and American Express. The resulting competition could, in the short run, lower some costs to businesses and consumers. However, over the longer term, the merger would keep intact the broken and predatory system in which credit card companies profit handsomely by rewarding our richest Americans and advantaging the biggest corporations.

Credit card companies increasingly generate money via swipe fees, or the money merchants pay issuers every time a credit card is used. Total swipe fees rose 20 percent in 2022 to an estimated $160 billion a year nationally. The pandemic changed how we buy things, significantly increasing the share of transactions put on credit cards rather than conducted in cash, adding to the swipe fees merchants pay.

On top of this, a 2018 Supreme Court ruling effectively forces merchants to accept either every type of card — from, say, a basic Green Card to the Platinum Card — from an issuer like Amex or none of them. And even though fancier types of cards generally demand higher swipe fees, the ruling also barred merchants from incentivizing consumers to use the cheaper ones. These facts combine in a way that makes it even more appealing for Capital One, a giant credit card issuer, to merge with Discover, which owns a payment system, and generate greater profits from credit cards, particularly higher-end reward cards.

Your Rewards Card Is Actually Bad for You, and for Everyone Else

Chasing credit card points is a game in which everyone loses..

This is a story about you and your favorite credit card, the one that earns you points. You use your card for everything. You pay off your balance every month. And you watch with glee as your rewards grow and grow and grow. And when it’s time to cash in, you announce that you’re going to get a family gift. And each member will get one vote. And then your daughter argues that the family needs another iPad. And your son has fallen in love with the ugliest garden gnome that you’ve ever seen. And so to break up the skirmish, you decide that you’ll be getting the frying pan. Because what brings the family together more than food? Marty is the answer. But let’s keep him out of this. And when they complain and say, “But that’s not what I wanted,” you look them in the eye and say, “This was never about you.” “It’s about us, all of us.” And then two weeks later your frying pan arrives. And you can’t help but smile because you kind of did get this for yourself, though you’ll never admit it. And you’re looking at the frying pan. And it’s staring at you and you at it and it at you and you at it. And you just have this split second where you think to yourself: Who actually paid for this? Who pays for all of this? Well, if you love your rewards card, then you’re probably not going to like the answer. Because you try to be a good person, you shop locally. And each week you buy, let’s say, $100 in groceries from MJ. When you swipe your card, that $100 doesn’t go straight to MJ. Instead, store owners are charged a series of fees, the largest of which is called the swipe fee. It’s set by the card network, usually Visa or Mastercard. And your bank uses it to pay for your rewards. The swipe fee is usually between 1.5 percent and 3.5 percent of your total. The more premium your credit card, the more that MJ is charged. Now, that might not sound like much. But it can add up. For small businesses like MJ’s, swipe fees can be one of their biggest expenses. And small stores like hers get charged higher rates than big-box competitors. In order to cope, store owners like MJ raised their prices. That means that all of us are paying more. But only those who have special cards are getting rewards. And here’s the catch: The wealthiest Americans tend to have the best cards that give them the most rewards, while poorer Americans are more likely to pay in cash or debit with no rewards or benefits. So what we really have is a system that forces everyone to pay higher prices in order to subsidize rewards that primarily go to the wealthy. So this rewards card, it’s really a screw-over-poor- people card. Every time you use it, you’re contributing to inequality, helping to drive up prices and further squeeze the most cash-strapped Americans, all so that you can get that free frying pan. You’re probably not benefiting from rewards as much as you thought. In 2020, the Federal Reserve found that the average American at every income level loses more to swipe fee price hikes than they earn in rewards. And of course, the poorest Americans are still getting handed the worst deal. On average, they pay five times more in price mark-ups than they’ll ever receive in rewards. Why are we stuck in this system? Why are swipe fees in the U.S. nine times higher than they are in Europe? Why do we have to pay so much just to pay? Well, it’s largely thanks to two companies, Visa and Mastercard. This system is their core business. It’s what they do for a living. And, sure, they’re providing a service and deserve to earn a profit. But these two companies control over 80 percent of the credit card market. With scant competition, Visa and Mastercard have faced little pressure to rein in swipe fees. The truth is for the vast majority of Americans, the best deal might not come in the form of a new piece of plastic but instead a new piece of legislation. That’s because Congress has the power to regulate swipe fees. In fact, in 2010, they did just that for debit cards. Remember the swipe fee on that $100 grocery purchase? If you paid with a debit card, it would have only cost MJ 26 cents. Dick Durbin, the senator who helped crack down on swipe fees for debit cards, has authored a bipartisan bill that would use competition to drive down credit card swipe fees. But the banks and credit card companies are, of course, pushing back. Right now, there are two things that you can do. First, call your senator and encourage them to support this bill. You can go to this website to find their number. Second, if you’re shopping at a small business that you want to support, remember that how you pay can make a difference. Using your debit card can save small businesses a lot in swipe fees. But the best solution might be elsewhere in your wallet. Increasingly, small businesses are offering discounts for cash payers. Avoiding this predatory system can be a win for both of you. And if those rewards are just too good to say goodbye to, well, then at least don’t go around telling people that you’ve never taken a handout, because you have. And the working class is paying for it. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Credit card companies found they could command ever-greater swipe fees from merchants while at the same time offering their wealthiest consumers more deluxe credit cards that reward big spending with cash back, travel points, access to fancy airport lounges and the like — and then pass on the cost of those rewards to merchants. Merchants must then choose whether to accept and pay the higher swipe fee demanded by these platinum expensive cards or not take any from that card company. In our increasingly digital economy, most merchants have little alternative but to accept the pricey versions and to pay for the privilege. Naturally, merchants pass on their increased cost to all of their customers.

That’s how the rest of us, whether we pay with cash, a debit card or a middle-of-the-road credit card, wind up paying more — because we are subsidizing these rewards cards for whom only the wealthiest qualify. One study from economists at the Boston Federal Reserve estimated that the highest-income households profit over $1,000 a year tax-free from the payment system, adjusted for inflation .

Because swipe fees include a fixed cost in addition to a percentage of the total cost, small-dollar transactions are extremely expensive for merchants. My research found huge costs for such transactions as buying a cup of coffee or paying for a bus or subway ride. One year my oldest friend’s small coffee shop paid more in card processing costs than for coffee beans.

Big companies can leverage their resources to lower swipe fees, giving them a leg up. Starbucks stole a page from the credit card playbook and built an app that gives consumers rewards on future purchases if they upload larger amounts of money from their credit cards, thus lowering the total fees Starbucks has to pay the credit card companies for each swipe.

Some big businesses negotiate discounted swipe fees. Costco is the most aggressive; there have been reports that the big discount retailer’s contract with Citibank and Visa lowered its costs to 0.4 percent while a local dry cleaner may be paying closer to 3 percent.

The problem isn’t limited to nonwealthy consumers and small businesses: Parking meters that used to run on coins now rely on credit-card-powered apps, which charge transaction fees that can be over 20 percent, such as 45 cents on $2. Public transit agencies can lose 7 percent of the money they generate in fares in card-processing fees. A growing gap between what users pay and local agencies receive could stress budgets and require higher taxes, increased fees or reduced public services.

To fix the problem, Congress should legislatively correct the Supreme Court’s mistake. For starters, give merchants the power to reject the priciest credit cards, and let’s see if their users are willing to pay the true cost of their rewards. This solution ought to have some bipartisan support; the idea was strong enough politically to be supported by states as diverse as Ohio, Texas and Maryland. Bipartisan legislation to overturn a conservative Supreme Court ruling may sound like a pipe dream, but in payments policy we’ve seen a few examples such as the Durbin Amendment to what became the Dodd-Frank Act, which lowered debit interchange fees, received 64 votes (including 16 from Republicans) in the Senate and made it into law.

Second, brave policymakers could start taxing reward points. The richer you are, the more likely you qualify for bigger rewards. Progressive taxation rates mean that exempting rewards from taxation makes them nearly four times as valuable to those in the top tax bracket as the bottom. Why is interest from my savings account taxed, but the cash back from card spending not? Once upon a time the value of frequent flier miles was hard to quantify; now the Points Guy has it down.

Finally, we could require all merchants have access to the same swipe-fee pricing, regardless of size. Why should the payment system give big business another advantage? The electronic cash register should not tilt the playing field.

Our payment system’s problems will not be solved by allowing or stopping a combination of Capital One and Discover. Adding a fourth major issuer to compete with the big three will make little difference if the system’s rules remain the same. Capital One already seems to be competing with American Express for wealthy customers who like elite airport lounges and big travel perks, which are funded in part from higher swipe fees. The rewards have kept getting richer over the past 20 years. Simply adding one more company to earn large profits through the existing system will hardly stop it.

Blocking the merger will fail to change the payment system that continues to drive greater rewards to those with the most money already, paid for by merchants and consumers who use cash, debit or lower-tier cards because they are not rich enough to qualify. As the economy continues to digitize with more micropayments, the credit card burden will keep growing, particularly on smaller businesses. Today’s large banks and payment companies will make more profit, sharing it based on who qualifies for elite status.

Until legislators are willing to change a system that showers tax-free rewards on the upper middle class, the cash register will continue to exacerbate the wealth gap and help big business get even bigger. It may feel great to stand up against a merger and fight those “big banks” — while enjoying a “free meal” at an exclusive airport lounge before taking a vacation using frequent flier miles. But if victory is more of the status quo, then the biggest losers will be those the government should protect the most.

Aaron Klein is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 2009 to 2012.

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