Suspiciously Convenient Beliefs

Please, tell me more about how your side is magically right about everything!

Some beliefs seem a bit too convenient. For example:

Many socialists think worker co-ops are required by justice yet are—as it happens—the most productive form of the firm.

Many libertarians think our rights are incompatible with taxation and that also—as it happens—a taxless society would promote utility best.

Many Republicans think the GOP is right on nearly ever issue—Israel, abortion, public spending—despite these issues being totally unrelated; many Democrats think the same about their party.

Many vegans think plant-based diets are morally required and are—as it happens—better than any other diet for the environment and human health, something people also say about subscriptions to Going Awol.

And so on down the list.

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I have at least one suspiciously convenient belief—chances are, so do you. In this joyous and rollicking essay, I want to explore how enlightened people should think about beliefs of this sort.

Instead of rambling listlessly, I have assembled for your convenience a list: a list of explanations for why your beliefs might display this suspicious pattern.

The most obvious way to begin, of course, is to begin with the most obvious.

Explanation #1: Motivated Reasoning

This is probably what you thought of first.

Unless you’re uniquely unsusceptible to bias, motivated reasoning provides the most natural explanation for why some of your moral beliefs seem to line up suspiciously well with, say, your vested interests, party allegiance, or unrelated empirical facts. (You don’t have to have been the one who engaged in the motivated reasoning for this to be true. Motivated reasoning could still explain why you hold a suspiciously convenient belief if you absorbed it from your parents, parish priest, etc., when they’re the ones that engaged in it.)

To see why this is the most natural explanation, just think of all the suspiciously convenient beliefs you reject. Suppose, say, you’re a centre-left Democrat who happens to think—shock, surprise—that the Democratic Party is right on nearly every issue, despite believing that Democrats are no more moral or inherently better at evaluating policies on average than Republicans, Libertarians, or Greens, and despite realising that most of the issues the Democrats are supposedly right about—climate change, prisons, paid maternity leave—are totally unrelated to one another.

Even if you ultimately insist that you believe in Democratic policies because they’re correct, and not because they’re Democratic policies, you probably believe motivated reasoning explains why other partisans—Republicans, Libertarians, Greens—hold beliefs that align suspiciously well with their party’s platform.

Hence, from behind the veil of partisan ignorance, where you’re told you’ll be an ideological partisan but won’t know which party you’ll line up with, you should guess that, probably, your suspiciously convenient partisanship will be explained by motivated reasoning—in which case, that should warm you up to the idea that motivated reasoning explains your own beliefs.

Explanation #2: The God of Abraham

Some beliefs are so convenient that they border on the miraculous. Given this, it’s worth exploring whether some of them might actually be miracles.

To see why this might not be crazy in all cases, take the libertarian example. Many (#notall) libertarians believe:

1. that our rights require a minimal state;

2. that a minimal state would in fact be the best political arrangement in terms of human flourishing; and

3. that the content of our rights (for example, our right not to be taxed by the government) is independent of the average consequences of enforcing them, such that even if libertarianism were the shittiest way to organise human society vis-à-vis human flourishing, it would still be the only way to respect our rights.

If this is true, it’s pretty miraculous. How convenient that the best political system qua human flourishing seems just tailor-made to respect our rights, as if by an invisible hand!

As I said before, the first thing a libertarian should think is that this belief is explained by bias. But suppose the libertarian goes over the moral and economic arguments again and decides: ‘Nope, libertarianism still seems right to me!’

At that point, I submit, the libertarian has some reason to update his beliefs in favour of theism: the belief in a perfect God exists who designed everything, including human psychology, which determines which economic system is best for human flourishing.

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There’s a pretty plausible story of why a perfect being—an omnipotent God with a flawless moral character—wouldn’t annoyingly design us so that the only way to promote human flourishing would be to violate our most basic rights as humans.

Hence, given that the God Hypothesis predicts more strongly than naturalistic atheism that there’d be a somewhat of a fortunate match-up between human flourishing and the demands of justice, libertarians of the sort I’m discussing should warm up to the idea that the match-up is literally miraculous.

Appealing to theism, here, does have its difficulties. You might think that, the fortunate match-up between human flourishing and the demands of justice notwithstanding, the evidence against theism—chiefly, from evil—is enough to disqualify God from the explanatory race.

Another problem is that of explaining why, if God would be motivated to ensure a correlation between the causes of human welfare and the demands of justice, why He didn’t make the correlation tighter. In a talk titled “Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences”, libertarian philosopher Roderick Long rejects the theistic explanation on the basis that

any deity powerful enough to arrange a rough concurrence of justice and benefit could presumably have arranged a more precise one than that which we currently enjoy; her failure to do so must thus be explained, and any such explanation, to the extent that it is successful, is likely to make even the rough concurrence mysterious once more.

At first blush, this just seems to re-state the problem of evil. And indeed, the question of why the correlation between justice and good consequences isn’t perfect is just a subset of the question: “Why didn’t God make the world less imperfectly?”—which is the problem of evil.

But Long’s point is that theists are going to have to respond to the problem of evil, either by arguing that we wouldn’t expect to know what kind of world God would make, or by arguing that God would have some reason to allow imperfection to creep into the world (to preserve free-will, to facilitate character building, etc.), so that the fact that God didn’t ensure a perfect correlation between justice its consequences is unsurprising. But if they do that, he thinks, then it’s no longer clear that theism-plus-whatever-theodicy-the-theist-just-came-up-with-to-make-the-problem-of-evil-go-away would predict any fortunate match-up between justice and good consequences at all. After all, if we’re totally in the dark about God’s creative intentions, or we’d actively expect Him to create a world groaning with imperfection, it’s not clear why we’d expect God to ensure a match-up between justice and good consequences even loosely.

This is an important challenge, but one the theist can meet, at least in principle. Most theodicies are designed to be moderate: not weak enough that they let theism be taken out by the evidential problem of evil, but not so strong that they prevent theism from being able to predict good things, like consciousness, beauty, or the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. The theist could just appeal to a (reasonably) non ad-hoc theodicy of that variety and… bingo bongo: theism-plus-theodicy will predict that God would probably ensure a rough correlation between justice and good consequences, without predicting that the correlation would be perfect.

Explanation #3: Sheer Luck

Funny things happen all the time.

For instance, you might be reading a Substack thinking ‘Gee, I wish a subscribe button would show up soon, I really want to read more of this fellow’s stuff’, and then woooosshh, one happens to appear immediately, looking oh-so-alluring and clickable.

It’s possible—with any suspiciously convenient belief—that it’s all just a big coincidence (though the more suspicious the convenience, the more suspicious that possibility becomes.)

But for any suspiciously convenient belief (who’s truth—were it a genuine coincidence—would be highly surprising), genuine coincidence is a last resort, once we’ve ruled out all the non ad-hoc hypotheses (motivated reasoning, theism, the one I’m about to discuss) that actually predict the coincidence, or suspicious belief, in question.

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Explanation #4: Consequentialize It (Don’t Criticize It)

Daniel Greco—the esteemed Yale Philosopher who may or may not be a reader of this blog—has discussed the libertarian example in print. To see the next explanation at play, it’s worth quoting him at length:

Imagine two individuals, both of whom have broadly libertarian values—they oppose most economic regulations. They also both believe that economic regulations tend to stifle innovation and to increase poverty—they tend to produce changes that even non-libertarians would recognize as for the worse. Our first libertarian, however, holds her position for fundamentally deontological reasons—she believes that, irrespective of their downstream consequences, economic regulations infringe on people’s rights, and are intrinsically wrong. Perhaps she was convinced by Nozick (1974). Our second, by contrast, has purely consequentialist, non-rights-based grounds for her libertarianism. Now, imagine both of them are confronted with some new proposed regulation. Both of them think it would be wrong to enact, and both of them think it would have bad consequences. If my earlier claims are right, our first libertarian has grounds for suspicion about her beliefs. By her lights, the fact that economic regulations are both unjust and have bad consequences is a pure coincidence. The discussion above suggests that her beliefs deserve serious scrutiny, even if they may survive it. But by contrast, our second libertarian needn’t countenance any such suspicious coincidence; while she thinks that economic regulations are unjust, and that they have bad consequences, the former fact is fully grounded in the latter. There’s nothing epistemically suspicious here.¹

This is, of course, 100% correct.

Many ‘suspiciously convenient beliefs’ are only suspicious because they imply a fortunate match-up between non-consequentialist principles and good consequences that just so happen to flow from them. If you just deny that there are any true non-consequentialist principles—or, at least, that there are any that hold in this case—the suspicious ‘coincidence’ disappears, like a coin in the hand of a conjuror.

Many libertarians, though, zealously eschew consequentialism, and will maintain to their dying day that the contents of our rights are unaffected by the expected consequences of enforcing them. For them, this point is moot, and the suspicious coincidence lingers.

Also, many suspiciously convenient beliefs don’t involve a fortunate match up between non-consequentialist principles and good consequences (e.g., the case of the partisan Democrat), so the strategy has limited application.

Conclusion

There are responses I haven’t considered. (For example, the Democrat might respond that his suspicious cluster of DNC-endorsed beliefs is explained by the fact that Democrats are, in general, smarter, less evil, or less biased than other Americans—hence why they all arrive at the same (correct) beliefs.) But the one’s I’ve considered are the ones I like best, and are, I think, the least insane.

In general, when your beliefs seem suspiciously convenient, you should assume it’s because of bias. Once you’ve ruled that out, you can start appealing to God or good luck or whatever.

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1. Greco, Daniel, ‘Climate Change and Cultural Cognition’, in Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett (eds), Philosophy and Climate Change (Oxford, 2021): pp. 189-190.