W.K. Clifford contra the choice to go to war in Iraq

Presently in my philosophy class we are discussing the arguments for and against God. One argument that stuck out was that of W.K. Clifford. Clifford was a mathematician and philosopher that started out as a catholic but later turned against religion. He argues that it is morally reprehensible for anyone to believe anything based on insufficient evidence. I immediately thought of our rationale for the decision to invade Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. What belief did this decision stem from? It seems it would have to stem from the fact that we believed Iraq was involved in the attacks. Since then, that belief has been shown to be completely unfounded. Now someone with an opposing viewpoint might say that we had to act quickly in order to prevent another attack; this is the exact type of situation that Clifford spoke of when he authored this philosophical principle. By making this decision countless lives have been either lost or impacted in a negative manner. Who has paid for this mistake from insufficient evidence? The troops of both sides immediately spring to mind. The Iraqi civilian population has suffered greatly as a result of this hubris. The worldwide reputation of the United States has been adversely affected. The idea of national sovereignty was violated, both in Iraq and Pakistan. All for a belief based on insufficient evidence. No one doubts that the President verily believed that Iraq was in someway responsible for this attack. However, the sincerity of conviction does not relieve him of the responsibility for this mistake. The point is that he(we, they, etc.) had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. And let me be more clear, had we gone into Iraq and found the WMD’s we so desperately believed were there, we would still have been at fault. For it is not whether we were right or wrong in our belief, it is whether we were right to believe it based on sufficient evidence. Now you might disagree with this but let’s use an analogy to help illustrate the point, and because I am not nearly as eloquent as would be necessary to convey this point I will quote the example of Clifford himself.

“A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first: that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the hip sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections.” … “He would put is trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.”

Now almost everyone would agree to the guilt of this man, but let us now look at a similar case and see what the determination is. And once again I will borrow from Clifford

“suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not on jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong forever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.”… “The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it”

That last sentence is something we often take for granted. Right or wrong is decided at the time of decision and only then. Consequences can be left to the realm of chance and in that way one might get lucky even though his decision was made in bad faith. But the decision itself is still wrong. If more people held such stringent constrictions on their beliefs it seems very plausible there would be less war, less conflict in general. That maybe people would not think they knew what was best based on feeling rather than evidence. One of the earliest things learned in a sociology class is that we act on our beliefs as if they are true whether they are not. It’s through this rational that people feared they would sail off the end of the earth, that they thought the earth was the center of the universe, that Europeans thought colonizing and enslaving other peoples was their right and duty, and now that we can invade a society we have no understanding of and expect to solve their problems. Maybe if there were more second-guessing of our beliefs there would be less action, but there would also be a lot less perilous action.