Brian Zamulinski

My paper ("Hypocrisy and the Nature of Belief," Ratio 28(2) 2015, 175-189.) is an analysis of belief that works with both evolutionary intuitionism and the ethics of belief. 

The idea is that a belief is at least partly an inscription-like representation, that believers have a disposition to maintain objective consistency between the beliefs represented, and that the two together produce disinclinations to act inconsistently with the propositions believed.   Disinclinations are not reducible to dispositions, possessing several distinguishing properties, and the objections to the dispositional analysis of belief do not count against this analysis.  It is compatible with most truisms about beliefs and, where it is potentially incompatible with some, they can be explained away as understandable errors. 

What is important is that the analysis links beliefs and action.  Disinclinations tend to prevent people from acting in ways that are inconsistent with what they believe.  It is only a tendency, albeit a strong one, because weakness of the will is possible. 

As for the ethics of belief, the analysis means that to believe a proposition is to have a license to act in accordance with it.  This both establishes the possibility, and increases the probability, that people will perform certain acts.  Some of the acts will be immoral.  Hence, it is necessary to avoid certain beliefs in order to eliminate the risk of certain actions.  The only way to guarantee that one will avoid them is to avoid believing without sufficient evidence. 

With respect to evolutionary intuitionism, foundational attitudes can now be identified as beliefs even though they were naturally selected for reasons that have nothing to do with their being true.  They were renamed “attitudes” to avoid conflict with the philosophers who (mistakenly) maintain that beliefs necessarily “aim at” the truth.  (Defining beliefs in that way does not prevent the existence of things that are just like them except that they do not aim at the truth.)  Moral facts are partly constituted by the relationship between acts and foundational attitudes.  The analysis of beliefs as representations that help produce disinclinations explains the nature of the relationship.  Furthermore, since people are disinclined to act inconsistently with the contents of their foundational attitudes, it supports the claim that evolutionary intuitionism can also provide an account of moral motivation.