As with reasoning about facts, if we don’t all agree on what’s right/righteous, then we can’t all be right/righteous.

While I’ll agree about “righteous” as that seems largely a subjective term, that we might all think and agree that we are all right on any given issue doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that we are all in fact wrong. Which should, I think, engender some degree of “fear and trembling” over embarking on any program, particularly one where we all agree.

However, I think that the crux of the problem is that, as you phrased it, “everybody thinks that they arrived at their beliefs through logic and evaluation of evidence”, particularly if not exclusively relative to various religious, political and sexual issues where moral judgments hold sway. But the evidence seems to suggest that many if not most of our premises derive from inductive leaps – the problem of induction – that are predicated, in each of our cases, on very different sets of data points. Rather analogous to the childhood pastime or puzzle of connecting a bunch of dots to draw a picture: many different figures can be drawn, very few if any actually corresponding to “reality”. Not surprising then that many of us frequently wind up at loggerheads insisting that the other person “just doesn’t get it”, and then raising questions about the other person’s ethics, morality or honesty. Somewhat apropos is this passage from Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain [highly recommended]:

Shermer wrote: As we saw in the previous chapter, politics is filled with self-justifying rationalizations. Democrats see the world through liberal-tinted glasses, while Republicans filter it through conservative shaded glasses. When you listen to both “conservative talk radio” and “progressive talk radio” you will hear current events interpreted in ways that are 180 degrees out of phase. So incongruent are the interpretations of even the simplest goings-on in the daily news that you wonder if they can possibly be talking about the same event. [pg 263] [my emphasis]

For an interesting and graphic analogy of that process, I would recommend Massimo Pigliucci’s post on The limits of reasonable discourse wherein he uses the “fitness landscape” metaphor of evolutionary biology to model the process of discourse – reasonable and otherwise. In each case, very slight differences in the “fitness” of the related “premises” – for physical survival, or for basing policy on – can lead to very different conclusions even though steps based on each of those slightly different premises are entirely “logical”.

We’re so skeptical about everything, all the time, only because it’s always so easy, to be so wrong, and never even know it.

Great article. Shared. Favorite quote: “cognitive laziness” (stealing that).