“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
-Matthew 10:34-38 (Revised Standard Edition)
Doxastic (from the Greek word δόξα -“Doxa” - meaning “belief”) commitment, a steadfast allegiance in action to the beliefs one holds, is an intrinsic precondition of honor. After all, one of the fundamental demands of honor is the condition of skin in the game, that the person in question be exposed to the costs of her actions. When an honorable human beings acts, she does so in a fashion that exposes her to not only the benefits, but also all of the costs, no matter how bitter, of that action.
The honorable person is thus fully exposed to all of the harmful consequences that result from her behavior. Just as she has her skin in the game when it comes to her ventures in the world exposing her to the harmful effects of those ventures going belly up, she has her soul in the game when it comes to her moral beliefs exposing her to being hurt by them. Nevertheless, doxastic commitment demands that we put our full soul into the game, and be willing to take whatever hurt that follows.
No one likes being hurt, and no one especially likes consciously opening himself to harm in the future. Soul in the game exposes the very fiber of our ethical being and identities to wounds, uncertain in their severity, so it should be no surprise that so many want to avoid identifying themselves with clear-cut moral propositions that doxastic commitment requires. As Cicero noted in On Duties: “From the beginning nature has assigned to every type of creature the tendency to preserve itself, its life and body, and to reject anything that seems likely to harm them...” Our animal nature thus expresses itself when we hedge on our believes and remove our whole soul from the game in order to avoid pain.
However, if doxastic commitment leads to a great chance of being hurt in the future, then would it not be rational to protect oneself against that pain by hedging one's beliefs? We need not abandon all of our moral commitment to do this; rather, we only need to be a bit wishy-washy on key matters that would bring up conflict. Our soul need not completely out of the game, but it could just play the game less intensely. However, this ignores the twofold importance of doxastic commitment. Not only is it a laudable trait for a human being to have, but doxastic commitment is conducive to the selection of the best moral practices across societies.
For one thing, fear of pain is never a virtuous motivation. It may illicit sympathy from an onlooker, but the impartial spectator would never applaud it. There is simply no honor in it. That being willing to accept great costs for one's beliefs is so important to honor is displayed in dueling traditions in history. Those customs demanded that a duelist be willing to sustain great bodily harm, and even death, to display their doxastic commitment and therefore their honor.
Another aspect of doxastic commitment is that it is much easier to keep people accountable for their beliefs in a community that adheres to that custom. Doxastic commitment thus allows for the efficient communication of desired moral conduct because a person with her full soul in the game is open to social cues that alert her to the desirability of her conduct. Why this is so can be understood in light of systems theory. In a complicated system in which paths of concatenation twist and turn this way and that, simple signals that illicit certain responses from the constituent parts of the system are a means of ensuring that the constituent parts of that system are operating as they need to ensure the health of that system. Thirst and hunger are two mundane examples by which an animal body, itself a system of many constituent parts, ensures that it is kept well fed and satiated. An animal need not take measurements of either hydration or nourishment to maintain its health; instead signals within the system provide controls that keep it acting towards the overall wellbeing of the whole system.
A moral community is also a complex, adaptive system since there is a constantly changing frequency of moral habits within it, and those frequencies can change based on the signals of approbation and censure they interact with. In order for the best patterns of conduct to multiply within the community, people need to learn what those best patterns of conduct are, and be put into a situation in which they are likely to actually go through with adopting them. Both are critically necessary. In order to discover them, people need to have their moral character open to critique. So much in human knowledge proceeds via the process of conjecture and refutation. This is especially true when all of the knowledge necessary to come to the final judgment is rarely at the disposal of any one person, which is certainly true in practical ethics. We may never have the knowledge to determine the judgment of the impartial spectator, but he social process of conjecture and refutation, of approbation and censure, can help us come close.
However, moral learning by approbation and censure can only function when there's soul in the game. When people do not put their whole soul in the game, they weaken the signals that they receive about the desirability and propriety of how they live their lives. When people choose to associate themselves with moral propositions that are so indefinite that they can be twisted to suit almost any situation imaginable, then they are unaccountable. Any attempt to criticize them is like trying to grip water: It will always frustratingly slip between one's fingers, ever in metamorphosis to accommodate the circumstances.
Worse, people are more likely to put their whole soul in the game when they are likely to receive praise than when they are to receive condemnation. So now not only is not holding to the habit of having soul in the game not only because it delays the process of the discovery of the best morals by conjecture and refutation, but it also corrupts that process because people will act so as to get a positive signal without truly having the trait that would bring that positive signal about. Not only do they not have their whole soul in the game, but the soul they put there is not their own.
As a result, doxastic commitment lends itself not only to personal virtue, but also the efficient operation of an ethical society in which everyone gets not only the benefits, but also the costs, of their moral beliefs, which in turn helps to weed out the least proper and least cleaved-to moral beliefs.
Doxastic commitment is thus not only a sine qua non for a human being's virtue, but also a rule that helps the efficient discovery of the best moral beliefs. Without soul-in-the-game, not only is an individual really incapable of standing for anything because he is incapable of being wrong on anything, but an individual is not accountable for what they have said before because they have not committed to it. A human being without soul-in-the-game is either too afraid of the pain that being open to the costs of one's beliefs or simply does not have any. The impartial spectator would certainly applaud neither.
The word illicit is used twice when elicit is what is meant. There are at least four other errors that should be corrected to make the article more readable. Might there be a physical address to which a copy of my suggested corrections be mailed?
Thank You, -jcw-
Posted by: John C. Wheeler | 08/08/2016 at 11:04 AM