The shipowner

In 1877 the mathematician W. K. Clifford opened an essay with a story1. A shipowner is about to send an emigrant ship to sea. He knows it is old, not well built, and has often needed repairs. Doubts cross his mind. But he talks himself out of them: the ship has survived many voyages, Providence will protect the families aboard, and it would be unfair to suspect honest shipbuilders. He comes to sincerely believe the ship is safe, watches it leave “with a light heart”, and collects the insurance when it sinks.

Clifford’s verdict: the shipowner is guilty of the deaths. Not because he lied (he believed what he said) but because “he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.” Clifford then adds the twist: even if the ship had arrived safely, the shipowner would not be innocent. There would be no deaths to answer for, but the fault in how he formed his belief would be exactly the same. Luck changes the outcome, not the wrong.

From that he draws his famous principle:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The verdict on the shipowner is easy to accept. The principle is harder once you see how far it reaches. Clifford allows trust in qualified testimony, so it isn’t a demand for proof of everything. But every belief, about history, medicine or your friends, must rest on evidence that is sufficient, and much of the debate since is about what “sufficient” means and who decides. The rest of this piece is about the space between those two reactions.

James: sometimes you have to jump

Nineteen years later William James replied in “The Will to Believe”2. He agreed that we usually should follow the evidence. But he argued there are questions where evidence cannot decide, and where refusing to believe is not neutral: it is a decision too.

James called these genuine options: choices that are live (both answers seem possible to you), forced (you can’t avoid choosing) and momentous (the stakes are high and the chance won’t come again). For those, he argued, “our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide.” His examples were religious faith and trust between people: if you wait for proof that someone is your friend before treating them as one, the friendship may never happen.

You can’t simply choose to believe

Try it. Believe, right now, that there is an elephant in your room. Offer yourself a thousand euros for it. It doesn’t work.

Neither Clifford nor James thought you could. James asks, mockingly, whether we can just by willing it believe that Abraham Lincoln never existed; he defends a role for the will only where evidence leaves a genuine option open. Clifford locates the shipowner’s fault in what he did: he stifled his doubts and didn’t inspect the ship. Later philosophers made the point explicit and called it doxastic involuntarism: we cannot believe at will3,4.

That raises a real problem. Ethics usually follows the principle that “ought implies can”: you can only have a duty to do something you are able to do. If belief isn’t something you do, how can you have a duty about it, or be blamed for it? There are three main answers.

Answer 1: indirect influence. You can’t choose a belief directly, but you can influence much of what produces it: what you read, whom you listen to, whether you look for counter-evidence, how long you keep investigating, which habits of mind you build. The influence is partial (nobody controls their upbringing, their information environment or every habit), but it is real. On this view, the ethics of belief is mostly an ethics of inquiry, and responsibility scales with the opportunity you had to inquire.

Answer 2: role oughts. Richard Feldman argued that epistemic oughts, oughts about evidence and justified belief, are like the oughts of a role5. A teacher ought to explain clearly even if, today, they can’t. Likewise, a believer ought to have the beliefs their evidence supports, whether or not they could have done otherwise. This keeps Clifford’s standard but separates it from blame: falling short means failing an evidential standard, which is not the same as holding a false belief, and not the same as deserving moral blame.

Answer 3: beliefs as your own. Others argue that you can be answerable for a belief itself, even though you didn’t choose it, because beliefs respond to reasons: if someone asks why you believe something, you owe them your reasons, as you would for an intention6. Responsibility, on this view, doesn’t require voluntary control at all.

I find the first answer the most useful in practice, because it says where to put effort, though the third captures something real: we do ask people to justify their beliefs, not only their research habits. In an earlier piece I argued that even perception is less trustworthy than it feels; if that’s right, how you check matters more than how sure you feel.

Stakes change the standard, or at least the caution

Does “sufficient evidence” mean the same amount in every situation? Clifford doesn’t say. A well-known example, Keith DeRose’s bank case7, suggests it may not.

You’re driving home on Friday and wonder whether to stop at the bank to deposit a cheque. You remember the bank was open on a Saturday two weeks ago. If nothing much depends on it, “I know it’s open tomorrow” seems fine. Now suppose a large payment bounces unless the cheque is in by Monday, and banks sometimes change their hours. With exactly the same memory, “I know” now seems too strong. Shouldn’t you check?

It is uncontroversial that high stakes usually call for more caution before acting. Pragmatic encroachment is the stronger and disputed claim that the stakes change the epistemic facts too: that with the same evidence, you might know or be justified in the low-stakes case but not in the high-stakes one8. Critics answer that only your practical situation changed, not what your evidence supports. For the shipowner, the weaker claim is enough: whatever he was entitled to believe, a ship full of families was no place to act on thin evidence.

Can a belief wrong someone?

A newer debate asks whether beliefs can be morally wrong in themselves, especially beliefs about people.

Tamar Gendler opens her discussion of the topic with a real case, from the historian John Hope Franklin’s autobiography9. In 1995 Franklin hosted a dinner at the Cosmos Club in Washington, where he was a member. A woman handed him her coat-check ticket, assuming that a Black man in the club must be staff. Suppose, as the philosophical discussion does, that most Black people at the club at the time were in fact staff, so that her inference matched the base rate. Something still went wrong, and Franklin was wronged. The question is where the wrong lies: in her action, in her failure to look at him properly, or in the belief itself.

Two different ideas are in play here, and both are disputed:

  • Doxastic wronging: the belief itself wronged Franklin, not just the action of handing him the ticket10.
  • Moral encroachment: because a false belief like hers would wrong someone, it needed more evidence to be justified in the first place11. Gendler describes the uncomfortable background: in a world shaped by injustice, following base rates faithfully can lead you to believe things that are probable and still wrong to believe.

Critics reply that the wrong lay in the action, or that she ignored individual evidence she had: Franklin was a guest, dressed as one, not in uniform. On that reading her error was a failure of evidence, which is wrong enough, without needing a special moral standard for belief.

Whichever of these theories is right, my practical recommendation is the same: be slow to conclude things about an individual from a group statistic, especially when being wrong would wrong them.

So, can you be blamed for what you believe?

My answer:

  • Not in the way you are blamed for an action. Beliefs aren’t chosen, so blaming someone for a belief as if they had decided it sits uneasily with “ought implies can”. Some philosophers think you can still be answerable for the belief itself.
  • Yes, for how you formed it, as far as you had a fair chance. You can influence what you investigate, which doubts you follow up and when you stop looking. That is where the shipowner’s guilt lies, and often ours.
  • Stakes raise the bar for action, whether or not they also change what you know.
  • Beliefs about people deserve extra care. Even if moral encroachment is wrong as a theory, it is good advice as a habit.

The practical form of Clifford’s principle is less grand than his version and harder to argue with: before you act on a belief, ask how you came to hold it, which doubts you set aside, and whether the stakes and the people involved demand more than you have.

  1. Clifford, W. K. (1877). The ethics of belief. Contemporary Review, 29, 289–309. Reprinted in Lectures and Essays (1879). ditext.com ↩

  2. James, W. (1896). The will to believe. The New World, 5, 327–347. Reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). Project Gutenberg ↩

  3. Williams, B. (1973). Deciding to believe. In Problems of the Self (pp. 136–151). Cambridge University Press. ↩

  4. Alston, W. P. (1988). The deontological conception of epistemic justification. Philosophical Perspectives, 2, 257–299. ↩

  5. Feldman, R. (2000). The ethics of belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3), 667–695. ↩

  6. Hieronymi, P. (2008). Responsibility for believing. Synthese, 161(3), 357–373. For an overview of all three answers see Chignell, A. The Ethics of Belief, section 3, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu ↩

  7. DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52(4), 913–929. ↩

  8. Fantl, J. & McGrath, M. (2002). Evidence, pragmatics, and justification. The Philosophical Review, 111(1), 67–94. ↩

  9. Gendler, T. S. (2011). On the epistemic costs of implicit bias. Philosophical Studies, 156(1), 33–63. The Franklin episode is from his autobiography, Mirror to America (2005). ↩

  10. Basu, R. & Schroeder, M. (2019). Doxastic wronging. In B. Kim & M. McGrath (Eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology. Routledge. ↩

  11. Basu, R. (2019). Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs. Philosophical Issues, 29(1), 9–23. doi:10.1111/phis.12137 ↩

  12. Enoch, D. & Spectre, L. (2026). There is no such thing as doxastic wrongdoing. Philosophical Perspectives, advance online publication. doi:10.1111/phpe.70015; preprint philarchive.org ↩