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Moral Conviction and Character
Matthew Pianalto
Eastern KentuckyUniversity
Abstract: We often praise people of integrity, who honor their convictions in the face of adversity and practice what they preach. We admire people who have the courage to take a stand. However, strong moral convictions can also motivate atrocious acts. I argue that moral conviction itself—qua moral conviction—has instrumental value that is connected to its relationship to integrity and courage, and explore three things—reflectiveness, willingness to provide reasons and elucidation, and basic humility—that must accompany moral convictions in order to ensure that they are held responsibly, and which thus mitigate the inherent riskiness of believing with conviction. I also suggest that such moral convictions have a social value and thus that the value of moral convictions is not limited to the important (if instrumental) roles they play within the life of the individual.
“People in those old times had convictions; we moderns have only opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.” –Heinrich Heine, The French Stage (1837)
1. These words of Heinrich Heine suggest that there is something valuable about convictions and that a world in which people have “only opinions” is a world in which nothing great can be achieved. We often praise people of integrity, who honor their convictions in the face of adversity and practice what they preach. We admire people who have the courage to take a stand. Of course, this praise must surely also be based upon respect for, if not approval of, that for which such people stand. The conviction of suicide bombers is surely as much a factor in our condemnation as are the horrific consequences of their actions. Given a long history of catastrophic, vicious, and insane convictions, is there anything about moral conviction qua moral conviction which, at least sometimes, makes it valuable? It might seem that all the value can be located in the content of one’s convictions. If that’s right, then there is nothing“value-added” in belief with conviction. Since convictions qua convictions can be good or bad, that any particular moral belief attains the status of a conviction might simply be, at best, a point of moral indifference.
A more severe view on conviction would hold that moral convictions are a bad thing to have—that there is something irrational about elevating any moral belief (however respectable) to the status of a conviction. In doing so, one risks succumbing to vices of moral blindness: fanaticism, dogmatism and self-righteousness (or what Bernard Gert has recently called moral arrogance[1]). Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate certainty,”[2] and Nietzsche warned, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”[3] Convictions can blind us. Thus, some have thought, better not to have them.
I will argue that both of these views—ambivalence toward and outright dismissal of moral conviction—are mistaken. In what follows, I will suggest that the value of conviction is instrumental andwill provide a sketch of a few traits and activities that must accompany conviction in order to temper its inherent riskiness.
2. My subject herein is moral conviction, although I will sometimes drop the qualifier and refer simply to conviction. We can speak of particular moral beliefs as moral convictions, and of persons believing particular moral claims with conviction. Taken as a subject-term, moral convictions are those moral beliefs that flow from, or reflect, a person’s central moral commitments and ideals—those which play a central role in a person’s moral reflection, decision-making, and outward activity. Moral convictions tend to be settled, firmly held, and believed to track objective moral truth, and thus are not primary candidates for revision (and a person might not regard her convictions as open to revision at all).
Taken as a mode, we can speak of believing with conviction as a mode of belief in which the individual does not simply assent to the truth of p, but rather the individual embraces p, and holdsp among the class of claims which she regards as bedrock, or not up for grabs (and in the moral case, essential to one’s moral outlook). I am hesitant simply to define belief with conviction as belief with “subjective certainty,” because this seems unnecessarily strong.[4]A person who believes p with subjective certainty may indeed believe with conviction, but if a person is deeply committed to p—which is what I have in mind by a person’s embracing p—then this seems sufficient for regarding the person’s relationship to p as one of conviction.[5] Thus, conviction comes in degrees, and we might differentiate stronger and weaker convictions, as well as moral views that do not attain the status of conviction, in terms of the resilience of a belief in the face of various kinds of pressure (such as the presence of disagreement or various prudential threats to the person prepared to act on her convictions).
Additionally—and putting aside concerns about weakness of well (although see Note 11 below)—moralconvictions possess strong motivational force. So a conviction is a belief one embraces and which is strongly motivating.This motivational force is not restricted to their influence on outward action. Convictions “go deep” in the individual and influence the way in which she sees the world around her, how she understands herself, and how she organizes and acts upon her other beliefs, aims, and projects.A person of conviction not only has strong moral beliefs, but will have a strong tendency to speak out on relevant moral issues or to take other proactive measures in the service of her convictions. This is the source of conviction’s inherent riskiness. Their strong influence and centrality of place can, if those convictions are misguided, drive one headlong into (moral) disaster—both the outward disaster of immoral action and the inward disaster of a distorted self.
3. With this sketch of moral conviction in hand, we can consider what kind of value moral convictions, in themselves, possess. There are enough reasons to hold moral convictions under suspicion. Their resilience may seem problematic, since the person of conviction might demonstrate too little sensitivity to contraveningconsiderations.[6] Similarly, those who acknowledge the essential contestability of moral claims might wonder whether belief with conviction can ever be rationally defensible, or at least think that the legitimate scope of belief with conviction must be severely restricted. We certainly want people to have appropriate moral beliefsand to believe sincerely and firmly. However, does belief with conviction make anypositive contribution to admirable persons or to the performance of admirable actions, or isbelief with conviction a negative tendency which is sometimes tolerable, but never in itself to be encouraged?
The positive contributionof convictions seems tenuous, I suspect, because their value isinstrumental.The instrumental nature of their value goes some way toward explaining the ambivalent view about conviction sketched at the outset, since something with instrumental value can be put either to good or bad use. Strong moral convictions often stand behind both atrocious and inspiring actions. Perhaps those like Yeats and Nietzsche, who adopt the extreme, anti-conviction view, denounced conviction too hastily as a result of focusing only upon its worst manifestations. Here, there are obvious parallels with those who denounce religious belief due to the many horrible things that have been done in the name of some God or other, failing to take sufficient notice of the good persons and actions that have also been inspired by religious faith. Bad convictions, like bad news, get more press, and this is understandable. But to conclude that “the best lack all conviction” goes too far, as this remark fails to do justice to the many moral heroes and heroines who stood by their convictions, for example, in the face of an unjust status quo. Gandhi had convictions but was nota fanatic or self-righteous lunatic.
There are two ways in which we might understand the value of conviction as playing an instrumentally important role in the life of the individual. Theseflow fromthe identity-shaping and motivational roles played by convictions. In addition to these two kinds of value, moral conviction may also have a third kind of value—a social value, which I will comment on at the end of this essay.
3.1. If we take convictions to mark an agent’s deepest, and sometimes unconditional, commitments, and if such commitments play an important role in the development of a person’s identity or sense of self, then having convictions may be importantly related to the possibility of having or acting with integrity. A common conception of integrity would have it that a person who does not “stand for something” lacks a basis for integrity, and so has no integrity to lose. Kekes, for example, writes, “Many men have no unconditional commitments. This means that they have no clear sense of themselves. The moral consequence is that they may be nice, but not good. Such men are afloat in conventional morality, but they have not made its requirements their own.”[7] Lacking a sense of self, a person without any convictions simply goes with the flow. If society expects him to treat others kindly, he does so; if society expects him to abuse others, he does what’s expected. If asked to give up his own life in the service of a greater good, he does his duty, but his motives lack depth: there is nothing of him in any of his actions. This is, I take it, what we often mean when we say that a person lacks conviction. By contrast, the person of conviction (sometimes[8]) exhibits a kind of autonomy and self-investment. This person’s convictions may be conventional or radical, but the difference is that in the person of conviction, his actions flow from his character and his deep sense of what is right and good; his actions are a part of who he is and what he stands for. Such a person can, of course, act out of character, and doing so may indicate a loss of integrity or a (heretofore unrecognized) lack of conviction. If he retains any amount of his integrity in the aftermath, such lapses are an occasion for remorse (and importantly, such a reaction may be essential for the restoration or preservation of integrity over the course of a whole life. The person who feels no remorse probably had no integrity in the first place and so, despite surface appearances, had no integrity to lose and was not the person we believed him to be).
So far, these considerations only posit a constitutive relationship between convictions and integrity—that having integrity requires that a person have some conviction(s). In order for convictions to have instrumental value, there must be some value in having integrity. Perhaps this needs no argument; however, some ways of understanding integrity inherit many of the same concerns we might raise about conviction. If a suicide bomber can bomb away with integrity, then we should be equally ambivalent about integrity. The thought that moral integrity is of positive value has led some to construe it in such a way that those committed to vicious projects cannot have it (though they might exhibit some kind ofpersonal integrity).[9]This would imply that not all convictions make moral integrity possible, and if a person can be significantly blinded by her own convictions such that she loses all sense of self, then perhaps some convictions are incompatible with integrity (in any sense) altogether. This might happen, for example, if a person has unconditional commitments which are incompatible, or someone who, in the grips of his convictions, fails to acknowledge his own fallibility or who comes to see herself as a completely bound instrument of her own convictions. Such a person may not be lacking in conviction, but may indeed be lacking other traits which make integrity possible. Thus, even if conviction plays a necessary role the development of a person of integrity, conviction alone is not sufficient. This does not show that convictions lack value, but only that their value is one part of a larger story.
3.2. The strong motivational powerof convictions also has instrumental value. Believing with conviction may make certain kinds of actions possible for the agent which wouldn’t be possible if the agent has, as Heine put it, “only opinions.”
Convictions drive action, and the degree of social or personal risk involved in undertaking a particular action—where one believes that some central moral issue is at stake—would seem to require a complementary degree of conviction. This might seem to blur unnecessarily the line between conviction and courage, or between belief and desire. Our convictions, it could be said, are one thing, and whether we have the courage to act upon our convictions is another. Courage, however, needs an object, something about which one can act (or preserve, or realize)with courage. So, as with the relationship between conviction and integrity, we can say that one’s convictions serve as a central referent for one’s disposition to act courageously. Particularly, if we wish to speak of moral courage, it seems plausible that the strength of one’s belief will make a difference in whether one’s disposition to respond with moral courage is activated.[10] Perhaps a person lacking moral conviction has no basis for acting with moral courage. Conversely, the stronger our conviction, the more likely we are to act; conviction provides a reason for courage—and importantly, a stronger reason than a mere opinion.[11]
We know that convictions can motivate people to do things that wefind atrocious, but it is equally clear that convictions have guided some of our most inspiring figures. Socrates’ conviction that he must not allow himself to be an instrument of injustice made it impossible for him to sell himself out and save his life. His conviction (and his courage) enabled him to resist the easy escape which his friends were willing to provide.[12] Martin Luther King Jr.’s convictions made it possible for him to persist in his struggle against racial inequality even in the face of great personal risk. Such people are unimaginable without conviction, precisely because without strong conviction, it is difficult to see how they could have persisted—without a steadfast object for their courage. This is sufficient to show that conviction has an important place in a morally admirable life, but again, it can only be part of the story.
Even Nietzsche, who denounces convictions as “prisons,” recognizes the motivational value of conviction and admits that great actions can require conviction. While he berates the need some have to believe in an absolute value or truth, seeing this need as a sign of weakness and a lack of self-mastery, he admits that the pursuit of one’s own ideals may require or, as he puts it, permit convictions. He writes:
Conviction as a means: there is much one can achieve only by means of a conviction. Grand passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not submit to them—it knows itself sovereign.—Conversely: the need for belief, for some unconditional Yes and No […] is a requirement of weakness. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself…[13]
Nietzsche’s remarks on conviction cut against the suggestion above that convictions play an important role in the development of an integrated self. For Nietzsche, the problem is that convictions can also consume the self, leaving a person thoughtless, small-minded, and inauthentic. On the other hand, the idea that a person could “use” convictions in order to achieve some great end, without being consumed by the conviction, would seem to be in tension with the very conception of conviction as a belief that is not up for grabs (or as an unconditional commitment).Thus, the important question is how, or whether, it is possible to believe with conviction without being consumed by such belief. (If not, then Nietzsche’s proposal simply makes no sense.) On the assumption that this is possible—I will not argue directly for this claim here—we must ask: what must we do in order to believe both responsibly and with conviction?
4. That convictions play instrumentally valuable roles in our moral lives does not provide reason for adopting any particular conviction. Given the risks—since if we place our conviction in the wrong things we will do or become evil—one might take a cautious approach and have conviction only in those things which one knows for certain are correct. The problem with the cautious approach is that one would then run the risk of having conviction in exactly nothing and become a moral drifter (or as Kekes put it, as quoted above, become “afloat in conventional morality”). Our lives present us with moral challenges and dilemmas, and often there is not enough time or information—or it is not clear that more time and more information would even be helpful—to ensure that our course of action, or our ideal, is certainly the correct one. This is what James was getting at when he said that, “Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof.”[14] This is not to say that moral dilemmas can only be resolved by adopting a conviction one way or the other, but hard choices do require that one “take a stand” in the face of uncertainty, and cautiousness may not always be the best, or the most respectable, option.