Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But the question we would have to ask is: do people who have beliefs insulated from reasons and evidence?
That they take to impose categorical demands on action.
Is that category of belief something that should be an object of appraisal respect?
And I'm skeptical that we can give an affirmative answer to that question.
Sometimes, yes.
Sometimes, as I discuss in some of the written work, the religious believers are the only good guys around.
Because the funny thing about holding beliefs, no matter what,
And feeling that they impose categorical demands on your action, is that, you know, when the tyrants and the brown shirts are running things, those people are still going to do what they believe they have to do no matter what.
They're not going to compromise.
Which is why, you know, if you look at Nazi Germany, you look at apartheid in South Africa, you look at apartheid in the United States.
Among the most vigorous resistors were
certain religious sects.
The other group that were the significant resistors tended to be communists.
And for not unrelated reasons, right?
Because they too took themselves to have be acting on categorical demands of action upon them.
I don't think actually that the communism satisfies the first part of the the definition of religion, but put that to one side.
So without a doubt, religious believers, right,
This funny combination of believing things no matter what the evidence is and feeling you've got to do things no matter what the disincentives are, sometimes that turns out to be a spectacularly valuable human psychology.
Sometimes it doesn't.
And given, as it were, the mixed record, it's hard for me to see how we could support the idea that this form of conscience should be a special object of of appraisal respect.
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