Number 87 : July 1997 |
What follows is a response to an article that Philip Lloyd Lewis had written for Resurgence Magazine and copied to me. The relevant passage was :-
If someone believes in something, then it exists BUT only in his or her world and the worlds of those who agree with him or her. Each person creates his or her own world; ....
Philip : While your "let everyone create their own world" approach does have a very positive element of mutual tolerance, surely it has some very great dangers as well ? It makes no distinction between beliefs and delusions.
If you come to believe that you can fly unassisted and start prancing about on the top of Canary Wharf ready for take-off, isn’t it my duty, if I have the opportunity, to persuade you that you are wrong ? And you would be wrong - the world you’ve created for yourself is in error, as would be demonstrated by your imminent demise. Worse, you might impinge on someone else’s world - someone of the "I’m never going to die" world-view - by landing on top of him, thereby proving him wrong as well. Similarly, people who rely on casting out demons, or believe that the soul is in the blood, have a different approach (in theory at least) to medical assistance and can cause positive harm to others. Don’t your views lead to everyone being humoured rather than respected ?
Of course, we can allow our subjective worlds to exist, provided they are corrected by objectivity. Objectively, we are indeed insignificant specks in the universe. However, I’m all I’ve got, so to me, subjectively, I’m important. I’d like others to allow me some space, so have to allow them some space too and allow that they’re important to themselves as well. Going back a paragraph, the reason I have a duty to persuade you out of a dangerous delusion is because, were I to be found in a deluded state, once I had recovered my senses I would be thankful to you for recovering me.
It seems to me that you need to provide arguments against these points. The important point at issue is that certain world-views are demonstrably wrong. Whether we have a right or duty to seek to correct erroneous views is another matter entirely. The foundations of ethics is a tricky subject ! I think one can build an objective model for reciprocity from game theory.
Theo Todman