Profiles in skepticism: Cicero

Skepticism and the ethics of belief

Cicero according to Midjourney

Regular readers of Figs in Winter know that I’m partial to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher who contributed so much to the understanding and popularization of philosophy in the ancient world. So he couldn’t possibly be missing from this short series on ancient skepticism.

There is one aspect in particular of Cicero’s philosophy, however, that is not widely appreciated even though it is arguably of fundamental importance, just as much now as it was in Cicero’s time: his contribution to the debate about the ethics of belief.

The debate is about whether it is ethical to hold beliefs when the evidence is shaky, not available, or even when such belief seem to go against the available evidence and arguments. It deeply connects two branches of philosophy usually seen as independent: ethics and epistemology. In modern times the discussion was framed by two important essays, one by the mathematician William K. Clifford, the other by the philosopher William James.

Clifford published his paper in 1877 in the Contemporary Review with the apt title “The Ethics of Belief.” He famously argued that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

James on his part responded in 1896 by defending what he just as famously referred to as “the will to believe,” especially in the case of belief in god. According to James, under some circumstances it is permissible, or even obligatory, to form a belief even though we lack sufficient evidence for it. Such circumstances include situations in which it is important to arrive at a belief of some sort, for instance because whether one does or does not believe in god (allegedly) changes significantly one’s behavior in life.

J.P.F. Wynne, in chapter 7 of the highly recommended collection Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present (ed. by Diego Machuca and Baron Reed, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) makes an interesting argument to the effect that Cicero anticipated Clifford by 19 centuries or so.

To see why, we need to talk a little bit about Cicero’s philosophy and his allegiance to the so-called New or Skeptical Academy, a phase of Plato’s Academy that lasted from around 266 BCE, when Arcesilaus of Pitane became Scholarch, to 90 BCE, when Antiochus of Ascalon attempted to develop a syncretism that merged Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism.

Cicero tells us the story of this phase of the school in his book, Academica. We may be tempted to assume that he adopted the sort of skepticism taught by his teacher, Philo of Larissa (not covered by this series of essays, but discussed in Machuca and Reed’s book). Philo thought that it is okay to “assent,” i.e., strongly affirm, to something even though there is a chance that the notion in question is wrong. That’s because the two ways we have to assess whether something is true or not—our senses and our reasoning ability—are both fallible. Given that, we have to acknowledge that we could be wrong in any particular instance, but at the same time we have to make up our mind anyway, or we wouldn’t be able to make decisions and act on things.

A different position within the Skeptical Academy was defended by Clitomachus of Carthage, a student of the great Carneades who became head of the school around 127 BCE. According to both Carneades and Clitomachus—and this was Cicero’s take as well—we should never assent to anything at all, because assent implies a high degree of certainty, and that’s the path that leads to unquestioning dogma and away from the skeptic’s goal of open inquiry.

But hold on a minute. If we don’t assent to anything, how do we make up our mind about acting in the world? We follow, and tentatively accept, whatever seems plausible to us, based on a combination of evidence and arguments as we are best able to assess them. Cicero puts it explicitly:

“What keeps somebody from acting, who follows things plausible, so long as nothing impedes him?” (Academica, II.108)

Cicero uses a specific word in the context of this discussion, verisimilitudo, which translates to “truth likeness” and is, of course, the root of the English word verisimilitude. Importantly, he did not mean something that approximates the truth, or that is likely to be true, because we do not have access to the truth itself, and so we can’t really tell how close we are to it.

Rather, he meant something that seems to us to be true, that looks like what the truth would be like, if we did have access to it. Something is “truth like” if it generates very clear and undeniable sensorial impressions (e.g., “it looks like it’s the middle of the day, since the Sun is high”) or if it results from a very convincing argument (e.g., “the square root of nine is three because…”).

What’s the difference, then, between giving assent to a notion (Philo’s position) and judging it to be truth-like in the sense of Cicero, Clitomachus, and Carneades? Cicero elaborates on this point in a dialogue featuring his friend Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who is given the task of defending Antiochus’s anti-skeptic position:

“The difference is only that when you are moved, you give in, you assent, you agree, you wish it to be true and sure and grasped and perceived and reasoned and firm and fixed, and you cannot be moved nor pushed out of it by any argument. But I judge that nothing is of such a sort that, should I assent to it, I would not often assent to something false, since truths are distinguished from falsehoods by no mark, especially since there are no criteria of logic.” (Academica II.141)

Lucullus, featured as a character in Cicero’s Academica. He was a Roman general and statesman who, after he retired, became famous for his sumptuous banquets, so much so that the word “Lucullian,” in Italian, is still used to refer to elaborate excess in eating. Image from Wikimedia.

Cicero is telling Lucullus that to assent to something leads to a rather inflexible position that quickly becomes entrenched and can no longer be moved by evidence or reason. One becomes dogmatic in the negative sense of the word (which comes from the Greek meaning “opinion, tenet,” literally “that which one thinks is true”). There is nothing that unequivocally distinguishes truth from untruth, “no mark” and “no criteria of logic.” The best we can do is to weigh the evidence and arrive at a tentative conclusion.

Moreover truth, for Cicero just as much as for Clifford, has intrinsic value, which is why we can talk about the ethics of belief. He says:

“The search for and inquiry into the truth, above all, are proper to humanity.” (De Officiis I.13)

Human beings are naturally curious, and just as naturally value the truth. As Socrates would say, nobody wishes to be wrong on purpose. It follows, then, that:

“[It is] most vicious to accept falsehoods in place of truths.” (Academica II.66)

And that:

“Rashness and error in assent are vicious in all matters.” (De Divinatione, I.4)

That’s pretty much Clifford’s own position, and definitely not the one defended by James. At this point I have to lay down my own cards in the name of intellectual honesty: I find myself in wholehearted agreement with Cicero and Clifford, and just as strongly disagree with James’s take. Indeed, I think the latter stance to be positively pernicious.

I would go so far as to suggest that widespread endorsement of James’s take on the ethics of belief is what brought us to a society—certainly not intended by James himself—in which we are awash with fake news and alternative facts, or where people say things like “I feel this to be true,” or “it’s my personal truth.” James’s original “will to believe” has ballooned to a license to believe whatever one feels more comfortable with, or happens to be more convenient. The result, as Cicero says, is a vicious rashness. His alternative recipe ought to be seriously considered as a remedy to many maladies affecting modern society:

“We live for the day. We say whatever strikes our minds as plausible. Thus only we are free.” (Tusculan Disputations, V.33)

The root of our freedom, in this context, is not that we can believe whatever we want, but that we strive to believe what strikes us as plausible after having paid attention to the available evidence and arguments. And, crucially, that we are open to the possibility of changing our mind. Of course reasonable people may disagree. But only unreasonable ones abandon the search for truth.

[Next and last in this series: Sextus Empiricus. Previous installments: The Cyrenaics; Pyrrho; Arcesilaus; Carneades.]