ECON 2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Joel Feinberg
Document Summary
The moment we gasp our first breath we believe breathing is important. Same goes with our beliefs, from religion to theories. We tend to believe something usually by having prior knowledge or experience of some sort. We"re constantly shaping our beliefs due to new evidence or past evidence that best accommodates us. Clifford an english mathematician and philosopher, shows the ethical importance of our belief"s premise. He shows how the development of one"s beliefs determines if one is right or wrong, despite the content of the belief itself. Beliefs in themselves have a wide-spread feature to them thus he argues that it can be potentially dangerous with a false pretense despite the action based on the belief. Clifford begins with an example where belief and ethics play an important role in one"s decisions. A ship-owner was about to send to a sea an emigrant ship.
