Is a false belief itself a harm?

Question

No specific examples will be given, as the specifics here aren't the point. I'm also not talking about consequences of holding objectively false beliefs, nor in communicating them (knowingly or otherwise). I'm talking about whether unknowing self-deception (by continuation of holding the belief, not necessarily by origin) should be understood as a harm to oneself.

To clarify, I'm not asking if a belief can be harmful (i.e., capable of causing harm), but rather if it can itself be a harm per se. Is holding a belief in something that is objectively false itself inherently a harm?

Answer 1

Suppose that you hold a true belief X, and suppose you could somehow be confident that if you held instead not-X, this would not have any other consequences on your life. Suppose a wizard is standing by, ready to cast a spell to change your belief in X to the false belief not-X. Would you be indifferent to whether the wizard casts this spell?

Not likely; you would prefer to continue to believe the truth. Morality, and especially harm to the individual, is in some sense about what the individual prefers. So your preference here gives some basis that it's a moral harm to believe not-X.

We could flip the scenario; suppose you initially believe the false not-X, and the wizard proposes to change your belief to the true X. Again you would refuse, this time because you wrongly believe not-X to be true, and do not want to abandon what you think to be the truth. You are still showing a preference for believing the truth - it is simply that you do not know what the truth is, in this case.

Moral harm is not just about preferences, but specifically about well-informed preferences. In the case when you initially believe X, you are better informed than when you initially believe not-X, and therefore your preference from the initial position of believing X is more morally relevant than your preference from the initial position of believing not-X. Your well-informed preference is to believe X.

This also allows us to weigh the harm caused by believing not-X in comparison to possible benefits that may arise from such a belief, such as a possible sense of community with others who hold the same false belief. The question is, which tradeoffs of veracity vs. community would you prefer, if you were well-informed about X and also well-informed about all the possible positive consequences of holding not-X?

We must also consider the possible negative consequences of holding not-X. Beliefs are hardly ever held in a total vacuum. False beliefs tend to lead you to actions that you wouldn't prefer if you knew better. For instance, belief in not-X could cause you to proselytize not-X to others. It could cause you to demand not-X be taught to children. This causes harm to people besides yourself. So for your sense of community with other not-X believers, you have potentially helped cause harm to many others.

Beyond proselytizing, there may also be other harmful effects of believing not-X. If not-X is in contradiction to certain findings of science, then you may become motivated to suppress those findings, and distrust science in general, and again spread these tendencies to others. Or perhaps critical thinking leads people to believe not-X, and therefore your belief in not-X leads you to disfavor critical thinking, and favor a more authoritarian culture.

Answer 2

No, in general false beliefs can be utterly harmless in having zero negative consequences. I'd I believe Elvis Presley had naturally brown eyes, that belief would likely not cause me or anyone else any disadvantage, unless in very specific situations where it would not just be the belief itself, but its application causing the harm.

So for many situations and many false beliefs, it's trivial to demonstrate lack of measurable harm.

However every false belief is a vulnerability to correct reasoning, and the revelation of holding a false belief is socially disgraceful, thus humans typically strive to avoid false beliefs or the revelation of holding such. Strictly speaking, this goes for any non-conforming belief, even if true, but there is usually a correlation. A person known to hold many false beliefs will be considered a gullible fool and not worth of a lot of trust. This is even worse if the belief is already revealed as a scam.

In information theory, contradictory beliefs are worse than false beliefs, as they allow any inference, but if course false beliefs are always prone to evolve into contradiction with new true beliefs from reality. But a false belief can be isolated and the thus never be used for (false) inference, thus causing no harm.

Answer 3

I would steer you away from the ethical dimension and consider the psychological one, as "moral harm" is only meaningful if it is defined in terms of psychological consequences.

You ask:

Is a false belief itself a harm?

If a false belief is inherently a harm, then the question follows, what is the object of harm? The mind? What does it mean for the mind to be damaged? This seems an inherently psychological question, since harm to the mind in contemporary society falls upon the psychologist. From a canonical psychological perspective, excessive false belief is dysfunctional because it represents a misalignment between the mind and the world, so yes, it is a harm per se. We can take David Burns and his website (feelinggood.com) as as a source to explicate the question. From WP:

Burns was an early student of Aaron T. Beck, who developed cognitive therapy during the 1960s and 1970s. Cognitive therapy was also based on the pioneering work of Albert Ellis during the 1950s, who popularized the notion that our thoughts and beliefs create our moods. However, the basic concept behind cognitive therapy goes all the way back to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher. Nearly 2,000 years ago he wrote that people are disturbed not by things, but by the views we take of them.

Central to Aaron Beck's work in CBT is the notion of cognitive distortion, which is the psychological exhibit of what a philosopher would consider to be a doxastic attitude. In CBT, mental health is seen as a function of the mind to be accurately aligned with the world, which finds a conceptual partner in the notion of the correspondence theory of truth. Under the thinking of CBT, one's behavior, thoughts, and feelings are interconnected, and therefore gross misalignment between one's beliefs about the world appears and how the world actually is both causes and is a harm.

This is because there is a feedback loop between emotions and belief such that distortions in belief escalate feelings, and then escalated feelings fuel distortions in belief. Thus, a cognitive distortion (a type of false belief about the world) harms the individual by exacerbating an emotion or feeling (like anxiety) causing the harm, and then the anxiety exacerbates the cognitive distortion (the false belief) causing a harm. Therefore a person with grossly false beliefs about the world might be symptomatic of a personality disorder, for instance.

Consider a defenseless physically and mentally abused child who develops vulnerable NPD. If the medial prefrontal cortex is adversely affected in regulating emotional suppression, and the amygdala is hyperactive, then the harm caused is the clinical-grade narcissism which is a complex of false beliefs from the dysfunction of the brain caused by the abuse. Thus, the severity of false beliefs measurable by a psychometric like the MMPI, is a measure of the harm to the mind itself.

Answer 4

Material false beliefs are objectively good in an agent possessing a harmful purpose (i.e., a purpose that will limit the materialization of desires across society). It is good for a terrorist to possess false beliefs about how to inflict maximum harm upon society.

Material false beliefs are objectively harmful in an agent possessing a good purpose (i.e., a purpose that will probably maximize the materialization of desires across society; Primus, 2021). It is harmful if a police officer has false beliefs relating to how to best neutralize the terrorist.

Formational false beliefs are objectively harmless (formational beliefs exist as ends, rather than as a means to ends, so they possess no objective moral value). It is neither harmful nor good to believe in God or Santa if you enjoy it or find it entertaining.

As for whether these beliefs are intrinsically harmful it depends on whether we define intrinsically in relation to the agent or the belief itself. Material beliefs (beliefs we believe we need to possess) are relational by definition, meaning that they are valued as a means of achieving higher goals and have no intrinsic value in isolation from those goals. They are instrumental. So a false belief that eating sugar is healthy will be harmful to the agent who believes they need to possess a belief about what is healthy and what is not. Formational beliefs (beliefs we desire to possess, for the sake of them, e.g. for enjoyment or entertainment) are of intrinsic value and not intrinsically harmful.

A belief that sugar is healthy is harmless in itself if the agent desires to possess that belief (e.g, for fun, entertainment or parody purposes). If an agent possessing formational beliefs does eat sugar (and is harmed) then it is the aspects of that agent that followed his formational belief that are morally problematic - not the belief itself. All formational beliefs should be protected as artistic freedom - they are the precious aspects of life, the ends which all means serve.

Primus (2021). Purism: Logic as the basis of morality, Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 29, 1–36. https://philarchive.org/rec/PRIPLA

Answer 5

Beliefs have no consequences unless we act on them. Harm can only potentially come from acting on the incorrect belief. For instance, if you believe the Earth is flat, but you're never inavigating long distances or influencing people who do, there's no harm.

As another example, we generally believe that racism is wrong. But if a racist is never in a position to discriminate against someone on the basis of race, no harm is done to anyone. But some believe there's a moral harm in holding "undesirable" beliefs. This is similar to the belief that a married person having "lust in their heart" is as bad as actually committing adultery (acting on that lust). If you agree with this philosophy, then it would be consistent to consider incorrect beliefs harmful by themselves.

But to be more rational about it, the reason to consider these beliefs wrong is not because they're directly harmful, but because they suggest a likelihood of future harm. It's difficult to keep yourself from acting on your beliefs if you're ever in a position to do so. A racist might not be in a position to making hiring decisions today, but maybe next year he will be. A lustful person may have restrained themselves today, but the next time they might not be able to resist.

We can think of this as a tiny crack in a physical structure such as a bridge support. By itself it may not interfere with the operation of the bridge. But repeated stresses will cause it to spread, eventually impacting the structural integrity, and the bridge collapses.

But going back to my original paragraph, a crack in a bridge that's never used is not a problem.

Answer 6

Speaking philosophically, beliefs (like theories) are neither true nor false. Beliefs are models of the world that we build from incomplete information in order to have practical guidelines for action. A belief may lead us to take bad actions depending on how incomplete the model is, but beliefs in and of themselves are not harmful. They're necessary.

A belief is a tool, like a hammer or a knife. It can do good when you use it the way it was meant to be used, and can do harm when you use it other ways. No sense blaming the tool for the failures of the workman…

The concepts of 'truth' and 'falsity' are idealizations or abstractions, and don't generally apply to real-world problematics. In the real world the best we can manage is to devise a model that is functional and useful within its proper constraints. Beliefs/theories that are dysfunctional and useless can be harmful, but they should be evaluated on their general incompetence, not on some unwieldy conception of 'truth'. Asserting 'truth' or 'falsity' is a useful social convention, granted, but shouldn't be taken as ontological knowledge.