People generally have reasons for believing the things they believe. Sometimes those are good reasons and sometimes not. When we believe something, we typically take our reasons to be good ones. It would be hard to sustain belief for reasons we know to be bad. Perhaps people sometimes do this, but the problems with this sort of willful thinking are apparent and won’t get much comment here. The more common problem occurs when people mistake bad reasons for good reasons yet remain reluctant to testing those reasons. This is a failure of intellectual courage.
Intellectual courage consists in being willing to examine the quality of our evidence and arguments. Intellectual courage is typically exercised in a social context. It involves submitting our views and reasoning to the scrutiny of others, embracing peer review in spite of the possibility of humbling results. Left to our own devices, we aren’t so likely to spot and correct the mistakes in our thinking. We wouldn’t think the way we do to begin with if we thought it was flawed. And confirmation bias is liable to highlight evidence and reasoning that confirms our prior ways of thinking. So, without peer review from others, we are likely to become entrenched in our opinions and the reasons that support these, whether or not these reasons are well founded.
But subjecting our opinions to peer review from people who see things differently can be a frightening proposition. We risk a good deal when we do so. Not only do we risk finding that we might be wrong about something, we also risk public discovery of this embarrassing state of affairs.
Courage generally is a willingness to take risks when the potential benefits warrant doing so. Acting courageously does not mean acting without fear. It means acting in full awareness of what is at stake, including the possibility of failure. Perhaps a person who is has developed courage through a long-standing practice of reasonable risk taking won’t be phased by fear. But people will generally have to face down lots of fear in getting to that point.
People who are very concerned about what others think may inflate the risk of others discovering they are wrong. Sometimes people have powerful reasons to be concerned about what others think. We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Conservative former congressman Adam Kinzinger describes this as the current situation for republican politicians when he remarked on a recent Atlantic podcast (Autocracy in America) that “many people would rather die than not belong.” And so, we have the spectacle of republican politicians who can’t admit that the last presidential election was fair, even when they know better. Intellectual courage appears to be off the table for people who care more about belonging than truth and find themselves in social situations where holding the right opinion is required for belonging. Intellectual courage can remain a big ask when holding the wrong opinion merely lowers your status slightly in the eyes of some others. This, I’d submit, is the basic dynamic of groupthink. When the group in question insists on orthodoxy, this dynamic will be intellectually oppressive. The rare person who insists on thinking independently and speaking her mind in spite of intellectually oppressive group dynamics does so at a very high price, as Adam Kinzinger might attest.
A healthier environment for exercising intellectual courage would be one where people can respect each other across differences of opinion. This isn’t quite what happens when people “agree to disagree” or when they dissolve disagreement by taking people to “have their own truth.” Demanding that others agree without is obviously disrespectful. But fencing off that part of another that doesn’t agree with you isn’t so much better. It’s a defensive maneuver which involves declining to understand the other. Respecting others does involve being open to reasonable disagreement. But disagreement is only reasonable when it is the result of reasoning together. Discovering disagreement should be a starting point for critical thinking aimed at greater understanding, not the occasion for a kind of truce or avoidance.
When I meet a philosopher I disagree with, I’m eager to understand why. This is how inquiry and research proceeds in philosophy. In trying to understand a view that differs from my current opinion I stand to learn about some new evidence or argument. The payoff for exercising intellectual courage is deepening my understanding of others and learning new things, sometimes learning from my own prior mistakes. Of course, philosophy is a pretty safe space for this kind of risk taking. Out in the real world we often encounter people who aren’t interested in understanding or being reasonable. So, it is up to us to cultivate community among critical thinkers.
We are fallible beings, and nobody likes to find they are in error. So, we will always have need of intellectual courage. But we can significantly lower the stakes and make it easier for people to exercise intellectual courage by seeking to understand differing points of view and making a shared project of reasonably evaluating our respective evidence and arguments. This is one of the key goals in teaching critical thinking.