Mens Rea: Intellectual Recklessness

The Reckless Farmer

Let us imagine a farmer who has gone into town for some equipment to build a new shed. He has boxes of nails, tools, and other equipment piled on a large stack of lumber. He makes no attempt to secure his load. The road home has a place with a rather sharp right turn. While he is taking the turn, a bag of cement slides off of the stack of lumber and flies into the windshield of an oncoming car, killing the driver.

The driver is obviously morally culpable for that driver’s death. He did not intentionally kill the driver. However, he is responsible for that driver’s death nonetheless, because he could have, and should have, taken action that would have prevented that death. He had an obligation to go through the effort and think ahead, consider the possibilities, realize those possibilities that could harm others, and then take steps to make sure that the harm did not happen.

An unsecured belief has far more potential to cause harm to others than an unsecured cement bag on a winding road. A doctor’s false belief can kill a patient, or maim that patient for life. An unsecured belief can bring down an airplane full of passengers when the mechanic falsely believes that he had put the new bolts in to secure some part. An unsecured belief can cause a pilot to drop a bomb on friendly forces. It can even start a war.

To prevent these harms, we have even more of an obligation to make sure that our most dangerous beliefs are secure, as the driver does for securing his cement bag. The harm that people are caused to suffer as a result of an unsecured belief are as much the moral responsibility of the people who held and acted on that belief, as the harm caused to the driver of the oncoming car is the moral responsibility of the person who packed the truck.

When to Secure Beliefs

The moral responsibility of securing our beliefs has certain specific requirements. Just as with the driver of the truck, the first step is to ask, “What if?” He looks at the cement bag and asks, “What if I am taking a hard turn? Will the cement bag stay put, or will it slide?” He goes down his list of possible scenarios and he asks himself what might happen, then he takes steps to ensure that if the scenario comes to pass, nobody (but himself) will suffer harm.

The person attempting to make sure that his beliefs are secured faces the same set of questions. He asks, “What if?” He looks at all of the places where a belief of his, if false, could lead to others being harmed. This is easy to do when his belief supports a conclusion that will clearly harm others — a decision regarding what to make legal or illegal, or a decision to go to war, or whether to fire a gun at an intruder. Any time that this is the risk that one takes, there is a clear obligation to make sure that the belief is as secured as it can be.

If a belief is not a belief about who is to be harmed, it is still necessary to ask, “Who would be harmed if I was wrong?” The airplane mechanic who believes that he has put all of the parts back on the plan needs to ask, “Who would be harmed if I am wrong?” In his case, a great many people risk being harmed, and so he needs to make sure that his beliefs are well secured. If he has any doubts, he needs to take steps to alleviate those doubts.

There is a second level of complication here. One of the beliefs that the morally responsible agent has to check is his belief that nobody will be harmed. We can dismiss as irrelevant our false beliefs that can harm nobody but ourselves. This is the same as being reckless about what one eats, where only the person who does the eating suffers the risk of harm. However, it would count as intellectual recklessness for a person to refuse to secure the belief, “Nobody can be harmed; therefore, I do not need to worry if I am right about what I claim.”.

There is as much intellectual recklessness in discussing potential harm of a false belief, as there is in accepting the possibility of harm but taking no steps to secure the beliefs that may be responsible.

How to Secure Beliefs

Since the days of Aristotle, scholars have long known how to better secure our beliefs. He discovered the first principles of logic. Over the years, scholars have continued to add to this body of knowledge. They are identified and categories forms of reasoning that are “truth-preserving”. Known as “valid argument forms” they have names like modus ponents, disjunctive syllogism, and D’Morgan’s Rule.

Scholars have also identified forms of reasoning that to not properly secure a belief. These are the fallacies — formal and informal. Formal fallacies are those that violate the formal rules of logic. Informal fallacies are argument types that occur in public debate that do not actually support the conclusion that the person using them is trying to support.

“Affirming the consequent” is one type of formal fallacy. Rain, for example, requires clouds somewhere in the sky. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that if it is raining, then there must be clouds. However, it makes no sense to look outside and see clouds, and assume that it must be raining. Inferring rain from the existence of clouds is an example of affirming the consequent.

An example of an informal fallacy is, “Agree with me or you’ll be sorry.” This line does not help to prove that the person making it is right, but it does provide the victim with a reason to agree with the person making the threat.

There are a lot of informal fallacies. A short list includes

There are a few dozen additional recognized and named informal fallacies.

The issue here involves the use of these fallacies by people in a position of authority who are making decisions that affect the lives of others. A person who uses an informal fallacy in this context has, by that fact alone, demonstrated that his beliefs are not well secured. Morally, he is no different from the farmer who drives down the road without ensuring that the bag of cement is secured. He is at risk of instituting a policy that can do great harm. Yet, he is not concerned enough about the harm he might create to make sure that he is not grounding his support for that policy on fallacious reasoning.

He is being intellectually reckless. And he is morally culpable for any avoidable harm that results from his recklessness.

Accidents Do Happen

We all make mistakes. Somewhere in my writing somebody can certainly find an example of a formal or informal fallacy that has wormed its way into my thinking that I did not recognize.

When we are in a position where a mistake has potentially disastrous consequences, one of the things we tend to do is to have somebody else go over our work, to see if they catch something that we might have missed. I post these essays in part to ask people to go over my work and see if they can spot the formal fallacy or the false premise that I might have missed. It has proved fruitful. The essay on “In God We Trust” that I posted had an error that a reader pointed out to me, allowing me to make a correction.

A factory does not dismiss an otherwise productive and efficient employee over one small accident. They institute procedures to help ensure that big accidents do not take place, including procedures that recognize that humans are fallible, and that there are ways of alerting humans to the possibility of error. They use whistles, lights, and warning messages like, “Are you sure you want to delete this file?” to help avoid these mistakes — recognizing that no system is entirely successful.

However, if an individual shows that he is repeatedly and consistently reckless in ways that continually threaten the lives of others, there is reason to subject that person to harsh moral condemnation and to ensure that he is never placed in a position where his recklessness will be a threat to others, and to hold him morally responsible for the harm he does to others as a result of this recklessness.

This is the way we treat physical recklessness. Intellectual recklessness should be subject to the same sort of treatment. The person who proves that he lacks the capacity to reason and to avoid formal and informal fallacies should be recognized as a person who is even more of a threat to his neighbor than the reckless farmer in my initial example. He, too, should be subject to the strictest moral condemnation, steps should be taken to ensure that he is not placed in a position where his recklessness will be a threat to others, and he should be held morally responsible for the harm he does to others as a result of this recklessness.

The more power and authority a person holds, the more these standards should apply to his displays of intellectual recklessness.

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