In the essay “Ethics of Belief” by William K. Clifford he argues that it is morally wrong to believe things without good evidence and we should never trust something without sufficient evidence. William James thesis in “The Will to Believe” states is that it is completely normal for us to sometimes belief something that does not have sufficient evidence, if we judiciously want to believe that is true; that we are free to choose to believe anything we want to believe. In this paper, I will show how this James believes Clifford is wrong because he trusts that it is right to believe something without having evidence and how they both back up their opposite ideas.
To argue his thesis, Clifford provides an example of a ship-owner whose boat sank
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The harm of believing something without good evidence comes when someone says something just because they believe in that thing, without looking for much evidence, and someone else believes it. In this case people might end up believing something that is not true, or right or is just not like that. And if we believe something someone said without evidence and pass that message on, we are being as morally wrong as the person who first said the thing because we are saying it without evidence. It may affect our character and social fabric because we would be believing and preaching something that is not true and passing it to other people.
Believing something without sufficient evidence is also morally wrong because it motivates people to deceive others. Some people might think that they would not deceive someone else but even the slightest thing would occur. Maybe I did not do so well on a test and my mom asks me about it, and because I do not need to give her any evidence I could tell her I got an A instead of telling her the truth. This is one simple example of how we might deceive someone in a case of emergencies when a lie sounds better than the truth. We see it every day how people who are gullible are seen as week by