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The Ethics of Conspiracy Theorizing
25 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre Josh and M review Juha Räikkä's 2009 paper, "The Ethics of Conspiracy Theorizing."
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Captain Corrin's Adventures
00:00:00
Speaker
We present once again the adventures of Captain Corrin, space pirate and insurance salesman.
00:00:22
Speaker
The crew had mutinied, and so Space Boy Maurice and I had marooned them on Astra-Astroid, so they could rethink their potential skullduggery and ne'er-do-wellness. I had returned to airlock to airlock mugging to parse the time. Oi, who goes there?
Captain Corrin's Insurance Ventures
00:00:36
Speaker
It be I, Captain Corrin, insurance salesperson for onion and onion financial prudence. And, part-time pirate, could I ask you a few questions, sir? Well, I suppose so. Good. Firstly, what be your name, sir? Louis Aerat's Milligood Hope.
00:00:52
Speaker
The 23rd. Well, Louis, you don't mind if I call you Louis, do you? I'd like to mug, I mean, sell a policy to someone if I weren't on a first name basis with them. I'm sure that's fine. Good, good. Do you own a pet? Or a set of pets? Or even a timeshare on such a thing as a terrier? I have a deep space Kraken from the Antilles void. I call him Al Gustus.
00:01:15
Speaker
I suspect it as such. It's all coming together now. Is your Kraken a boy or a girl, sir? Kraken's a gender neutral. The ideal pet for the individual seeking to avoid all talk of gender in the marketplace. To be sure, to be sure. Would it be fair to say that you're employed? Would that be unfair to those hard workers out there, sir? Bear alone. Self-employed? Of course you are, of course you are. Now, Louis, as an unen- Self-employed? Pet owner. Are you aware of just how much wear and tear a lifestyle like yours can commit upon a domicile?
00:01:45
Speaker
Not sure I follow. Allow me to explain. As a pet owner, especially with gender-neutral beasties such as the Space Kraken. Called Augustus. Your very belongings are injurious to not only your well-being, but that of your home and your family. Ah, yes, Augustus is a bit of a tear away.
00:02:00
Speaker
As I thought, sir. And being unen- Self-employed. I don't actually have a checkbox for that, sir. Being at home all the time, anyway, just exacerbates those trades. While in the space of the year, you create as much damage as a room of monkeys on break from rewriting Astro Hamlet in three months. What can I do? Home and content insurance, sir. Of course. Sign me up. I would also recommend signing over your home to someone else so that your living expenses become tax deductible.
00:02:28
Speaker
That doesn't sound like a particularly good idea. Ah, but more preferable than being keel-hauled. How likely is that? I could arrange its enemy capacity as a space pirate. Oh, yes, very good point. Aye, that it is, that it is. Now, I'll be needing next week's recent advance, and I still haven't received the bond.
Introduction to Conspiracy Theories Discussion
00:02:59
Speaker
the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:03:08
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. M. Denterth. We are sitting side by side in Auckland, New Zealand, popping corks. That was not the popping of champagne of a successful anything, really, I suppose. M's just hitting the hooch. As per usual. Now, we have an episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre for you this week, looking at another new paper, but a couple of things first.
00:03:36
Speaker
Do you want to go with your news? Indeed. So there is a new research project coming out of the
UK Research on Conspiracy Theories
00:03:42
Speaker
UK. It's a five year project. Been run. Been run. Been run. Not long. Been run by Karen Douglas, who's a professor of psychology at the University of Kent. And it's looking at the consequences of belief in conspiracy theories. I'm going to read you the abstract for the project.
00:04:03
Speaker
The rise of conspiracy theories is often framed as a cause of various social ills, such as declining public trust of democracy, the growing allure of populist and extremist politics, and the rejection of scientific consensus in favour of hearsay and fake news. However, the extent to which conspiracy theories contribute to these problems is not clear.
00:04:25
Speaker
Despite hundreds of academic articles on this topic in recent years, and significant interest in conspiracy theories in both academic and non-academic circles, there has never been a systematic investigation of their consequences. In fact, we know very little about when, how and why conspiracy theories affect the decisions and wellbeing of individuals and societies.
00:04:49
Speaker
The current project will address this issue, pulling together a team of three postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students, one master's students, and senior collaborators from a range of academic disciplines. To discover when and how conspiracy theories are influential, three sub-projects will each focus on one of the key contexts in which conspiracy theories have shown the most potential to shape people's beliefs and behaviours, politics, vaccination, and climate change.
00:05:18
Speaker
To understand why conspiracy theories are influential, a fourth subproject will focus on the consequences of conspiracy theories for the person who spread them, concentrating in particular on the use of conspiracy theories by politicians and other elites. A project on this scale, and with this level of sophistication, has never been attempted before.
Formation of the Advisory Board
00:05:41
Speaker
It will adopt a mixed methods approach using archival and social media analyses, interviews, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, and experiments including attitude, behavioural, cognitive, neuropsychological and physiological techniques. This project will move significantly beyond the state of the art in the literature to identify when, how and why conspiracy theories matter.
00:06:09
Speaker
Most interesting, why are you bringing this up though? Well because Karen is someone I know so I met her for the first time at the Miami conference back in 2016 and we've been in correspondence over the years. Karen's a prominent social psychologist rising on conspiracy theories and I think it's fair to say
00:06:34
Speaker
Compared to my love of particularism, Karen's more on the generalist side, although not necessarily the ardent generalist that some social psychologists are. Karen has written on material which indicates there can be positive consequences to having conspiracy theories in society, particularly the whole idea that vigilance means you might want to be uncovering potential conspiracies. So what's interesting about this project is the advisory board.
00:07:02
Speaker
So this is a ERC, European Research Council, advanced grant. So it's 2.5 million euros over five years. And one of the things you need to do when you're putting forward a grant of this type is to get a whole host of unpaid advisors. So these are the senior academic collaborators that she mentioned in the abstract.
00:07:27
Speaker
And so I thought it would be interesting to look at who's involved in this project other than Karim. So we've got the Australian, Stephen Lewandowski. We've got the other Australian, Matthew Hornsey. We've got Joe Yusinski and Steph Orpers and a fifth person.
00:07:45
Speaker
So Stephen Lewandowski is known to many people who work on conspiracy theory. He's a psychologist who is very much a
Ethics and Social Impact of Conspiracy Theories
00:07:54
Speaker
generalist. I mean, I've met Stephen, we've drunk together, he's a good time to have around. That makes no sense whatsoever. Why did you make me say that? It's fun.
00:08:05
Speaker
But at the same time, he is also very much a generalist. And you've got Matthew Hornsey, who is a psychologist at the University of Queensland. And he's working on why people largely resist apparently reasonable messages.
00:08:21
Speaker
Steph Orpers, who is a sociologist, he works in media studies, largely works on how cultural beliefs are medicalised, as well as an examination of game culture. Joe Ucinski, who, of course, we've talked about, is a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida. And the first person happens to be me. Right. I figured that's where this was leading. Yeah.
00:08:47
Speaker
So basically I'm on the advisory board. There is a particularist in the mix. Now whether that means they're going to try and sway me into their cult or whether I'm going to induct them into mine is another matter entirely. But yes, I will be involved in this project. So I'll be visiting Kent at some point to talk with the people there. There's going to be a major conference. I'll be attending that. I'm involved in this project. You said there were unpaid advisory positions. Yes.
00:09:17
Speaker
So you're still, your evil global paymasters aren't coming up with the goods yet. No, my luxury yacht that George Soros keeps on telling me is going to be delivered, has yet to be delivered. I'm beginning to think that the person I'm corresponding with may not be George Soros. It might be Bill Gates in a mask. Oh, dear. Well, he's famous for promising yachts and never delivering on them. You know, I've heard that about him.
00:09:44
Speaker
So that's one bit of news. The other bit of news, of course, that's relevant to this podcast is that yesterday, Michael Collins died. Michael Collins, the Irish politician, not the Irish politician who died like 100 years ago. I mean, he could have died again. Possibly. No, we're talking about the astronaut Michael Collins, who was
00:10:04
Speaker
part of the Apollo 11 mission and manned the orbital module thingy while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong got to gallivant around on the surface of the moon. It's true, they went to the moon, they went beep, beep, zip, zip. That's exactly what they did scientifically, but yes.
00:10:21
Speaker
No, we did an episode on the two Michael Collinses a few years ago, the Irish Michael Collins and the astronaut Michael Collins, because there's... There are conspiracy theories around Michael Collins. Joe Rogan featured at one point as being someone who'd talked about him. He's currently going around telling people that if you're young and healthy, you don't need a vaccine. He is. Actually, let me look up on our list. Episode 185.
00:10:49
Speaker
If you want to hear what we had to say about both Michael Collinses, that's when we did it. That's almost 150 episodes ago. It's getting close to it, yeah. Bit of a whirl. It is. I mean, I can never remember what we've covered on this podcast in the past. Well, that's why we keep a list. It's true, although do we keep that list updated? Ish. Updated irregularly. Did we update it at all during the pandemic? I think so.
00:11:16
Speaker
I chucked a few titles in there. Well done. Well done, you, Josh. That's a little bit of background administrative stuff. Now, anyway, I think maybe we should have had those the other way round, really, because possibly your talk and your news about people looking at the effects of conspiracy theories might have led better into the topic of today's.
00:11:36
Speaker
My advisory position on Karen Douglas' thing is a much more important event than the death of Michael Collins. You're quite right. We should have started with the small news and then built up to the big news. The big news of my being involved in a large EU-funded project, unlike the trivial death of an astronaut. I mean, really, what have astronauts done that I haven't done? Been to space. Fine. Astronauts have been to space. Well, actually, not all astronauts have been to space.
00:12:05
Speaker
but this particular one very definitely quite famously did and was a famous Irish politician. But of course also if we'd done it that way around that it would have made quite a good segue into the topic of today's episode where we are looking at the ethics of conspiracy theorizing by Johar Reicher.
00:12:24
Speaker
It's true, we could have started with minor news, broken major news, and then just trailed off with a paper. I mean, it's a great way to allow the people to relax as they process the information. It's probably true. My ego's getting gigantic. It really is. Maybe you better play a sting while we wait for it to deflate. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:12:53
Speaker
New Sting. I like it. It's shortened to the point. It's succinct. I like it. And it's got that nice kind of classical vibe. It's less relaxing. It's more exciting. More sedate, but pompous.
00:13:10
Speaker
Which is basically what we're going for. This is podcast. State, yet pompous. In fact, actually, if someone wants to write a review on iTunes, simply saying, state, but pompous, we would be very pleased with that. Quite happy. Yeah. So today in our installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, we're looking at the Ethics of Conspiracy Theorising by Yu Haraika of Finland. Finland, Finland, Finland. Yeah, sorry, I knew before I said it.
00:13:39
Speaker
So this is the second paper of his that we're looking at, and it's the second paper that was published in 2009. In the Journal of Value Inquiring. Is that a philosophical? It is, although it's not a journal that I know.
00:13:54
Speaker
So this particular one was published in November of 2009 and as we'll see it draws in some of the same material that he had in his previous paper. Indeed at some point it almost reads like it's exactly the same material. A bit of a cut in pace but that's okay. Yeah I mean technically self-plagiarism but you know it's fine. Right if you
00:14:19
Speaker
I didn't look to see if he actually sort of footnoted himself in his previous paper. That would have made sense. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Why are we quibbling about this nonsense when we have a paper we could be looking at? Now, it starts with an interesting claim that philosophers have not been particularly interested in conspiracy theories. The few contributions that have appeared have concerned mainly epistemic questions, which
00:14:44
Speaker
I mean, I guess that's kind of fair. Like we've seen, obviously, there has been a lot of work done at this point. And yet it's probably by only a handful of people. We've looked at not more than half of it. I think certainly less than 10 authors so far. So much less than 10 authors by this particular point. It's only about half a dozen, I think. Yeah. So by this
00:15:04
Speaker
So in terms of the body of philosophy as a whole, I suppose it's fair to say that not many philosophers have looked at conspiracy theories. Yes, so we're about to see the kind of pre-Cambrian explosion of literature on conspiracy theories generally, because truth be told, it's not just the case that within philosophy there isn't much being written on this topic. There's actually not much being written at all anywhere.
00:15:30
Speaker
And we're going to see a very, very large number of papers suddenly start to appear in two or three years time within the academic literature, which is also going to coincide with a lot more people writing on conspiracy theory within philosophy. So it is one of those claims where he's right. And yet at the same time, I still kind of it's all kind of a kind of jarring statement to make in that there it's true.
00:16:00
Speaker
Statistically, the base rate fallacy, not many philosophers and not many papers, have been produced on the topic of conspiracy theory. But at the same time, I still don't see that as being the claim is not particularly interested. Well, certainly those who have written on it are certainly particularly interested, but nevertheless.
00:16:20
Speaker
So, yeah, so his introduction starts with a bit of a rundown of philosophers' attitudes to the conspiracy theories. He mentions here your Pictons and your Cailis and your Clarks and your Bessians and so on. And it's...
00:16:35
Speaker
As I recall from the last time we, the last of his papers we looked at, one of our complaints was that he tended to overgeneralise from time to time and make statements that were perhaps a bit too sweeping. And some of that seemed a bit like that there, but that's okay. It's just an overview. Having done so, he finishes up his introduction with the sort of statement of purpose, I suppose. He says,
00:17:00
Speaker
In what follows, the ethical status of conspiracy theorising, especially political conspiracy theorising, will be briefly evaluated. In particular, we will consider why people tend to disapprove morally certain conspiracy theories and why they're justified in doing so. It seems that the possible undesirable social outcomes of conspiracy theorising as a whole do not explain the moral uneasiness that we may feel towards certain theories.
00:17:25
Speaker
The ethical evaluation of conspiracy theorising as a cultural phenomenon should be distinguished from the ethical evaluation of particular conspiracy theories. Political conspiracy theorising may be a valuable cultural phenomenon even if most or all political conspiracy theories have moral costs.
00:17:41
Speaker
And so straight away, we see he's again focusing on political conspiracy theories. I don't know if it's just because that's what he talked about in the previous paper. And so that lets him stay in the territory that he's already staked out. As we'll see in the next section.
Distrust and Social Consequences
00:17:56
Speaker
He runs the same kind of taxonomy he did in the political conspiracy theories paper. So he's very interested in a certain subclass of conspiracy theory, the political conspiracy theory, which he wants to contrast with things such as total conspiracy theories and the like.
00:18:15
Speaker
So yeah, it's very much narrowing down on a particular issue, which he does take to be a problem from the off. So there's a kind of, if we assume these things are a problem, how do we explain that assumption?
00:18:34
Speaker
as opposed to examining the assumption to see whether it's correct to have it the first place. But we'll get to that shortly. Yes, and still interesting to see from the from the get-go that he's looking at both taking sort of both a generalist and a particularist stance, looking at
00:18:50
Speaker
you know, can we talk about the effects and the moral effects of conspiracy theorising in general and also looking at the effects of particular conspiracy theories evaluated particularly. Also, I have to say in his favour, we saw the problems that have been
00:19:07
Speaker
that come up time and again due to Brian L. Keeley being not 100% consistent in his use of terminology as to whether he's talking about conspiracy theories or unwarranted mature conspiracy theories or whatever. I'm pretty sure right throughout this paper, the terminology is quite consistently political conspiracy theorising to make it clear that that's exactly what we're talking about. So that's good to see, keeps things a bit clear.
00:19:37
Speaker
But so we move on to section two which is defining political conspiracy theories and that's basically what it is. He defines the particular class of conspiracy theories he wants to talk about and yeah this was the section that seemed very familiar having read his previous paper. He introduces the same definitions he used in on political conspiracy theories, the idea that
00:19:59
Speaker
political conspiracy theories are public versus non-public and the idea of local, global and total conspiracy theories. He repeats the claim that we saw in his previous paper that once a conspiracy theory becomes the official theory, that conspiracy theories and official theories are in opposition and when a conspiracy theory becomes the official theory, people cease to call them conspiracy theories, although he pretty much immediately goes on to
00:20:27
Speaker
changes from saying they're not called conspiracy theories to they're not conspiracy theories that he is buying into Cody's idea that
00:20:41
Speaker
once something becomes official, it stops being a conspiracy theory. So he's often comparing political conspiracies versus political conspiracy theories. So he wants to kind of run that line that as soon as we're talking about a story which is in any way accepted by the public or endorsed by some kind of authority, then it's not a conspiracy theory. And thus we shouldn't call it a conspiracy theory.
00:21:13
Speaker
Having staked out the particular definition that he wants to use, he says, this way of using the concept of conspiracy theory is not accepted by all writers on the subject, but there are good grounds to follow it, as it is in line with the ordinary meaning of conspiracy theory. If all the explanations that include references to conspiracies and secret action were conspiracy theories, then the history of the world would be a massive conspiracy theory, which it is not.
00:21:37
Speaker
which I don't know about that statement. I don't think you'd have to say that all of history is one big conspiracy theory, but it would imply that history is completely riddled with conspiracy theories, and it kind of is, which is the point that's been made by the likes of Keeley and Pigdon and Basham.
00:21:55
Speaker
Indeed, what you house doing here is basically resurrecting Popper's conspiracy theory of society by going, well, look, either you think that the entirety of history is made up of one conspiracy after the other, which is ridiculous to believe, or we've got grounds for a suspicion of conspiracy theories. And Picton's 1996 paper is basically the repudiation of Popper's view by going, no one believes that all of history is made up of conspiracies.
00:22:25
Speaker
People simply say sometimes conspiracies are causally effectatious in history. And so yeah, it's a weird claim to make, especially when you're citing Picton, who has argued against that claim at quite some length.
00:22:44
Speaker
So having set the scene, we move on to section three on the social effects of conspiracy theorising. And I think this section kind of is the generalist analysis and then moves on to more particular analysis later on.
00:23:00
Speaker
So he starts by saying, what should we think about the ethical acceptability of political conspiracy theorising? A brief overview on the comments concerning the ethics of conspiracy theorising suggests that it all depends on the social consequences of the activity as a whole.
00:23:14
Speaker
And so he quotes Steve Clark, David Cody and Charles Picton on the virtues of political conspiracy theorising, as they've all pointed out, you know, it's that they allow us to uncover the real conspiracy theories that we know happen. And being being overly critical of conspiracy theories allows people to get away with conspiring and being able to say, oh, that's just a conspiracy theory. So that was, as we've seen, that's been
00:23:46
Speaker
been their view on the virtues of conspiracy theorising. He quotes the introduction of conspiracy encyclopedia, which I'm not familiar with. It's not a volume I have to have, so it's not that much I can easily check. It says similar things. But then goes on to point out that it's not all sunshine and lollipops. Other people point out the downside of conspiracy theorising.
00:24:14
Speaker
According to critics, political conspiracy theorising tends to undermine trust in democratic political institutions and its implications may be morally questionable as it has close connections to populist discourse as well as anti-Semitism and racism.
00:24:29
Speaker
It's also often claimed that conspiracy theorising not merely undermines democratic deliberation, but creates a risk to social order as conspiracy theories often encourage people to view society in a polarised way. Furthermore, critics have pointed out that conspiracy theorising generates not only false, but harmful beliefs about the root causes of social events.
00:24:48
Speaker
their view it's important that people understand that most social events should be explained by referring to social structures and inequalities rather than to acts and intentions of individual agents as suggested by conspiracy theories, which I mean yeah it sounds like the the whole sort of the what do they call it the great man view of of history versus the the conspiracy conspiracy cock upy
00:25:12
Speaker
Well yeah, it's the idea between history is enacted by great individuals striding the earth versus the fact that actually sometimes history is just the way that processes unfold over time. So it's the idea that
00:25:28
Speaker
Julius Caesar wasn't particularly important as an individual because there would have been another Julius Caesar, given the nature of Rome and the political structures at the time, someone was going to find that actually demagoguery was the best way to control Rome. It's not that Caesar created the crisis, it was there was a crisis and someone stepped into that void.
00:25:49
Speaker
It's the old adage that if Hitler didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. No one's ever said that. But they have made the claim that someone else would have come along. Hitler was the product of German culture rather than an aberration in German culture.
00:26:07
Speaker
He segues a little bit into a point claiming that while attitudes to conspiracy theorising are seen on the left and the right of politics, this sort of critical attitude is more prevalent on the left, that the political left
00:26:23
Speaker
want things to be seen in terms of structural inequalities and what have you, and that looking at conspiracy theories seems to be endorsing the opposite view, but I don't quite know how true that is, and also don't really know that it's that relevant to the discussion. No, although it is interesting, because historically, despite someone that we know who used to be in comms for the national party, people have claimed that conspiracy theorising is very much a right-wing activity.
00:26:53
Speaker
that conspiracy theories have been not uncommon but certainly less common with respect to left-wing activists. It's right-wingers who are more likely to see malevolent actors operating behind the scenes and left-wingers are more likely to blame structural inequalities for bad things that occur. Whether that's actually true now is a bit of an open question.
00:27:20
Speaker
But he does also continue with a quote from Mark Fenster, with whom I'm also unfamiliar. I am familiar with Mark Fenster. Is he in sociology? He is a sociologist, yes. But he has a quote to block a text from Mark Fenster, and the quote ends by saying,
00:27:40
Speaker
Conspiracy theory, on the other hand, either misattributes dominance to individuals or simplistically places the blame for the ills of the world on individuals rather than on underlying structural causes. As a result, it cannot lead to effective political activity, rather it leads to harmful scapegoating, or it misleads activists into thinking that merely removing an individual or a secret group will transform society.
00:28:01
Speaker
which again seems to be the same point again that this criticism of conspiracy theorising says, no, it leads people in the wrong direction and can't bring about meaningful change.
00:28:14
Speaker
Now I've made a somewhat, I'm going to stress somewhat, similar comment here about David Icke's views in the past, because what's kind of fascinating about David Icke, if you sit down, like I have, through his eight to 10 hour lectures, is that he doesn't really want people to do anything.
00:28:35
Speaker
He wants people to become aware of the conspiracy, and thus to publicly declare that they believe the world is controlled by alien shapeshifting reptiles, and that the moon is a transmitter of a signal from Saturn which turned out to be Satan. But he takes that you don't have to proactively go out there and do anything to change the world, because in part he sees that as kind of being a left-wing thing of agitating for change. Rather, as soon as you know that the conspiracy exists,
00:29:05
Speaker
that is sufficient for them to not be able to control you. So really all you've got to do is promote David Icke. If you tell people about David Icke and people listen to David Icke, then the world would be a better place. Change will happen if you believe it will. Which is precisely what he's trying to claim. You don't have to do anything other than buy his books and attend his lectures and pay a subscription for his website and all that other malaki.
00:29:32
Speaker
And as Joe Biden says, we're not down for malaki. No. Who is these days? Joe Biden. Well, strangely enough. So we've had a look, or rather, Yuha has had a look at these sort of general attitudes towards conspiracy theorising as a whole and says that while there are interesting questions raised by taking this general view, either for or against political conspiracy theorising, in this paper, he's more interested in particular instances.
00:30:01
Speaker
Oh, particular. So he says, for our purposes, it is more important to pay attention to the fact that every now and then people have negative attitudes towards single conspiracy theories. If we assume that they're justified in having their negative attitudes, we can ask what justifies them. It is unlikely that the negative attitudes towards single theories are justified merely because the theories are mistaken and their defenders lack epistemic virtues. At least in some cases, the negative attitude has a clear moral tone.
00:30:30
Speaker
as such epistemic mistakes do not justify moral condemnation. That's also unlikely that people are justified in their negative attitudes towards single conspiracy theories just because the theories represent conspiracy theorising, an activity that may have morally questionable social and cultural consequences in the long run. Perhaps the alleged harmful effects of conspiracy theorising as a whole provide further support to the view that a single conspiracy theory is unethical, but there must be something else in it as well.
00:30:58
Speaker
Now the if we assume line is going to be doing an awful lot of work in the rest of this article. So the line if we assume that they are justified in having their negative attitudes, we can ask what justifies them.
00:31:16
Speaker
Now it's true, the rest of the paragraph kind of goes, well, some of those assumptions are going to be questionable, but by and large, he is going to assume that the assumption is justified and find a way to justify that assumption.
00:31:30
Speaker
So this leads into section 4, unethical conspiracy theorising. Finally, someone's getting around to some bad conspiracy theorising. Naughty, naughty conspiracy theorising. Yes, probably made by child labour or palm oil or something.
00:31:51
Speaker
or promoted by VW. So weirdly enough, there is a series occurring either later, no, early next month or early June, which is a conspiracy, a seminar series on conspiracy theories, which is financially backed by VW.
00:32:15
Speaker
and the people who are speaking in the series are largely generalists. And as Charles Pigdon has pointed out, well as you know, sorry, actually it was Brian Elkely in Co-respondence, he says, are they going to mention the fact that VW engaged in a fairly large-scale conspiracy with the whole Emission Scandal thing? Because you know,
00:32:36
Speaker
seems a little bit weird that VW is promoting conspiracy theories are bad. Don't look at our history. Don't look at our history at all. But at any rate, in this paper, he starts the section by saying that
00:32:53
Speaker
You know, look, sometimes we may have moral objections to particular instances of conspiracy theory. We may think that the conspiracy theorists are liars who don't believe what they're actually saying and are just sort of grifting. It may be that the theories include sort of libels or slurs, your antisemitism and racism that we see in conspiracy theories, as you mentioned. But then sometimes even when this isn't the case,
00:33:18
Speaker
He thinks we might feel morally uneasy about some conspiracy theories and that this may be due to something about the conspiracy theory itself. Tell me about Alison Brandon.
00:33:33
Speaker
He gives an example of two historians, and he writes, consider the story of two historians, Ellis and Brandon. Why Brandon? Why not Brendan? I mean, maybe Brandon's a more common Finnish variant. Possibly. Of Brendan, but I'm just, at some point I'm probably gonna say Brendan rather than Brandon. Because you're thinking about Brendan Fraser, as we all are at all times. I'm especially thinking about Doom Patrol and how I can't wait for season three. Oh, he's a delightful swearer, is that?
00:34:02
Speaker
Brandon Fraser. Anyway, so consider the story of two historians, Alice and Brandon, who have both written a book on the history of the foreign ministry of some country. Alice believes that all institutions have a tendency to grow and increase bureaucracy. She uses this theoretical framework when she interprets data and evidence. Unfortunately, she draws many mistaken conclusions and describes people's actions and intentions in a wrongful way, placing them in a false light.
00:34:31
Speaker
Her desire to be faithful to her theoretical framework leads to her misinterpretations. Even if her book is consistent, it is scientifically unsatisfactory. People are worried about her professional competence and ethical standards.
00:34:45
Speaker
Brandon does not work within a particular theoretical framework, but again the investigations suffer from gross misinterpretations. Brandon used to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before he was fired. He is strongly prejudiced in favour of interpretations that show how incompetent and arrogant his ex-superiors and ex-colleagues were.
00:35:07
Speaker
The result is a book that is more or less seriously written, but when published, faces deep moral condemnation. Although both Alice and Brandon make similar mistakes, Brandon is morally more liable than Alice because Brandon is personally involved.
00:35:25
Speaker
Now, didn't quite follow that section, to be honest. And I'm not sure that my intuitions met Yuha's intuitions here. So in part, it's a worry about the story. So we're told that Brandon was fired.
00:35:41
Speaker
actually not told why Brandon was fired. He may have been fired because his ex-superiors and ex-colleagues were indeed incompetent and arrogant and thus he is writing a faithful history of the ministry which gets condemned by the public
00:36:02
Speaker
but only because they believe the ministry over there to what it takes to be a disgruntled employee. So in part I actually don't think the story is fulsome enough to be able to make the claim that somehow Brandon is more morally liable for his so-called mistakes than Alice's. And also I'm a little bit worried here about the idea that
00:36:26
Speaker
Alice's theoretical framework basically gives her an out because there's also a question here as to, well, surely self-correction and the like means that if a theoretical framework is bad, then she should be getting feedback of some particular type and then modifying the framework. And I'm kind of worried here that Alice sounds like she's going to turn out to be a generalist.
00:36:52
Speaker
that she's got a theoretical framework which leads to bad conclusions, but she's sincere in the employment of that theoretical framework. Brandon turned out to be the particularist. He's the person who's looking at a specific example,
00:37:12
Speaker
and thus points out to people that actually there's something rotten at the core here, and people don't like that being pointed out, so moral condemnation follows him. So yeah, I just don't think the story is doing what Yuhar wants us to think the story is doing. In part because I think the story just isn't fulsome enough to make the point he wants to make.
00:37:37
Speaker
But yeah, I think what he seems to be going for though is that this moral unease that we have with conspiracy theories relies on sort of personal, possibly subjective factors, because he goes on to say,
00:37:56
Speaker
Although political conspiracy theorists may be serious when they blame people, it happens fairly often that the alleged conspirators are their political enemies or belong otherwise to a group they do not like. There are both left-wing and right-wing conspiracy theorists. Left-wing conspiracy theorists tend to blame right-wing politicians and capitalists, and the right-wing conspiracy theorists tend to reprove left-wing politicians and groups such as labour unions and immigrant organisations. Seemingly objective conspiracy theories are not always objective.
00:38:24
Speaker
And a little bit further down, typically the conspiracy theorist doubts certain institutions and agents before she has a conspiracy theory. It is seldom the case that her suspicion of conspiracy leads her to doubt certain institutions and agents. So in this case, he's implying that Brendan has an agenda.
00:38:42
Speaker
and is being insincere or at least isn't willing to recognise that he's got some psychological conditioning that means he's going to criticise as ex-employer rather than tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
00:38:59
Speaker
I mean, certainly this is a concern we see about conspiracy theories, where it does appear that people are starting with the conclusion and working their way backwards, that your QAnon types hate left-wing politicians, hate Hillary Clinton and George Soros and Barack Obama, and so are quite happy to take on board and then elaborate on conspiracy theories which say that these people are evil and their political opponents, in particular Donald Trump,
00:39:28
Speaker
are virtuous people who are going to save us all from him. So I can see, I can see, I think I can see where he's coming from. But the problem here is that once again, if we go back to the Alice story, if we take it that Alice is meant to be kind of the opposite side of the coin from Brandon, if Alice's theory means that
00:39:55
Speaker
her production of the history of this particular foreign ministry basically absolves them of blame of bad things they did because her theoretical framework doesn't allow that kind of interpretation. Then you get the opposite problem, which is if you end up defending institutions from charges of corruption because your theoretical framework says they can't commit it, and they're going around committing
00:40:21
Speaker
corrupt angst then you've got a particular problem of when does the moral condemnation falls on the people who end up defending organizations which turn out to be indefensible just because of some political piety
00:40:39
Speaker
But yes, so what you really does seem to be going for is the idea that these preconceived ideas can impact the moral opinions that others might form about those conspiracy theories, I guess.
00:40:55
Speaker
He says, following on from what we talked about just before, he says, typically the conspiracy theorist doubts certain institution and agents before she has a conspiracy theory. It's seldom the case that a suspicion of conspiracy leads her to doubt certain institutions and agents. Very often the conspiracy theorist wishes to witness a conspiracy. This is why she often also witnesses it or so she thinks.
00:41:19
Speaker
The same is true of investigative journalists who develop conspiracy theories. They wish to see conspiracies, not always because they have biased attitudes towards certain groups and agents, but because witnessing conspiracies benefits them professionally and sometimes economically too. Thus, too often, conspiracy theorists not only place people in a false light in the public eye, but do so in order to benefit, ideologically or personally, although they do not always realise this. There is empirical evidence for this. What evidence? I don't know.
00:41:46
Speaker
it's a footnote to conspiracy encyclopedia yes which again i don't know what yeah i mean a few examples would have been useful also
00:41:59
Speaker
So you could rewrite this about, sorry, so let's say we compare conspiracy theorists with a, to use terminology from social psychology, a conventionalist, someone who believes the standard story. You can tell exactly the same story by going, well look, conventionalists don't want to see conspiracies.
00:42:18
Speaker
and so they'll tell stories which allow them to ignore conspiracies going on, and sometimes they will do that in order to benefit ideologically or personally, although they don't always realise this.
00:42:34
Speaker
So someone who's going, there's no conspiracy going on, may well also benefit from turning a blind eye to these things. I don't see how this doesn't cut both ways. Yeah, I mean, it kind of sounds like stuff that we've talked about before in the past, the way people will say, the whole get politics out of it, stop talking about politics, you don't discuss politics, when what they really mean is
00:42:57
Speaker
politics i disagree with and not not acknowledging that the idea that things are fine just as they are and you shouldn't question it is a political viewpoint it's the the essence of conservatism so yeah but nevertheless he's still staying on his his particularist sort of bent here looking about that that that moral disquiet can come about due to the particular qualities of particular conspiracy theories he also says
00:43:26
Speaker
that we tend to think the less public the persons in question are, the more there should be evidence. Unhappily, conspiracy theorists who name ordinary people or use definite descriptions of them are not always based on strong evidence.
00:43:44
Speaker
Unfortunately, conspiracy theories by conspiracy theorists who name people are relatively common, at least when it comes to conspiracy theories of investigative journalists. Their conspiracy theories are often local and concern issues such as the use of public money and the relations between funding bodies and organizations to be funded.
Moral Costs vs Social Benefits
00:44:01
Speaker
And so there was sort of the claim that conspiracy theories that are saying that sort of people in positions of power are bad, are less morally objectionable than conspiracy theories that are blaming ordinary people or people in a position of lesser power. I mean, it seems like the
00:44:23
Speaker
It seems like sort of the intuition about punching up versus punching down, that we find the letter morally worse than the former. But the whole thing does seem to be there's a lot of generalisation going on. It's kind of assumed here that these conspiracy theories of investigative journalists are somehow bad.
00:44:42
Speaker
because it's an, unfortunately, conspiracy theories by conspiracy theorists who name people are relatively common, at least when it comes to conspiracy theories of investigative journalists. That's only unfortunate if you think that they're not warranted conspiracy theories. If the investigative journalist is producing a warranted conspiracy theory that shows that actually there's a financial link between politician X and body Y, that's probably a good thing.
00:45:12
Speaker
Yes, I don't know, but that's the end of section four. Section five now seems to be concerned with sort of weighing up the two. We have possible pros and cons of conspiracy theorising, or at least political conspiracy theorising in general, and we have potential sort of moral costs of individual conspiracy theories.
00:45:34
Speaker
And before we move on there, I just want to point out that we'll be coming back to this general idea sometime around about 2016.
00:45:46
Speaker
because Pat Stokes, who also writes about this thing, which you might call restricted generalism or reluctant particularism, sorry, reluctant, no, it is reluctant. He is going to also talk about the moral costs of conspiracy theories in public discourse, but in a slightly more sophisticated fashion.
00:46:13
Speaker
So, in the present paper, Chapter 5 or Section 5 is the difficulty of an overall estimation, where Yuhar says, an evaluation of single political conspiracy theories may suggest that they often have moral costs. Not only are people placed in a false light, but when this is done, however inadvertently, it is done in order to gain something.
00:46:36
Speaker
How serious are the moral costs? We may ask whether we should conclude that Clark, Cody and Pigdon are wrong when they praise conspiracy theorising simply because of its alleged desirable social effects, or whether we should come to the conclusion that political conspiracy theorising may be a valuable cultural phenomenon, even if many political conspiracy theories have moral costs. And so I think he seems to be the question he seems to be looking at here is,
00:47:01
Speaker
Is it the case that the overall good of political conspiracy theorising outweighs the potential moral harm of, say, slandering people or what have you in individual conspiracy theories? And he runs a rather interesting analogy, doesn't he? He compares it to the war on terror and the idea that
00:47:26
Speaker
I don't know, this is writing in 2009, so possibly the worldview was different than it is now. But he seems to be sort of saying the war on terror is overall good because terrorism is bad and it benefits the world as a whole to get rid of terrorism. Even if it turns out you have to contravene a whole bunch of personal rights of individuals to get this greater good.
00:47:54
Speaker
So he's sort of, I suppose, no, he doesn't actually present that as a clear cut position. I think he sort of asks the question, is the war on terror worth the harm to individuals? And he says that that's not clear. And so then as analogy says, well, maybe it's a similar, it isn't clear.
00:48:14
Speaker
if the potential consequences to individuals of conspiracy theories against them, especially unwarranted ones, I suppose. His focus here is very much on unwarranted accusations.
00:48:29
Speaker
So yeah, is the harm that can come to individuals who are the target of unwarranted conspiracy theories worth the social good of engaging in conspiracy theorising overall? Which is a direct reply to Clark, Cody and Picton, because in their previous papers, they're going, look, we have to accept that there is a kind of cost to conspiracy theorising in the wild. Every so often people will be falsely accused. But isn't it really, really important
00:48:59
Speaker
to uncover those conspiracies, because we don't like those conspiracies. And Yuhar's going, but is it? I mean, would it be better if those accusations just weren't made at all, if it turns out that lots of innocent people are impugned by these conspiracy theories? Now, part of the argument here kind of does rest upon the idea
00:49:22
Speaker
that conspiracy theorists of this kind of pejorative kind are making lots and lots of explicit claims of x and y. Now that's actually an interesting empirical question. Steve Clark has a paper, which I believe we've looked at, which basically goes, I don't know. And other people are going, well, maybe they do. And other people are saying, no, they definitely don't. So it's not entirely clear what the scale of the problem is.
00:49:53
Speaker
He does raise the point that an important question is whether all morally questionable conspiracy theories could be replaced by morally unproblematic conspiracy theories without losing their alleged desirable consequences. If not, we may ask if we should conclude that the costs are so minor that they must be accepted.
00:50:11
Speaker
After all, we're not talking about massive human rights violations in the context of conspiracy theorising. Although I suppose we could argue these maybe not massive human rights violations, but we have sort of seen, you know, mass murder as a direct result of conspiracy theorising it. There can be the definite downsides there.
00:50:32
Speaker
He rounds off by referring to Steve Clark's paper saying, according to Clark, giving a thousand conspiracy theories some consideration is a small price for us to pay to have one actual nefarious conspiracy such as the Watergate conspiracy uncovered sooner rather than later. The price of conspiracy theorizing is not always limited to that of giving them some consideration, whether it could be so limited is an open question.
00:51:01
Speaker
Which I suppose is fair, it's not just that we have to suffer people saying these things in order to get at the genuine ones that actually have social
Media's Role in Spreading Conspiracy Theories
00:51:12
Speaker
worth. Sometimes the dodgy ones have much worse consequences. Yes, but once again, that's an empirical question.
00:51:22
Speaker
So Section 6, the second to last section, is a bit of a segue. It's entitled Media and Morality, and talks a little bit about, because as we saw just previously, he's started already talking about investigative journalists, and the conspiracy theories they raise, and how sometimes they will raise a conspiracy theory that they have suspicions of, but don't have the evidence for yet, and the morality around that.
00:51:53
Speaker
As we've seen, conspiracy theorising consists of developing and disseminating conspiracy theories. Traditionally, the people who develop the theories have seldom also been the people who disseminate them. Today, the internet provides a forum for conspiracy theorists to disseminate their theories without the support of traditional media.
00:52:10
Speaker
When morally questionable conspiracy theories are made public, the people who disseminate them must bear some responsibility. It'll be worth considering a few points related to questions of journalistic ethics, as the present argument implies that investigative journalists and activists who operate in the public sphere often act wrongly, or at least create moral costs.
00:52:31
Speaker
So the basic issue is, as he says, when it comes to political conspiracy theorising, publishing suspicions can be morally problematic because harsh claims are made in too early a stage of the investigations. So what do you make of that?
00:52:48
Speaker
I mean, it's an interesting issue, it's one which we'll come back to when we look at Pat Stoke's work, in that, yes, it is true that sometimes the rush to publication means that false claims are made about people, often unknowingly.
00:53:07
Speaker
This is not a problem unique to the publication of conspiracy theories in the media. This is also something that we see with mass shootings in the US, people making claims about, we think X did it and it turns out X, you know, it's a misidentification, but the media really rushed in quickly to do it.
00:53:27
Speaker
It's things that happen when murder investigations are going on. It's a problem in general with the way that print media works in the modern age of getting information out quickly, which is in part due to the economics of
00:53:43
Speaker
journalism and also the fact you're often competing against other media outlets to be the first to go to print. So it's not necessarily a problem that we should be thinking of only through the lens of conspiracy theories because it's a problem across the board.
00:54:01
Speaker
Now, he goes all particular risk again, and he says that media outlets are justified in publishing claims that perhaps haven't been substantiated yet, which may lead to these sorts of conspiracy theories we're worried about.
00:54:16
Speaker
But in each case, it's the evidence that's important, and he contrasts two different cases. The claims that Renault Trax and Volvo Instruction Equipment, two companies owned by Volvo AB, made illegal payments to the former Iraqi government under the so-called Oil for Food program, and compares those to claims that Monsanto covers up the deadly consequences of their genetically modified food.
00:54:46
Speaker
And he says the difference between the two is that the evidence against Volvo AB is there. We have the actual record of these payments that they made, whereas the case against Monsanto is much less clear that the argument around the science around the GMOs and whether or not they're deadly and what have you.
00:55:08
Speaker
The scientific arguments in favour of those claims are much more shaky. And also the moral cost is sort of the disparagement of Monsanto staff, these researchers and scientists who the conspiracy theory would claim are in it for the money and don't care about the death and destruction that they're causing.
00:55:33
Speaker
I'm not quite sure at which stage he's getting at there. I don't think he's being sort of completely post facto and saying if it turns out that the evidence was there, then it was justified. I think he seems to be saying that there needs to be enough evidence to make you suspicious, even if it doesn't prove the case.
00:55:54
Speaker
which arguably is what a particularist is going to claim, that you don't rush into telling stories about conspiracies until you're fairly clear there's a good story to tell about why you think there's a conspiracy in this case. So the fact that journalists might rush into publishing stories which are either explicit conspiracy theories or have associated conspiracy theories with them,
00:56:22
Speaker
is not necessarily a knock against taking conspiracy theories seriously, it's a knock against the problems of the way the media launders stories in the public domain.
Final Thoughts on Conspiracy Theories
00:56:36
Speaker
So Yuhar concludes the section by saying, morally acceptable conspiracy theories need not always be warranted, but they should be based on sufficient evidence as they involve claims that are very harsh from some points of view.
00:56:48
Speaker
It may be morally excusable to place people in a false light in the public eye and claim that they are probably conspiring against others, at least in cases in which there's a lot of evidence available on a conspiracy and every reason to believe in conspiracy, but in which there is no conspiracy. So yes, certainly a particular viewpoint there. I'm not quite sure what I just said in that last sentence though.
00:57:11
Speaker
I mean, it's evidence available, if it isn't to believe in it, but I think he's he's saying is it OK if you had plenty of reason to suspect to this particular conspiracy theory, even though in the end it turned out there wasn't one.
00:57:27
Speaker
I'm just going to check to see you actually got the quote right in case there's a terrible, not cut and pasting properly. So if you can continue to vamp or move on, I will just double check that. Okay, because it does. That last sentence does read rather weirdly. And now I'm going is that actually in the text? Or have we got a cut and paste issue going on there?
00:57:51
Speaker
Well, at any rate, so that is the end of the argumentation. So where are we at the moment? We've seen you can look at the social benefits and possible social ills. It's not a cutting-paste issue. That is the line. So
00:58:15
Speaker
I take it that what he's saying actually is something along the lines of you are allowed to allege a conspiracy in a situation where the evidence is very suggestive that a conspiracy exists and there's quite a lot of suggestive evidence even if it turns out that on investigation there is no conspiracy. So the threshold for accusation is you've got to have a lot of good evidence that says a conspiracy exists
00:58:44
Speaker
There are going to be a few cases where it turns out there is no conspiracy, but the evidence still strongly suggested that there was, and you are allowed to make an accusation in that case. But you need a lot of evidence before you can make that kind of accusatory step. Yep. So there we go.
00:59:01
Speaker
So, yes, we've looked at the potential social costs of conspiracy theorising in general and the potential moral costs of particular conspiracy theories and the idea that we may have to weigh the two against each other. And so this all finishes up in Section 7, concluding remarks, which reads,
00:59:22
Speaker
As we have seen, the ethical evaluation of conspiracy theorising as a cultural phenomenon should be distinguished from the ethical evaluation of particular conspiracy theories. Until now, the debate on the ethics of conspiracy theorising has centred upon the question of what the social consequences of this activity as a whole might be. While this question is meaningful, it's important to notice that single conspiracy theories tend to have moral costs.
00:59:46
Speaker
Not only are people placed in a false light in the public eye, but this is done however inadvertently in order to gain something. It is doubtful that every conspiracy theory that has moral costs is necessary in order to reach the alleged desirable results. Conspiracies are common. It is relatively easy for many people to slip into a conspiracy without really noticing it. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that the free market is prone to conspiracies.
01:00:12
Speaker
People of the same trade sell to meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. According to Smith, there's not much we can do to prevent conspiracies. In his view, it is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings by any law which could either be executed or would be consistent with liberty and justice. As Smith is right, as he may well be, then we have a good reason to adopt a sort of a favorable attitude toward conspiracy theorizing as a cultural phenomenon.
01:00:41
Speaker
Even if conspiracy theories do not prevent conspiracies, they may make potential conspirators think twice.
01:00:49
Speaker
See, I found that an interesting paper and an interesting blend of the sort of generalist and particularist viewpoint and the way it wasn't, should we evaluate them all in general or should we look at things particularly, but that you can do both and there are different concerns that show up when you do.
01:01:13
Speaker
So I thought this was an interesting perspective, but yeah, as with the previous of his papers, perhaps a bit too much generalisation and a bit too much hand waving in places. Yes, and I do wonder about the selection of examples. So the whole issue with what exactly is the example of Alison Brandon meant to do, or the citation of the Internet Encyclopedia for there are examples of this.
01:01:40
Speaker
the comparison with the war on terror and also using some discrete examples but not necessarily using an apples with apples comparison but an apples with origin. Origin? The origin of apples. Yes, precisely. Well we all know about the origin of apples. No, we said we'd give a speak of that. That's true. We will not talk about our time in the garden of Eden because it was
01:02:07
Speaker
It was embarrassing. It was very, very embarrassing. So yeah, I worry more about the examples that I use to motivate this analysis. And I think what's going to be interesting is that when we get to Pat Stokes' work in 2016 and start looking at his reasons for a reluctant particularism, which rifts upon Newhouse work, but then develops it in a slightly different fashion,
01:02:35
Speaker
It's going to compare that with this, because I think when I think of this paper, I'm actually thinking more about what Pat is going to say, rather than what Yuha has actually said. Now there we go.
01:02:48
Speaker
So I think that's it, the end of another installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Now, if you are one of our patrons, those most lovely and sweetest smelling of individuals, you have a bonus episode coming up for you as well. What are we going to do this week?
01:03:08
Speaker
This week we're returning to a classic and by returning to a classic we're going back to a segment we've done once before and we did plan to do it a lot more and then didn't. We're going to take a look at the websites of Alex Jones and David Icke. We're going in without any knowledge about what stories are on their websites today and we're going to be shocked
01:03:31
Speaker
We're going to be surprised we might even have a new sound effect as a warning when we talk about particular stories. So if you are interested in hearing that and you're a patron, then good news. All you have to do is stick around. If you'd like to hear that and you're not currently a patron, then you can become one by going to Betrayal.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you're not interested in being a patron, thank you for listening all the way to the end of this episode anyway.
01:03:59
Speaker
Yes, yes, thank you for listening to another exciting instalment of conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre. So I think all that remains is for me to say goodbye, and for me to say goodbye and finish. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X. Dentist. You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
01:04:26
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.