What aesthetic, social and intellectual needs do beliefs serve in their time?
If, for instance, it turns out that the belief serving as a basis for a morally reactive attitude is false--that is, if the person in question did not in point of fact violate the obligation in question--then the rational basis for the attitude is shown to be undercut.
What makes us act or behave in a certain way is always constraint to complex processes, with religious "belief" serving only as a means to make sense of the world.
Anti-Humeans just think that action-guiding purposes can be served by beliefs concerning genuine properties (McDowell 1981; Bromwich 2010; Swartzer forthcoming).
How about academics and scientists who claim the mantle of expertise and objectivity while knowingly twisting the facts to serve their beliefs, across a wide range of issues?
He shows his remarkable design for the Central China TV towers in Beijing to demonstrate his somewhat self-serving belief that a vibrant Asia is now ready to eclipse a stagnant America.
More than that, they share with Trump a harsh, rightwing nationalist-populist agenda, fierce antipathy to Obama-era, European-style multilateralism and multiculturalism, a penchant for divisions, walls and barriers, and a self-serving belief in "strongman" leadership.
I'm a Princeton graduate myself, and for years I've harbored the self-serving belief that those who offered me a place there were indeed infallible judges of human potential who plugged my statistics into their patented formulas and sat back, stunned at the results.
Still Tory MPs, knowing as they must his unsuitability, threaten at regular intervals to inflict him on the rest of us in the self-serving belief that good old Boris Johnson humming and hawing might nevertheless save their party and their jobs.
The end of my self-serving belief that every addict carries like a shield to justify the harm they cause: "I'm only hurting myself, so leave me alone".
To sustain the extraordinary level of denial he needs to hold the profoundly distorted, self-serving belief that he is always right and never wrong, greater than all others and far above the law and the truth, he needs followers –- millions of them, if possible -– who join him in his delusion.
