Faith in Humanity

Abstract

History and literature provide striking examples of people who are morally admirable, in part, because they have some form of faith in people’s decency – figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, and Alyosha Karamazov. Nevertheless, moral philosophers have largely ignored this trait. And I suspect that many philosophers would view such faith with suspicion, dismissing it as a form of naïvete, or some other objectionable form of epistemic irrationality. I argue that such suspicion is misplaced, and that having a certain form of faith in people’s decency, which I call faith in humanity, is a centrally important moral virtue. To make this view intuitively more plausible, I discuss two moral exemplars – one historical and the other literary – whose lives vividly exhibit such faith. Then I offer a rationale for the view that having faith in humanity is morally admirable.

Keywords: Faith, Trust, Hope, Virtue, Moral exemplars, Epistemic bias