Do (or should) utilitarians hold truth as a virtue? My question stems from a discussion about the irrationality of believing in a religion for the purpose of its utility (e.g., that it enables morality that otherwise would not exist). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VF98DkJokI&NR=1

[edit: I am referring to seeking a personal understanding of truth or the closest thing that we can get to it by means of comprehensively critical rational justification--and doing so as a virtue. The topic of truth-telling is different. The answer to my question is yes or no. If You say yes, then you find value in truth (as defined in this paragraph) that is extremely high even if you discount instrumental value (remember that truth-telling is not within my definition). If you say yes, then you thing seeking truth has value even after you account for any instrumental value such as the ability to more effectively get what you want. If you say no, you might be willing to make an attempt to change your behavior so that you no longer critically analyse information and instead embrace dogma or revealed truth as a means of obtaining utility (happiness).]

To help complicate the matter, let's say that a dozen longitudinal studies showed that sending kids to Joe's Weekend Religious Instruction Institute for Kids produces better performance on a broad measure of morality than teaching your kids utilitarianism using the most effecient utilitarian instruction method available. Let's also assume that Joe's school teaches kids about a religion that you dislike, but the weekend program sticks mostly to the ethical topics who's final conclusions are mostly consistent with your ethical beliefs, and the program is free and has free transportation (meaning free day-care). How would you weigh the outcome a decision to send your kids to this religious school, and how would the virtue of truth-seeking enter that equation?

p.s.:
I just realized how important this point is to me. I have adopted as my primary epistemological goal the attainment of a personal understanding of truth to the best of my abilities. This can be considered a value that offers no exception (absolutism), which seems to imply that I hold truth-seeking as a virtue. I now see utilitarianism as a means to the end of a truthful understanding of which course of action best corresponds to the greatest good (or a more precise definition of "good" not listed here), with the understanding that utilitarianism is subjugated beneath the priority of truth-seeking.

If you accept the possibility that you would intentionally choose a course of action that results in a false understanding of something because it leads to greater perceived happiness, then you do not hold truth as a virtue. I would not pursue such a course.

[edit:] Here is a revised statement: I see a strong commitment to truth as a necessary antecedent to rationality and therefore I see it as antecedent to utilitarianism.

I don't hold truth as a virtue. I don't even hold beliefs as being inherently correct or incorrect. The map and the territory are fundamentally different. One is part of a brain, and the other is a universe.

That said, I do not think it's likely that lying like this would be a good idea. I have something to protect, and knowing enough to protect it is far more important than just being happy myself. If I send my kids to Joe's Weekend Religious Instruction Institute for Kids, it might make them nicer people who donate more to charity, but so what if they think God will tell them which charity, rather than figure it out for themselves. They're also likely to assume that God made nature right, and trying to give animals a better life than what they have in nature would be bad.

I have adopted as my primary epistemological goal the attainment of a personal understanding of truth to the best of my abilities. This can be considered a value that offers no exception (absolutism), which seems to imply that I hold truth-seeking as a virtue.

If you mean for everyone to know truth, you are already a utilitarian, albeit one with an unusual idea of utility. If you just want to know it yourself, that would make you an egoist.

The link you posted inches toward a resolution, but first some other stuff...

DanielLC wrote:I don't even hold beliefs as being inherently correct or incorrect...

They're also likely to assume that God made nature right, and trying to give animals a better life than what they have in nature would be bad.

I'm not sure if I have the full picture. Are you saying that you would avoid the (imaginary) religious school in my example, in part, because it is likely to lead you kids to adopt the belief that humans have dominion over nature and can do what they want with it (or according to some Mormon missionaries, they feel that it is their duty to God to subdue the earth). If that is the case, then you place high value on your view of animal treatment.

Here comes the link to "truth" (or the development of the most comprehensibly critical rational justifications that are thought to bring people as close as they can get to an accurate understanding of their universe). What is the nature of your high valuation of your view about animals? Either you think that your view about animals is aligned with a truthful understanding of the universe (at least to your best understanding in the Karl Popper sense) or you are not really concerned about how closely your view aligns with an accurate understanding of the universe. If you are not concerned with being aligned with an accurate understanding of the universe (what I'm calling truth or our best attempt to understand it), then why bother with denying hamburgers to yourself or your kids? In other words, if you set a goal to attain the greatest good (or anything of the sort) and you are not concerned with truth, then you can do anything and tell yourself that you achieved your goal (because truth is not very important). If you had no concern for truth, I don't think you would be concerned about the authentic cause-and-effect relationship between eating animals and disutility.

I say that goals have no authentic meaning without a commitment to truth. You cannot authentically achieve any goal if you don't have a prior commitment to truth that will be used in your evaluation of your progress toward that goal. I think you do have a commitment to truth but have not adequately contemplated the relationship between your commitment to truth and your other values (or we are not communicating due to equivocation or misinterpretation). I see a strong commitment to truth as a necessary antecedent to rationality (maybe the wording here is imprecise).

I wrote:I have adopted as my primary epistemological goal the attainment of a personal understanding of truth to the best of my abilities. This can be considered a value that offers no exception (absolutism), which seems to imply that I hold truth-seeking as a virtue.

DanielLC wrote:If you mean for everyone to know truth, you are already a utilitarian, albeit one with an unusual idea of utility. If you just want to know it yourself, that would make you an egoist.

This is the core of my original question. There are two points: truth as utility and the egoist thing.

I. I don't think this one position makes me an egoist, because such a statement implies that I use an egoist approach to all (or nearly all) morally relevant situations. You could say that my stance on this topic is egoist.

II. As for "truth as utility," perhaps I could phrase it that way, but when a person holds the value of a given thing as infinite (or nearly so), it no longer becomes part of a utilitarian equation and becomes a deontological equation. I'm not sure on this point.

The link you posted might allow for a utilitarian interpretation of my situation in #II. That link mentioned many things, some of which were plausible motivations for truth-seeking. One was related to being "wedded to success" and " It describes how you learn the Way, beginning with a desperate need to succeed." One was a counter example about "Being the lone voice of dissent." The paragraph that starts with "But part of what I like about rationality..." lists several attributes of rationality that seem incompletely explained from a psychological viewpoint (i.e., they can be expressed in terms of more fundamental experiences that are know to lead to positive reactions, such as "a sense of accomplishment or self-efficacy"), but that leads me to a much-studied topic in psychology: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the bad feeling that people get when they are presented with information that contradicts what they already believe. It has been measured many ways including the tendency of people to change what they previously stated as their objective evaluation of something. My point: there might be a utilitarian value on truth that has a basis in human biology (and psych), but it derives from the disvalue of holding mutually exclusive beliefs. The other things don't really apply to me: I am not competitive, and my obsession with logic has caused many problems over the years (long story).

I am not fully convinced about the utilitarian explanation of holding truth with such supreme priority as I do. My counterexample is that I would not be willing to take a pill to cure myself of my psychological disorder that causes me to feel bad when my actions conflict with my pre-existing, strongly-held beliefs (sense of internal consistency). At the same time, I explicitly acknowledge my willingness to release belief in old ideas when the evidence leads me in a new direction (and I have done so on some major issues). I also spend lots of time pondering philosophical topics at the expense of other activities that would be more entertaining. You could say that I hold my primary epistemological goal due to a psychological disorder (although I don't have OCD and I am high-functioning by most standards), but rationally I see it as a necessary antecedent to rationality. In an extended form: I see a strong commitment to truth as a necessary antecedent to rationality and therefore I see it as antecedent to utilitarianism. If that means I hold it as a virtue that can override utilitarianism, then so be it and let my label of "utilitarian" fall where it may.

because it is likely to lead you kids to adopt the belief that humans have dominion over nature and can do what they want with it

Kind of the opposite. If you believe that God exists, and knows what he's doing, nature is how it should be, and it's not your place to interfere. My opinion is that the world is far from perfect, and we'd better interfere or it will stay that way.

If you are not concerned with being aligned with an accurate understanding of the universe (what I'm calling truth or our best attempt to understand it), then why bother with denying hamburgers to yourself or your kids?

I am not concerned with what I know about how animals live; just with how they live. If I had the opportunity to improve their lives, but was somehow forced to forget about it afterwards, I'd do it anyway.

You cannot authentically achieve any goal if you don't have a prior commitment to truth that will be used in your evaluation of your progress toward that goal.

Knowledge is of instrumental value. It's not important in of itself. I just need it to do what really is important.

I don't strictly need to evaluate my progress either. I just need to make progress.

I. I don't think this one position makes me an egoist, because such a statement implies that I use an egoist approach to all (or nearly all) morally relevant situations. You could say that my stance on this topic is egoist.

I don't understand. Are you saying that you have values besides truth? I'm not sure what it counts as if you have some values that are only about you, and others about the universe in general.

II. As for "truth as utility," perhaps I could phrase it that way, but when a person holds the value of a given thing as infinite (or nearly so), it no longer becomes part of a utilitarian equation and becomes a deontological equation. I'm not sure on this point.

Absolute value doesn't matter much. It's relative. If you have the same values as me, but hold them each to be twice as strong, you'd do the same things. The same goes if it's a googolplex as strong.

Also, nearly infinite doesn't mean anything. A googolplex is no closer to infinity than one is.

I see a strong commitment to truth as a necessary antecedent to rationality and therefore I see it as antecedent to utilitarianism

You don't have to be rational to be a Utilitarian. It just helps a lot.

Here's Daniel Dennett stating the issue, using the example of religion to put a fine point on this issue.

I think the question of whether we should send kids to religious schools is similar to the question of whether to choose a gold army or a silver army, in Dennett's terms. I would choose the silver pieces, because doing otherwise would make me a hypocrit. It would make it hard for me to live with myself. It would make it hard for my children to trust me. Guilt, and lack of trust would undermine my happiness.

You think that truth just IS important. But I put to you this. Just imagine for a moment that truth was not important for its own sake. Suppose that facts had to be useful to be important. Would that undermine the importance of truth? The answer is that telling the truth improves trust, and prevents you from becoming a hypocrite. So then, I hope that you would at least consider the possibility that truth might be important instrumentally, but not intrinsically.