The Intellectual Arbitrariness Objection: Version 2

Suppose you had been born in Saudi Arabia. If you had been you would have been a Muslim. Suppose you had been born in India. If you had been you would have been a Hindu. Suppose you had been born... If you had been, you would have been...

Considerations like these can quite easily give rise to the thought that your current religious beliefs (e.g. that God exists, that Jesus is his son and is the savior of the world, ...) are in some sense arbitrary. You are not justified in thinking that the religious beliefs that you actually have are true and thus that every belief that is incompatible with them is false. After all, you only believe what you do because of a kind of accident of birth. This gives rise to the following principle: 

If S's religious or philosophical beliefs are such that if S had been born elsewhere and elsewhen, she wouldn't have held them, then those beliefs are produced by unreliable belief-producing mechanisms and hence have no warrant or justification for S

What should we make of the above principle?

There is quite a bit we can say about it, but I think that the most powerful thing to notice (powerful in the sense that it is the easiest to see and the most persuasive) is that if we accept the principle, then it will quickly follow that pretty much all of our important beliefs—political, moral, scientific, etc—will turn out to be unwarranted or unjustified. 

Take for example your belief that slavery is wrong. But we have good reason to think that had you been born elsewhere and elsewhen (we do not even need the elsewhen) you would not have held the belief that slavery is wrong. So, from the principle it follows, that you are not warranted or not justified in believing that slavery is wrong. The same can be said about your belief that women are of equal worth as men, your belief that the holocaust was wrong, etc. etc. 

Furthermore, note that we have yet another instance of the philosophical tar-baby. The principle itself, it will turn out, is not warranted for the person who holds it because the principle itself would not be held by that person had she been born elsewhere and elsewhen. 

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