First, what is intellectual cowardice? Secondly, why is it bad? And, thirdly, how does it actually manifest itself? Defining intellectual cowardice is the easiest of these three tasks, and so I will start with that. To say that someone is demonstrating intellectual cowardice is to say that they are simultaneously putting forward a claim as a claim and refusing to stand by it. For example, a scientist could demonstrate intellectual cowardice by presenting an empirical generalization on the basis of data but refusing to stand by that generalization as a good one. Intellectual cowardice is motivated by a fear of being shown to be wrong, hence its name, but at the same time desiring to be recognized for intellectual accomplishments. This leads to the somewhat contradictory practice of putting forward claims in one context, but at the same time adopting the position that the claim is not necessarily worth standing by. This allows them to accept any compliments that come their way as a result of the quality of their claim, but at the same time dismiss any criticism of it as reflecting badly on them, because they refuse to stand by it.
Shall we consider intellectual cowardice as a sin? Obviously the way it has been described makes it seem like being an intellectual coward is a bad thing- but just because we can cast it in a negative light doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be rejected. After all, fear can be appropriate in some contexts. And isn’t what really matters is the claim(s) which are being made? Why should we care about the attitudes adopted towards those claims by the people putting them forward? In a sense this is right, in an ideal world all that matters is the claim(s), and the people behind them are irrelevant; we judge the claims, not the people. But this is not an ideal world, and unfortunately we don’t have an infinite and perfect capacity with which to evaluate claims. Wasting our time with inferior claims can greatly slow down our ability to make progress. More disastrously, is the effect of a claim revealed to be flawed, which leads people to reject similar claims. That can be a real problem if some of those similar claims are far superior to the flawed claim.
It is worrying about being wrong that makes us explore all the consequences of our claims and how they stand up in comparison to variations on them, to leave none of their details unexamined, so that they can be the best claims that we can make when we actually put them forward. Someone who isn’t worried about being in error isn’t bound by this constraint. Instead, they are free to put forward whatever claims satisfy their pragmatic desires, which are usually for intellectual recognition. This results in pandering to popular ideas, constructing claims so that they will be maximally acceptable to the sensibilities of those who will judge them, or in constructing claims purely to be controversial, so that those claims will receive wider attention simply because so many will wish to object to them. Essentially, neither process results in the best possible claim(s).
However, I doubt that if we confronted someone who was being an intellectual coward about ethics in this way, that they would admit it. Perhaps they might argue that their ethical claims are still relevant because many people share the same intuitions as they do, and that in some way the claims they are making are thus “right” for a large number of people. But the entire edifice rests of the idea that somehow deduction from intuitions to specific ethical claims, or the coherence of ethical beliefs, matters. That, I believe, is an assumption that is completely without motivation given the belief that there is no absolute “right” answer when it comes to ethics. If we believe that there is a right answer then clearly coherence and incoherence matter because of true preservation and entailment; incoherence implies that some of the claims involved must be in error, possibly, the very claim that we are trying to establish, and so in striving for the truth we attempt to eliminate incoherence. But when truth doesn’t matter incoherence has no ill-effects. Certainly there are contradictions buried within many religious belief systems (the problem of evil, for example), and even if those contradictions can be somehow ironed out by dedicated theologians it is clear that most of the religious approach matters naively, such that their beliefs contain actual contradictions. Clearly, these contradictions do them no harm.
Of course, it is true that from contradictions anything can be derived, and thus that we cannot entertain a contradiction when we are attempting to derive a truth. But this isn’t a problem if there aren’t absolute truths in ethics, because we don’t attempt to derive truths from premises that aren’t themselves believed to be true. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from stomping their foot and simply insisting that coherence is required, even if nothing necessitates that coherence. But if nothing necessitates that coherence then it is simply an opinion, and if they wish to be intellectually honest they should preface their claims in ethics with a statement noting that they proceed on the basis of coherence despite the fact that they have no reason for doing so besides personal preference. Obviously doing this would result in people not really taking their claims seriously, but the omission of such a disclaimer is intellectually dishonest, since caring about coherence strongly implies the belief that claims can be true or false in this domain without it. And hopefully pointing out that fact would indicate to those who are intellectual cowards in this way that they are doing something wrong, even if it doesn’t exactly reveal the nature of the error.
