Years ago, the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court of the United States raised numerous issues including one about beliefs and facts. Oversimplifying things for the sake of brevity, the owners of Hobby Lobby said they were opposed to abortion on religious grounds and they claimed to believe that certain forms of birth control are abortion. On this basis, they claimed that providing insurance to their employees that covered what they saw as abortion would violate their religious beliefs and impose an unreasonable burden.
As I tell my students in my ethics class, a moral issue often involves three main components. The first consists of the relevant facts. A factual matter is such that the claim being made is true or false regardless of how we think or feel about its truth. For example, the mass of an object is a factual matter. The second consists of the relevant concepts, which are often in dispute. Resolving such a dispute involves presenting and defending definitions of the key terms. In the Hobby Lobby case, a key concept is abortion. The owners of Hobby Lobby claimed that certain birth control methods are methods of abortion. This seemed to be because the owners claimed to believe that life begins at conception, and they seemed to reject the notion that pregnancy begins at implantation.
If pregnancy begins at implantation (which is the scientific consensus), then the methods in question (specifically those which prevent implantation) do not involve abortion. As such, the owners of Hobby Lobby would have held factual incorrect beliefs regarding these methods of birth control, and this would undercut their moral position. If their moral opposition is based on a factual error, it would seem to be unfounded.
However, if pregnancy begins at conception (which is not the scientific consensus), then these methods do involve abortion. In this case, the owners of Hobby Lobby would have been factually correct. But the question would remain as to whether their moral claims were correct. After all, a person can be right about the facts but be wrong about the morality, which leads to the third component, that of morality.
Obviously, a moral issue always has a moral component. In this case, the moral issue is whether abortion is morally wrong. The owners of Hobby Lobby claimed to believe this—but belief does not entail a claim is true. People often sincerely believe false claims. Fortunately for the owners of Hobby Lobby, they did not need to argue their moral beliefs were correct or even plausible—they just had to convince the court that they believed what they claim to believe. Given the context, this is not unreasonable—after all, the issue addressed by the court was not whether abortion is morally wrong.
The owners of Hobby Lobby did not even need to argue for their factual claims and their concepts. They did not need to make the case that pregnancy occurs at conception and that the methods in question cause abortions. Apparently, they merely needed to establish that they believe what they claim to believe. This raises an interesting general issue that goes beyond the specific Hobby Lobby case: should facts matter when considering cases involving value beliefs?
On the one hand, it can be argued that the facts should not matter—at least in the sense of requiring that the beliefs in question be proven. This can be based on practicality: religious beliefs would be difficult to prove, and this could be seen as imposing an impossible burden on those bringing legal cases involving their values. Also, legal cases about such beliefs are not about their truth but about the right to hold such beliefs.
On the other hand, it can be argued that facts do matter—especially when the beliefs have an impact on others. Returning to Hobby Lobby, the reasoning seems to have been that the owners should not be required to follow the law because they are opposed to abortion and they believe that the birth control methods cause abortions. If it is claimed that it does not matter whether the owners are right or wrong about actual claims, this establishes the general principle that the truth of the claims does not matter in such contexts. This raises the question of how far this principle should extend.
In the Hobby Lobby case, to say that the facts are not relevant might not seem serious. After all, the question of when life begins is one that is disputed and the Hobby Lobby owners could engage in a conceptual dispute over the definition of “abortion.” But suppose we accepted the principle that the facts do not matter, only the sincerity. This would entail that if the owners of Hobby Lobby claimed that paying women the same as men caused abortions, then all that would matter would be the sincerity of their beliefs. The fact that such a claim is obviously false and absurd would not matter. Once the principle that truth is irrelevant is accepted, then truth is irrelevant. If the owners could show they sincerely believed that equal pay for women would cause abortions, then the facts would not matter. One could argue that such absurd claims would not pass muster but a cynical person might point out that someone would just need to appear adequately sincere.
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