Indoctrination, Moral Instruction and Non-Rational Beliefs

The manner in which individuals hold various nonevidentiary beliefs is critical to making any evaluative claim on an individual’s autonomy. I will argue that one may be both justified in holding nonrational beliefs of a nonevidentiary sort while being capable of leading an autonomous life. I will defend the idea that moral instruction, including explicitly religious content, may justifiably constitute a set of commitments upon which rationality and autonomy are dependent. Moral instruction, I will argue, does not have to conflict with the autonomy of persons provided that the process of instruction and learning conduces to some degree of reflection and critical thinking. I will not deny that some individuals never truly possess the capacity to flourish; that is, some will not manage to escape the psychological effects of fear and a crippled identity instilled in early childhood. Nevertheless, I will argue that individual psychology is central to our ability to assess the outcome of an upbringing purported to be indoctrinatory, particularly the role that experience and agency play in enabling us to evaluate our beliefs