Im sure youve all heard the famous quote by
Voltaire.
I disagree
with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Well, actually Im sure that first sentence isnt
true, and not (just) because of your ignorance. The problem is that Voltaire never said it. (And not
just because he would have said it in French, the original quote is,
surprisingly enough, in English.) Goes to show that you shouldnt believe
everything you hear around the traps.
(If you flick through all the details on that link,
youll see that Voltaire said similar things to this, but never exactly this.
The closest is a sentence from a letter translated as Monsieur
l’abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible
for you to continue to write. This is pretty close in spirit,
but I think its a stretch to translate that as the famous quote, particularly
since it refers to defending the general right of freedom of speech rather than
the particular right to assert the particular proposition at issue, and since
it doesnt really talk about defence.)
Now theres an interesting philosophical point
behind this. Now that you know Voltaire didnt say this, do you think you could
have declined to believe that he did say it? Do you feel silly for having
formed a belief on too little evidence, or do you feel cheated by misleading
evidence? If the former, then you are committed to at least some kind of
voluntarism about belief, the thesis that what we believe is at least in part
determined by our will. Voluntarism has had a pretty poor press the last few
centuries or so, but cases like this suggest to me that a weak version of
voluntarism has to be true.
I got alerted to the fact that Voltaire didnt make
this quote from this Guardian
column by Richard Ingrams. (Scroll down to the last paragraph.) It also
says that Burke didnt say All that is necessary for the
triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. So I suppose
that I now believe that Burke didnt say that, and perhaps you do to, or at
least youve stopped believing that Burke did say it.
On the other hand, Ingrams is at best sloppy at
attributing the Voltaire quote. He says it was said by somebody
called S. G. Tallentyne, which isnt strictly speaking
true. It was said by Beatrice Hall writing under the pen name S. G. Tallentyne.
So maybe we shouldnt have trusted Ingrams on Burke.