Conspiracy theories during COVID-19

By Dr David Coady, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies , University of Tasmania

When Professor Clive Hamilton recently suggested that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory he was careful to insist that he was putting forward an ‘accident hypothesis’, rather than a ‘conspiracy theory’.

This is rather disingenuous of him, since if his hypothesis of an accidental laboratory leak is correct, then there has certainly been a conspiracy by Chinese authorities to cover up the accident. Why does Hamilton deny that he is putting forward a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that he appears to be doing just that?

The answer of course is that conspiracy theories have had a bad reputation, ever since the philosopher Sir Karl Popper first popularised the expression. To characterise a theory as a conspiracy theory is to imply that it is false and that anyone who believes it, or wants to investigate whether it’s true, is irrational.

On the face of it, this is hard to understand. After all, people do conspire. That is, they engage in secretive or deceitful behaviour that is illegal or morally questionable. Conspiracy is common in all cultures throughout history, and it has always been particularly prevalent in politics. Most people conspire some of the time, and some people (e.g. spies) conspire almost all the time.

Since people conspire, there can’t be anything wrong with believing they conspire, thus there can’t be anything wrong with believing conspiracy theories. Thinking of conspiracy theories as characteristically false and irrational is like thinking of scientific theories in this way. It is as if we thought of phrenology as a paradigmatic scientific theory.

Conspiracy theories, like scientific theories, and virtually any other category of theory, are sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes rational, sometimes not.

The literature on conspiracy theories contains a wide array of mutually contradictory definitions. Although the term ‘conspiracy theory’ lacks any fixed meaning, it does serve a fixed function. It serves the same function the word ‘heresy’ served in medieval Europe; that of stigmatising people with beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned orthodoxies of the time and place in question.

Whenever we use the term ‘conspiracy theory’ (or related terms such as ‘conspiracism’, and ‘conspiracist ideation’) pejoratively we’re implying, perhaps unintentionally, that there is something wrong with believing in conspiracies or wanting to investigate whether they’re occurring.

This rhetoric silences the victims of conspiracy, and those who (rightly or wrongly) suspect that conspiracies are occurring, and it herds respectable opinion in ways that make it more likely that powerful interests will be able to get away with conspiracies.

So one bad effect of the current use of these terms is that they make it is easier for conspiracy to thrive at the expense of openness. Another bad effect is that it is an injustice to people whose beliefs are characterised as conspiracy theories. This is what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls ‘testimonial injustice’. When someone asserts that a conspiracy has occurred (especially when powerful people or institutions are involved) that person’s word is inevitably given less credence because of an irrational prejudice produced by the pejorative connotations of these terms.

There are of course conspiracy theories about COVID-19 which should be given no credence. The belief that governments are covering up a link between COVID-19 and 5G mobile phone networks is false, irrational, and probably harmful and it happens to be a conspiracy theory. But it is not false, irrational or harmful because it’s a conspiracy theory.

To dismiss it as a conspiracy theory is to dismiss it for the wrong reason, and it gives proponents of the theory an easy reply. After all many well-established truths were once derided as conspiracy theories. Furthermore it is not as if there have never been conspiracies to spread deadly diseases.

Is Professor Hamilton’s COVID-19 conspiracy theory true? I have no idea. But there is one thing I’m sure of. The fact that it’s a conspiracy theory doesn’t make it less likely to be true. •

Conspiracy theories, like scientific theories, and virtually any other category of theory, are sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes rational, sometimes not.