I think I understand Moore's Paradox a bit better now, after reading some of the comments on Less Wrong. Jimrandomh suggests:
Many people cannot distinguish between levels of indirection. To them, "I believe X" and "X" are the same thing, and therefore, reasons why it is beneficial to believe X are also reasons why X is true.
I don't think this is correct—relatively young children can understand the concept of having a false belief, which requires separate mental buckets for the map and the territory. But it points in the direction of a similar idea:
Many people may not consciously distinguish between believing something and endorsing it.
After all—"I believe in democracy" means, colloquially, that you endorse the concept of democracy, not that you believe democracy exists. The word "belief", then, has more than one meaning. We could be looking at a confused word that causes confused thinking (or maybe it just reflects pre-existing confusion).
So: in the original example, "I believe people are nicer than they are", she came up with some reasons why it would be good to believe people are nice—health benefits and such—and since she now had some warm affect on "believing people are nice", she introspected on this warm affect and concluded, "I believe people are nice". That is, she mistook the positive affect attached to the quoted belief, as signaling her belief in the proposition. At the same time, the world itself seemed like people weren't so nice. So she said, "I believe people are nicer than they are."
And that verges on being an honest mistake—sort of—since people are not taught explicitly how to know when they believe something. As in the parable of the dragon in the garage; the one who says "There is a dragon in my garage—but it's invisible", does not recognize his anticipation of seeing no dragon, as indicating that he possesses an (accurate) model with no dragon in it.
It's not as if people are trained to recognize when they believe something. It's not like they're ever taught in high school: "What it feels like to actually believe something—to have that statement in your belief pool—is that it just seems like the way the world is. You should recognize this feeling, which is actual (unquoted) belief, and distinguish it from having good feelings about a belief that you recognize as a belief (which means that it's in quote marks)."
This goes a long way toward making this real-life case of Moore's Paradox seem less alien, and providing another mechanism whereby people can be simultaneously right and wrong.
Likewise Kurige who wrote:
I believe that there is a God—and that He has instilled a sense of right and wrong in us by which we are able to evaluate the world around us. I also believe a sense of morality has been evolutionarily programmed into us—a sense of morality that is most likely a result of the formation of meta-political coalitions in Bonobo communities a very, very long time ago. These two beliefs are not contradictory, but the complexity lies in reconciling the two.
I suspect, Kurige, you have decided that you have reasons to endorse the quoted belief that God has instilled a sense of right and wrong in us. And also that you have reasons to endorse the verdict of science. They both seem like good communities to join, right? There are benefits to both sets of beliefs? You introspect and find that you feel good about both beliefs?
But you did not say:
"God instilled a sense of right and wrong in us, and also a sense of morality has been evolutionarily programmed into us. The two states of reality are not inconsistent, but the complexity lies in reconciling the two."
If you're reading this, Kurige, you should very quickly say the above out loud, so you can notice that it seems at least slightly harder to swallow—notice the subjective difference—before you go to the trouble of rerationalizing.
This is the subjective difference between having reasons to endorse two different beliefs, and your mental model of a single world, a single way-things-are.
There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.
I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.
I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.
Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.
You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."
The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.
"I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously."
I cannot conceive of how it is possible to deliberately and consciously choose to believe in something.
I grew up in a religious family. I served as a missionary for my church. I married a woman of the same religion. For most of my first 28 years I believed not only that there was a God but that he had established the church of which I and my family were all members.
But once I started examining my beliefs more closely, I realized that I was engaging in the most dishonest sort of special pleading in their favor. And then it was no longer possible to continue believing.