I take no position on whether or not Thomas Merton was assassinated by the CIA. Some say he was. I neither affirm nor deny. I suspend judgment on a question about which I have no need to have an opinion. To investigate the matter properly would take me too far afield, and for no good reason. This is not to say that you may not have a good reason.
On some questions the prudent course is to suspend judgment. But not on all. On matters pertaining to one’s personal welfare in this life and beyond, it would be highly imprudent to take no position. For in those matters we have a stake in the outcome.
For example: Do we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? The question is not merely theoretical. The intellectually honest answer is that no one knows. There are arguments on both sides, good arguments that cannot be dismissed out of hand. A good argument, as I use the phrase, needn’t be rationally coercive or philosophically dispositive. No one knows, but many are the beliefs. I take it for granted that belief, even reasoned belief, is not knowledge.
Suppose you exercise doxastic due diligence and dig deep into the mass of considerations for and against personal survival of death. Suppose the arguments cancel out, or seem to you to cancel out after the exercise of said diligence. Should you then suspend judgment and rest in doxastic equipoise? Not by my lights. That would be highly imprudent. It is here that “the will comes into it” as I like to say. What does that mean?
It means that you must decide what you will believe and thus how you will live and act. I won’t pause to explore the belief-action link except to say that what we truly believe is manifested in our actions, and that how we act shows what we truly believe. Why must you decide? Because no one knows the answer, and because it would be imprudent not to take a position on the question, assuming you care about your future well-being.
I have made two main points.
The first is that while suspension of judgment is permissible and often advisable, it is in some cases prudentially irrational. While it would be theoretically rational to suspend judgment on the survival question should the arguments pro et contra cancel out, it would not be prudentially rational. We are not disembodied transcendental spectators but ‘seated in life’ possessing as we do a Sitz im Leben in Wilhelm Dilthey’s phrase. Hence the rationality appropriate to our situated predicament cannot be mere theoretical rationality.
The second point follows from the first. Given that there are situations in which the reasons for and against cancel out, it would be prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.