Conviction can be held at no cost to anyone, so belief alone cannot be the criterion

The argument

Proponents of this account press a difficulty for the view that sincere belief is what matters. Beliefs are held by everyone, including incompatible ones, and holding one strongly enough to die for it is a measure of intensity rather than of anything else. Proponents argue that if conviction were the criterion, the title would be distributed according to how fervently people happened to feel, which is not how it is distributed and not what anyone means to be praising. The mechanism of the objection is that belief is self-contained. A conviction can be maintained in private, cost nothing, touch no one, and still be perfectly sincere. Dying for it adds a price but does not change its direction: the person has spent their life on something internal to them. Proponents argue this is why a death undertaken for a conviction that serves no one strikes most people as a waste rather than a sacrifice, and why the accounts that move us are the ones where somebody else was in the picture. Proponents add that the two elements can be separated cleanly, which is what settles the matter for them. Take a person who dies for a conviction that benefits others and one who dies for a conviction that benefits nobody. Both have equal sincerity; only the first is readily called a martyr. Now take a person who dies for others while holding no particular belief about it. Proponents argue that this case is honoured too, which means the benefit is doing the work in both comparisons and the belief is doing none.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the comparisons are rigged by the examples chosen. A death for a conviction that benefits nobody is hard to describe without making the conviction sound frivolous, and once a serious belief is substituted the intuition reverses. They add that the account cannot explain why the title is so strongly associated with persecution rather than with rescue, since persecution is precisely the case where the sufferer is singled out for what they hold. Others object that benefit to others is not independent of belief in the way claimed, because what counts as a benefit is itself settled by some conviction about what is good for people.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the premise understates what dying for a belief demonstrates. A conviction maintained at the cost of one's life is not merely intensely felt; it has been tested in the only way available, which is a fact about the belief's standing in the person's life rather than about the temperature of their feelings. [Rejecting P2] The comparison is disputed as question-begging. Describing a conviction as benefiting nobody already strips it of the significance that would make the death intelligible, so the intuition the premise reports is produced by the description rather than by the structure of the case. [Rejecting P3] Critics deny that deaths for others are honoured in the absence of any belief. Those who die rescuing strangers are called heroic rather than martyrs, which is the distinction the premise needs to erase and does not.