Everyone is entitled to their own opinion?

hi everybody welcome back to the lecture videos for philosophy 115 critical thinking here at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro my name is dr. Adam Rosenfeld um so today in this lecture video I want to talk a little bit about this phrase everyone's entitled to their own opinion sometimes we hear it as everybody's got a right to their own opinion by now you've all had an opportunity to read that piece by Jamie white called the right to your opinion and we've also had a discussion board where everybody had a chance not only to pipe up and say what they thought this phrase everybody's entitled their own opinion is supposed to mean but also whether we think it's true depending on how we're interpreting it and that was a great discussion I'd like to kind of summarize a lot of what I saw in that discussion and kind of put a bow on this so that hopefully we can move past this and begin to open up our first unit of this course about arguments so again our big question of the day concerns this phrase everyone's entitled to their own opinion I've heard it I'm sure you've heard it maybe you've used this phrase before I hear it almost daily in conversation lots of people say this is it true and maybe before we address this question of whether it's true or not we have to figure out what it's supposed to mean because like how can I tell whether or not something is true without knowing how I'm supposed to interpret it there are three major interpretive options that I want to explore in this video there might be some other subtle variations on these but I think these cover most of the ground of what people might mean when they're saying everyone's entitled their own opinion the first of these options is something that I'm going to call the first amendment interpretation the second one is gonna be something that I'll call the all beliefs are equally good interpretation and the third option is going to be something that will call the non literal interpretation where what it is that everyone's entitled their own opinion is supposed to mean is actually something radically different than what the words of that sentence might literally mean so let's take a look at this first amendment interpretation first so it's worth pointing out that at least four citizens of the United States it is true that have a First Amendment right that protects free speech and maybe we want to say something like yeah our First Amendment rights that protect free speech they also cover our right to our opinion because we're not just thinking about the right to having a belief or having an opinion but we're thinking about a right to express that opinion but what is that right actually guarantee is what does it protect it's worth pointing out that the First Amendment to the Constitution only really protects us from government interference with speech not just speech but a whole cluster of things that all kind of get it kind of glommed together and called free speech freedom of press freedom of religion freedom of assembly freedom of petition and freedom of speech all of these are protected from government interference and even there there are some notable exceptions there's plenty of judicial precedent identifying that threats to national security are the sorts of things that are not protected by the First Amendment likewise threats to public safety like yelling fire in a crowded theater aren't the sorts of things that are protected by the First Amendment furthermore you can be punished after the fact for plenty of forms of speech like libel and slander these are those sorts of things that you can be sued for and obscenity there's also like judicial precedent identifying that obscene speech isn't the sort of thing that's protected by the First Amendment although there's plenty of debate as to what's going to count as obscene so while there are some exceptions to this I think the real juicy bit here the real important thing to focus on the real clear point of this is that the First Amendment only really protects me from government interference and this doesn't really seem to match the context in which I typically tend to hear people say that they're entitled to their own opinion or that they have a right to therapy it's not when government agents are knocking down their door and threatening to arrest them that they say I have a right to their to my opinion they seem to somehow think that it's relevant to bring this up in casual conversation at this point I can imagine some proponents of this First Amendment interpretation saying something like yeah that's actually kind of maybe a thinner version of what I meant what I actually mean is not that there's a legal constitutional right to free speech but there's a kind of like in that legal constitutional right is in term based on some kind of per natural right that doesn't just protect me from governmental interference but from kind of interference from anybody not just government agents but people that I might meet on the street and have a conversation with as well but here too I think that there's something just a little bit mismatched and I think we can get a clue into kind of untangling this by looking at a tool that Jamie Whyte brings to this analysis he asked us to consider well if we want to claim some sort of right it seems like that only makes sense if there's some sort of concomitant duty on the part of others to respect that right we might also frame this by way of a question like what does it mean to violate this suppose it right for example if I have a right to life then this means that others have a duty to not kill me that's the duty that is conferred upon others in order to respect my right to life there's a really clear case of what it would mean to violate my right to life and a really clear idea of what it is that that right protects me from um likewise we might think about the First Amendment right as we were just discussing it and kind of like the literal legal constitutional sense what does that protect me from what would it mean to violate that right well if government force is used to silence me then it seems as if we have a plausible case for a violation of my First Amendment right okay so what does that mean for kind of like a more robust sense of our right to one's opinion what kinds of duties do these confer upon us in order to respect other people's right to their opinion what would it mean to violate that right this is usually the point in the conversation where folks will point out that nobody can make them change their mind that perhaps this is what it means to have a right to their opinion is that nothing that I can do can force them to change their beliefs but perhaps we can see here that this seems to be a meaningless right if it's impossible to violate that right if it's impossible for me to force somebody to believe something that they don't want to believe maybe we don't think that that's impossible maybe we recognize that like look you can brainwash people that would be forcing somebody to change their beliefs but there we run into the kind of the same problem that we saw with the legal First Amendment right where it's just perhaps true that it's wrong to brainwash people that there's some kind of right that other people have that gives us a duty to not brainwash them but it just doesn't seem relevant to the context in which you hear this in casual conversation nobody says hey everybody's entitled to their own opinion when government agents are trying to arrest them you don't usually hear it when what they really mean is hey don't brainwash me bro so what sorts of duties are required in order for us to have a right to our own opinion in the sense that people seem to mean when they say it um maybe they mean that I have a duty to agree with other people's opinions but right away we can see that that's probably not going to work after all if you have a right to your opinions then I also have a right to my opinion all we're saying everybody has a right to their opinion and my opinion might very well be that your opinion is no good and it's false and that it should be disagreed with right so no it doesn't seem possible that we could all have a right to our opinions if that right requires that other people agree with us maybe we mean not that you have to agree with other people in order to respect their right to their opinion but you have a duty not to publicly criticize their opinions but again this seems like it falls apart pretty quickly after all we were just talking about freedom of speech this whole conversation is under the rubric of kind of like a First Amendment interpretation of what it means to have a right to your opinion and if we do think that there is either illegal or constitutional or a natural right to free speech I not only have a right to disagree with your opinions but I have a right to express that disagreement as well so again if we think that we have some sort of right to free speech in addition to a right to free belief then no that can't possibly mean that each of us has a duty to refrain from publicly disagreeing or criticizing other people's opinions maybe the duty that we have in mind here is a duty to not try to change other people's minds you might say that okay you can disagree with other people's opinions and still respect their right to their opinion you can even publicly disagree and publicly criticize their opinions while still respecting their opinions their right to their own opinions but you can't try to change their mind because that gets a little bit too close to brainwashing that gets a little bit too close to trying to force them to think a particular way um I gotta be honest this one just doesn't really seem like it lands either and that's mostly because it seems pretty clear that I have all kinds of duties that involve trying to change people's minds maybe some of these duties are social duties maybe some of them are familial duties or duties of friendship if I see a good friend of mine about to step into traffic and they appear to believe that it's safe for them to cross the street when in fact I'm looking at the scene and I'm thinking to myself like no it's not safe to cross the street it seems like I actually have a duty to not just disagree not just publicly disagree and publicly criticize their belief to other people but to try to change their mind if somebody's walking around with spinach from their teeth but they believe that they don't have spinach in their teeth if they believe that there's it burns up when there's a bridge down it seems like if I care about them at all I have a duty to tell them that I'm that I think they're wrong to try to change their mind maybe you have a friend who seems to be of the opinion that their behavior is acceptable when in fact they're acting like a jerk and everybody hates them again seems like I have a duty insofar as I care about this person to not just disagree to not just publicly disagree but to actually try to change their mind so none of these duties while they do seem relevant to the context of casual conversation with people in which we encounter a disagreement none of those duties actually seems to obtain so like we're still left with some kind of lack of clarity as to what this suppose that right to one's opinion means at this point I think it's safe to say that we've explored this interpretive Avenue well enough to suspect that the senses in which it's true that we have something kind of like a First Amendment right protecting a right to our own opinion protection from interference through government force or protection from brainwashing these sorts of things which are like maybe true rights they just don't seem relevant to the context in which you usually hear people say that everybody's got a right to their own opinion and the sorts of understandings of this right that give us duties that do seem relevant to that context something like I have a duty to agree with your opinion or I have a duty to not publicly disagree with your opinion or a duty to not try to change your mind while those are relevant they just don't seem to be true so let's move on to this second possible interpretation which I've called the all beliefs are equally good interpretation of what it means to say that everybody's got a right to their own opinion I should probably start off by saying that my intuition on this point is that this is just clearly not true but perhaps I need to be a little bit more careful right I need to perhaps offer reasons for why I think this is clearly not true I need to try to understand what people mean when they say something like all beliefs are equally good after all there were even some posts on our discussion board that I think gave some shades of this all beliefs are equally good sort of position so what's going on there well I think that there's one potential confusion in talking as if we think that all beliefs are equally good that probably needs to be attended to and that's a possible confusion between whether or not something seems true to you and whether it is true for you some folks seem to be saying that like the mere fact that I believe something makes that a good belief for me to have but I don't think that that's the case the mere fact that I believe something only tells me that that belief is mine it doesn't tell me whether that belief is true it doesn't tell me whether that belief is justified or a good belief for example it seems to flat-earthers that the earth is flat does that mean that the earth is flat for them that seems kind of difficult to believe right are we suggesting that they get a completely different or I believe that the earth is round and so for me there at the town but for them the earth is flat well how many earths are they're here is there a flat earth that the flat earther lives on and around earth that the round earthers get to live on or is it the case that there's one planet it's called Earth it's got a particular shape and there seems to be some sort of disagreements about what that shape is similarly I sometimes get the impression from folks that by pointing to the mere fact of disagreement on some point like for example the shape of the earth we're trying to indicate that there is no truth of the matter just because people disagree but again the mere fact of disagreement only tells me that people disagree it doesn't tell me why they're disagreeing and it doesn't tell me which of those opinions are better or worse or equal to any of the others it's entirely possible that the disagreement exists because one person believes something that's true and another person believes something that's false and that's why they disagree so maybe you're thinking here like wait hold on a minute Adam are you saying that like true beliefs are better than false beliefs and yeah that's what I'm saying true beliefs are better than false beliefs this seems to be what it means to say that you believe something that you think that it's true beliefs aim at truth and all things being equal a true belief seems to be better than a false one this brings us to a whole class of statements that I think I can feel pretty comfortable saying are bad opinions to hold because they can't possibly be true we call these kinds of statements self contradictory statements there's a logical principle that's fairly robust that usually gets referred to as the law of non-contradiction and that principle says that a and not a can't be true at the same time and in the same respect for example let's take a statement like the following adam is alive and not alive that statement is definitely false there is no way that it could possibly be true and if we think that beliefs aim at truth then a belief like Adam is alive and not alive at the same time in the same respect that's a bad belief because it can't possibly be true this is because any statement of the form a and B for example Adam is alive and not I can only be true if both a and B are true this is just what the concept and means whenever Adam is alive is true Adam is not alive has to be false that's just what the concept not means and whenever Adam is not alive is true then Adam is alive has to be false again because that's just what the concept not means it's just not possible for Adam to be both alive and not alive at the same time and in the same respect and that's why this statement has to be false one interesting thing here is that I don't even have to know whether Adam is alive or not alive to know that Adam is alive and is not alive is definitely false and that I shouldn't believe it regardless of whether Adam is alive or not alive this statement can't be true because it contradicts itself we might even go a step farther to say not only is it the sort of thing that has to be false but that it's an incoherent belief now observant students would have noticed that there are two qualifications that come with this principle of non-contradiction a and not a can't both be true at the same time and at the same respect let's take a look at those two qualifications first at the same time this is just a recognition that things can change let's say that today it's true that Adam is alive but tomorrow morning Adam gets hit by a bus and he dies and as of that point it's no longer true that he's alive it's now true that he's not alive have we somehow like magically broken the law of non-contradiction here no because the law of non-contradiction says that things can't both be the case and not be the case at the same time at no point in time is that I'm gonna be both alive and not alive even though he might be alive at one point in time and not alive at another point in time whoa wait a minute though not so fast you might be thinking to yourself let's say that Adam gets hit by this bus and sustains a traumatic brain injury and ends up brain-dead so he's alive but also he's not alive well this brings us to that second qualification in the same respect this amounts to a recognition that we can use words in more than one way so let's say Adam is brain dead and a persistent vegetative state after the bus accident well what do we mean when we say that he's alive perhaps we mean his body is alive his heart is beating his lungs are operating and there's some brain stem activity that's regulating other sorts of activities that are going on in his body so Adam is alive in the sense that his body is alive well what do we mean when we say that he's not alive well it seems like maybe we mean something like the person that we know and love as Adam on the basis of like the catastrophic brain injury that we're looking at here is gone and seemingly not coming back so in that sense while this body is alive it's not really Adam anymore and so Adam is not alive so this persistent vegetative state that Adams in doesn't lead to some sort of violation of the law of non-contradiction because I'm using alive in more than one sense here in more than one respect so long as alive means the same thing when I say he is alive and not alive then he can't be both alive and not alive at the same time the only way that I can make it appear that I've violated that is if I'm changing up what alive means in the middle of the sentence likewise we might play this little game when we say Adam is in the frame but no now Adam is out of the frame and we say like yeah but not at the same time and then some he goes what about this what about now Adam is both in the frame and not in the frame but again it seems like we're just being sloppy with our terminology here if we can just pick one thing that we mean every time we say in the frame then Adams going to either be in the frame or not in the frame he can't be both at the same time and in fact we'll finally he can't be he can't be neither as well if let's say in the frame means his head is completely in the frame then this is not in the frame right it's not both it's just not in the frame if in the frame means at least one part of his head is in the frame then this is going to count as in the frame but the only way that I can make it even up here that he's both in the frame and not in the frame at the scene time is if I change up what it means when I say in the frame in the middle of the sentence this reveals this way in which consistency appears to be a clear virtue of belief that at the very least a belief should be internally consistent with itself it shouldn't contradict itself if it's going to be coherent if it's going to be the sort of thing that could possibly be true but furthermore we can also identify some kind of broader cases where I'm not saying a and not a at the same time and in the same respect all in one sentence but perhaps today I say a and tomorrow I say the exact opposite I say not a and you identified that like hold on just a second yesterday you said a today you're saying not a those two things can't both be true at the same time one of them is gonna have to be false one of them is going to have to be something that you get rid of now and this just indicates that there are some beliefs that are not worth holding on to this kind of sticks with this point that we're trying to articulate here which is that it does make sense to say that there are some beliefs that are better than other beliefs namely beliefs that are coherent are better than beliefs that are incoherent this is the point in the conversation where frequently I'll see folks raise an objection that's based on a distinction that they were taught when they were younger in school in fact this is a distinction that I was taught when I was younger in school this is a supposed distinction between facts and opinions full disclosure I think that this is a terrible distinction I wish they would stop teaching it it makes my job harder it makes it the prospect of thinking critically more difficult I think that this is not a distinction that makes a whole lot of sense but we got to take a little stop for just a moment and examine what's going on there so the substance of this distinction seems to be that facts are the sorts of things that can be true or false whereas opinions are not the sorts of things that could be true or false there's just no truth value whatsoever to an opinion the major difficulty that I have with this is that I'm not ever really clear on what sorts of statements the people who are making this distinction think count as opinions let's start with an opinion like this the opinion of the flat earther that the earth is flat if it's true that opinions aren't the sort of thing that can be true or false then the opinion the earth is flat is not true it's not false the opinion of the earth it's not flat not true not false maybe this is what we mean when we say like all opinions are equally good except that this doesn't really seem to be the case with an opinion like the earth is flat it does seem to be the case that there is a truth of the matter I might even be really cautious here and say it's not absolutely clear what the truth of the matter is some people believe that the earth is flat some people believe that the earth it's not flat and we're not sure which one is true but even if I don't know which one is true that doesn't necessarily mean that there's just no truth of the matter just that we haven't figured it out yet but maybe I'm being unfair to this distinction maybe folks who would make a distinction between facts and opinions in this way where facts have truth values and opinions don't have truth values they would say something like the earth is flat is a fact it happens to be a false fact um this is the sort of thing that's provable I'd like to stop them for a moment and wonder like what do you mean by provable because if you've ever met and conversed with a flat earther you'll recognize that they can be pretty resistant to the sort of proof that you offer even if that proof seems incontrovertible as long as you're able to say something like that proof is the product of some conspiracy to get me to believe that the earth is round when it's not can be kind of difficult to overcome so while I'm not sure what it means to prove that the earth is not flat um I'll grant that this is not the sort of thing that people who make a distinction between facts and opinions are thinking of they might think this is a fact and that's why Adam and everybody else seems to think that there's a truth value to whether or not the earth is flat maybe the kinds of statements that we're looking at are more like this their statements like slavery is unjust maybe that's the sort of thing that's not a fact but it's just an opinion and therefore has no truth value so an opinion like slavery is unjust is not true or false and the opposite opinion like slavery is just also not true or false and therefore they're both equally good maybe this is what we mean when we say that all opinions are equally good but again this one just doesn't really seem plausible it does not implausible that the opinion that slavery is just is as good as the opinion that slavery is unjust even if I were to concede that there's no proof one way or another incontrovertible proof as to whether or not slavery is just or unjust that doesn't mean that there isn't evidence one way or the other or that there aren't good reasons to believe that slavery is unjust rather than slavery is just and for the record we should be careful that anybody who's saying that the opinion that slavery is unjust is just as good as the opinion that slavery is just because there's just no truth of the matter to either of those statements needs to be careful that they're not contradicting themselves by also believing other statements like oh I don't know you should respect other people's rights to their opinion right if that's the sort of thing that is just mere opinion then it seems like the opinion that you should not respect people's right to their opinion is just as good as the opinion that you should respect people's right to their opinion right both of these sort of ideas are appealing to some sort of principle of Liberty either Liberty to say and think what you want or Liberty to be free from enslavement and if we're gonna make that appeal to Liberty when it comes to free speech but somehow say that there's just no truth of the matter when it comes to an issue like slavery freedom of your body then it seems like there's some inconsistency some incoherence in those positions some folks might point out that at various points throughout human history and even today in various parts of the globe there are people who disagree with the notion that slavery is unjust but we've been here before the mere fact that they disagree about this doesn't prove one way or the other what the truth of the matter about slavery is anybody who's thinking to themselves that like in a time where people believed that slavery was okay then in that time slavery was in fact just needs to go back and attend to that distinction that we made before between what seems true to somebody versus what is true for them I don't see any reason why we might not suspect that even though it took humans at pressingly long amount of time to figure this out slavery has in fact always been unjust it's just that we didn't always realize it or recognize it a statement like slavery is unjust is what appears to be a moral claim and my sense is that those who tend to make a distinction between facts and opinions where facts have truth values and opinions are not the sorts of things that have truth values they do have a tendency to try to classify moral claims as mere opinions and not facts but hopefully these preceding remarks that I just made give us a sense that on close inspection this is actually a really difficult position to hold to hold the position that slavery is unjust is just not the sort of statement that has a truth value to it again we can concede that we don't have proof one way or the other that we don't know exactly what the truth value of slavery is unjust is but that doesn't mean the same thing as there just is no truth value one way or the other that actually seems like a very difficult claim to swallow but perhaps the proponent of this distinction between facts and opinions will concede this and say like okay the earth is flat that's a fact and you know what slavery is unjust we'll let that one go as well that's the sort of statement that can be a fact as well here are the sorts of statements that I have in mind when I think about opinions they're the sorts of statements that give expressions of taste a statement perhaps like this the first Back to the Future movie is the best movie in the whole trilogy perhaps this sort of statement seems tempting as a mere opinion with no truth value to it because it's even more difficult to discern than some of the other cases like whether the earth is flat or whether slavery is unjust but I'd like to before we explore that entertain the possibility that when somebody says the first Back to the Future movie is the best of the trilogy or when somebody says chocolate ice cream is the best ice cream flavor that maybe this isn't exactly what they mean maybe what they mean to say is I like the first Back to the Future movie better than the other Back to the Future movies or I like chocolate ice cream more than I like other kinds of ice creams if that's what somebody actually means when they say the first Back to the Future movie it's the best or chocolate ice cream it's the best then it here's that what they mean to say is a fact it's the sort of thing that can be true or false if they're lying about how they feel about back to the future or chocolate ice cream and what they're saying is false if they're telling the truth about what they like the most then what they're saying is true it is the sort of thing that can be true or false so with that slight reinterpretation of an expression of taste we can see that maybe what's going on here is I'm making a factual description of my own feelings and therefore this kind of idea of a statement that's a mere opinion that has no truth value to it again seems to kind of like evaporate what sorts of statements are we really talking about here but then again say I confront the person who says that the first Back to the Future movie is the best of the trilogy and I say do you mean to say that you like it the most and they say no that's not what I mean I mean it's actually the best maybe then we're in territory where we would say like okay there's just no truth of the matter as to what the best movie in a trilogy is all opinions are equally good again that just seems like it's too much of a stretch for starters I'd like to suggest that those who disagree about what the best movie is or what the best ice cream flavor is might be using the term best best movie or best ice cream flavor in different ways than other people the disagreement might actually be a product of us using terms in more than one way if you and I could agree what the criteria for best movie were or if we could agree about what the best criteria for best ice cream are say we said the best ice cream is the one that sells the most if we can agree about what best means there then it seems like there's gonna be a truth of the matter when it comes to best movie or best ice cream flavor you know for those who might be a little bit skeptical about there being a truth of the matter when it comes to aesthetic value like best movie or best ice cream flavor it seems like those folks would still be in a position where they might have to admit that there are better and worse opinions when it comes to what the best movie is consider this prospect that there's one person who says the Back to the Future is the best of the trilogy and another person who says that it's not the first of those people is the late American movie critic Roger Ebert somebody who spent a lifetime studying film understanding its history and its vocabulary and all the semiotics of telling stories with like moving pictures and sound and when he tells us that he believes that the first Back to the Future movie is the best of the trilogy he gives us all kinds of very very compelling reasons for why that's the case lays out what it means to be the best movie lays out why it is that the first of those movie the first movie in that trilogy satisfies those criteria better than all the rest and then we turn to the second person who says no it's not the best movie in the trilogy and they confess that they've never seen any of the Back to the Future movies that they were playing once but they slept through the movies and they didn't really watch them and I don't know they've just got a gut feeling that the first Back to the Future movie isn't as good as the third are those two opinions equally good we can dispense with this question of whether one of them is true or the other one is false and still seemingly be in this position where it seems just silly to say that the opinion of somebody who hasn't seen a movie is just as good as the opinion of somebody who has seen the movie when the opinion in question has to do with how good the movie is so again I find this to be a difficult and potentially problematic distinction between so-called facts and opinions where facts of truth values and opinions don't mostly because it's just not clear what these opinions that don't have truth values are supposed to be and to the extent that folks want to say that facts are the sorts of things that can be proven whereas opinions are not the sorts of things that can be proven I'm really really concerned and worried that we're blurring over this distinction that we made earlier this recognition that the mere fact that we don't know what the truth of the matter is doesn't mean that there just isn't any truth of the matter if we're gonna say that there's no available proof on what the truth of some statement is therefore there is no truth it seems like we're just assuming there that there's no such thing as a truth that we don't know yet and that just seems kind of irresponsible and a little bit arrogant now I do think a distinction between sentences that have truth values and sentences that don't is a valuable one we're actually going to hit this in an upcoming lesson we're going to talk about complete sentences that can be true or false and complete sentences that can't possibly be true or false but it's not on this basis of a distinction between fact and opinion this actually seems to be a really messy kind of poorly thought-out distinction and I would like to recommend that we not make this any more complicated than it needs to be toward that end I'd suggest that we think of opinions like this opinions or beliefs and we can use those words interchangeably are the things that aim at truth they're the things that we think are true that's what it means to have an opinion is to think that something is true my opinions might be true they might be false am i believing that something is true is not the sort of thing that makes it true it's not the sort of thing that makes it false I don't really see that there's any reason to insist that any of those statements are the sorts of things that can't be true or false at all and it certainly seems like it's gotten less no closer to believing that all beliefs or all opinions are equally good but what this does reveal is this whole kind of strange and mushy middle ground where we don't exactly have incontrovertible proof one way or the other on some issue we did say that beliefs aim at truth and that therefore a true belief is all things being equal better than a false belief and say self contradictory statements that can't possibly be true or obviously false and obviously bad beliefs but this doesn't really tell us what we do when we don't have proof when we're not sure what the truth of some matter is how do we determine which beliefs are better and which ones are worse in the absence of knowing what the truth is one way that we can address this and I'll point out by the way that this is the big argumentative move in this video lecture so pay close attention this is this is the little the little jump in logic that I'm arguing for is to say that we can have a proxy for truth in justification we might think of this in terms of what we mean when we say that somebody has a right or an entitlement in the same that we think that that entitlement needs to be earned somehow say for example that your phone is sitting on the desk and I come up and I pick it up and I say it's in my possession now so it's mine I have a property right to this phone you might counter that like no I don't have a property right to this phone and my mere possession doesn't give me that property right that in fact what I need to do is earn their right to that phone I need to give you money or I need to give you some sort of comparable good or service to the phone or maybe you have to give it to me as a gift in order for me to have an entitlement to that phone as my property and what we're working with here is a suggestion that one's entitlement to one's opinion might work in a similar sort of way such that we would say that in order to be entitled you have to have some sort of a justification for holding that opinion just like you would need some sort of justification for possessing a piece of property now the kinds of justifications that one offers for having an opinion are probably going to be different than the kinds of justifications that you would offer for possessing a piece of property but it seems like there do need to be some sort of justifications there and the style of justification that we focus on in this course is a style of justification that involves giving reasons to support your belief reasons that explain why that belief is in fact believable so we might want to offer an appendix to that first claim that we made movie said that since beliefs aim at truth all things being equal a true belief is better than a false belief we might also want to add to that that in the absence of any kind of in controvert able proof or in the absence of knowing for sure what the truth of the matter is we'll say that all things being equal an opinion that's supported by reasons is better than an opinion that's not supported by reasons or an opinion that's supported by good reasons is preferable to an opinion that is supported by bad reasons or not supported by good reasons we'll have an entire semester to explore all of the possibilities there if this seems appealing at all then it seems like we're gonna also have to at the very least be suspicious of this claim that all beliefs are equally good that sort of interpretation of what everybody is entitled to their own opinion means does seem relevant to the kinds of context that will encounter in everyday conversation with you know ordinary citizens but it just doesn't seem to be true this brings us to our third and final class of possible interpretations of this statement everybody's entitled their own opinion and that's the class of statements that aren't to be interpreted literally at all that's actually kind of explodes into a lot of disparate possibilities but one of the ones that comes to mind most readily and I think this does match the way that people use that phrase everyone's entitled to their own opinion is perhaps when they're in conversation with somebody there's a disagreement and what they really mean to say is I don't want to talk about this anymore I'm done now if that's what they mean to say then as long as they're telling the truth that seems like yeah that's that's a true statement if you don't want to talk about it anymore then it's true that you don't want to talk about it anymore doesn't mean exactly the same thing as everyone's entitled their own opinion but like all right if it just means I don't want to talk about this anymore then fine we might even go so far as to say that you have oh I don't know a right or an entitlement maybe not like a constitutional right or maybe even not even a natural right but it does seem kind of rude to pester people who don't want to talk anymore to like helm them and kind of like stay after them it does seem like the sort of thing that like just being polite and respecting other people means respecting them they don't want to talk anymore and leaving them alone while that's true I think we also want to be careful of some red flags that this usage of everyone's entitled their own opinion or to say like I just don't want to talk about this anymore might sort of indicate now some folks were keen to point this out on the discussion board that if you're the sort of person who's happy to be in the conversation until people start criticizing your position and as soon as that happens then you start saying I don't want to talk about this anymore then it seems like maybe you're being a little bit lazy right if you're a conversation down before it even begins if like I publicly state on social media that this is what I believe and as soon as somebody comes back at me I say I don't want to talk about this anymore but I say it kind of sideways I say it through this everybody's an eye on their own opinion but what I mean is I don't want to talk about this anymore then it does seem like I'm at risk of kind of being lazy in the way that I'm thinking and interacting with other people's ideas we can put a slightly different spin on this as many people did in the discussion board by kind of referring to this phrase as a defense mechanism that when I say everyone's entitled their own opinion I'm kind of like putting it up as a shield this is actually a strategy that a philosopher named Stephen satis uses in an essay that he has called student relativism that when somebody says everyone's entitled their own opinion or everybody has a right to their own opinion I'm kind of putting it up to protect myself from criticism it seems like this might be something a little bit different than laziness it seems like maybe this might be cowardice or at least can be a form of cowardice that says that like I'm willing to criticize other people's beliefs but as soon as criticism comes back my way up goes this field of everybody's entitled to their own opinion furthermore I think that there's something even nastier than laziness or cowardice going on here I think there might be something more like duplicitous honest as well because when you say everyone's entitled to their own opinion it's usually put forth in this way that makes you seem as if you're very magnanimous and very open-minded and how nice of you to allow everybody else to have their opinions but what might really be going on here is if I'm only trotting this out when my opinions get criticized then I'm not actually really being open-minded I'm in fact being really closed-minded and covering it up with this phrase that makes me seem as if I might be open-minded and that is a real problem so while there may be some of these non literal interpretations of everyone's entitled their own opinion that might be acceptable in everyday conversation like just announcing that the conversation is over as some people pointed out saying let's just agree to disagree here um there really is this risk of perhaps laziness or cowardice or duplicitous Ness in that statement as well and I would say if we wanted to be really really careful about it we might just say what we mean instead of kind of like saying everybody's entitled their own opinion say we've talked about this long enough I'm tired I gotta go pick up the kids I don't think that this conversation is really doing anywhere anymore neither of us really seems to be moving the other I don't really get what we're supposed to be getting out of continuing to talk about this so let's stop that seems maybe just fine but if that's what you mean then just say so and if I'm using this phrase in a way that actually asserts a kind of a closed mindedness while appearing to be open minded then it seems like maybe I'm just undermining whatever admirable sentiments there might be at the heart of a statement like everyone's entitled their own opinion and there are some admirable sentiments at the heart of it for example it seems like one of the things that people are thinking about when they say this is that everybody has a right to think for themselves beyond our right to think for themselves maybe we might say that every adult has a duty to think for themselves and that's important we might also recognize that open-mindedness and tolerance and respect and politeness these are all important values even when we disagree with other people perhaps even especially when we disagree with them we need to be mindful of being tolerant and open-minded and respectful and polite in orders to let them think for themselves in an order for ourselves to continue to think for ourselves but we'll note that neither of these things as admirable as they are really means quite the same thing as everyone's entitled to their own opinion now perhaps there are some additional interpretive possibilities that we haven't chased down but you know we're pushing 45 minutes here at this point so I think it's maybe safe to say that we've been pretty thorough the First Amendment interpretation turned out to be the sort of thing that appears to be true but just not relevant to the context in which that phrase everyone's entitled to their own opinion gets used the everyone whose beliefs are just as good as any other beliefs that interpretive option turned out to perhaps be relevant to the context but clearly not and these non literal interpretations turned out to be things that like maybe are admirable maybe not so admirable but perhaps we shouldn't be speaking in riddles this way we should just like be a little clearer about what we mean to say to avoid any misinterpretation so if we find ourselves in a conversation with somebody and they trot this little phrase out that everybody's entitled their own opinion it seems like there's a whole bunch of stuff that we might want to clarify if we expect that conversation to continue to go anywhere for starters we might want to make sure that the person that we're talking with also accepts this idea that true beliefs are all other things being equal better than false beliefs and we might want to push a little bit deeper on this point too to make sure that we're all acknowledging and distinction between what seems true to me or what seems true to you and what is true for you or what is true for me that those are two very different ideas and the mayor of fact that you believe something doesn't make it true for you only means that it seems true to you we might also want to upend that recognition that we don't always know what the truth of the matter is and so we might have to turn to just to Fickett ory reasons we might have to ask people for support and recognize that a well supported opinion or a well supported belief one with good just victory reasons is all things being equal better than one that doesn't have good support or good justificatory reasons we might want to clarify that if we don't get those sorts of reasons for why your belief is believable then it seems like the extent to which I respect your opinion doesn't really carry any sort of weight if you want your opinion to be taken seriously if that's what respect is going to mean if we think that your opinion should be regarded as on par with other people's opinions then you need to give us reasons the degree to which your opinions are respected or taken seriously is proportional to the degree of justification that you offer merely pointing out that it's not illegal for you to say what you're saying that the government can't throw you in jail or that like I can't brainwash you into believing otherwise doesn't really go very far in earning sort of respect in the sense of taking your opinion seriously particularly if we think that the person is saying everybody's entitled their own opinion as a defense mechanism because they think they're being attacked we might need to clarify that not every expression of disagreement is an attack sometimes it's very friendly in fact we might recognize that frequently we have duties to one another to be honest and while that requires that we be tactful and not abusive to one another it also requires that we tell people when we think they're wrong and when it comes to the sorts of duties that we owe one another in order to kind of exemplify some sort of respect for other people's opinions it seems like one of the things that comes along with that is a duty to hear people out if I'm gonna say that the extent to which I take your opinion seriously is proportional to the extent to which your reasons are good I need to give you a chance to explain your reasons I might even have a further duty than that that Duty might involve that I have to not just listen to your reasons but help you come up with better reasons to figure out what the best possible reasons for the position that you're representing are and it's probably worth recognizing that those responsibilities go both way in any given conversation and last but not least when we're in a conversation and somebody says everyone's entitled to their own opinion we should probably clarify not just to the other person that we're talking about but for ourselves as well that we all have a responsibility to at least entertain the possibility that when our opinions conflict with other people it's because our opinions are not very good and that we are the ones who ought to change our minds that's not going to be the case in every single scenario but if you don't at least entertain that as a real possibility it seems like you're not going to be able to enter into a conversation with somebody in a way that predisposes you to appropriately respect the opinions that they're expressing and the reasons that they're giving for why those opinions are believable and again the duties need to go both ways this is one way that we know that this could be the sort of thing that we could universalize and say that everybody has this right in the sense that everybody has to seem sort of Duty's to respect that right if you want your position to be the sort of thing that's taken seriously as like possibly respectable then you need to be ready to grant that same sort of respect to other people so is it the case that everyone's entitled with our opinion is it the case that everybody has a right to their opinion well I would say that statement is only really believable or interesting in a very specific sense if we think that being entitled to your opinion is going to mean something interesting that's to say if we think that me respecting your right to an opinion means that I should treat your opinion as the same as I would treat any other person's opinion then you need to give just victori reasons for why that opinion should be taken seriously and if there is that sort of right then there's a duty that goes along with it to respect that right we have a duty to hear each other out to give each other a chance to give just victori reasons to justify the opinions that we hold if we don't give those reasons if there is no justification for why that belief is believable then there is literally no reason for why we should take your opinion seriously now this might raise some serious questions about like what counts as good support right what counts as the sorts of just for a reasons that need to be taken seriously and that is the theme of the whole rest of the class that falls under the rubric of what we call identifying reconstructing and analyzing arguments I think it's important that we take a moment out to analyze that kind of everybody's entitled to their own opinion move before moving on to look at arguments very seriously because if we can't deal with that then that phrase can be used to kind of derail a discussion where we're seriously examining people's arguments before it's even begun we can kind of dismiss the prospect that we might find anything interesting when we look at the reasons behind what people believe that is to say if we're just gonna say like all opinions are equally good or everybody's in tell their own opinion it seems like it's a move that kind of suggests that like we not do that analysis and I want to do that analysis that's what this class is about and I hopefully in this video have made a case for why we can't just dismiss that move that when somebody says X and we're thinking to ourselves like oh no kind of seems like not X that we don't just kind of shrug our shoulders we don't just automatically say that like I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that there's some value in having a discussion where we're both giving each other the opportunity to and also kind of creating this expectation for us to live up to where we give each other reasons for why these beliefs are believable if I've succeeded in that if it seems like this is the sort of thing that you're interested in spending a semester doing then you're in luck you're in the right class um I look forward to seeing you in other discussion boards other video lectures and yeah thanks a lot

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 1,193

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Critical Thinking, Opinion

Id: e0ffPZp8TWA

Length: 51min 40sec (3100 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019