No, you’re not entitled to your opinion
This article by Patrick Stokes, lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University, first appeared on online comment and analysis site The Conversation where it has now been viewed more than a quarter of a million times – the biggest since the site launched
Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.
Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”
A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.
The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.
Firstly, what’s an opinion?
Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.
You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”
Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Ms. Dorey has no medical qualifications, but argues that if Bob Brown is allowed to comment on nuclear power despite not being a scientist, she should be allowed to comment on vaccines. But no-one assumes Dr. Brown is an authority on the physics of nuclear fission; his job is to comment on the policy responses to the science, not the science itself.
So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion?
If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.
But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.
The ABC’s Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from – you guessed it – Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was “accurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups.” But this implies an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise. Again, if this was about policy responses to science, this would be reasonable. But the so-called “debate” here is about the science itself, and the “choice groups” simply don’t have a claim on air time if that’s where the disagreement is supposed to lie.
Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: “there’s evidence, and there’s bulldust,” and it’s no part of a reporter’s job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise.
The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of “openly calling for censorship of a scientific debate.” This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all – or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it “confuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue.” Again, two senses of “entitlement” to an opinion are being conflated here.
So next time you hear someone declare they’re entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you’ll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
innaresting!
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fabulous
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In my opinion, one of the best articles on Mumbrella in ages.
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Everyone is entitled to their opinion…and similarly, everyone is also entitled to see the person with the opinion as a complete, utter nutjob, two cents short of being locked up in a looney bin.
Of course, if the nutjob is persuasive enough to get decent popular support (no matter how crazy the ideas), he/she might enter politics or join Today Tonight…
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Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
But one isn’t entitled to their own facts.
Investigating the credibility of the facts behind a pundit’s opinion is what marks out good journalism from crap. Harold Scruby used to be a good litmus test which ACA and TT regularly failed.
Meryl Dorey willfully twists and obfuscates scientific fact to present a distorted and invalid view of the dangers of vaccination. WIN Wollongong were complicit, stupid or lazy in not validating the views of an extremely marginal campaigner. I suspect the latter.
For further reading see http://meryldorey.org/ – which I have nothing to do with, but find very amusing.
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An interesting read but with a few fallacies, in my unexpert opinion.
I don’t think it is trivial to say “no-one’s entitled to stop my opion being said” – that’s an important right not afforded everybody and people have died defending it.
The solution to any disagreement is surely not censorship, but debate. everyone has the right to air their opinion, and as Bob said everyone else has a right to ignore it.
The real problem is when a third party, i.e. in these instances a mass medium, takes up one person or group’s opinion and broadcasts it, giving it equal weight with more objectively informed opinions – in a way trying to take that evaluation decision out of peoples’ hands by lending it credence it is not really afforded.
Critcise the media for their poor choices by all means, but not the people for exercising their right to a point of view, however misguided.
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brilliant article, thanks for publishing it.
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The great irony of posting this here is that marketing and advertising essentially operates at the level of Meryl Dorey. And like Dorey, most here will miss the point.
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@Bob (comment 4)
or 2GB?
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“Criticise the media for their poor choices by all means, but not the people for exercising their right to a point of view, however misguided.”
Yes, people have a right to a point of view held to themselves. Yes, they cannot be criticised for simply holding the view. But if seeking to express that view to the public, then they have to be prepared to argue for it with logic and facts. There is no Right of Free Speech to say just anything and not justify it.
When will someone give us the law-based origins of that Right (17th Century?) which certainly was a right to put a considered and defensible view, not a right to rant and obfuscate. This blur is at the core of the “Preachers” debate in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall right now.
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“But if seeking to express that view to the public, then they have to be prepared to argue for it with logic and fact.”
Not quite. Anybody can hold a view – but if seeking to persuade someone else to believe it or agree with it, then they need to be able to convince that other person, ideally via facts and similarly strong justifications.
The triumph of many con artists, bullies and liars however, shows that convincing others is not always a matter of truth and logic, but often of force of personality and unethical means.
But proof does not always consist in an argument either. People can be persuaded of something once they have investigated it, the person holding those views and the credibility and background of the person and the information s/he cites. Etc.
Convincing a person or group etc is seldom just a matter of one argument at one place or one time, assuming of course that the person arguing his/her case is being truthful.
Then of course there is the line of spurious argument, which is only about perusading someone to believe something, and therefore lying is one of the tactics because what is really being pursued is converting the person to one’s cause, not proving the truth of an argument, the investigation of which could prove that the cause is immoral and the argument merely an instrument rataher than a real investigaton into truth, facts and reality.
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Phwwoooahhh:
Lecturer in philosophy appearing in mUmbrella, and getting applause too. Nice…
Sorry, I don’t want to seem too flip:
It’s just that media are so hugely influential today and the level of commentary about what’s happening is either so thin as to be invisible, or so slanted as to be crooked, that I long for a bit more serious commentary about what is going on before our very eyes & ears.
Media Watch is welcome, as is Gruen Transfer, and mUmbrella’s at least open, I guess: but gee, why do TV critics, for example, ignore the fact that some 25% of what’s being watched is ads?
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Paul, I could be wrong … but I suspect that TV critics are critiqueing the progammes, and are doing so before they are broadcast (i.e. off a DVD or something similar). Duh!
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