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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Keep your bad opinions to yourself

No, you do not have a right to your opinion. Because:

1. A right for one person carries with it duties for other people. If I have a right to live, you have a duty to not kill me. If you have a right to your good reputation, I have the duty to not libel you.

2. If you did have a right to your opinion, what is the corresponding duty I have? To agree with you? Of course not. If you have a right to your opinion, I have a right to mine; so we can't both exercise our own rights and fulfill our duties to the other person. To listen to your opinion? Heavens no. There are too many opinions, and there is so little time. To let you keep it without protest, even if you are wrong? But if you were, for example, crossing the street because you had the mistaken opinion that a speeding car were not heading for you, wouldn't you consider it my obligation to correct your mistake?

3. So there is no right to an opinion, unless you keep it to yourself, in which case there is no right at all, since rights can exist only in connection with other people and their behavior. Whenever anyone says, "Well I have a right to my opinion," he is really saying that he has no evidence to offer for that opinion and he is really not interested in pursuing the truth of the matter. It's like resigning a chess game because you know you can't win it.

That's my paraphrase of one of the passages in the opening chapter of "Crimes Against Logic," a nifty little book by Jamie Whyte, an English philosopher who used to lecture at Cambridge, which I received for Christmas. I've read dozens of books on argument and rhetoric and logic, and this is one of the most readable. Whyte is short on the jargon that professional arguers love to throw around, such as "ad hominem fallacy" and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," and long on everyday, comon-sense examples. If you want to be better at spotting the flaws in others' arguments, and better at making arguments yourself, I highly recommend it.

Comments

brian stouder
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 7:21am

"No, you do not have a right to your opinion. Because:

1. A right for one person carries with it duties for other people. If I have a right to live, you have a duty to not kill me. If you have a right to your good reputation, I have the duty to not libel you."

Where is the immutable law of physics (akin to 'for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction') that supports the arbitrary assertion that the "duties of other people" (with regard to your right to have an opinion) must include listening? (let alone AGREEING!)

"You have a right to your opinion" might simply impose the duty on others NOT to imprison (nor physically attack, nor otherwise disenfranchise) a person for her opinions, yes?

I think the fellow's point is that a person has no 'right' to state as fact things which are false, owing to his 'right to have his opinion'. The discussion reduces to defining what we mean by 'opinion'.

Uninformed opinions are worthless, other than what various patterns of incorrect opinions tell us about groups of people that share them; but people do indeed have a right to their opinions

brian stouder
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 7:22am

(in my opinion, anyway!)

Larry Morris
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 8:15am

Huh, all these years, I thought I had a right to my own, uninformed, however stupid and arbitrary, opinion, ... just goes to show you.

Leo Morris
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 9:02am

Larry: You retain, as we all do, the ability to have them and the privilege of expressing them, just not the right to have them unchallenged by evidence in an argument.

Brian: "I think the fellow's point is that a person has no 'right' to state as fact things which are false, owing to his 'right to have his opinion.'" Exactly. It is precisely because we can think of no corresponding duties, such as just letting the mistakes go unchallenged, that the right does not exist. And Whyte is making the point just as it applies to argument and debate, not in any larger context. I do not have the right to be the prettiest person in the room, which we can debate endlessly and which may result in your duty to leave the room, without getting into whether the government should be able to shoot me just for being ugly.

But there are frequently consequences for being wrong (as in the crossing-the-street example). Jus task current and, especially, former congressional Republicans.

Steve Towsley
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 9:38am

If enough people hold an incorrect opinion, some dangerous sod can get voted into office, so the "worthless opinion" can still have dire consequences if left alone to fester.

I think it is absolutely key to the matter of freedom of speech that everyone understands there is no obligation whatsoever to listen, or to provide an audience however tiny.

Freedom of expression does not imply the freedom to intrude upon others who choose not to show up at the tree stump you stand on. That is why it always angers me when some protest group thinks they are entitled to plant themselves where they are not wanted, and some judge supports the intrusion.

In short, you have the right to speak, and I have an equal right to utterly ignore you.

Larry Morris
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 9:47am

Leo: "just not the right to have them unchallenged by evidence in an argument", as long as we all realize that very often the "evidence" is at best misleading and sometimes pure bunk itself. And, sometimes the best "opinions" are based on nothing more than a best guess and intuition - and are proved correct only years or decades later.

Leo Morris
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 11:52am

And that's the whole point of arguing, in the hope that good arguments will ultimately drive out the bad.

Bob G.
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 1:58pm

OK...I'm sold.....the missus now has the FIRST item for my Valentine's Day "list...lol!

Honestly, it does sound like a good read, as does the dialogue here on this topic.

Looks like 2007 might be a better year after all.

B.G.

Steve Towsley
Wed, 12/27/2006 - 3:59pm

I have to laugh here at the "crossing the street" example. It reminds me of one fine day a few years ago, as I drove past the FW Newspapers building, when Nancy Nall was crossing the street in front of my car.

Let me now report that whatever I may have been contemplating -- in a wryly humorous sort of way -- I DID slow down and let her get across the street. That touch of the brakes squared me for good deeds for quite a while afterward....

Laura
Thu, 12/28/2006 - 5:49pm

Apparently Bush doesn't believe people have a right to have an opinion unless they agree with him. That's why he surrounds himself in the White House with only those who agree with his every move and screens all people to make sure they are supporters before he lets them into open public meetings.

tim zank
Thu, 12/28/2006 - 6:16pm

Did I miss something? How did George Bush get dragged in to this?

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