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.
