No, you’re not entitled to your opinion<\/a> by Patrick Stokes in The Conversation.<\/p>\nThe Text:<\/strong> 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 \u201cphilosophers\u201d \u2013 a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.<\/p>\nSecondly, I say something like this: \u201cI\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard the expression \u2018everyone is entitled to their opinion.\u2019 Perhaps you\u2019ve 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\u2019s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.\u201d<\/p>\n
A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument \u2013 and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The problem with \u201cI\u2019m entitled to my opinion\u201d is that, all too often, it\u2019s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for \u201cI can say or think whatever I like\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Firstly, what\u2019s an opinion?<\/p>\n
Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that\u2019s still a workable distinction today: unlike \u201c1+1=2\u201d or \u201cthere are no square circles,\u201d an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But \u201copinion\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I\u2019d be silly to insist that you\u2019re 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\u2019s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they\u2019re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views \u201crespected.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So what does it mean to be \u201centitled\u201d to an opinion?<\/p>\n
If \u201cEveryone\u2019s entitled to their opinion\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
But if \u2018entitled to an opinion\u2019 means \u2018entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth\u2019 then it\u2019s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.<\/p>\n
On Monday, the ABC\u2019s Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was \u201caccurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups.\u201d 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 \u201cdebate\u201d here is about the science itself, and the \u201cchoice groups\u201d simply don\u2019t have a claim on air time if that\u2019s where the disagreement is supposed to lie.<\/p>\n
Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: \u201cthere\u2019s evidence, and there\u2019s bulldust,\u201d and it\u2019s no part of a reporter\u2019s job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise.<\/p>\n
The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of \u201copenly calling for censorship of a scientific debate.\u201d This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all \u2013 or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it \u201cconfuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue.\u201d Again, two senses of \u201centitlement\u201d to an opinion are being conflated here.<\/p>\n
So next time you hear someone declare they\u2019re entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you\u2019ll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: No, you’re not entitled to your opinion by Patrick Stokes in The Conversation. The Text: 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 \u201cphilosophers\u201d \u2013 a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n