Disagreement

Bryan Frances

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745685236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Regardless of who you are or how you live your life, you disagree with millions of people on an enormous number of topics from politics, religion and morality to sport, culture and art. Unless you are delusional, you are aware that a great many of the people who disagree with you are just as smart and thoughtful as you are - in fact, you know that often they are smarter and more informed. But believing someone to be cleverer or more knowledgeable about a particular topic usually won't change your mind. Should it? This book is devoted to exploring this quandary - what should we do when we encounter disagreement, particularly when we believe someone is more of an authority on a subject than we are? The question is of enormous importance, both in the public arena and in our personal lives. Disagreement over marriages, beliefs, friendships and more causes immense personal strife. People with political power disagree about how to spend enormous amounts of money, about what laws to pass, or about wars to fight. If only we were better able to resolve our disagreements, we would probably save millions of lives and prevent millions of others from living in poverty. The first full-length text-book on this philosophical topic, Disagreement provides students with the tools they need to understand the burgeoning academic literature and its (often conflicting) perspectives. Including case studies, sample questions and chapter summaries, this engaging and accessible book is the perfect starting point for students and anyone interested in thinking about the possibilities and problems of this fundamental philosophical debate.

Part I

Basics of Disagreement

The most important thing you need to do in this first part of the book is acquire a deep understanding of what may be the most important questions to ask about disagreement. With that understanding secured, plus a raft of test cases of disagreement to think about, in Part II you will be in a good position to look closely at some answers.

1

Genuine vs. Illusory Disagreement

Before one is faced with the question of how to react to a disagreement one needs to have discovered the disagreement. Usually, there is no difficulty: if you think belief B is true and I don't – I either think B is false or I have withheld judgment on B – then we disagree. However, often what looks like a disagreement is actually illusory: there is no genuine disagreement. Surprisingly, a great many apparent disagreements in real life are merely apparent. Consider the following:

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1 Abortion's Moral and Legal Status

If Bo says “Abortion is wrong” and Po says “Abortion isn't wrong,” they might not be disagreeing at all. It all depends on the details of the case. Bo might mean to say that abortion is morally wrong while Po is saying that it isn't legally wrong (both of them talking about the same country and time period). They may well agree that abortion is legally permissible and morally impermissible; so, no disagreement exists even though their language, the sentences they used, made it look like they disagree. Alternatively, they might agree that they are talking about morality as opposed to the law, but they mean different things by “abortion,” with one of them including nothing but third-trimester abortion while the other includes abortions at any time.

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In that story the two people, Bo and Po, were using one word (“wrong,” or “abortion”) with different meanings. Here is a slightly different kind of illusory disagreement, one in which the two people are using a word with incomplete meanings.

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2 Led Zeppelin's Influence

I say to you “Led Zeppelin was very influential” and you say “No they weren't.” Now, we may be disagreeing with each other, but we may not. Perhaps I was really thinking something like “Led Zeppelin was very influential in pop music compared to many other rock groups,” which is completely true, while you were taking a much longer, more historical perspective, according to which only Elvis and the Beatles, among recent popular music artists, count as anywhere near “very influential.” You might have been thinking “very influential” means competing with Chopin, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, and the Beatles. I may completely agree that Led Zeppelin is not “very influential” compared to them!

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In this case we weren't really disagreeing at all, even though our language suggested that we were. Another case:

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3 Michael Jordan's Height I

We are arguing whether basketball great Michael Jordan is tall. I say he is and you say he isn't. At first, it looks like we disagree. But then we realize that I mean that he is tall for an adult male while you mean he isn't tall for a professional basketball player. Naturally, when we discover these different meanings, we may very well admit that we don't disagree at all, since we agree that he is tall for an adult male but he isn't tall for a basketball player. Until you know what the “for” business is, you can hardly evaluate the sentence “Michael Jordan is tall”: you have to answer the question “Tall for whom?”

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In this case there is no difference in the meanings of our words – not even regarding the word “tall.” Instead, we have different comparison classes in mind: the class of adult males versus the class of professional basketball players. However, the next story shows that, even if we agree that we are talking about adult males (so we agree on the comparison class), we could still be talking past each other and hence not really disagreeing when debating whether he was tall for an adult male.

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4 Michael Jordan's Height II

Your standard for being tall for a certain group (e.g., the group of adult males) is something like “Taller than around 95 percent of people in the group,” while my standard might be something like “Taller than around 75 percent of people in the group.” Both standards are pretty reasonable (e.g., you can't consult a dictionary to see whose standard is best). In this dispute we are not talking about different comparison classes – the class of basketball players versus the class of adult males. We agree on the “tall for” bit. But we are still disagreeing about the standard for being tall. If we somehow managed to realize that we had been using the different percentage standards, then we would probably admit that we really weren't disagreeing about whether Jordan was tall. Instead, we would probably say that we had been disagreeing about what the word “tall” should mean.

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That's a common phenomenon: two people seem to disagree about topic X only to discover, upon further discussion, that they are really disagreeing about what their words mean or should mean, the words they use to talk about X. A final case:

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5 The Great Actress

Ugh, Mug, and Bug are debating whether Julia Roberts is a great actress. Ugh insists she is, saying that the fact that Roberts won a Best Actress Oscar award is all you need to know. Mug says he doesn't know what to think on this issue because he doesn't know what experts in acting think about her work; Mug is unimpressed by the fact that she won an Oscar award since he thinks such awards have little to do with acting talent. Bug is with Ugh, but for a different reason: he says the mere fact that her movies have made so much money is all the proof you need that she's a great actress.

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Are Ugh and Bug agreeing with each other when they both affirm “Julia Roberts is a great actress”? Maybe not. When Ugh says someone is a great actress, perhaps all he has in mind is this: she has won the acclaim of her peers and other recognized judges of acting ability. That's certainly a reasonable way to fill out the meaning of “So-and-so is a great actress.” But Bug might be filling out “So-and-so is a great actress” with this: So-and-so has successfully entertained a great many people. Ugh and Bug end up saying the same words, “Yes, she is a great actress,” but they are really saying different things, at least at one level of meaning. It's not hard to imagine a situation in which Ugh knows nothing of the monetary success of Roberts's movies and also thinks that monetary success has nothing to do with acting greatness. In addition, perhaps Bug would say that winning awards is utterly irrelevant to acting greatness: the purpose of acting is to entertain, and entertainment success in movies is measured in revenue. Finally, Mug thinks that acting greatness is determined by the opinions of the people who study acting the most, perhaps the instructors at places such as the Juilliard School. The three of them are talking past one another.

We can even conceive of a fourth participant in the discussion, Jug, who conceives acting greatness to be determined by all the factors Ugh, Mug, and Bug focused on. Now we have four people spending an hour or so discussing a “single” question, but in reality there are multiple questions flying around; it may well be the case that each person is entirely correct in his or her conclusions, but the four of them never discover this fact.

Notice that discovering that there is no real disagreement might take considerable time; it's not as though the discovery will always be revealed in a minute or so. In the abortion case, Po and Bo might argue for quite a while, talking past each other for hours, before they figure out that they are using “wrong” in two ways: legal and moral. I have witnessed this happen on multiple occasions in my role as a teacher. The same holds for you and me with our fictional debate over the influence of Led Zeppelin, or the case with Mug, Bug, Ugh, and Jug.

In fact, in many real-life cases it's worse than that: Bo and Po may have started their discussion with no real inkling of the moral/legal distinction. But once they discuss things in a fruitful manner, they may, if they are lucky and persistent, finally discover that what Bo “really meant all along” is that abortion is morally wrong and what Po “really meant all along” is that abortion is legally allowed. But it might be even worse still: at the start of their discussion they might not have had any real solid view at all. When they used “wrong” they didn't mean morally wrong, legally wrong, or anything else that specific. They were just plain confused, as they hadn't really carefully considered the moral/legal distinction. And when people are that confused – which I think happens a lot: the Julia Roberts story is another real-life case – it can be extremely hard to discover whether there is any genuine disagreement.

Note, however, that it would be asking too much to demand perfect precision and understanding in order for there to be genuine disagreement. Suppose Sam and Pam disagree over whether third-trimester abortion is morally permissible in cases in which the woman's life is not in danger. There's no confusion over kinds of abortion: they agree that the method of abortion can be anything that is currently used. Nor is there disagreement about what the third trimester is or any confusion over legal versus moral permissibility. So far, it looks like a case of genuine disagreement. If a third party then pipes up and says, “But it's not a case of genuine disagreement unless they can agree on a strict definition of ‘moral’,” we would not be impressed with her objection. After all, who can define just about any word? Suppose you and I disagree about whether our cat is in the den. This can be a case of genuine disagreement despite the fact that neither of us can define “cat” or has perfect understanding of what a cat is. Similarly, we can disagree over the morality of third-trimester abortion even though we don't have a perfect knowledge of what morality is.

Here is another case, one that will look like the ones just discussed but really isn't:

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6 The Greatest Baseball Player

Lee, Bee, and Gee are at a bar watching a baseball game and Lee asks, “Okay, who was the greatest baseball player of all time?” Gee replies with “Babe Ruth!,” Bee replies with “Ty Cobb!,” and Lee comes back with “Cy Young!” (Ruth and Cobb were hitters; Young was a pitcher.) And the argument is off and running, for hours on end – until the alcohol runs out, the money runs out, or the bar closes.

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At first, this looks like a case in which there is no truth of the matter. One might think that “greatest baseball player” is too vague or ambiguous for there to be one true answer to “Who was the greatest?” After all, one person might value home runs very highly, in which case she will probably rank Ruth over Cobb (Ruth had 714 lifetime home runs while Cobb had 117). Another person might think that, since getting hits is the key, Cobb wins over Ruth (Cobb had a lifetime batting average of .366 while Ruth's was .342; Cobb had 4,189 hits while Ruth had 2,873). Yet another insists that pitching is the real key to the game, and so he picks Young over the others. Each of these “value systems” is pretty reasonable, and none is clearly the superior of the others. It's easy to convince yourself that there is no right answer here, because it all depends on what you mean by “greatest.”

But this view – that there is no truth of the matter – does not hold in this specific case. It's true that there are lots of different intelligent and roughly equally good ways to weigh baseball greatness – no doubt about it. To that extent, the view of the previous paragraph contains some important truth! So I'm not saying that the view is worthless or lacks insight. However, the interesting thing about this particular case is this: no matter what value system you adopt in order to rank baseball greatness, as long as it's not a ridiculous value system Ruth is going to come out on top. The primary reason is that he is the only player in history to be excellent at both hitting and pitching – and he was fantastic at both of them. No one else comes remotely close.¹ In the story above, Gee really did have the right answer. (If they had been debating the question of who was the greatest baseball hitter, instead of player, then everything changes.) The lesson is this: even if the disagreement concerns some vague, ambiguous matter that is open to several reasonable yet differing interpretations, there can be genuine disagreement and an absolutely true answer. This shows how tricky things can get when attempting to discover genuine disagreement.

Note

1 Provided we ignore Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston, neither of whom played in the major leagues as a result of segregation. But even they didn't pitch, so Ruth still wins.

2

Easier Questions about Disagreement

In order to understand the tougher and more interesting questions about disagreement, it's instructive to look first at the easier questions (which is not to say that they are easy!).

Q1: Is it ever the case that two reasonable people can come to different yet reasonable answers to a single question?

Sure. This can happen when two reasonable people, call them “Pro” and “Con,” have accessed very different bodies of evidence in coming to their contrary views. (Throughout this book, Pro believes claim B is true while Con believes B is false.) Pro's evidence gives strong support to B as the answer; Con's evidence gives strong support to not-B as the answer. Here is an illustrative story.

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7 The Jury

During a jury trial in which the butler is accused of murdering the maid, the prosecution is able to present excellent evidence for his guilt but the defense is able to present equally good evidence for his innocence. Now imagine that the only information Pro has heard is the excellent evidence from the prosecutor – nothing from the defense attorney; Con has heard only the reverse. They aren't on the jury but the case is famous and they have heard about it via television and the internet. Pro has heard one side and Con has heard the other. Pro thinks the butler's guilty while Con thinks he's innocent.

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Given that each side has truly compelling evidence, and neither Pro nor Con knows anything about the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Concepts in Philosophy
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Stories
• Introduction
• Part I: Basics of Disagreement
• Part II: Conciliatory or Steadfast?
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index