No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.īut if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. 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.
So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion? 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. 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. Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. 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.” 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. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. 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. 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. 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. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. 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.
#Hopefully yours how to
You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”Ī 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. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. 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. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once.
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