All Opinions Don’t Deserve Respect


No one’s opinions have any entitlement to respect. Respect is what you may earn after surviving challenge in the marketplace of ideas. While everyone from flat-earthers to white supremacists is entitled to speak their opinions, they have no entitlement whatsoever to have their opinions taken seriously.

The New York Times Magazine article on campus conservatives annoyed me for many reasons which I have already described at what I hope was not undue length. The quotes from two Bucknell University professors on the final page of the piece, however, caught my attention for a slightly different reason. Both professors complain that with the rise of conservatism on campus, students have become less open to new ideas, dismissing them as “liberal talk.” One professor complains that students are no longer “thinking, in a complex way, about all the different ideas and evaluating them.” Another laments that “she talked about the theory that news coverage of warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the United States,” to be met with rolled eyes from her students.

This initially struck me as mere whining from left-wing professors disgruntled that their students are no longer unquestioning acolytes at the podium. While it is that, it’s also something deeper. These professors are complaining that the students are no longer giving all ideas equal respect and consideration. That may well be true. The question is, should they?

The best article I’ve seen on this subject is Jonathan Rauch’s piece from Reason Magazine , “The Truth Hurts: The Humanitarian Threat to Free Inquiry.” This article is excerpted from his book, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought.

Rauch considers the problem of knowledge: “What is the right standard for distinguishing the few true beliefs from the many false ones? And who should set that standard?” He sets forth five possible principles:

–The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.

–The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons' beliefs have equal claims to respect.

–The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.

–The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.

–The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each thorough public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

As Rauch points out, the last principle is the only one that is acceptable, but the others, the middle three in particular, are gaining ground (an observation unfortunately as true today as when published ten years ago).

What this means in practice is that no one’s opinions have any entitlement to respect. Respect is what you may earn after surviving challenge in the marketplace of ideas. While everyone from flat-earthers to white supremacists is entitled to speak their opinions, they have no entitlement whatsoever to have their opinions taken seriously. To be an open-minded person, you have an obligation to consider all the facts, including those which might disprove your favorite ideas, but you have no obligation to waste your time considering every possible hare-brained theory that anyone comes up with.

The theory that news coverage of the Iraq war could lead to more murders at home is not quite as dumb as the flat earth theory, but it still doesn’t appear to have much going for it. The most obvious objection is that we had plenty of coverage of the first Gulf War twelve years ago, but no concurrent rise in the murder rate that I’m aware of. Now, maybe Professor Daubman had done a new analysis of early 90’s crime rates and had come up with some statistically significant evidence of an increase at the time. But the Times article gives no indication that Professor Daubman had any new data to impart. Instead, she appears to believe that all her ideas are entitled to rapt attention from her captive student audience, merely because they are the product of her own brilliant brain.

I remain unsympathetic. Of all people, a college professor is in an excellent position to convince others of her point of view, given her built-in position of authority, a presumably far greater knowledge of the subject, and repeated opportunities to address the same audience. If students are regularly rolling their eyes during her lectures and muttering “there she goes again,” maybe that’s a sign that her theories need some more baking. Or perhaps she needs to beef up her presentation, with more solid facts or more pertinent examples. And if her students have grown skeptical of everything she says because she keeps interjecting her left-wing politics into her class, well, maybe she should just cut it out.

Posted: Tue - June 17, 2003 at 08:19 PM      

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