Deep disagreements are, in a sense, irresolvable. It is not that Amy is incapable of following Ben’s arguments or is generally insensitive to evidence. Rather, Amy has a set of beliefs that insulates her from the very sort of evidence that would be crucial for showing her to be mistaken. No line of argument or reasoning that Ben could sincerely present to Amy would rationally convince her. What should their response be? Should they approach the disagreement with the same intellectual humility of Frank and Gita, who rationally take the fact that they disagree as good evidence that someone’s made a mistake? [...]
It is because we use our cognition to support factual beliefs or value commitments that are central to our identity, particularly in situations where we feel that our identity is threatened. This makes us seek out evidence in ways that support our worldview, we remember supportive evidence better, and we are much less critical of it. Counter-evidence, meanwhile, is subjected to fierce critical scrutiny, or ignored altogether. Factual beliefs can therefore become markers for cultural identities: by asserting your belief that climate change is a myth, you signal your allegiance to a particular moral, cultural and ideological community. This might in part be the psychological dynamic that drives the polarisation over climate, and similar mechanisms might have a role in other politicised social disagreements. [...]
As the political philosopher John Rawls noted in Political Liberalism (1993), a liberal society largely rescinds from attempting to control the flow of information and the minds of its citizens. Therefore disagreements are bound to be pervasive (though Rawls had religious, moral and metaphysical disagreements in mind, not factual disagreements). What is particularly troubling about some societal disagreements is that they concern factual matters that tend to be almost impossible to resolve since there is no agreed-upon method to do so, all while relating to important policy decisions. Generally, theorising about liberal democracy has focused largely on moral and political disagreements, while tacitly assuming that there would be no important factual disagreements to consider. It has been taken for granted that we would eventually agree about the facts, and the democratic processes would concern how we should adjudicate our differences in values and preferences. But this assumption is no longer adequate, if it ever was.
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