by Rachel Robison-Greene
Epistemic humility is a virtue. I often tell my students that if there is one skill I hope they leave my course with, it is the ability to recognize that they might be wrong about something. Realistically, they are wrong about many things. We all are. If we are to successfully work together to arrive at truths worth knowing, it is important that we leave behind our previous beliefs once we have come to see them as unreasonable.
Toward this end, some find it useful to remind people that “reasonable people can disagree” about all kinds of things. It’s true, they can. However, we ought to be cautious about taking this claim too seriously; the expression is vague at best and ambiguous at worst. It confuses the respective aims of inquiry and interpersonal interaction. To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern.
Social media provides us with countless instances of people sharing their opinions. Fitness influencers often provide advice that is not grounded in any medical expertise. We are warned about the dangers of vaccines or the best treatment for a medical condition in minutes if not seconds by people who are participating in an attention economy rather than in a marketplace of ideas. There are pockets of the internet in which men advocate for limiting the rights of women or for insisting that traditional gender roles are best for everyone. There are others in which anonymous posters advocate for white supremacy. Is it possible for “reasonable people” to disagree about such things?
When people use the word “reasonable” in this context, it could mean more than one thing. To say that a disagreement is taking place between reasonable people might be to say something about their respective characters; we might be saying something about their track records of reasonableness. If Tom and Mary, two experienced cooks disagree about, say, the best vegetables to put in a stew, we might say that this is an instance of reasonable disagreement. We might conclude, then, that the two answers are on par with one another and there is no compelling reason to prefer one to the other.
There are problems with this way of thinking about reasonable disagreement. First, if we think of reasonableness as a character trait, we are likely to be led astray by our assessments of which people count as “reasonable.” We are likely to participate in what philosopher Miranda Fricker has termed “epistemic injustice.” In particular, we might find ourselves contributing to what she calls “testimonial injustice” which “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word.” Members of marginalized groups often experience testimonial injustice. For example, members of African American populations experienced testimonial injustice for decades in the areas adjacent to the Mississippi River zoned for petrochemical plants—the area known as “Cancer Alley”. As Robert Bullard explains in The Quest for Environmental Justice, black women had to fight significant power structures to be heard and considered reasonable when describing the negative impacts that pollution was having on the health of their communities. For members of some populations, reasonableness as a trait of character is a starting assumption. Others have to fight to be viewed as reasonable.
Second, if we think of reasonableness as a character trait rather than as a procedure for responsible belief formation, we run the risk of assessing someone as “reasonable” in cases in which their beliefs have no connection to evidence. Imagine, for example, that Mark the engineer has a reputation for reasonableness. In his work life, he has a track-record of making wise decisions that result in the proper functioning of the machines he designs. One day, he does something out of character. He advises his crew that all machines should be shut off to prevent potential harm caused by the fact that Mercury is in retrograde. His coworkers rightly balk at this idea. Though Mark has a character that people would ordinarily be inclined to describe as reasonable, his beliefs and subsequent actions do not count as reasonable in this case because they are not appropriately connected to good evidence and, as a result, they are not truth conducive. If an employee argues against Mark’s decision, we should not say “Oh well, this is the kind of thing about which reasonable people can disagree!”
There is a related tendency to use the expression “reasonable people can disagree” to create an equivalence when it comes to conflicting beliefs that large groups of people hold. A common perception exists that if a large enough group of people believes something, it has met the litmus test for being a “reasonable’ belief and the people involved “reasonable people.” This is a familiar critical thinking error. The fact that a large group of people believes something does not provide us with a compelling reason for thinking it is true. Large groups of people have always believed things on the basis of bad evidence or no evidence at all. The practice doesn’t improve as more people engage in it, it is simply the case that more people are reasoning and assessing evidence poorly. The fact that many people believe the claims made by Q-Anon adherents provides us with no reason for believing those claims are true. What it does provide us with is reason to be concerned that we live in an epistemic climate in which so many people are encouraged to believe such things.
John Stuart Mill offers many compelling arguments in Utilitarianism. Along the way, he makes at least one infamously bad argument. He argues from the claim that each person desires happiness to the conclusion that happiness is desirable. The fact that a person, or even a large group of people desires something does not entail that what they desire is desirable. The first claim is a description of the psychology of a person or group and the second is a claim about something distinctively normative (in this case, what is desirable). People make a similar mistake when it comes to thinking about what counts as reasonable. The fact that people take themselves to have reasons to believe something does not make the belief in question reasonable, at least not if the belief is not sensitive to the available evidence. The term “reasonable”, when used correctly, picks out normative facts about what it is to reason and assess evidence well.
When people say, “reasonable people can disagree” they might be flagging a foundational principle of discourse engagement. They might want to signal that respect for persons requires that we treat each person’s argument as if it is equally likely to be true as any other person’s argument. The motivations here are admirable, but the social benefits are not what they may appear to be. Respect for persons might require engaged listening. It might require careful consideration. It does not require treating weak evidence as if it is strong nor does it require treating unsound arguments as if they are sound. Far from being kind, we are actually doing one another an injustice when we engage one another as if all arguments are equally compelling. Respect for persons may require that we recognize one another as creatures that offer and respond to reasons. This does not entail that we treat conspiracists and scientists as if their conflicting views amount to an everyday, perfectly balanced, “reasonable disagreement.”
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