The Limits of Tolerance

Ray Briggs
What should you do in the face of radical disagreement?

Ken Taylor
Do you live and let live or try to convince the other person? They’re wrong?

Ray Briggs
Aren’t some ideas just too terrible to tolerate?

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus where Ken and I teach philosophy.

Ken Taylor
And Ray, welcome back to the host chair, it’s been a while. Glad to have you on board.

Ray Briggs
Thanks.

Ken Taylor
Today we’re thinking about tolerance and radical disagreement. What happens when your moral and political ideals put you deeply at odds with my moral and political ideas?

Ray Briggs
Well, we agree to disagree. You like Katy Perry, I like Taylor Swift. What’s the problem?

Ken Taylor
Well, right, that might work for like ice cream or something. I’m not gonna get bent out of shape because your tastes differ from mine. But I’m thinking about serious moral issues. I mean, what if one person thinks, for example, that abortion is a fundamental human right, and the other thinks that abortion is just outright murder?

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, I think even with something as morally and politically divisive as abortion, we should still live and let live

Ken Taylor
Sounds nice, Ray. But have you tried telling that to like those pro lifers marching in the streets or even to pro choice people? I mean, let’s see how far you get with that with either side.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, I’m not saying they have to like each other, besides just have to tolerate each other.

Ken Taylor
Okay. I like that word, tolerance. It’s a nice buzzword. But tell me what exactly do you mean by that?

Ray Briggs
I mean, that even if I completely disagree with your views, even if I regard you as benighted for holding them still I can express your right to hold, express, and to some extent act on them.

Ken Taylor
Whoa, that sounds a little like, begrudging, don’t you think? I mean, it’s like you’re saying to me, Okay, God, everything you believe is stupid, or more immoral, and you’re stupid and immoral for believing it. But hey, I accept your right to be stupid and immoral, if that’s what floats your boat. Thanks, Ray.

Ray Briggs
What more do you want?

Ken Taylor
Well, I don’t know. I mean, how about a little like, positive affirmation? How about a little respect?

Ray Briggs
Seems like a lot to ask. Why should everyone have to affirm you?

Ken Taylor
Well, it’s not just about me, right? It’s the fundamental human need. There’s need for respect and affirmation. And geez, how would you feel if like your partner barely tolerated you?

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, I’d hate that. But that’s about my life partner. I don’t want to be intimate with most of my fellow citizens. It’s all I can do to put up with them.

Ken Taylor
Gee, you could do view of your fellow human beings, I think.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, now that you mentioned, I guess I do. All those religious fundamentalists shoving their beliefs down my throat and anti vaxxers spreading disease and climate deniers destroying the planet. Ah, so those views aren’t just wrong. They’re downright dangerous.

Ken Taylor
Frustrating, isn’t it,Ray? I mean, don’t you wish you could talk some sense into all those awful people?

Ray Briggs
Fat chance of that. They’re not going to listen to me?

Ken Taylor
Well, okay, maybe maybe they will. Maybe they won’t listen to a philosopher and all that. But don’t you think come on in your heart of hearts. So you think the world would be a much better place? If just more people were willing to listen?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, of course. I want more people to listen to me.

Ken Taylor
Then you have to listen to other people, Ray. You have to listen to those vaxxers and fundamentalists, that’s only fair. But I’m right and they’re wrong. Right now you’re just being dogmatic? How do you know they’re wrong if you won’t even hear them out?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, seriously, Ken, though, what about Flat Earthers are Holocaust deniers or homophobes who want to put people through conversion therapy? Sometimes that idea is just so ignorant and so morally bankrupt, that it’s not even worth considering?

Ken Taylor
Well maybe, I mean, it especially if the view is like, so clearly, objectively, morally bankrupt, that any person could see it. But you know, right. You can’t dismiss every view that disturbs you. I mean, you can’t mistake your own deep, abhorrent and disturbing set of view for like the moral truth.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but how do you tell the difference between views that are outside the bounds of reasonable debate and views that deserve a fair hearing, even when you find them deeply disturbing?

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s an excellent question. And to help us think about that excellent question, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Ninna Gaensler-Debs, to learn more about camps that try to instruct kids and empathy and understanding and to demonstrate to them the limits of tolerance. She files this report.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Reporter Karen de Sá’s kids are grown now, but when they were teens, they like 10,000 Other kids from the Bay Area, attended a several day retreat that aims to teach high schoolers empathy and leadership skills. Here’s a recent promo video for one of these types of camps.

Camp Anytown
Camp Anytown has taught me that knowledge is power. And if I utilize my voice, I can make a difference in the world no matter how big or small.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
I learn that as long as we stand together, we can accomplish so much more. A few summers ago, many years after attending as a camper, Karen’s daughter was asked to come back to camp this time as a counselor. Karen is an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. When her daughter came home afterwards, she was concerned by what she had seen. And so Karen started to ask some questions.

Karen de Sá
Then I talked to some teachers, and they had some really, really deep concerns about what had gone on. And they were, in one instance actually kind of horrified.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
During her reporting, Karen ended up visiting two different camps, Camp diversity and camp every town in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And what she found disturbed her kids were divided up by identifying factors like race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and asked to speak about and roleplay stereotypes,

Karen de Sá
They really try to take the students who are between 14 and 18 into really, really raw, emotional places around issues of racial prejudice, discrimination, sexual harassment, abuse, suicide. It gets very intense very quickly and often in very unsuspecting ways.

Richard Valenzuela
Terrorists, they’re all terrorists, put that in big letters, terrorists. Are you Jews waiting for the train or what? The Mexican/Brown group will clean up because they’re good at it.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
This is from video footage that Chronicle photo journalist Gabrielle Lurie took of Richard Valenzuela engaging in a lunchtime segregation exercise. He was a director at Camp Diversity at the time. And during exercises Valenzuela would taunt students

Richard Valenzuela
I instigate some areas for them to be able to reveal and to learn, because it gives them you know, can deal with it or have to deal with it, we’re hoping that they become less vulnerable.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
The basis for Camp Everytown’s programming is an idea called contact theory, or contact hypothesis. The most commonly understood version of this idea comes from a book called The nature of prejudice written in 1954. By social psychologist Gordon Allport. He compiled a couple of decades of research and said that under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact could be one of the best ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority groups. But Karen emphasized to me that the camp’s practices are not rooted in any evidence based research on effective empathy building. And when she was reporting this story, and considering the well intentioned goals of the camp, she kept a post it on our computer that said, at what cost?

Karen de Sá
For a lot of the white students, if there were real eye opening experiences, they didn’t really get kind of the depths of the pain of discrimination. But it kind of came at the expense of those students who had suffered the discrimination but also kind of open them up for for the problem of kind of limited after care.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Karen says the kids would sometimes share experiences like sexual abuse, or even thoughts of suicide, revisiting really traumatic moments, but there weren’t mental health professionals present or resources in place to help the campers continue to process and heal after sharing.

Carmel Evans
Within that four days I cut I probably cut a lot more than I would have within two weeks.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
That’s Carmel Evans. She’s a high schooler who attended Camp Everytown in Boulder Creek in the fall of 2017. She suffered from depression before the camp and said that while her experience was amazing, she loved the intimacy and closeness that the camp fosters. She also found it really difficult.

Carmel Evans
I felt like maybe they needed to talk about coping skills, because they, they made us feel these intense emotions. And then they were kind of like, okay, circle up time time to be cheery and happy. But what do you do when you can’t pull yourself out of it?

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Executive Director Tuyen Fiack of Silicon Valley FACES, the organization that runs Camp Everytown, wrote a statement that addressed the Chronicles reporting. She challenged some of the representations, but also announced that they invited various experts to camp to provide feedback. In response camp, every town is instituting changes in training and curriculum that prioritize self care and trauma informed practices, and partnerships with other youth services.

Karen de Sá
We all want to see kids come together. It’s kind of a hard thing to challenge because if you critique the way they’re going about this, it sounds like you don’t care about those schools, even if you do.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Pushing these teens to or even beyond their limits might help encourage some towards more tolerance and empathy. But for others, it may do more harm than good. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Ninna Gaensler-Debs.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that bracing report on how challenging It is to get this right. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. And today we’re thinking about tolerance and radical disagreement.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Regina Rini, Professor of philosophy at York University, and also the author of “Abortion, Ultrasound, and Moral Persuasion.” Gina, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Regina Rini
Thanks so much for having me on.

Ken Taylor
So Gina, this is a great and interesting topic. I wonder though, what you’re an academic, you’re a philosopher, what got you interested in questions about moral disagreement and the limits of tolerance and all that? Did you have some, like upfront experience with deep disagreement?

Regina Rini
Absolutely. So a lot of this comes out of my experience living in different moral communities among different types of people, and seeing how they think about each other. So I grew up in the Midwest, in a politically conservative or religious family. When I was a kid, my dad would always have read conservative talk radio on that in the car like Rush Limbaugh that sort. And a lot of what I heard was a kind of demonizing of people on the left. And then when I was older, I moved to the East Coast, I lived in New York City for 10 years, and the people I was around tended to be on the left tended to be liberals. And then I would hear from them a similar sort of basically the same thing demonizing people on the political right. And the cards on the table here, my own sensitivities, my own sensibilities politically or more to the left these days, but even around other people who are to the left hearing them speak that way dismissively. And demonizing people on the right, still sits with me uncomfortable in the same way hearing Rush Limbaugh attack people on the left did when I was a kid. And so it’s that sensation that something’s gone really wrong. If our response to hearing that people disagree, is to immediately go to they’re terrible, and no one should ever engage with them.

Ray Briggs
So some people believe that the best kind of response to moral disagreement like that, is this wishy washy, let’s agree to disagree kind of tolerance. Do you think that’s the best we can hope for?

Regina Rini
No, I don’t. And the reason for that is, I think that there’s something valuable about the way people can relate to each other. And once we appreciate that valuable thing we see we need to go farther than that we need to positively engage in fact, but I argue is that we have a moral obligation to make ourselves open to being persuaded by the people we don’t agree with. So don’t just ignore them.

Ken Taylor
You know, I think that’s a powerful thought I want to get onto it. I want to probe your reasons for thinking that but I don’t want to give up too quickly. I don’t want to surrender too quickly. The importance even though it’s kind of arguing against that this live and let live. I begrudge you but okay, your you have your stupid immoral views, but we’re going to coexist, can’t call that kind of thing what he called unsociable sociability. I mean, we don’t really intrinsically like love all of our fellow human beings, but we have to put up with them. And this big grudging tolerance is like part. I mean, you got to agree that if we don’t have that we’re in deep trouble. Maybe that’s not sufficient. But surely it’s necessary that we have at least a kind of begrudging tolerance of one another.

Regina Rini
Yeah, that seems right. To me. I mean, a minimum, we’re gonna live together in the same place, we have to at least have that level of begrudging tolerance, like you said, but I think there’s valuable reason to want more and in fact that I think we’re obligated to want more to seek out more than that.

Ray Briggs
So can you tell us a little bit more about what what the more is that we should be seeking out?

Regina Rini
Sure. Yeah. So the idea here is that there’s different ways we can relate to people we disagree with. One is to ignore them, like I already mentioned. Another is to threaten them. Another is to try to bribe them like there are lots of different ways we can try to get them to do what we want them to do. But another category is to persuade them, which is to offer them reasons. And I want to pay attention to what that wouldn’t what’s involved in offering somebody reasons. It’s saying to somebody, I want you to act differently, believe differently. And I want you to do that, because of the reasons I’m about to give you. Yeah, because you feel threatened.

Ken Taylor
I think you mean a certain kind of reason. But we’ll get into that because I can give you a reason by pointing a gun at you. But that’s not right, right. Yeah, exactly. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about radical disagreement and the limits of tolerance with Regina Rini from York University.

Ray Briggs
How demanding is my obligation to listen to moral persuasion? What if someone’s views deny my personhood? Aren’t some points of view just so awful that I shouldn’t even consider them?

Ken Taylor
Persuasion, openness and the limits of tolerance—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues?

Lucinda Williams
Please, please, please convince me.

Ken Taylor
if I radically disagree with you, should I tolerate you, shun you, or try to convince you? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the limits of tolerance. Our guest is Regina Rini from York University.

Ken Taylor
Gina, now I’m not sure I agree with you, you said that we have a duty to be open to moral persuasion from people who radically disagree with it. I think we have a duty of tolerance at least, but maybe more. But even if I were to grant you that we have this duty, aren’t there limits to that kind of duty? I mean, aren’t there times when you’re so beyond the pale, then I’m just allowed to shut my ears tomorrow, persuasion coming at me from that direction?

Regina Rini
Yeah, I think there are, but they’re pretty limited. They happen sometimes. But they’re very special circumstances. So the idea is something like this. The reason why we should be open to persuasion is because persuasion is about respect, mutual respect. It’s how we show that we treat each other as people whose Minds Matter, and not just as things to manipulate, or votes to pay for, or in some dismissive way, we really care that everybody’s got a mind. Everybody’s got thoughts. And so being open to persuasion is a way of showing respect to somebody respecting their mind. And here’s the idea. So the thought is that if somebody, the thing they want to persuade you of is that they don’t respect you, because they regard you as less than human or is not deserving basic civil and political rights, then they’re not engaged in a project and mutual respect. They’re not trying to share respect back and forth with you. And those are the special circumstances where I think we have no responsibility at all to listen,

Ken Taylor
I don’t I don’t know. I mean, I see what the claim. I mean, it’s a complicated claim with many parts. Yeah. But I was start with the first part. I mean, I do agree that there are persons with whom I’m engaged in a project of like, collective life together. But there are other persons from whom I even if they don’t treat me as a thing, I’m, I’m fundamentally at odds with them. They’ve got a religious, a comprehensive religious doctrine like that. Maybe it doesn’t. It doesn’t offend me as such, but I still find it deeply morally problematic. I don’t know I’m just gonna say for argument’s sake, the Mormons I, you know, care what they think about me, but I just, I don’t share any kind of community with them that would allow me to reason back and forth with them. So why should I listen to the Mormons?

Regina Rini
Because I think you want them to listen to you, I think you do care?

Ken Taylor
Do I care? Am I You go your way, I go my way. I will tolerate them, but I will not engage them. What’s wrong with that attitude?

Regina Rini
Because I think that most of us, I think all of us actually, once we were honest about it, want other people to think about us in this way. We want to be respected by others in this way, we don’t want them just to see us as a vote to manipulate or someone to step around. We do care that other people see us as having legitimate views as having views that are actually worth listening to. And that we’re not just causal objects that we’re people who have beliefs and thoughts and reasons behind them. And the thought here is, if you want other people to see you that way, then you need to make the effort to see them that way. Whether or not that’s your instinct.

Ray Briggs
So I like this as an ideal. I’m worried about how reachable it is, and and sort of the trust involved and trying to get somebody to see me as a person to listen to. So like, what if I extend them that trust and they don’t extend it back to me?

Regina Rini
Yeah, I think that’s the right question to ask. And that’s really hard. And I think a lot of it depends on the details. I mean, is the reason they’re not doing that because they’re distracted right now or because other people around pressuring them? Or is it really, if you can really tell, they’re just never going to listen to you or even see you as a person who could give them reasons that I think that we get close there to the special circumstances I mentioned, were given that you can’t share reciprocal respect to that person, your obligation to listen to them seems to fade too. But I want us to be super careful that we’re not just preemptively dismissing the people we disagree with and assuming they never could listen to us.

Ken Taylor
I want to go back to your fundamental thing that I want people to listen to me and therefore should listen to, I don’t know that I want people to listen to me. I mean, on the radio, well, I want look, I do agree I draw a circle around my like intellectual moral community, and there are people in it. And it’s an inclusive community. And within that circle, I think, well, our disagreements are reasonable disagreement. But somebody else might draw the circle of people with whom they regard their disagreement as reasonable disagreement. They might draw that circle differently. You seem to believe that that circle encompasses all humanity. But why should I believe that? That it? I mean, I don’t know why that’s true. I don’t know why there aren’t kind of different, differently sides circles, different centered on different kinds of points of view, like, you know, Rawls has this notion of an overlapping consensus, but not all substantive modes of of life or comprehensive views can go together in a in an overlapping consensus.

Regina Rini
Yes, I don’t think it extends to all humanity, but extensive, very wide. So it’s basically anybody who accepts the basic idea I said that all of us are not just OB Next, we’ve manipulated but we’re people who have thoughts and reasons behind them. And once you’ve got that going, once you accept that all people are like that, then you’re already committed to the background sort of respect, I’m pointing out, you might not always practice it, you might screw up, you might fail to remember it. But you do accept the basic thing, you do have that much in common. And so not everybody does. There are plenty of people out there in the world who are have all sorts of views about people they refuse to engage with as humans. And those people are not in our circle. But the circle is actually very large. And so I don’t think we should be looking for additional barriers to add to that if we can find that common point of agreement. We’re all people, we all have beliefs, we all have minds. And we’re not just things to be manipulated. Once we’ve got that starting point going. I think that gives us actually a lot.

Ray Briggs
So Gina, I’m thinking that maybe there’s this this third alternative between people or objects to be manipulated, and people are like, people we have to listen to. And that’s that we can leave each other alone. I think like for a lot of a lot of interactions, say with my neighbors, a lot of the time, I don’t want to go talk to them about like, my opinions about what they should be growing in their garden. Nor do I want to manipulate them particularly I just want to live alongside them and not interact much. When like, Isn’t that an option? Like when isn’t when isn’t that an option?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s my question.

Regina Rini
You know, it’s a really good question. So for example, if I were to say, it’d be great if the Toronto Raptors would have been, I don’t know if your listeners know your universities in Toronto, so I’m gonna go ahead and say that, and I imagined, maybe some of your listeners might disagree with that. That’s something where it might be good if we were to agree to disagree, and not try to hash out our disagreements about who should be winning basketball tournaments. But other kinds of questions aren’t like that. And I think moral questions are particularly because most moral questions are what philosophers called universally prescriptive their claims about what everybody should do. And they give rise to a whole bunch of second tier universally prescriptive claims, like when it’s okay to shout at somebody when it’s okay to imprison them when it’s okay to hate them. And so given that the things we’re disagreeing about in the moral domain are things that are meant to apply to everybody, and not just basketball fans in a particular city. That’s where it really matters that we don’t just avoid each other and avoid talking about, well, we all are implicitly making claims about what everybody has to do.

Ken Taylor
Well, maybe that’s the mistake right there. They think that view of me maybe moment, morality, in some people’s mouths purports to be universally prescriptive. But let’s think about the political domain. And whether politics and political procedures can settle the moral truth. And I think, suppose I’m the kind of philosopher it felt political philosophers think, well, settling the moral truth is not the business of politics, people are going to have their competing moral doctrines. And politics is not about Well, that’s the true one. And that’s the other one. But politics is about how can we have a reasonable scheme of cooperation, despite our moral differences without having to settle, which is the true comprehensive moral title, I’m kind of speaking in a kind of quasi enrolled the invoice. And I just wonder what you think about that. I mean, I’m not a Rawlsian, for lots of reasons. But I’m kind of speaking in a quasi Rawlsian voice just to try and figure out what you think about that kind of approach?

Regina Rini
Yeah, so one of the distinctive things about Rawls is that he admitted he was generally doing what people call ideal theory, which is an idealized world, what would the ideal political system look like? And I’m not so sure that that is the ideal view. But even if it is, the real world isn’t really like that people aren’t willing to. They don’t approach politics is divorced from personal morality, their their political, their votes, and who they support is informed by what they believe is right for all of us together. So I just don’t think we can expect reasonably expect people to treat their political decision making is separate from their moral beliefs. And given that, then, again, a lot of our political action is about making universally prescriptive claims, how we should all be, how we should live together.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about tolerance and radical disagreement. And Rick from San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Rick. What’s your comment or question?

Rick
Yes, I have a comment regarding your co hosts who said that people are anti vaxxers are unreasonable. I regard myself as a vaccine skeptic. So I, you know, I’m very critical about the value of vaccines, but I actually accept that some vaccine may be good, but I think his point of view is very unscientific, you know, as to be more open minded about it. I consider myself a progressive, I’m not a closed minded person. So how does he conclude that people who have skepticism about vaccines are somehow close minded and scientific that just doesn’t hold water?

Ken Taylor
Thanks for the comment. Rick, I think calls for a response from Ray.

Ray Briggs
So I there’s a lot of evidence that vaccines have, like helped to prevent a lot of terrible diseases like polio, like Polio is basically eradicated in this country because of vaccines. And there’s not a lot of evidence that Vaccines do things like cause autism, like there’s a bunch of discredited research by some guy named Andrew Wakefield saying they do. But like abstracting a little bit from the issue of vaccines. This is interesting. So one of the reasons I think that this is important is because it’s a disagreement with with consequences. So, like, if you get this wrong, if you know if I get this wrong, then, like vaccines are doing like lots of terrible things to kids that I don’t think they are, if you get this wrong, then vaccines are sort of preventing us from getting preventable diseases like mumps and polio. And, you know, if we don’t like vaccinate our kids, then the social consequences for other people are going to be terrible. I think this sort of brings us back to Regina, his point about sort of morality being prescriptive for everybody. So I think that like vaccinating children is a moral issue. Because I think like if if you don’t do it, you could hurt other people. And you kind of can’t coordinate the consequences of your actions off from from other people.

Ken Taylor
So Gina, I want to know what you think about this debate between Ray. And Rick. I mean, it’s, I think Ray’s made a powerful point, I just wanted to, if there are real world consequences that we have to live with is not just a matter of private preference and private action, then that’s like, I think regular point is that make puts pressure on us to, like, settle this issue in a way that we can all live with. Would you agree with that or not?

Regina Rini
Yeah. What’s interesting, here’s there’s two different disagreements going on one’s a scientific disagreement about what the evidence shows. And the other is a moral disagreement on what you should do in a society if you disagree with other people about the science. And that that’s like a general argument that couldn’t be made by vaccines and make climate change other things. And so I take it that the scientific debate is not the kind of thing I’m talking about science is a different topic, or it’s not morality, I take it that our standards there need to be about scientific debate. And so that’s where I think I’m with Ray, as far as the science goes, What’s more complicated and I think your color is getting at is, if you find yourself just unconvinced by the science. And everybody’s telling you, you’re wrong. And you have to make decisions about your own kids in your own life. And that’s a moral question. And I think there’s an argument to be made that given our responsibilities to other people, we ought to take the chance my own perspective of getting the science wrong, and act in a way that’s meant to protect other people. And that even if you don’t end up agreeing with the science, that might be the right answer. So I think that’s debatable.

Ken Taylor
So even if I’m okay, I’m again, I’m not I don’t want to. I’m not I don’t want to push this Rawlsian line too hard. But even if I, but if I were a Roseann, I would think I would say, Well, look, it’s a moral disagreement, but it’s but the moral disagreement, we’re not going to settle that through politics, what we have to do is settle our political disagreement. And we have to do that by appealing to a special kind of reason what he calls a public reason that, you know, may or may not look like a good reason from your like, comprehensive moral point of view. But we’re not arguing from our comprehensive moral point, Ray, you want to get in?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, something just occurred to me about about this debate in particular, and also about climate debates, which is that there are factual so they have moral consequences. But they’re factual, and they ought to be able to be settled by sort of public shared factual means. And I, it’s interesting that these debates continue, even though you think that like, if everybody looks at the actual evidence, we should all be able to come to some agreement or other

Ken Taylor
There’s values too. But Regina, what do you think?

Regina Rini
There’s something tricky going on there. So I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a vaccine scientist, I don’t think either of you are either. And I don’t think any of us have sincerely weighed up the evidence on these things. Instead, we’re relying on trust to a particular scientific community. And we’re relying on a value judgment about who to trust and why to trust them and when to trust them. And those values are really complicated and not sure they’re moral. They’re not scientific at first pass. There’s something really complicated the social. And that’s why I think we can have an honest disagreement about how to approach when to trust experts. Now, my own view is, these are pretty clear cases where we should trust the climate change experts and the vaccine experts. But I want to allow space for having an open discussion with people who don’t accept that claim about who to trust. And that’s where it’s not a scientific question. It’s a question about how we arranged society together.

Ken Taylor
So we got another caller on the line. Aria from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Aria
Yes, thank you for taking my call. I think one elements have been left out of this incredibly important and practical discussion is that people have a lot of fear and they’re identified with their beliefs and experiences. If I’m not right, I’m not saying so we have to go through that experience together sort of confusion and disorientation together when we’re willing to be willing to experience that confusion together but also to be impacted by other people’s ideas that we don’t necessarily agree with. And we will be changed in some important way, even if our basic viewpoint is based on science, or pseudoscience or strong convictions that have been handed down to us are. So we have to really know that that’s the cost of being together with diverse people and in in the future will be based on.

Ken Taylor
Aria, you’re raising a really important and really deep question I wish we had, we got to get take to a break. But I want to make a really quick point about what ARIA says, This is why I’m not a Rawlsian. Because it’s something that ARIA said, because if I were a deeply religious person, I would say that Rawls is demanding that I checked my identity, my fundamental identity at the door, before I enter into public debate, and that the things that strike me as like the deepest possible reasons, can’t be put forth as a reason. But that seems like really—

Ray Briggs
Ken, I want to hear what Gina has to say about this.

Regina Rini
I’m with you on that.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so, but we can take this up a little more after the break. Yeah, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about radical disagreement with Regina Rini from York University.

Ray Briggs
How can we prevent moral disagreements from degenerating into shouting matches or civil wars? What’s the best way to cultivate respectful conversations in the social media?

Ken Taylor
Fake news, flame wars, and your civic duties—when Philosophy Talk continues

Bob Dylan
Time will tell who has failed and who’s been left behind, when you go your way and I’ll go mine..

Ken Taylor
You go your way, and I go mine—that’s the best we can do when we disagree? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and our guest is Regina Rini from York University and we’re asking how do we cultivate respectful disagreement?

Ken Taylor
So I want to go back to the just what we said before the break, because you you you only you said you were with me. But I want to, I want you to expand on this point of So somebody has a point of view that’s deeply tied up with who they are. And like I said that the reason I’m not a Roseann is because it seems to me that a Rawlsian requires that those kinds of points of view, those kinds of reasons that are generated. From that point of view, don’t get to enter at least a political sphere. And that seems to me people don’t like that. And you said you were with me, but I’d like you to expand on that if possible.

Regina Rini
Yeah, no, I think I basically agree with what you said so far, though, I’d add one thing. So I think it’s unreasonable to expect people to set aside their fundamental identities in the political realm, that’s just not how people work. The one thing I want to insist on goes back to something I said earlier, the kind of people we don’t have to listen to, which are the ones who take as a as an assumption that certain types of people don’t count, but they’re not fully human, they don’t get basic civil rights, they don’t get to be part of the political discourse. And the reason why that’s special is because we can’t actually have democratic discourse, if we’re taking it that some people who are trying to speak don’t get heard, don’t get to have any voice at all, in order to be able to work together and form some sort of common will a choice together as a democratic society, we have to take that as our starting point that everybody counts. And so I take it that people who come in with a starting point that some people don’t get to count, that position, their holding, should be rejected by the rest of us as the ground rules.

Ray Briggs
So Gina, that seems right, but I’m wondering how you tell when something constitutes that kind of disrespect? And when something is just disagreement, it’s sort of not always obvious?

Regina Rini
Absolutely. I think that’s the most the hardest, most important question here. Because it’s very, very tempting to say, the people I disagree with, that’s what they’re doing in a complicated way. They’re just ignoring the basic human equality of some people. And the problem is that sometimes that’s true. And sometimes we’re just telling ourselves that is an excuse to disagree with them. And I actually think philosophers are not the best situated to figure this out. Often psychologists are in a better position, or even I was thinking about this, like professional poker players, the people who can tell whether somebody’s sincere from the way they’re speaking, and the way their face looks, may actually be better at this than we are. So I wish I had But sir, and I find this so vaccine. But

Ken Taylor
You know, I want to try something else out on you, though, because you said something. I don’t know if you noticed the condition. No, but you said a conditional something about if we’re committed to democracy. I agree. If we’re committed to democracy and the more inclusive and pluralistic our democracy we we will allow our democracy to be but but you know, democracy is really, really hard. It’s cacophonous and all this sort of stuff. And I say, well, it’s if you can get the kind of begrudging tolerance among a wide range of people a you’ve won some kind of victory. But you know, what, democratic societies often fracture precisely because people cannot sustain this thing. And so you could say, well, one person’s ponents Another person Stalin’s that is, so maybe instead of democracy we should narrow the scope of political community to something like populism or maybe Vanguard movements, which say, I have to divide the people into like the the revolutionary people who need to be transformed and the anti revolutionary reaction elements. I know, don’t listen to the capitalist anymore. You were but you were bargaining with a capitalist over like trade unionists, what you want to do is seize the factory history is full of that stuff. So tell me tell me how to think about that. Because there’s populist movements, there’s Vanguard as movements, there’s revolutionary overthrow of the old order, which is precisely the opposite of let’s listen and tolerate.

Regina Rini
Yeah, no, I think we’re hitting a kind of bedrock here, which is that I my commitment to democracy, and I think a lot of explicit Democrats, small d Democrats, comes from the idea that democracy is really fundamental to who we are. It’s the political system that instantiates the idea that we’re all equal, and that we all regard each other as equals. And a lot of the extreme movements you’re talking about start from the assumption that we’re not that there is some privileged group that knows the right way, and is going to lead us all to the right way of having things. And if it doesn’t, really doesn’t come along, then we’ll take whatever means are necessary to make them come along. And I can’t exactly give an argument against that position. It’s just that I find it repellent. And I think a lot of us do, and those of us who do find that as a starting point, repellent, are there by Democrats were united in this conception that we need as a society where everybody counts in our decision making.

Ken Taylor
I totally agree with you. And I think but I guess all I want to add is, yeah, it’s really hard. And it’s really hard to achieve and sustain, partly because of the way people are about these things. But we’ve got to caller, Phil from Oakland. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Phil. What’s your comment requested?

Phil
Hey, I just wanted to take you guys to the whole discussion in general. And then there’s this question about attention. Potentially, that’s here, one of the things we talked about is why do these conversations break down into shouting? And one of the callers mentioned Well, that one of the things we need dimension is the fear, and that people identify with a position they have they feel personally threatened when they’re challenged on that idea. And some people therefore go into conversations refusing to ever budge from that position. So then it’s not a conversation. So we could sort of say that the ego or like identifying with a position is the problem. And so my question to you guys, because we then were just talking about how well it’s impossible to leave my identity at the door. So how can we, you know, not leave our identity at the door, but also take our ego out of the conversation?

Ken Taylor
I think that’s a question for you, Gina, since you’re the expert here. Thanks, Phil.

Regina Rini
It’s a really good question. It’s also really hard. And I think what what your caller is identifying is something about vulnerability. If I go into this discussion with somebody who deeply disagrees with me and make myself open to being persuaded, I’m making something about me something fundamental about me up for grabs, that’s really hard. And all there’s all the psychological pressure to never ever do that. Because we don’t want to be vulnerable in that way. And I think what that tells us is that we want to have these honest conversations, they’re not going to happen, like in middle of a political rally on debate stage, they’re gonna happen one to one and quiet places where there’s not an audience shouting, and where people feel that the background conditions are enough to make them safe to be vulnerable. That’s really hard to create that situation. But when we can, that’s really useful to have it.

Ray Briggs
So you mentioned creating the right background conditions for a good conversation. And a lot of political discussion these days takes place on sort of social media and the internet, which seems like it might create questionable background conditions for a conversation. Do you have thoughts about how we can do better or, or what kinds of problems social media might? Cause?

Regina Rini
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the number one problem is the audience problem. Everybody on social media imagines themselves up on a debate stage with a microphone. And they imagine there are 1000s of people out there watching and everything they say, is being judged as a move in a competitive debate. I mean, when when people are showing pictures of their cats, but when people are arguing about politics, they think about it this way. And that puts us in exactly the wrong position. Because now, if you listen to the other side and can see anything, then you’re admitting a vulnerability, and you’re weakening your position. And I think this is really fundamental to how social media works. The social part of social media, I’m actually really worried that we’re not capable of having most of us most of the time are not capable of having really genuinely opening good conversations on social media. Some people find ways to do it, but they’re actually don’t understand how they do reliably.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, they’re few and far between. But look, I think you guys, I think we’re at something really deep that’s prompted by a collar and the talk about vulnerability and all that. Look, I think one of the things that’s difficult in a democracy is as like ours is what I call the civics the Civic Square, right? Not the governmental, we know what the government should and shouldn’t do. We have pretty good theories of that. But how citizens should relate to one another and their daily commerce not mediated by government, but in citizen, the citizen to citizen engagement in the public square, I think we have a completely broken public square completely, utterly broken. And, and we don’t know how to gauge each other in as as free and equal citizens on non government mediating mediated cont exchanges. And I don’t know how to fix that. But I think we do need to fix that. If democracy is going to survive. What do you think about that thought?

Regina Rini
Yeah, that seems right to me. I don’t know if I think it’s quite as broken as us I completely broken I don’t know if we’re that far gone yet. Although I agree that things have gotten pretty bad. And I do blame social media for playing a role. And getting us to that point, I’m actually working on a book right now. That’s about social media and democracy. And I am really scared that it might just be that social media is not compatible with maintaining a good democratic culture, it might be that we often just agree to give it up, if we’re gonna have a chance at keeping a decent culture going. Well, it’s not just I know, the problems also, you know. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
All this hyper partisanship campaigns, you talked about camp, you’re not just a person to be manipulated. Well, most of our political class thinks of the voters as not people to be informed and engaged in democratic deliberation, but in manipulation and the art of mental manipulation, or our home to the fair, the Well, I mean, I do think it’s a crisis.

Regina Rini
And that’s why people hate politicians, because that is to be an effective politician, you have to think about human beings in that way. And that we don’t want to be thought about in that way. So it’s really scary that a lot of us are now acting like little politicians all the time and thinking about everybody else in that way. How can we maximize partisan advantage for our own side? Then I think, yeah, I wish I wish I had the solution that that’s the scary part. I feel like I have a diagnosis and a lot of what’s happening, but I don’t know how we solve it. So I think I’m with you in saying we’re in a difficult situation. And I hope smarter people are thinking about ways of pulling us back.

Ken Taylor
They’re not smarter, they may have different—

Ray Briggs
Ken, you’ve got to respect people and trust people! That’s what we talked about the whole time!

Ken Taylor
So Gina, want to give you one last thought. You said you don’t have a solution, right? But I want to give you I want you to give us a takeaway for this conversation. Because I think this is deep, hard, challenging stuff at the core of democratic life. So give us one last one last takeaway.

Regina Rini
So what I think is helpful is if you ever find yourself in a position where you’re talking to somebody, you know, you disagree with deeply, but you have a kind of relationship, maybe they’re a close family member, or close friend, someone you really deeply trust. And you can put yourself in a moment of vulnerability, and just say to them, you know, I’d like to honestly hear why you think that thing, I don’t agree with it. I’m going to listen to you and give you a fair hearing. I might not agree with you, but I’m going to do it. And they they can trust you to take to mean it when you say that. Take advantage of that. Because like, that’s uncomfortable. People don’t want to do that it feels corny, at best, or dangerous at worst. But those are so rare. If you can find that that’s a really good thing to experience. And hopefully you’ll come away from that experience finding chances for it elsewhere.

Ken Taylor
On that hopeful note, I’m going to thank you for joining us, Gina, this has been a very agreeable conversation.

Regina Rini
I agree.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Regina Rini, Professor of Philosophy from York University, author of “Abortion, Ultrasound and Moral Persuasion,” among other things. So, Ray, are you having agreeable or disagreeable thoughts?

Regina Rini
Now, I’m having agreeable thoughts. But I I’m a little pessimistic. I’m I’m hoping that we can all sort of achieve the ideals that Gina really seems to want. And I just, I just think we have to have the trust in each other to do it.

Ken Taylor
I agree with you. I mean, I’m more than a little pessimistic. I am a lot pessimistic. But I what I do believe is that it’s humans are what they are. But we have to design a social world, which compensates for what humans are. And so we need to design the public square completely differently. Social media, as its evolved as an abomination. The news media as it as it evolved is an abomination. Our political campaigns are an abomination. So we got to start over. But you know what? This conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is, with apologies to Descartes Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog. And you can become a partner in our community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Regina Rini
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog. Now, here’s a guy who only tolerates his philosophy at high speed. It’s Ian Sshoales, the S

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Things are getting better for tolerance these days, I think. Certainly consciousness is being raise to unheard of heights. New communities are springing up every day. The transgender community, the Cambodian immigrant community, we’re community building, we’re diverse and woke, we got best selling self help books on the shelves targeting special needs we just found out about, how to be gluten free, how to infest our gut with good bacteria, we got Ted talks, and swarms of advisers, counsellors, psychologists, invading our talk shows, and informing us how to *navigate* the treacherous waters of intolerance. The fly in this ointment is that tolerance is not a two way street. Racists are supposed to tolerate people of color, but people of color are not allowed to tolerate racists, even though they are an endangered minority, I hope. We can’t tolerate sexism, but the me too movement and identity politics have led to all sorts of sometimes troubling new elements to our moral tinkering- the emergence of toxic masculinity, for instance, the nuances of inappropriate touching, leading to the death of the group hug, the toppling of Confederate statues, the removal of elephants from the circus, trigger warnings, interrogating our cultural assumptions, walking back, moving forward, calling out, coming out, and self identifying as a shamer of fat shamers. Of course, there’s a backlash. People who have deep concerns, allegedly, around accusations of white privilege, calls for reparations for slavery, the spread of the cultures of victimhood, all those communities, each with its own agenda! Are just gonna bring us all crashing down into the rising sea of global warming, which is just a lie, but progressives are gonna make it happen anyway just to get Trump. It’s sad. It’s a sad conspiracy attempted coup. Let me interrogate the larger picture here. What we have is a weird master culture constantly striving to be monolithic. It used to be just white, not only just white, but German, English, French. Then came the Irish, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, many of whom were kept on the outside of the monolith, forcing themselves to form their own sub cultures, the Mafia, vaudeville performers, binge drinkers, corrupt politicians. When Indians got in the way, we killed them, saving a few back to be buddies later on, and to own casinos. Black people, well, they’re just now entering the monolith, and a sizeable minority of the majority is still peeved about it. But, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not WHITE so much that’s being promoted, but a corpus of behaviors. Anybody can belong, but you gotta act the part. More suburban than anything else. Live in a house rather than apartment, you’re IN, you can play basketball in your driveway, but no ethnic dances, you can scream at sporting events, but not out your window at three a.m. You can be gay if you get married and have kids. Now you can have tattoos and still get a job, so long as it’s not a naked woman embracing a cobra. and it’s not on your face. Take the Uber not the bus. Protest march, but don’t pick fights with the neo Nazis. Use go fund me, not government grants. Tolerance, my friends. There’s a theoretical level playing field, that we have to aspire to if we want to belong. Kind of a really boring heaven, and everybody’s treated the same. Somewhere above that field, a point of view hovers, deciding what’s not being allowed on the field, and what is. It is decided, but it’s not always clear how. It’s arrived at by a weird consensus, that is both conscious and unconscious, democratic and mob-driven, hysterical and stuck in the mud, ever changing and as old as original sin. But tolerance is a weird way to look at it. I mean, we have tolerance for pain, tolerance for fools, a tolerance for alcohol, the assistant principal had a low tolerance for my schoolyard shenanigans, and I don’t know how much longer I can tolerate the tweets of Trump, though what choice do I have really? Tolerance levels, in other words, are always different, not always positive. Tolerance is what we go through until we just can’t take it any more, and it becomes intolerable. The approval ratings get so low it’s cancelled. Unless it gains a cult following. That’s my dream, my hope. But then again, I identify as pugnacious. The cranky incipient geezer with bum leg community – population one, that’s me –I am definitely endangered. Won’t you please help? Tolerate me, if you can. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Tina Pamintuan.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Monty Python
Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type makes me puke! You vacuous, toffy-nosed, malodorous pervert! What? I came in here for an argument! Oh I’m sorry, this is abuse.