We don’t expect people to have good reasons for their beliefs; or, a Footnote that got Out of Hand

Originally, the text of this blog post was going to be a footnote for another blog post. This that’s just context so the title — which was unavoidable — makes sense.

One way people (including me!) often give reasonable-sounding-but-not-actually-that-convincing arguments for their views is by what I like to call Appeal Without Evidence to a Hard-to-verify Outcome” (AWEHO). An AWEHO is a red flag that someone might be simply giving a justification for a view they want to believe instead of engaging in a pure and honest intellectual search for the truth.

Here’s an example of an AWEHO in action: The other day my flatmate asked me if I thought hate speech should be illegal. As a good, red-blooded, American I immediately said that it should not (without even clarifying what he meant by “hate speech”!).

I could have given a principled reason for this response, such as “I think that freedom of speech is an unalienable right that governments should not take away.” That could just be a core value that I hold which might have led to an interesting metaphysical debate about whether certain aspects of individual freedom are ends in themselves, how my views as a Christian and his as a Bahai’i affect our views on rights of communities, whether objective morality exists, etc.

But I didn’t make that kind of argument, because I don’t think freedom of speech should be an unalienable right. What I said instead was that making hate speech illegal would drive hateful ideas underground where they would fester and spread amongst hateful people. And since they were not being combated in the open marketplace of ideas, these hateful ideas would take deeper root and give rise to violence and vitriol that could have been avoided if those ideas were allowed to be debated in the open (I wasn’t this poetic when I was answering hastily and rashly).

In doing this, I’ve made an AWEHO. I’ve tied my support for the legality of hate speech to an empirical prediction: Allowing hate speech will lead to less hate in the long run. 

But I don’t really know if this prediction is true! It could just as easily be the case that banning hate speech in some circumstances decreases hate in the long run. I haven’t done any research to back up my empirical prediction. I’m sure there are lots of smart people on the internet with evidence of bans on speech leading to better outcomes, and I didn’t even do a cursory Google. The theoretical mechanism I described is compelling, but many beautiful theories are false.

And my flatmate did not challenge me on this defense of the legality of hate speech. Using an AWEHO as a rhetorical move is commonly accepted among people, like myself, who like to think we have good reasons for believing the things we believe.

I think that when I make an AWEHO — when I make a prediction like “making hate speech legal will lead to less hate” — most people don’t really expect me to back that up. When someone retreats to an AWEHO, it’s often taken as a conversation-ender — the point at which people simply agree to disagree. I make my AWEHO (allowing hate speech leads to less hate in the long term), you make yours (allowing hate speech leads to more hate in the long term) and we move on with neither of us intending to follow up either via conversation or via Googling.

Ending the conversation at an AWEHO is fine if the debate isn’t really about discovering the truth — and most conversations aren’t. We talk about stuff like this to get to know each other, or because it’s fun, or to feel superior to other people.

But if we actually care about arriving at the truth it’s crazy to end an argument at an AWEHO! That’s where the argument should just be beginning! That’s where people really have an opportunity to teach each other! If the two of us have different empirical predictions, then probably one of us has some information that the other doesn’t have, and we can exchange that information and eventually arrive at something closer to agreement (in fact, maybe we should always arrive at agreement if we’re being really intellectually honest).

If we care about arriving at the truth, a reasonable area to “agree to disagree” would be if we have different values. And this often happens. In fact, part of the reason that abortion is taboo to discuss is because it’s obvious that different values drive different opinions, and discussion isn’t likely to change those values. If I had simply asserted that I held the value that the freedom to hate speech was important in itself, that could have been a point at which my flatmate might have more reasonably agreed to disagree with me.

But the fact that we accept AWEHOs in arguments means that we really don’t expect people to have good reasons for having the opinions they do. We’re happy to end an argument when they say something that sounds like it could be a good reason, even if they give no evidence to support it.

I think it’s important to be aware of these tendencies, both to give AWEHOs and to accept it when others give them, so that you don’t accidently think that they are actually grounds for reasonable disagreements between two people searching for the truth.