This fall, you'll find yourself engaged in familiar conversations. You'll be lounging on the Main Green or trying to get the Keeney hallway to stop spinning for just one second when a friend will say, "Those idiots in Congress ought to x!" or "The average person needs to realize that z!" What these conversations have in common is their normative element: We are not talking about the way the world is, but about how it should be. Normative conversations have the potential to do great good. Hopefully, we reach some conclusion, and if we're really motivated, we'll get out there and do something. This fact makes normative conversations some of the most important you'll have. Their conclusions have the potential to change the world in a way that a discussion of the primacy of signifier versus signified doesn't.
The importance of normative issues demands of us a careful eye when we tackle them. Their emotional significance makes us prone to bad reasoning. After all, we undoubtedly feel more strongly about workers' rights than about whether "Crank: High Voltage" or "The Transporter" is the better Jason Statham film — for the record, the former. Furthermore, Brown is, overall, a liberal school. This results in more homogeneity of opinion than in the general public, so dissenting voices may not be fully represented. With this in mind, we must correct for error wherever possible.
One of the largest and easily remedied sources of error in these debates is the primacy of wanting to win over wanting to understand. We should be charitable and argue against our opponents on the terms they set. It is too easy to build straw men that can be knocked down in a single blow, rather than considering our opponents' arguments in full force. This will both make you less dogmatic — if you walk a mile in their shoes, you might learn something — and will make your argument stronger. If you can show that — even on their own terms — your opponents are wrong, so much the better for your position. Think of it this way: Though you may be right, you are not incontrovertibly right. There is always room for reasonable disagreement. If you can dismiss your opponents' views without breaking a sweat, you are not doing them justice.
Now, when someone comes around shouting accusations of this nature, it is natural to nod in agreement while mumbling, "Not me." I want my message to make you slightly uncomfortable because that's the only way for me to effect change. This leaves me the unenviable task of naming names. As an example, let's look at an exchange that occurred last semester on the touchy issue of abortion. I ask the authors not to take it personally. I want to call out everybody who agrees with the authors' reasoning, not just the authors themselves.
In a March column, Sarah Gassel '12 urges us to compare the fate of an aborted fetus to that of a murdered infant ("The case for infant rights," Mar. 18). As she says, "Just as no one had the ethical right to take my life as a newborn … my mother could (not) choose whether or not I was to live while I was in the womb. Both abortion and infanticide would result in my non-existence on this earth — are they truly separate practices?" Though I am trying hard to follow my own advice, I am hard-pressed to find any other argument for the fetal right to life in her article. We need look no further since we are looking at her article specifically and not the arguments against abortion in general.
Her line of reasoning should have been that pro-choicers are clever enough to realize that their position allows infanticide, and so they must have some reason to think the two really are different or that infanticide is not as bad as it might seem. This could have led her to Judith Thomson's argument that rights to one's body trump another's right to life or Peter Singer's argument that fetuses are morally irrelevant, neither of which she confronts.
Susannah Kroeber '11 and Alyssa Ratledge's '11 reply ("Pro-lifers fail to provide alternatives," Apr. 6) hardly fares better. They rightly recognize Gassel's failure to be charitable, but they do not apply the same standards to themselves. They should have thought that pro-lifers are probably not maliciously plotting to antagonize low-income women, so there must be something more going on. Just by reading Gassel's column, we know she believes that the right not to be killed is more important than a woman's right to her body. If you thought people were being systematically murdered, others would understand or even join when you hurled vitriol at the murderers. Kroeber and Ratledge don't attempt to undermine the argument that leads to picket lines at clinics.
In short, it's better to think your opponent is ineloquent than stupid.
David Hefer '12 is a philosophy and math concentrator who just wants everybody to get along. He can be reached at david_hefer@brown.edu
