You’re not entitled to your opinion: Or, the aggressive ignorance of the 21st century
I’ve seen other people explain why “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” and “everyone can believe whatever they want to believe” are bad arguments. But I continue to see people use these arguments, so I’m doing it again. And because I’ve seen it come up recently, I want to apply it to people who say that they “just don’t believe in gay marriage.”
A legal designation isn’t even the type of thing you can believe or not believe in to begin with, but we use the word “belief” in very bizarre ways in the 21st century. Let me clear that up first.
A belief is an acceptance that something is true or that it exists. You can’t really say “I don’t believe in gay marriage,” because marriage is a social convention that already exists, and “gay marriage” is just extending that convention to gay people, who also already exist.
An opinion is a judgment that is not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. Opinions are not conclusive and cannot ground an argument. Opinions are things like matters of taste. Here’s an example: I don’t like Jello. That’s an opinion. Jello is not objectively awful. It’s not wrong for other people to like Jello. It’s just not to my taste.
People assert their opinions as if they are facts all the time. But they aren’t. Let me repeat that — an opinion is not a fact. If I say, “Jello is gross,” I am not stating a fact, because “gross” is always an opinion word. There is no agreed upon measure of grossness. This ruffles people’s feathers sometimes when you do it about movies or music. But when you make opinion-based judgments about other people is when you really get yourself into trouble.
Sometimes when you try to assert your opinion as fact, you make a bad argument that conflates a judgment based on your own ignorance (maybe because you have a personal agenda) with actual facts of the world.
So the argument that “I don’t believe in gay marriage so it shouldn’t be allowed because everyone has a right to their own opinion” is what we logicians call a fallacious argument. It commits an informal fallacy. (Which even has a Wikipedia page.)
Why? Because with any belief or opinion claim, you are implicitly saying “I cannot ground this in fact,” which means you are saying, “this is not something that can be argued for conclusively such that anyone else must agree with me or else be factually incorrect and illogical.”
Furthermore, you don’t have a “right to an opinion” because that’s really not what rights or entitlements are. And even if you did have a right to an opinion, that still would have no bearing on whether your opinion is true or false, because opinions don’t come with truth claims.
So, it’s a bad, fallacious argument that cannot be defended against the facts of the world.
Facts are real.
To live in a world with other people means you have to have shared, implicitly agreed upon frameworks of knowledge (epistemic frameworks). Shared knowledge may vary with language, custom, morality, etc., which is why globalization makes things tricky, but some facts are universally true even within the 21st century global context.
There are oceans on Earth. This is a fact.
Human societies operate according to rules or laws. This is also a fact.
There are other fairly universal things we agree on cross-culturally.
Children are different from adults and need certain care and protections that adults don’t need. I think it’s pretty safe to say this is a fact. Where we draw the line as to who counts as a child is where it gets hairy.
It’s bad to kill people. This probably isn’t a fact. But if we flip it to “no one really wants to be killed,” then we’re closer to fact territory.
You don’t have your own personal epistemic framework. That’s not how knowledge works. You live in a world with other people and you were born into a pre-existing epistemic framework that you don’t get to decide on. Maybe you don’t like oceans. You still can’t just assert that they don’t exist because you don’t like them. (Well, you can, you’re just wrong.)
The problem is we conflate the individual with the collective all the time. I’ll get into this more below, but we’re pretty much all egoic, narcissistic monsters because we live in a system that benefits egoic, narcissistic monsters by putting them on top of the social hierarchy. And we let this affect the way we talk about and think about the world.
Where do opinions go wrong?
If you’re ruled by your opinions and never consider shared facts and knowledge, then you are probably a bad person.
An opinion is something that can’t be proven or based in fact. It is not something collectively agreed upon. If you act on your opinions and in doing so cause harm to another person, you’re in the wrong. If, say, I opine that stabbing people is a fine thing to do, and then I stab someone, I can’t use that as an argument in a legal defense.
Yes, some rules and laws are bad because lawmakers don’t take into account the shared world, or they privilege one group over another. It’s usually in the application of the law where things get even worse. Power dynamics aren’t the same opinions, that is, they are gatekeeping abuses of a generally agreed upon system of rules. That said, we can probably agree that laws against stabbing people are at least well-intentioned and not based on opinion.
Why? Because we collectively agree that stabbing other people is bad, because it’s a fact that the vast majority of people don’t want to be stabbed and generally we think humans have some extent of bodily autonomy (at least in the case of stabbing). And I don’t mean that we all sat down and took a vote and that we do this every time a new person enters into our society. I mean that we generally agree not to physically harm other people when we live in a community, because we’re social creatures and it’s not good for the group if we’re all stabby and murdery. This is part of the idea of the “social contract,” which is a fancy way of saying that we’re animals who agree not to harm each other for the general success of our species. Because human societies are complex, we usually talk about this in an ethical or moral way.
Today, we let refugee children be held in and die in detainment centers away from their parents. We commit genocide and/or knowingly don’t try to stop other people from committing genocide. We kill each other in wars over artificial constructs. We kill each other because we think one ethnicity or skin color is better than another. We don’t pay people a living wage when we can easily afford to. We let people die because we think only rich people deserve healthcare. We sell women and children as property so men can buy them for sex. We let children starve to death, because there are 2,208 billionaires in the world who own shit like superyachts.
And if you want to say “well, none of this is my fault personally,” fine. But is our fault collectively. If you have ever purchased anything with money, you have indirectly engaged in some atrocious horror against humanity. It is what it is. We’re bad.
And we try to defend a lot of this behavior with opinions.
In the 21st century, we (especially we in the Minority World) would rather maintain a power system that operates on an egoic, narcissistic hierarchy on the individual level, and white supremacy, patriarchy, and wealth accumulation on the systemic level. This is our collective choice, because we let the individuals at the top keep going even though they directly cause a tremendous amount of harm not to just to many, but to most.
We’re terrible, immoral people — collectively — in part because we think about ourselves individually. Why do we do this? I don’t know. Because as soon as survival became relatively easy, we got bored and thought “let’s play the most dangerous game until we’re extinct”?
We know we’re bad. We even know that navigating our lives in terms of our individual ego is bad. Every single religion that I know of says something along the lines of “check your ego and think of the whole” or, pared down to a Western context, “love everyone.” But we don’t do it.
We get bogged down in all the other conflicting, often consumerist, messages that tell us the individual is good. And that you, as an individual, are responsible for everything about your life you don’t like. For the record, you’re not.
Your culture and your social formations shape you and can get things wrong. It happens all the time. Your culture can present things to you as facts that are not facts. Being a critical thinker, being a good human, means questioning whether things are just the opinions of powerful people trying to maintain something artificial that benefits them or actual facts of the world.
For example, take the “immigrants are bad and taking your resources” lie, which is a lie spread throughout the Minority World at this point but is frequently presented as a fact. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs or your resources, and if you think that’s true, you’re simply wrong, because there are agreed upon facts of the world that say otherwise (Google it). There are plenty of resources for every human living on this planet right now. They just aren’t distributed as such.
But all of this means that people can “unlearn” bigotry. You can recognize facts of the world. You can recognize when people are lying to you, even if it means being critical of your cultural and social framework. You can recognize that all children need care and that no one wants to be killed, and you can work to ensure children have care and people aren’t killed.
It might not seem like you have a lot of power, and you don’t individually, but you can be better at being human.
The limits of opinion.
Back to my point. When you talk about “respecting others’ beliefs,” you’re usually talking about religion, which is also one of the more common reasons people give for discriminating against gay people. In a U.S. constitutional context, the government cannot interfere with religious practices. (Though, this hasn’t always been upheld. See Employment Division v. Smith if you can stomach a Scalia opinion.) And per the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers and other public institutions cannot discriminate based on religion.
The thing is, being a bigot isn’t a religious practice. Conversion therapy isn’t a religious practice. Baking cakes for weddings isn’t a religious practice. Telling people that you don’t recognize them as fully human under the law or otherwise isn’t a religious practice.
In our overly personalized, overly individualized interpretation of life, we incorrectly think that our personal aversion to things matters or that our beliefs matter, and we think these things matter in a legal sense. They don’t.
A religious belief is like thinking god exists or thinking meditation is a good practice. Once you start blaming religion for the way you treat other people, you have left the realm of belief. You’re now in personal opinion territory, and you are probably ignoring facts of the world and any sense of humanity as a collective. You’re no different from me opining on stabbing.
If your religious leader or your mother tells you that “these people are wrong because they do non-harmful thing X,” then your religious leader or your mother is wrong. And they are making a bad argument. They are trying to manipulate an opinion into a belief or a fact.
If, in the common law system, we interpreted “religious freedom” as “you can tell two consenting adults that they cannot do X because they are the same sex,” then that legal opinion is wrong. And the judge is making a bad argument.
(I know I said I would talk about marriage specifically, but let’s be honest, marriage historically is a way to control who a woman can have sex with, so I’m not super thrilled with the institution itself. This is actually about sex and biopower. “Love is love” is a very sweet sentiment, but it holds no argumentative water. Also, people don’t always get married for “love.”)
It’s simply not a fact of the world that only men and women can have sex with each other. It’s just not. For one, people who don’t fit neatly into the categories of “man” and “woman” exist and they have sex. For another, people do in fact have sex with people who are the same gender or the same sex designation.
Generally speaking, we have decided collectively that people of a certain age and maturity level (both debatable) cannot consent to sex. We have agreed that members of other species cannot consent to sex with humans. We have agreed that you shouldn’t breed with close relatives. Other established limits on sex probably aren’t grounded in fact and are just socio-cultural operations of power and control.
(For example, within a consensual relationship, many people agree to monogamy. That’s a choice on the individual level within a social framework. And if you think monogamy is good or sex only within a legal marriage is good, those are opinions.)
The bottom line.
I cannot convince you to not be a bad person.
I cannot convince you that living with facts is a way to be good at being a person, because operating with facts is the only way to not artificially pit humans against each other for no reason.
Unfortunately, many of you choose to actively be bad instead doing the reflective work of trying to be better and to not harm other people. It’s a fact of the world that no one really wants to be harmed, and it certainly seems like the best way to prevent harm is to not harm others, because like it or not we’re in this together. And letting other people cause harm is our collective responsibility, too.
Of course, you’re not obligated to stop or prevent harm, and I can’t argue with that. But I can at least call you out for making bad arguments and for ignoring the facts of the world.
For all the ills of the 21st century, we have the capability of accessing most corners of the world and connecting with most people. The world is a big place, and sometimes we get things wrong and do wrong, but you can at least try, because the thing about collectives is that they’re made up of individuals. And we simply can’t use willful ignorance as an excuse.
