Things We Don't Debate, Part 2

Part 2 of "Why a both-sides debate isn't the best form of ethical discernment in every case."  My examples of unacceptable debate topics yesterday included those like "Are homosexuals inherently immoral?" or "Can religious people be trusted to have reasonable discussions about ethics with nonreligious people?" Debates on those topics, I argued,  establishes from the get-go an uneven playing field. One side--the side whose ability to debate at all is in question--starts with an inherent disadvantage.

That won't do. Debates work when debaters participate holding mutual assumptions that everyone involved is capable of debating in good faith. If you come in believing deeply that your opponent is a deceptive cynic who doesn't care about discussing things honestly--well, a debate isn't a good idea. The same holds if you believe your opponent to be fundamentally irrational or immoral. For this reason, many biologists refuse to debate creationists about evolution; they distrust creationists' ability to reason scientifically. Debating creationists, in their view, does nothing other than grant pseudo-scientific nonsense a veneer of respectability.

Two other kinds of unproductive debate topics come to mind.

The first would be debating some bit of established scientific or historical fact. The Holocaust happened. Earth is round and revolves around the sun. The universe is billions of years old. Vaccines prevent epidemics. We do not, at every mention of these topics, need to re-hash the scientific or historical processes that have established the truth of these facts--the testing and retesting of evidence, the debates, the refinements of theories, the development of consensus among relevant experts, the further discoveries that grow from this consensus, etc. The work has been done to substantiate these facts, and we have put their trustworthiness more or less stably beyond the realm of reasonable doubt.

In fact, framing such topics as "still up for debate" wastes time and energy (save perhaps as a strictly defined classroom exercise in scientific or historiographic method). It sows uncertainty, waters down the authority of scientific/historical consensus, and forces experts to divert time and effort into re-inventing wheels. Can you debate the shape of the earth? Sure. Is this useful or productive to do so? Not really. And in many cases, sowing uncertainty costs lives. Raise a debate about whether seatbelts save lives, and you could end up with more people not wearing seatbelts, which costs lives. After all, reality ultimately wins debates. Humans may cast doubt on the reality of global warming, but global average temperature trends keep creeping upward regardless.

Is scientific consensus carved in stone? Not at all. Scientific and historical truths can shift in the face of new evidence. But such shifting involves so much more than a simple pro/con debate. It requires a careful weighing of evidence and refinement of models, activities that often only highly trained experts can do. Sure, such processes involve debate among researchers, but at that point we've moved beyond the kind of pro/con debating we're talking about here.

The last kind of debate we don't have echoes yesterday's argument about goodwill assumptions of competence. Here I mean topics that used to be considered debatable but now are not. We don't debate the right of women to vote anymore (at least not in the US). We don't debate whether slavery is morally acceptable. We don't debate (in the US at least) whether one should be able to criticize government officials publicly.

Now, we could debate these things. We used to debate these things. It would be possible to resurrect pro- and con- arguments about them, but to do so would offend. Their settled-ness, their truth or falsehood, lacks an ultimate foundation in empirical reality. You can't look at the human genome and garner evidence for a right to habeas corpus. Or dignity. Or soul.

Our consensus about these issues depends not on scientific fact-finding processes but upon long, hard, and usually blood-soaked political struggles. Such struggles involve efforts to expand and deepen the answer to one of the fundamental questions of human politics: Who counts? That is, which humans in a society "count" as persons--entities invested with capability and right to participate in the ordering of society and have that participation respected by other participants?

In some times and places, only free male citizens of a particular city-state "counted" as full persons. In other times and places only landholding males of European descent could vote. In the US, bit by bit, we have expanded the franchise of popular sovereignty and liberal regard to include non-landholders, non-Protestants, women, non-Europeans, formerly enslaved people, LGBTQ+ people--the list continues.

The process of expansion is slow, difficult, and uncertain. Liberal democracies (to limit ourselves to present contexts)  do not easily extend rights and sovereignty to new participants within a nation. Those who count often resist sharing status with those who historically have not counted as equals--strangers, subservient classes, outcasts, aliens. The process of turning groups from relative non-persons to persons involves not merely rational arguments but actions (bold pioneers, fierce battles) and deep-seated, tectonic movements of political consciousness. Gradually a class's rights and status go from being up for debate to being assumed. Ideas once laughable or heretical become debatable. Once-debatable notions--maybe, over generations--solidify into political common sense.

Generally speaking, we should resist debate topics that undermine hard-won, common sense assumptions that allow certain humans equal regard as persons. We don't discuss someone else's established personhood as a debatable thing. Debating such issues collapses a complicated, long-term process into an intellectual classroom exercise. Worse, it does so in a way that fractures the bedrock of equal regard among democratic citizens, unsettling the playing field of democratic participation. It's like spreading a rumor (or maybe just a trollish, I'm just wondering suggestion) before the debate that your opponent is high, psychotic, or fraudulent. You're poisoning the well, preserving your (unquestioned) personhood while casting preemptive doubt on theirs. Foul play, that.

More tomorrow,

JF