There is No Such Thing as Respectful Disagreement

Can there be such a thing as respectful disagreement?

Well, let’s consider what that word “respect” means. We can boil it down to two possible definitions.

1. Deference.

2. Esteem.

Obviously you can’t disagree with someone and defer to them at the same time. To defer is to accept their judgment. So according to that definition of respect, no, one cannot disagree respectfully.

Still, that leaves the possibility of respectful disagreement when we are using ths second definition, “esteem.” Still, let us consider what disagreement entails.

To disagree is to say to someone “You are wrong.”

And to do that is invariably to call into question their intelligence, their judgment, their training, their experience, their knowledge and skill; to criticize them and make them feel “less than” — not least, less than the speaker, who is claiming to know more than they. The questioning, the criticism, the claim to knowing better may be very slight. And it may occur when we are engaged in dialogue with someone we ordinarily esteem (and to whom we might even usually defer). But esteem it is not. You may disagree with someone you respect, but the disagreement itself is not respectful.

That brings us to another point, which I think Carl Sagan summed up nicely in his last book, the justly classic The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: “ in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”

No one in a scientific argument — for that matter, no one engaged in serious discussion premised on logical appraisal of the real world — has any right to demand deference. Facts and logic come ahead of anything and everything else.

But there is still the matter of basic human consideration. Of not going out of our way to be nasty.

I suspect that were there more consideration, people would be less insistent in their demands for respect, reasonable and unreasonable.

Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.