I think there are a few issues that play out in this question. To sum up my statements below:
(1) There is no practical difference, in the majority of cases of everyday debate, between attacking an idea/claim/conclusion when it qualifies as a belief and attacking the person holding it.
(2) Further, there is very often no practical difference between attacking a premise underlying such belief and the belief itself.
(3) Whether or not a belief is true or false is less important than the reasoning leading a person to a belief.
(4) Attacking the premises or the conclusion will more than likely result in a defense of the premise or idea.
(5) A person defending a position is less likely to evaluate clearly how they arrived at the position.
(6) Therefore, attacking or questioning the validity of the premise or conclusion will often prevent anyone from determining the reasoning leading to it.
(7) We therefore must inquire why a belief was reached in order to determine which underlying beliefs/premises deserve to be tolerated.
(8) We lack sufficient knowledge determine any objective truth, but analyze smaller premises more easily.
(9) Admitting the impossibility of objective truth does not undermine whether something is considered true by most, when arrived to by reason.
(10) Attempting to apply inappropriate analytical tools to alternative ideas, however, often leads to an incomplete assessment of what evidence there is supporting it.
(11) Application of such tools often leads to inappropriate generalizations about beliefs, and distract from learning, again, why the individual holds the belief.
(12) We cannot discuss harm caused by a belief until we know the exact nature of the belief and why it is held.
(13) Tolerance is only practical when we know what ideas we both disagree with and are intractable.
(14) Tolerance will only practically reduce harm when the belief in question is both specific and the reasoning behind it is understood, which requires an individual assessment of what a person means when they state the belief and not an assumption that the belief entails certain premises, biases and reasoning and produces certain behaviors, benefits or harms.
(1) There is no practical difference, in the majority of cases of everyday debate, between attacking an idea/claim/conclusion when it qualifies as a belief and attacking the person holding it.
- There’s less of a difference between respecting a person and respecting their beliefs (or tolerating either) than I think people recognize. I personally believe that those who attempt to develop their knowledge through reason would be the most likely to tolerate beliefs different from theirs, even those one might consider “demonstrably false,” in others as it is common to claim a “harm production” analysis. Beliefs that cause no harm, even if wrong, would therefore be “worthy” of tolerance.
But I’ve often observed that those claiming to be rational are the quickest to dismiss beliefs that they’ve reasoned are wrong with what can often be heard to be or read as a superior attitude. And often I’ve seen the claim that it is appropriate to say that x or y belief is “ridiculous” or “idiotic” or any other term…indeed, several times I’ve seen some of the most sacredly held beliefs be described in a profoundly insulting manner (e.g., Jesus Christ described as a “cosmic zombie”)...because they are discussing the belief and not attacking the person.
But I think we’ve all seen that this is often a disastrous approach. The problem with qualifying conclusions that are generally accepted to be wrong when examined with some form of reasoned analysis in the manner described above is that in common debate there’s no real functional difference between that and an ad hominem attack. When you say “that’s stupid” it’s often heard as “you’re stupid.”
(2) Further, there is very often no practical difference between attacking a premise underlying such belief and the belief itself.
The second most common technique I see is that people will attack premises – often before the premise is offered as support for the “belief.” Or the belief is compared to other beliefs or conclusions the person finds to be equally “irrational.” But if they don’t hold the premise, they’re on the defensive because the other doesn’t seem to take the argument seriously. If the premises or conclusions are compared to things most adults agree are ridiculous, you get the same effect, whether or not they hold the premise. And if they do, they’re forced to backpeddle to show how they came up with the premise attacked. All tend to place that individual in an argumentative position where they are forced to argue or defend the belief rather than explain or discuss it.
(3) Whether or not a belief is true or false is less important than the reasoning leading a person to a belief.
What I see very little of is what I loved about law school – Socratic dialogue. Whenever I made a claim in a class, or was asked to explain why something happened, I was always asked what facts or other conclusions that claim was based on. And often, an alternative explanation was offered to challenge my claim that would be equally or perhaps even more reasonable considering those facts or conclusions. It always forced us to think through (or it was meant to force us to) each claim and always consider a counterargument until we came to the answer generally accepted in the legal community (or, sometimes, with one against that generally accepted but completely reasonable). When you debate or attack a conclusion or a premise you pit one idea against another. When you ask how someone comes to a position that you disagree with, going through with them step by step…well, I personally find that you at least get people thinking, which is better than the “I’ve made up my mind” or “we’ll have to just agree to disagree” results that I see coming from the other methods.
(4) Attacking the premises or the conclusion will more than likely result in a defense of the premise or idea. & (5) A person defending a position is less likely to evaluate clearly how they arrived at the position. & (6) Therefore, attacking or questioning the validity of the premise or conclusion will often prevent anyone from determining the reasoning leading to it.
Asking the person “Why do you believe that” instead of “How can you believe that when” also more clearly brings out what are the problematic and potentially intractable “harmful” beliefs a person may hold. Determining that someone things homosexuality is a sin because their pastor, who does amazing things in the community, and their family, who are loving otherwise, raised him to believe that and supports it with bible verses isn’t really something that I can clearly undermine. In so many ways that belief would be wrapped up in how that person views people he sees as loving – and to counter that I’d have to show that they were either (1) deluded, (2) hateful, or (3) some combination. Then might be the time when tolerance becomes the important tool. I have to tolerate the fact that they think homosexuality is a sin in order to get them to tolerate the fact that I should be afforded civil rights they are trying to deny me. If I don’t, they have a rational argument to pursue legislation and regulation regulating my behavior – because I am trying to regulate theirs.
(7) We therefore must inquire why a belief was reached in order to determine which underlying beliefs/premises deserve to be tolerated.
I think it’s inappropriate, therefore, to talk about tolerance at the beginning. Tolerance should never be conceived as a starting point – but an unfortunate endpoint. Tolerance is essentially damage control. But if we start a discussion with someone who makes a claim we find unreasonable or unsupported or just wrong by qualifying the claim in a dismissive manner, attacking it and the premises it was based on, etc., before a person has stated where it comes from, we don’t get to separate out the intractable beliefs from the ones we can reason through, and we end up having to tolerate entire belief systems rather than fixed claims that, eventually, will wither when separated from their supports. A moral objection that one shouldn’t be asked to tolerate beliefs that are objectively wrong, if accepted, must therefore produce (although not inevitably every time) results where the objectionable belief is reinforced in a respective individual or group – which is precisely the harm that anyone who has a moral objection to such beliefs would be trying to avoid.
(8) We lack sufficient knowledge determine any objective truth, but analyze smaller premises more easily.
- Of course, there’s an underlying problem of whether something can be considered demonstrably false or objectively wrong. This back and forth about whether we know a significant percentage of, well, anything is an interesting statement on the problem. Recognizing that we have a slim understanding of most things, and that the analytical tools we have to measure them or draw conclusions are severely limited, doesn’t call into question by necessity whether those conclusions are the best we have – and certainly better than previous conclusions based on less accurate or knowledgeable assessments (or those based simply on faith). That, in fact, is how we develop knowledge.
(9) Admitting the impossibility of objective truth does not undermine whether something is considered true by most, when arrived to by reason. & (10) Attempting to apply inappropriate analytical tools to alternative ideas, however, often leads to an incomplete assessment of what evidence there is supporting it.
But when you group things like “homeopathic methods” together and claim that a harm results from believing in them as such methods are demonstrably false (just as an example – you in the general sense here), the most problematic issue is that you end up creating evidence where there is none. Whether or not a particular homeopathic treatment should be relied on depends very much on what it’s being claimed to treat – and very often wellness programs are meant to promote general wellness. Of course, to say that there’s no demonstrable benefit from x treatment is to rely on a method of experiment and analysis in from a medical perspective that is designed to fix something when it goes wrong. These results can be clearly measurable. Whether a particular treatment that is part of a lifestyle where things go generally well can’t provide clear proof of the success because the level of monitoring, the longitudinal nature, and the size of the samples required often undermine an attempt to prove the success. And balancing any cofactors/contributors/environmental factors – the task is daunting.
Further, the idea of having a control group where any wellness program that one might think is effective is denied to them, in order to show its success, reeks of ethics problems. Therefore, we’re left with “subjects” who engage in treatments along with multiple other routines for which we do not have an alternate path to compare to because we just don’t know whether the treatment (1) extended their life, because even if they die early they could have died much earlier without it, (2) prevented them from getting disease, because even if they get sick, they could have gotten sicker, etc.
Therefore, I often hear people claim that there is “no evidence” that x, y, or z works as if the type of proof that would validate x, y, or z is feasible. Saying that it’s “unproven” may mean very little. Where it does, it should be recognized as important. And where, as in th OP’s example, an unproven method is used to the exclusion of a proven one…speaking out against such a thing is not “intolerance” but a simple statement as to what an individual’s bet course of treatment is.
(11) Application of such tools often leads to inappropriate generalizations about beliefs, and distract from learning, again, why the individual holds the belief.
The fact of “no evidence” is also often morphed into “evidence against,” which is extremely problematic. I think @crisw‘s statement below is a good example (bold, small print mine):
There is a huge difference between things we do not yet know and things for which we have absolutely no evidence that they are true and mountains of evidence that they are not.
For example, to use your example, there is zero evidence that alien-human hybrids exist. (True – however, origin of life theorists discuss exogenesis and panspermia as viable solutions, and the new arsenic bacteria may open up more doors…so is this “zero evidence”?) If they did, it would be very easy to show that something odd had happened through DNA analysis. But it didn’t.
Similarly, there is absolutely no evidence that homeopathy works (But again – what kind of evidence is there that anything improves wellness?), that astrology is true (This is false – astrology has been predictive in many cases; not, of course, generally predictive, but that’s hardly “no evidence”), that previous-life experience are verifiable (This of course requests, essentially, that one “prove their proof”), that the Earth was created 6000 years ago (But here, there is plenty of evidence _against that), that aliens abduct humans on a daily basis (Again, this seems to be more about plenty of evidence against), that the world will end in 2012 (Nor is there that the world will end tomorrow, three million years from now, etc. – especially considering our limited understanding of even our local corner of space and what’s in it), etc. etc. etc._
The evidentiary status of all of these, when compared to other predictive methods to measure similar phenomenon (e.g., radiometric dating, not the Bible for earth age) makes them all relatively similar. However, their evidentiary status is extremely different when compared to each other, as done above. When we simplify things in such a manner, we do ourselves an intellectual disservice. It also opens up a critique of the arguments in question that often distract from the validity of the argument. Again, comparing “no evidence” of the beneficial effects of homeopathy treatments meant to increase wellness – where we just don’t know and determining the truth seems pretty impractical – to “no evidence” of a 6000 year age for the earth – where there seems to be nothing but natural evidence against the claim – seems more like trickery than evidence one shouldn’t be tolerant of any of the above ideas. PS – personally, I wouldn’t argue in favor of the vast majority of them…and those I would are context-dependent.
(12) We cannot discuss harm caused by a belief until we know the exact nature of the belief and why it is held. & (13) Tolerance is only practical when we know what ideas we both disagree with and are intractable. & (14) Tolerance will only practically reduce harm when the belief in question is both specific and the reasoning behind it is understood, which requires an individual assessment of what a person means when they state the belief and not an assumption that the belief entails certain premises, biases and reasoning and produces certain behaviors, benefits or harms.
Finally, any claim, as stated before, that we judge whether beliefs should be tolerated should theoretically and practically be determined through a harm analysis – but as @crisw pointed out, this can be difficult. We can make the big statements (e.g., @ETpro‘s statement about the global caliphate is a reasonable big statement most can agree to) and the broad ones (e.g., @CaptainHarley‘s claim about tolerance ends where costs surpass benefits of it), but they don’t get us far. But it’s almost scary when you add in the factor that the beliefs we hold about our daily routines might be so much more harmful than anything we can debate here. If I buy something as simple as a table, what environmental impact does that have? Why should I have that table instead of feeding someone who needs it? If I donate the money instead, will that trend end up closing an outsourced furniture factory, causing layoffs that end up producing more hunger than is stopped through the donations? Etc., etc.
However, again, the problem of determining harm stems from an attempt to determine whether a general belief should be tolerated. When we determine in each case the specific belief held by the person or group that, for the moment, needs to be tolerated, the harm that can be caused by that belief will be easy to measure. And tolerating it means, specifically, that there is disagreement – but that tolerance is the only solution at the time.
Therefore, contrary to what’s implicit in how @wundayatta defines tolerance, I don’t believe tolerance means different things in different contexts. Tolerance doesn’t require respectful treatment of another because it is the result of such treatment – and a recognition that further discussion would turn from that. It also may not mean constantly attacking an idea, but it does mean always disagreeing about it. Indeed, as @Qingu states, tolerance and respect are almost mutually exclusive – you tolerate what you disrespect. In order to be tolerant – you have to disagree (to add bite to @Rarebear‘s assertion).
Thank you all for your tolerance. :-)
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