Your Opponents Don't Agree with You

1. “Everyone Agrees with Me”

I know what you’re thinking: Who the hell thinks that their opponents agree with them? A lot of people, actually. These are all theories that I’ve heard:

• Politicians who support gun rights don’t really believe in them. They’re just shills for the gun industry.

• Immigration advocates know that immigration is destroying America, but they don’t care because it gives them more power. (Tucker Carlson’s theory.)

• Pro-lifers don’t really think abortion is like murder. They just want to prohibit abortion because they hate women. (Seen on the internet.)

• Woke cancellers don’t really think that they’re fighting racism; they just like exerting power and hurting people. (fakenous.substack.com/p/why-we-cancel)

• Maybe religious people don’t really believe their religion. (fakenous.substack.com/p/do-religious-people-believe-religion)

Often, there are symmetrical accusations of dishonesty from both sides:

• Right-wing voices are paid off by the Koch brothers.

• Left-wing voices are paid off by George Soros.

• Vegans don’t believe in veganism, since they still kill bugs with their cars. (Caplan’s theory.)

• Meat-eaters know that it’s wrong but don’t care because they’re getting pleasure. (Many vegans’ theory, including mine.)

• Climate change skepticism is driven by the fossil fuel industry. They know they’re destroying the planet, but they don’t care because they’re making money in the short term.

• Nobody believes in climate change; it’s just a hoax for Democrats to seize power. (Carlson again. No joke!)

2. Why this Is Popular

On the face of it, it’s at least a bit surprising that large numbers of people who profess a position on a controversial issue actually hold the opposite view. Why do we advance theories like this? Some possible explanations:

1. Incredulity: Our own view is just so blindingly obvious that it’s impossible for anyone to not see it. According to the Principle of Charity in Interpretation, we should interpret other people as having basically accurate beliefs.

   • Compare: Suppose you and a stranger are standing in front of a large and very visible building. The stranger claims not to see any building (though he sees lots of other things in the environment). The most charitable interpretation is actually that he is lying, playing a joke, or something like that, rather than that he can’t see the building.

2. Antipathy: The (allegedly) intellectually charitable interpretation is also usually morally uncharitable, which is emotionally satisfying. It’s fun to think of your opponents, the outgroup, as a bunch of corrupt liars who are knowingly destroying society. That is more fun than thinking that they just can’t see your point.

3. Convenience: It’s also more convenient if your opponents already know the truth. In that case, you don’t have to engage with their arguments, since they aren’t real arguments but just pieces of propaganda, and you don’t have to give them arguments or explanations since they already know you’re right. You just have to morally exhort them to give up their dishonesty, which is a lot easier.

4. Actual plausibility: As some of my above examples may or may not indicate, it is actually plausible that a lot of people are dishonest.

   • (a) This overlaps with #1, when we recognize that some controversial points are really extremely obvious. (E.g., the wrongness of factory farming is really not a complicated or subtle point. It’s as obvious as any moral point you can think of.) Besides that, the other evidence for dishonesty:

   • (b) The way people respond to counter-arguments and evidence often looks a lot more like attempts to avoid admitting error, come what may, than like sincere attempts to figure out the truth. E.g., people are more often angry than grateful when you give them counter-evidence.

   • (c) If you think about what particular people would probably want to believe, that seems to correlate suspiciously with what they (profess to) in fact believe.

   • (d) There is a fair amount of apparent inconsistency and hypocrisy.

So I think that there are some cases where people do not really believe what they profess to believe. However, I think

(i) That this problem is way over-diagnosed. The overwhelming majority of people who profess a controversial view really believe that view just as much as the other side believes what they say.

(ii) The cases of people “not really believing” what they say are typically also cases where they don’t really disbelieve it either. Rather, they quasi-believe it; they are in a state which is kind of like believing, but not exactly believing. They’re not just utterly blatantly lying, like when a criminal tells the cops that he doesn’t know anything about the crime that he just committed.

3. Some of the World’s Dumbest Arguments

Anyway, I started this post because I wanted to make fun of some of the dumbest instances of the “everyone agrees with me” fallacy. So let’s get to that. The dumbest versions typically involve claiming that your opponent can’t really believe P because he doesn’t believe Q (or doesn’t do A), where you claim that any P-believer should believe Q (or do A).

Claims of that form could be true in some cases. But I’ve noticed that some of the dumbest ideas to be found in all of contemporary political discourse are claims of that form, in which the association between P and Q is somewhere between very tenuous and obviously ridiculous.

I’ll give you a left-wing example and a right-wing one, for balance.

Example 1: Abortion

“Pro-lifers don’t believe fetuses are people or that abortion is like murder. They just hate women.” The evidence for this: Pro-lifers don’t support expansive government programs to help poor babies. This proves that they don’t care about babies.

What’s ridiculous about this?

(i)

First, if you’re incredulous that someone could believe the pro-life position, then you are a blind ideologue. Because it is not hard at all to understand why someone would hold that position. The position is so natural on its face that it would be shocking if there weren’t a lot of people who intuitively accepted it. That is not to say the position is correct. But there is nothing the least bit counter-intuitive about it. To notice:

• Fetuses look a lot like babies.

• They also become babies in due course.

• Baby-killing intuitively seems extremely bad.

• Almost every society throughout human history has believed in the soul. So, whatever you think of the idea, it certainly is not counter-intuitive. If there’s a soul, then there’s a question of when it enters the body. It’s not a bizarre hypothesis, if you believe in souls, that they enter the body in the womb. Nor is it at all strange, again if you believe in souls, to think that killing a thing with a soul is murder.

Again, that’s just to say that the pro-life position isn’t counter-intuitive, and thus you shouldn’t be incredulous that people could believe it.

Obviously, that doesn’t address the arguments for abortion rights (e.g., Thomson’s argument), but it’s likely that most pro-lifers don’t know those arguments, so again you shouldn’t be incredulous that they still hold their view.

(ii)

Second, the claimed connection between opposing abortion and supporting government social welfare programs is obviously bogus. Here’s an analogy. Let’s say you’re talking to your conservative neighbor, Hank Hill. He wants the government to cut social welfare programs. Now, you point to a homeless guy on the street. “Hey,” you say to Hank, “let’s go stab that guy to death!” Hank says absolutely not; what kind of monster are you?

You now accuse Hank of inconsistency: It obviously follows from his position on social welfare programs that Hank “doesn’t care about” the poor, and therefore that he would be fine with stabbing homeless guys to death. It must be that he just wants to spoil your fun because he hates you.

See how ridiculous that is? There are any number of reasons why Hank might oppose government welfare programs for the poor. Maybe he thinks they violate property rights. Maybe he read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, and he thinks they are counter-productive and create perverse incentives. But “because poor people don’t matter & it’s fine if they die” is not among the likely reasons. No one would say that.

Don’t say that this is disanalogous because fetuses aren’t people and homeless guys are, because the whole pro-lifer premise is that fetuses are people.

(iii)

Third, the claim about the beliefs of pro-lifers is a silly stereotype. It’s based on this line of thought: “Pro-lifers are conservatives. Conservatives are against government social welfare programs. Hence, pro-lifers oppose social welfare programs.”

What percentage of pro-lifers actually oppose social welfare programs? Just because two positions are labelled “conservative” does not mean that everyone, or even a majority of people, who believe the one believe the other. Especially if one of them is a socially conservative position, and the other is an economically conservative position.

It’s also just false that most conservatives oppose the welfare state. Most conservatives basically support the status quo, just as most liberals do. Most conservatives and liberals are moderates and have only minor differences from each other.

It’s libertarians who take extreme positions like that we should repeal the welfare state. Libertarians often ally with conservatives, but they’re not the same at all. Most libertarians also support abortion rights.

Example 2: Global warming

I was a bit incredulous at Tucker Carlson’s theory that Democrats don’t believe in global warming (https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-china-will-have-control-of-our-energy-grid/, starting at 4:20). His evidence: Obama bought a beachfront house, and a lot of leftists live on the coasts. The logic, I guess: Anyone who believes in global warming must believe that the entire West and East coasts are going to be submerged, very soon. Therefore, they would evacuate those areas now.

What’s ridiculous about this?

(i)

First, again, if you’re incredulous that someone could believe in global warming, then you’re a blind ideologue. It’s not at all hard to see how someone would believe in global warming. Note

• It’s not at all weird, counter-intuitive, or contrary to experience that average temperatures worldwide have gone up 1 degree C since the start of the industrial revolution, which is what the global warming people are saying.

• It’s not at all hard to see how we could know that; indeed, if that were true, it seems like we obviously would easily be able to know it.

• It’s of course much harder to know what the cause of the warming is. But there isn’t really anything particularly amazing or unbelievable about the possibility that the tons of pollution we’ve emitted since the start of the industrial revolution could have something to do with it.

• Moreover, there’s certainly nothing incredible about a bunch of people believing that the mainstream climate scientists should be believed. They’re experts and we’re not, so we should listen to them. Whether or not you agree with that, it’s certainly not a weird, counter-intuitive position. It would be shocking if there weren’t a lot of people who thought that.

(ii)

Second, the claim about liberals living on the coasts is silly. The estimates are that ocean levels have been rising by 3 cm per decade. A person who believes that would not have to immediately evacuate California.

Now, the rise is thought to be accelerating, so climate scientists are saying there will be another 1-2 feet by the year 2100. Again, that hardly calls for immediately evacuating the entire West or East coast. Someone who thinks the ocean will be 1 foot higher in 80 years would not obviously refuse to buy a house near the beach.

Example 3: Capital Punishment

Here’s an old one: I’ve heard that it’s inconsistent to support capital punishment but oppose abortion. Because capital punishment is killing. If you’re in favor of killing, how can you claim that abortion is wrong?

I leave it to you to fill in why that one is ridiculous.

Concluding Lesson

Before claiming that someone can’t believe P because they don’t believe Q, spend at least four seconds thinking about what obviously ridiculous assumptions you’re relying on.