Category: Life Lessons

No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

Source: http://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978

October 5, 2012 6.28am AEST

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what’s an opinion? Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Ms. Dorey has no medical qualifications, but argues that if Bob Brown is allowed to comment on nuclear power despite not being a scientist, she should be allowed to comment on vaccines. But no-one assumes Dr. Brown is an authority on the physics of nuclear fission; his job is to comment on the policy responses to the science, not the science itself.

So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion? If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.

But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred. On Monday, the ABC’s Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from – you guessed it – Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was “accurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups.”

But this implies an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise. Again, if this was about policy responses to science, this would be reasonable. But the so-called “debate” here is about the science itself, and the “choice groups” simply don’t have a claim on air time if that’s where the disagreement is supposed to lie.

Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: “there’s evidence, and there’s bulldust,” and it’s not part of a reporter’s job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise. The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of “openly calling for censorship of a scientific debate.” This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all – or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it “confuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue.” Again, two senses of “entitlement” to an opinion are being conflated here.

So next time you hear someone declare they’re entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you’ll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.

Read more from Patrick Stokes: The ethics of bravery

Moving Flats

Don’t do it! Don’t move house. Don’t move flat! It’s so painful!
In particular, don’t leave rented accommodation. Everyone knows that estate agents are sharks – estate agents and used car salesmen: they’re as bad as each other.
Our experience of leaving Marina Heights, where we spent 9 happy months:
We vacated the place on Monday 7th December. Our contract said that we needed to return it cleaned to a ‘professional standard’. We’re not sure exactly what that means but we spent the preceding Saturday and Sunday cleaning the place like it had never been cleaned before. It was immaculate – which is more than can be said for the state of it when we arrived. The check-in report for when we entered the place indicated that one of the toilets still needed cleaning, several light-bulbs needed replacing. It failed to mention that the oven needed cleaning – as we discovered about a week later with smoke pouring into the room and setting off alarms.
Anyway, on the day we left, an ”independent” inventory agent inspected the place (yes, technically independent as in not working for the same company as the estate agent, but employed by the estate agent, and knows where his next meal is coming from). After commenting on microscopic scratches you could just see if you got your head right down to the table at the right angle in the right light (a really crappy table too – worth no more than 5 pounds at a car boot sale) he directed his attention to the mirror in the hallway and, again by getting the angle just right, was able to see some smudges on the glass. When we said that these were hardly relevant, he just held up his hands and said that he’s independent and “just reports what he sees”.In short, he was looking for problems.
The report that we received a couple of days later highlighted various such things – none of which compared with the diabolical state of the carpets that desperately need replacing, the cracks in the walls that need attention, the toilet seats that our incoming report said were in desperate need of replacement.
Anyway, the letting agent then sent us an email asking us for the invoice for the professional cleaning which we got done. This was an issue as they still had our 2000+ pound deposit, and the contract we had signed said that if they needed to get someone in to clean the place, the minimum fee was going to be 235 pounds. We responded that the contract didn’t require us to pay someone – it merely said that we should ensure that the place was cleaned to a professional standard, and that we would dispute any claim they made.
Now, here’s the bit you need to know for when you vacate your own apartment: In the UK, under the Housing Act (2004) landlords are required to return the tenant’s deposit or indicate to the tenant that they wish to claim some of it within 10 working days (or perhaps 14 calendar days – I found references to both) of the tenancy being terminated. So, after our initial response to the estate agents saying that we would dispute any charges, we didn’t contact them again, and hoped that they would forget about us. The 10th working day (we left on Mon 7th Dec, so Mon 21st Dec) was a bit exciting, but passed without them contacting us. So that night, we sent them an email as follows:

It has now been more than 14 days since we vacated the property and we have received neither our deposit nor notification of your intention to claim any of it. As you are doubtless aware, under current legislation the landlord is required to either return the deposit or notify the tenant of any intention to withhold the deposit within 10 working days of the tenancy being terminated. Those ten working days expired on Monday 21st December.

The return of our deposit is now overdue. Please return it forthwith to the bank account nominated in our previous email.


We sent this on the Monday evening. It didn’t get a response on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning we faxed a copy of the same email to them (point of faxing: we want a record of every correspondence so that if this ever goes to court or arbitration we can prove our side of the story). We got our deposit back the same day.
Lessons from this story:

  1. Estate agents and landlords are bastards
  2. Landlords do not have a right to your deposit. That means, if they want to keep some of it, they must put in a claim for it and justify it. You can argue against it.
    The dispute process appears to be genuinely impartial (thus landlords don’t want to go to arbitration) – they probably wouldn’t have been able to claim their 235 pounds under arbitration anyway, as it would have been considered unreasonable for giving a mirror another wipe.
  3. Remember the 10 working day rule. Don’t rush them to give you your money back, but on the 11th working day you can jump on them and demand it immediately.
    Ensure all correspondence with the landlord is recorded.
    It’s worth checking that your landlords have put the money in a tenancy deposit scheme. If they don’t prove this within five(?) days of you giving them a deposit, then they are liable to pay you a penalty of three months rent (I’m a bit hazy on this particular rule; the basic idea is right, but I’m writing it based on distant memories)