Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

It's Friday. So we're both looking forward to the weekend. Or not? Not really.

Agnes:

That's not how my world goes. I'm not looking not forward to it, but there's just different things I have to do on weekends. Also, it's not going to be Friday for most of the people who are listening to this.

Robin:

That's true. That's true.

Agnes:

We're going to talk about argument today.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

I've been thinking about two Let's say slogans that I think are very... widely agreed to, they're very routinely asserted, they're commonplaces, they're not controversial. Often they're asserted without people using the words I'm about to use. You don't even need to use these words to assert them because they're such commonplaces. A question I have about them is, are they actually consistent with one another? The slogans are, first, that you should fight for what you believe in, and the second, that you should argue for what you believe in. The question is, can we put forward as moral slogans that telegraph our ethos and our values, both of these ideas of fighting and of arguing as ways of engaging with, expressing, and trying to realize the ideas or values that you believe in?

Robin:

So I was initially thinking that both fighting and arguing are small sets of much larger spaces and we should think about how they sit in those larger spaces, but hearing you say that I'm also thinking that what you believe in clearly connotes something else than a thing you believe in. Because you don't want to argue for everything you believe in or you don't want to fight about everything you believe in. So there's something being said about here that somehow there are special things you believe more than other things. And we're fighting or arguing would be make more sense for those.

Agnes:

First, about the larger space, I'm interested in slogans and what we have slogans for. I don't think we have slogans for all the various activities we might engage in with respect to our various goals. It interests me that these both telegraph a certain ethos or a certain value outlook. Let me just say what I think that value outlook is, but actually before I say what that value outlook is, I should address your second question, which is you said, well, we don't want to fight for everything we believe in. I think that the phrase believe in means something different from believe that. We use the phrase believe in to pick out a small subset of all the things of which is true that we believe that they're true, namely, ones that have something to do with value, ones that we're passionately invested in, ones that have a special importance to us. I'm not going to give you a really precise definition, but I think that the ordinary language use of that phrase already picks out the relevant territory. So as long as you fix on that phrase, believe in, and don't substitute the phrase, believe that, it is going to be everything you believe in.

Robin:

But that's why it's interesting to ask, what is it to believe in something rather than just believe it?

Agnes:

Okay, I agree. We can ask that question. But before we ask that question, let me just flesh out the two slogans, just so it becomes clear what territory they're in and how they're in slightly different territories. So the slogan that you should fight for what you believe in sort of takes place in the sphere of activism, the struggle against oppression and injustice, the injunction to protect people and animals and nature, but also to do things like promoting education and art and culture insofar as you can see those as causes where for the sake of those causes, you might want to oppose people who oppose or are indifferent to the causes. But also it applies to in cases where somebody would be just stand up for themselves, like against an attacker or if somebody is threatening your right to exist. That's a very popular phrase. where the idea is that one of the things you can believe in is yourself or your right to exist or your right to live in a certain way, and that's something that you might fight for as against somebody who is in some way denying it. So that's fight for what you believe in. Argue for what you believe in is a very different world. It's the world of free speech and open inquiry and intellectual culture and tolerance and open-mindedness and how the diversity of opinion is essential for democracy. And it is based on the conceit that your opponents would agree with you if you gave them a good argument. They're arguing in good faith, you should listen to them, you might be the one who's wrong. This slogan is one that's in the background a lot of times when people like lament cancel culture or the bad climate online for discussions in various online fora. Okay, so we can sort of sum up the first slogan, it kind of says, defeat your enemies. And the second slogan kind of says, listen to your enemies. And that brings out what I see as the tension between these two different slogans that where people believe both of them passionately and sort of feel happy to assert them. And to me, it's that experience is a lot like if you were to tell each of your two children that they're your favorite child, only when the other one's not in the room. Okay, so tell me where you want to go with this with looking into what believe in means right well.

Robin:

So, the first phrase, just rings better in my head than the second one, I don't actually think I've ever heard anyone say the second phrase fight argue for what you believe in. They might say, you know, engage people, you know, discuss, inquire together. And so, I'm not sure the phrase believe in actually is the relevant kind of category for that second slogan. You're substituting there maybe to show the contrast, but I do think people will say, fight for what you believe in, and then the believe in concept is the relevant concept for that. But I'm not so sure believe in is the relevant concept for argue for things.

Agnes:

I think you're right that the first one is more natural. Maybe I should rephrase the second one, but I do think that we think that people should be open to argument about things that they really care about. On controversial topics, it's important that we have the hard conversations. And there's lots and lots of people who spend time just repeating that idea. And specifically on topics where there's something you passionately believe in, that's where we need to have the hard conversations. Those are the hard conversations, right? So if you shouldn't have those, there wouldn't be any hard conversations. The other conversations are easy. So I guess I just think we need to have the hard conversations, which is something people say all the time, is what I mean by you should argue for what you believe in.

Robin:

So I have an essay from a long time ago called Beliefs Are Like Clothes. And the basic idea is that beliefs serve many different functions in our lives. And sometimes those functions conflict. And so that in harsh environments, the function of beliefs to guide you and prevent you from harm stands out. Well, but in mild environments, other functions can be highlighted by analogy with clothes so if you're in a very harsh say Arctic environment, you should mainly pick your clothes to keep you warm and let you move. But if you're in a very mild pleasant environment like happens to be here today. you will primarily choose your clothes for other reasons. They don't need to keep you warm. They don't need to keep you protected from the elements. So you indulge yourself with color and identity and creativity and defiance and symbolism because the other function of clothes is minor there. And so similarly with beliefs, we can say, well, they actually serve a number of different functions. For some of those functions, it's important to get them right. and therefore to be open to criticism and to inquire together to figure out what they are. But they also serve the function of binding groups together and having them have a commitment together to pursue some cause together. And for that purpose, we tend to call beliefs, believe in. That is, we tend to use the word, I believe. We don't ever actually say the word, I believe. unless we tend to distinguish a set of beliefs where we have these other functions about them, we wouldn't say, you know, I believe the sun is setting. I mean, that would be unusual.

Agnes:

You might say, I believe so-and-so is going to win the election. Sure, right. Even if we don't want them to win the election. I don't think that's true. I think we add the belief operator when we think it doesn't go as a matter of course that our interlocutor would ascribe that belief to us. But that could be because of its belief in or it could be- I'll retract that claim then.

Robin:

But basically there are beliefs that, you know, you say emotionally, I believe. Yeah. That tends to demarcate a belief you're about to express that isn't just a practical belief that you will use to calculate behavior in practical situations. It has a social function of binding you to a group or binding you to some personal commitment and identity and that these functions conflict. And they can conflict, and that's one of the key backs of the human condition. And you're highlighting that conflict by saying that there are these slogans that have conflicting connotations. But is there more to it than just to say, I mean, anytime the same thing has to serve multiple functions, there will be conflicts because you can't do them both.

Agnes:

I think that there are three possible functions of beliefs. One of them is to be practically useful in guiding you, and another one of them might be bonding, and a third one is to be true, that is to know what's true. It's not the case that what's practically useful in guiding you is always going to be what's true. There are circumstances under which you might be better off believing what's false. And so I think that the question that you should argue for what you believe in motto is putting forward the importance of the truth. But I also think that the truth is not something that either side can let go of. It's not like the people who care about bonding are like, look, I don't care. Right through that like global warming is happening like that's just the team I'm on and I'm going to fight against the other team. So the truth is really embedded as a goal for belief in both of these projects. And so I guess I think maybe I just disagree with you. Actually, I think it's not the case that the goal of belief is to bond us, and it's not the case that the goal of belief is to serve a practical function. It does both of those things. But more fundamentally, the one thing we can't let go of is the idea that the goal of the belief is to have the truth, because you could give up either one of the other two functions and still have a belief, but you just can't give up the truth one and still count yourself as having a belief.

Robin:

just because several functions depend on each other and support each other doesn't mean they aren't distinctive functions. So you can have a car to get you to work and you can have a car to take you on vacations and take you to restaurants, but still it'll be a car and the different purposes may make you want to have a big car, a small car, a gas efficient car, things like that.

Agnes:

A way to put that is the truth can bind us to other people and it can also be useful in our lives. But I'm not really sure that that is the same division as fight versus argue. Can I go back to the clothing thing?

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

So it seems to me that in the case of clothing, what we want to say is that there's like a core function of clothing, which is to protect you. Maybe you want to say it's the original function or something like that. And then. The functions for which we originally produced clothing can recede in importance, and then new goals can get slapped on there like being fashionable or whatever. It could even be the case that what was once the core function stops being. a very significant function of it. If you think about people who wear bikinis at the beach, it's hard to believe that that's about protecting you from the elements in any sense. I guess there's just some variability even over time in what the functions are. But in the case of belief, it seems to me that the two parties, namely the fight for what you believe and argue for what you believe, they both agree that the function of belief is to have the truth. And it's just that the first group, the activist, thinks that you should, you have this moral truth and you need to realize it, to make it come true in the world. And often that's gonna be by imposing it on people who don't agree with it. The imposing can be quite gentle or it can be quite violent. But you're going to, in effect, take that truth and make the world conform to it, even if you don't actually end up giving the people who will now have to conform to it a reason why they should conform to it. Like if the Nazis are attacking you, right? One thing you might do is try to kill the Nazis before they kill you. Another thing you might do is argue with the Nazis and explain why they shouldn't try to kill you. If you do the first thing, if you just kill the Nazis, then it's like you're imposing your truth, as it were, namely, Nazism is bad. You're just imposing that on these Nazis without giving them any reason for thinking that there's any problem with Nazism.

Robin:

So a belief sits in a causal chain in our lives. There are things that cause the belief, and then there are the consequences that the belief causes. So what you were saying just now sounded a lot like the consequences of belief. That is, once I believe something, then that will have consequences for my actions, and I will then pursue various actions as a consequence of that belief. Whereas the inquiry looks more like the cause of the belief. Do I retain this belief or will it go away is influenced by what sort of inquiry I participate in. And so it seems like I will both want to pay attention to causes of my belief and consequences that, depending on the context, I could prioritize investigating the belief and clarifying it and questioning it. Or I could be focused on, say in the wartime scenario you gave, acting on the belief and pursuing its consequences. And then both of, neither of those have to necessarily have to do much with a shared conversation with somebody, but both of them could influence shared conversations.

Agnes:

I'm imagining we're in a scenario both slogans are relevant only to a quite specific scenario, which is. You have a moral belief. Someone else disagrees. Either they think it's false or they just don't think there's enough reason to think it's true. And this difference is somehow gonna make a practical difference. Like you think that it would be unjust for them to do X and they don't think it's unjust for them to do X. And in fact, they're gonna do X to you because they don't think it's unjust. So that's the scenario that we're in. And then the question is, Let's say the result that you want to bring about is that you want to negotiate this disagreement. Let's put it that way. You need to resolve this disagreement that you have with the person who thinks that it's fine for them to do a thing that you don't think it's fine for them to do. One way to negotiate that disagreement is to have a fight. Because even if you don't convince them that you're right, if you kill them, or if you incapacitate them, or if you make them cower in submission so that they will never again assert or act on this thing that they maybe continue to believe, then you no longer have a problem. At least you no longer have the same problem you had before. One way you might negotiate the disagreement is through the use of force. Another way you might negotiate that disagreement is through the use of, well, a different kind of force, the force of argument, where you try to navigate that disagreement by trying to bring yourself and that other person into line on the question that you disagree about.

Robin:

So I just want to review how we have this vast space of possibility that we very much narrowed down. First of all, we start with all beliefs and say we're going to focus on things we believe in. Then we say we're going to focus on situations where you fight for the things you believe in or argue for believe in, and now we're saying, oh, we're also focused on a situation where there's a central disagreement with another party. I mean, it's clear that you could fight for your beliefs without the context of a disagreement. You could also argue your beliefs without the context of a disagreement.

Agnes:

I disagree with both of those claims. That is, I don't think you could fight for your beliefs. Let's say, you know, a tornado is threatening to pull the door of the storm shelter that you're in, right? And you're pulling this way and the wind is pulling the other way or something. You're in some sense of the phrase fighting the wind, but it's metaphorical and you're not fighting for what you believe in that case. That is, I think all of the restrictions that you have just, adverted to are just all contained in my two slogans. So all those restrictions were already there just in the two slogans. That is, if you're in a situation that can be navigated by either fighting for what you believe in or arguing for what you believe in, then there's a disagreement. The disagreement is about some principle of value or something that we believe in and not believe that. So all of that's the territory we started in and we're still there.

Robin:

I think people will say, fight for what you believe in the context of, say, you want to graduate from college, but you're being distracted. And somebody says, if you really believe that you're college material, you need to fight for that. And you need to sit down and do your homework or something. That is, you're fighting parts of yourself. You can have a fight inside yourself for what you believe in.

Agnes:

I think maybe you can fight yourself. But imagine a case where you're not even fighting yourself. I mean, the point is you need someone. When you're fighting yourself, there's a sense in which you disagree with yourself. A part of you is like, but I just want to have fun and I just want to relax. You got to fight that part of yourself.

Robin:

So why isn't the obvious answer that if there's a party you might disagree with, then there's a bunch of contextual features that will indicate the relative efficacy or usefulness of fighting versus arguing? That is, it'll depend on sort of, for example, if you share a different language, then it'll be harder to argue. If you're not at the same intellectual level or have different backgrounds, it'll be harder to argue. If you happen to have tools for fighting, you might prefer to fight. If there's some larger law or structure that will punish your fighting, you might not want to fight. There's just going to be a whole bunch of contextual factors that would practically lean you in the direction of fighting or arguing. Of course, you could do both in the process of interacting with them.

Agnes:

Try arguing first and then if it doesn't work.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right. So I think that It's really important to me, again, to emphasize that we're talking about the slogans and what the ethos is that the slogan conveys. Like what are the other value terms that show up in the family of the slogan? And so I think that it's not the case that if you are fighting for what you believe in and if you're arguing for what you believe in, those are two different means you might take to the same end. That is, when you argue for what you believe in, your goal isn't to ensure that everyone has the same beliefs as you. That's not the goal of arguing. That's why we have phrase like open inquiry, open-mindedness, you might be the one who is wrong. Those are important phrases around argue for what you believe in. So there's a sense, I think there's a sense in which there's just two different value structures in play, like two different points of view on value. Like if you were like, you have your kid And they misbehave in some way, but you think it's kind of funny too. And you're like, should I reward them or should I punish them or something like that? Those are two different means to the same end. They're like two very different value responses. Oh, let me give a different example. You have to have patience while I give the example. I give this example in my first book, Aspiration. You can imagine a wife who has a love-hate relationship with her husband. Yes, she loves him, but she also resents him. She particularly resents that he always asks her to do things for her, to run little errands. He's asked her to mail a letter. And as she's going to the mailbox, she sees the trash can, and she's tempted to trash the letter. And then she's like, no, you know what? That's ridiculous. I can't be so petty and terrible. And then she tries to open the mailbox, but the mailbox is locked, it turns out. She wouldn't be like, well, I guess I should take my second best option of trashing it. That's not the way those two options were deliberatively structured for her. It wasn't like she was like, which of these is all things considered the best way of achieving my ends? It's more like she has a fractured value perspective. She's two people packed inside of one person. And if her better angels went out and she's like, I'm going to mail it, and then it's locked, she's not then going to take her second best option of trashing it. And I think, fight for what you believe in and argue for what you believe in. Stand in some similar relation like that to one another.

Robin:

So if you said, obviously we all have multiple values and that we have to combine them together in our actions. And you're trying to distinguish two ways that somebody combined values. One is a fractured model where you sort of, I guess, pick one or the other, but don't weigh them and average them together. And another might be a more standard, you know, expected utility framework where you weigh the different considerations and pick a sort of an expected utility average. Now. that may well be two different ways people combine values, but you've just claimed that this distinction between fighting and arguing is an example of a fractured value. And you've just stated that without evidence, and I don't see the evidence. So why should I believe that?

Agnes:

Right. So I think, I mean, Part of what was supposed to help you intuitively see that point was me giving you all the terms that go along with each of them. But maybe it's helpful if we then go a little bit into sort of what is it to fight for what you believe in? So I think that fighting for what you believe in involves deciding that certain events, certain things that might happen to your opponent count as you scoring a point in relation to them in a certain kind of battle. So I think fighting for what you believe in involves Well, I mean, it involves, as I understand it, politicization. That is, taking a disagreement and moving it into a different arena, moving it into a different context. So let's say I'm very upset with my political opponents, right? Then I really want us to win the election. Yes, I may want to win the election for practical reasons, because it will just bring about a lot of utility on my view. But also, I want to defeat my enemies. And I want to score points against them. And this victory would be a victory over them. It would count as my ideas winning out over their ideas. So that's, as I understand it, an essential part of fighting is that there's something that you're fighting over. That's your disagreement. But there are things that stand in as proxies for the ideas, usually people. And you are making them lose face, lose a competition of some kind, look bad. Maybe you want to silence them, ostracize them, et cetera. And then those count as them losing points in some battle. So let me stop there because there's a question whether you accept this idea that fighting is politicized arguing.

Robin:

Some kinds of fighting is, but again, even if I accept everything you just said, which I'm not sure I do, I don't see that it implies the fracturing, it seems like I can do a weighted averaging of those goals and other goals in my choice between them.

Agnes:

So part of why I gave you the example of the woman who is torn between her deep resentment of her husband and her love for him is that the idea of her doing a weighted average, I do love him, but I also resent him. Let me do a weighted average. That seems just obviously crazy. That's just a bad model for what's going on with that person. The right model for what's going on with her, she's torn between two different evaluative outlooks. So, I mean, I guess I gave you that example to say, I don't deny that sometimes we do expect the utility calculations. I just think that's not that that that model doesn't cover all of human behavior. And so I gave you an example of what it doesn't cover. And now I'm going to try to show you, OK, given that you accept my reading of the mailbox case, I'm going to show you why the fighting versus arguing is similar to that.

Robin:

If you just want to deny it and you want to say, no, we have to interpret the mailbox case in terms of- I'm thinking of examples where people will interleave fighting and arguing in a jovial and friendly way. And so that doesn't seem to fit the sort of stark contrast model that you're offering.

Agnes:

I think we should expect that this woman will interleave her resentment actions and love actions for her husband all the time because she feels both of those feelings.

Robin:

But she's having a conflict between them that somehow she can't integrate them very well.

Agnes:

Right, but she might, like the way that they're probably gonna be integrated in her life is that sometimes resentment wins out and she makes a snide comment or throws his letter in the trash. And then sometimes she cooks him a nice dinner. The fact that those are interleaved with one another is no argument against what I'm saying. In fact, it's an argument for what I'm saying that you had to put it in terms of interleaving them or doing one and then the other sequentially rather than saying that there's some integration of the two.

Robin:

Well, for example, I think often when people are trying to inquire in something together, they set up little debates. And the debate is a little fight. And the fight is seen as functionally helpful in the inquiry and not against the inquiry. But in the debate, they have more of a fighting norm. And that's accepted and understood. And that doesn't seem fractured or in conflict. It seems like they're quite comfortable mixing those two things together

Agnes:

So I think debating is something like pretending to fight, but you're really arguing, except that quite often the pretense gets away with you and you end up just fighting. And the way you can tell the difference is like, how much do the people care whether they win and how much do they care whether they learn something? And I think in the context of some debates, what people really care about is that they learn something. And they're not too focused on the winner and the loser. And that's a case where they were able to maintain the pretense. And then quite often, they'll be like, yeah, let's have a good natured debate. And then you can just see that people are being highly rhetorical and pulling tricks in order to win because, in fact, they're fighting. I think whether or not you're right that what happens there is that the debate has this kind of intellectually salutary role is just a question of whether or not they're able to continue to hold on to only the pretense that they're fighting as opposed to moving over to fighting.

Robin:

But you've used very binary language here. So again, the fractured model, I think, is a binary model. It says you're either pursuing one set of goals or the other. You aren't ever pursuing the mixture. So the more that I see actually pursuing the mixture, the less persuaded I am by the fractured model.

Agnes:

But you haven't yet given me any examples.

Robin:

But I would say when I experience debate, I feel more of a mixture. I feel both motives in play to varying degrees at varying points. It's not a choose one motive or the other situation.

Agnes:

I mean, I've watched a lot of debates in my life, and I've participated in many debates. And of all the debaters I've ever seen in my life, you are the farthest extreme of somebody who never strikes me as someone who's just trying to win. So maybe inside yourself, you feel this motive. But what I'm saying is it's actually really small relative to what other people look like.

Robin:

But the claim is about it's an intermediate mixture. We're not deciding whether it's 90% or 10%. Is it 0% or 100% or is it a mixture? That's the issue here.

Agnes:

Yeah, and I guess my thought is like, even as she decides to mail the letter, she might still feel a bit of resentment towards her husband. But I still don't think it's been mixed in, even if she feels it. I think that when you're debating, fundamentally, you're following the rules of argument, not the rules of winning. And any feelings that you might have about like, I'd really like to beat this guy and to make everybody think that I'm the right one instead of them, those feelings are like, you're able to squash them down. That are the most people.

Robin:

Following a particular rule set can still be a way you fight. Most fights have rules for different kinds of fights. And so you might say that I have internalized a good set of rules and I'm going to stick to those rules as the rules of my fighting, but I'm still going to want to win according to the rules.

Agnes:

I think that the rules that you've internalized are rules that say things like, If you can learn more in this particular case by just intentionally losing, do that. And you've even told me this. So you've told me that this is a point at which you disagree with your colleagues. Namely, when you think of good arguments against your own view, you try to make them salient, even though that might make you lose. You're not trying to win, you're trying to learn stuff.

Robin:

I can be both. That's the whole point of the mixture model. I'm claiming a mixture model. That is, all of these motives are relevant. So the fact that I weigh the other thing doesn't mean it isn't a mixture, right? This is the problem we should be distinguishing.

Agnes:

Let's just leave this topic. I think these things cannot be mixed. That is, just as love and hate for someone cannot be mixed, even though you can experience both at the same time. They just don't mix together well. But I think we should go back to the argument.

Robin:

Regardless of whether motive, social practices certainly mix them together.

Agnes:

Right, so you can have like two things that don't work very well together being contained in one activity if the activity is sort of in some way always on the verge of falling apart.

Robin:

But then there's this claim they don't work well together. I'm saying they often do work well together.

Agnes:

Well, I was actually in the middle of an argument to try to and so I stopped to give you a chance to object to the claim that fighting is politicized arguing. What was the definition of politicized? I mean, I sort of internally defined it. So politicization is the displacement of a disagreement into a zero-sum context where there's a winner and a loser. And I think a really helpful thing to think about is trial by combat. So if I claim that you intentionally murdered a member of my family, but you claim that it was an accident, And the judge looks at the two of us and there's just not that much evidence. And there's just kind of, he said, she said. In the medieval period, they might've decided to resolve that by, we have some kind of competition, some kind of jousting competition. Maybe it involves one of us killing the other, maybe it doesn't. And the idea is that God is going to intervene and make sure that the person who's telling the truth wins the competition. So that's a kind of politicization that's actually salutary in the sense that we can take this disagreement. Did you intentionally murder or not, and we can transpose it onto a different arena, literally another arena. And we can fight it out in that arena. I know in that arena, it's zero sum. In the original arena, it wasn't zero sum. Presumably we're both benefited by knowing the truth in the original arena, but we're not both benefited. We're not both winners if we're jousting or whatever. So, and then God intervenes, and then one of us turns out to be telling the truth. And then often whoever lost will then be killed, even if they weren't killed by the actual competition. Okay, so, and if we actually assume that, I mean that might have worked okay even if we assume that God never really did intervene because we don't believe that God works that way or maybe we don't even believe in God. But as long as the people themselves believed that God intervened then presumably they wouldn't do this contest unless they really felt pretty confident and maybe they would feel more confident if they really believed in their thing and so maybe they would fight better. So maybe there was some correlation between whether or not you won and whether or not you were telling the truth. That stops working in a world where we don't think that God intervenes in any way. And so the modern analog to trial by combat, I think, is actually betting. That is the idea of, look, if you really believe it, put your money on it. It has sort of the same function as the trial by combat, namely, first of all, separate out the stuff people say for the sake of social desirability from the stuff they really believe, right? And then there's a kind of, instead of divine intervention, you have, you know, the world intervenes to tell you who was right. So that's a sense in which it becomes possible to take the disagreement and transpose it into another arena. And something about that might still work. What I think is that political battles are not like that. That is, they share neither of the virtues of medieval trial by combat nor of betting.

Robin:

There's no divine intervention and whether or not you win just doesn't have that much to do with whether you're right you've defined political as a left out category, not arguing but now it's left out of this other thing trial by combat so it's just everything that isn't tribal combat or arguing is by definition political or.

Agnes:

So, um, um, I mean, Politicized is a better word than political because I think we very often fight like in a non, you know, you might fight against your loved one.

Robin:

Okay, whatever. But I mean, I'm just struggling to, at least I think I understand the word argue. But, you know, I'm losing track of what's meant by politicized here, other than that it's not argue. It's something else.

Agnes:

Yeah, so I guess as I've defined politicized, trial by combat and betting are themselves ways of politicizing an argument, but they're not necessarily noxious. That is, I don't think that it's necessarily problematic to take a disagreement and transpose it somewhere else and try to adjudicate it in that other arena. But in order for that to work, something has to be in place where the truth has a chance to be what determines the solution to the conflict. And so my claim is we can pick out specific ways that could happen. I think trial by combat is one way, with or without the presence of divine intervention, as long as it's believed in. And betting might be another way. But in effect, what I'm saying is politicization of disagreement in the absence of any of those mechanisms, that's what I'm claiming is not really consistent with concern for the truth. And thus is that was just by definition, right?

Robin:

You just defined politicizing to be a process that the outcome doesn't correlate with the truth.

Agnes:

No, I didn't define it that way. As I said, there are versions of politicization, namely trial by combat embedding, where the outcome will correlate with the truth.

Robin:

Right, but you just defined the noxious kind, the kind you're going to disapprove of, where it doesn't have a correlation with the truth. And then you're going to say, the problem with that is it's not correlating with the truth, which is just by the definition you gave it, right?

Agnes:

I don't think it is just by the definition. So I think that I'm making a substantive claim, which is that if you take all of that territory that I was describing earlier in affiliation with the first slogan, namely activism, struggle against oppression, protecting people and animals, promoting education and culture, opposing people who oppose your causes and standing up for yourself and fighting for your right to exist. When you think about the set of behaviors that correspond to all of that, they tend not to involve medieval trial by combat and they tend not to involve betting and they tend not to involve any kind of process that would ensure that they're going to win.

Robin:

We often have a great many processes by which we resolve conflicts, most of which have some degree of correlation with truth. So for example, we could ask a crowd what they think, and that crowd's belief might be correlated with the truth. Just whatever the popular opinion is, for example. We could do a poll and see what poll responders say. We can have a legal trial, or we can just assign an investigator and say, we'll trust whatever the investigator says. These are lots of different ways that we can, without arguing, resolve a conflict about a disagreement. where there's a correlation with the truth. But if all but arguing are politicized, okay. So I guess what's the substantive claim here? But it still seems like I can mix all these things. I don't see why I have to discreetly choose. I can fluidly mix between using these different mechanisms in different contexts based on relative cost-benefit trade-offs. Why do I need to make a fractured discrete choice about these things?

Agnes:

I guess, I mean, if I think about the things that when people say you should argue for what you believe in, and then when they talk about all the stuff you shouldn't do in the context of pursuing free speech and open inquiry and intellectual culture and tolerance, et cetera, they're just all things that you would do when you were being an activist. For example, try to shut up your opponent, make sure they don't end up on the stage at all, make them look bad, you know, make sure they don't get too many people behind them, too many adherence to their views. I can't think of one thing that you would do in fighting for what you believe in, in the sense of, you know, opposing your political enemies, whom, again, this is in the case where you see them as a danger and you have to stop that danger, where it would be kosher to do in an argument.

Robin:

Let's just go through examples. There's a conflict. And I think I want to win. My thing's important. I want you to lose. But I, for some reason, don't want to argue with you. I might say, let's pick this judge as a neutral arbiter. And we'll both agree to go with their decision. Now, is that illicit? I mean, plausibly, because a judge might well be better than random at estimating the truth. And I might think a resolution is better than having this conflict continue. and I'm willing to risk getting a decision that goes against me for a quick resolution here.

Agnes:

Yeah, so I didn't claim anywhere that these are like the only two possible activities. What I'm claiming is these two slogans are in tension with one another. I don't claim that they take up the territory of all of human life or all of the options. So a lot of what you might think of as a negotiation or having a judge intervene or whatever, would be us saying, let's set both of the slogans aside. I'm not going to argue to you about what I believe in. I'm not going to try to convince you. We're not going to try to figure this out. And I'm not going to try to kill you or intimidate you. We're just going to not follow any moral slogan. We won't feel great about ourselves. We won't feel like we're achieving some great moral victory, because there's no slogan that backs us and says that what we're doing is somehow a triumph of the human spirit. But we're going to get through it. And yes, that's a part of the space of human affairs, is stuff that doesn't have any slogan behind it. But what I'm interested in is we do have these slogans. We care about them a lot. We say them. We shout them. We act on them. And they are two different value perspectives. You could take the wife, the wife who loves and hates her husband. But sometimes they're just like, their interests collide. And they're like, look, we both need food for dinner. How about I'll do the shopping and you do the cooking? OK. So there might be these moments of compromise or whatever, but the rest of the time she's torn between love and hate, and that's a big problem. It indicates some very deep dysfunction in her relationship with him that she has these attitudes of love and hate, even if there are other times where a judge intervenes or they negotiate or they agree or whatever.

Robin:

So I guess we're running out of time. So we should, I guess, ask what is a central claim here we could return to that we could sort of work on, given the ground we've cleared or filled, depending on how you view it.

Agnes:

I thought we still had more time. You have to go?

Robin:

No, no. I just, you know, another 10 or 15 minutes.

Agnes:

We started at 4.23, and it's 5.08. So?

Robin:

OK, right, right. So we're at least 2 thirds of the way through.

Agnes:

Yeah, OK, fine. That's what I mean. I mean, I guess one question that I have is, let's suppose for a moment that these slogans really are, they contradict one another in the way that loving and hating someone are two contradictory attitudes, even though you could harbor both attitudes. You can't mix them, even though you could harbor both of them. Let's assume that that's true. Is it a live question to ask, okay, which of them is right? Or which one of them is really correct? Or when they do come into tension with one another, which should we favor? Is the right answer to say, well, sometimes favor the one, sometimes favor the other. I think that's a lot like telling the kids that they're your favorite one when the other one's not in the room. Or should we just say, no, one of these is correct. And my own view is, yeah, we should say that second thing. One of them is just right. And the other one's just wrong. That is, we have two moral slogans. One of our slogans is just an incorrect slogan. It's not a moral truth. And so we just got to let it go and stop fighting for what we believe in.

Robin:

we must have other areas of our lives where we have different approaches and that we maybe feel their intention, that it's hard to mix them easily, like the love and hate. Is it true that she loves or hates her husband? I mean, do we think there's a- She probably feels both. Right, but you're proposing that they're in fact the truth of the matter, you see in this other case, why can't it just be both?

Agnes:

So I think that she might want to, right, she might want to like figure out to resolve this ambivalence that she feels towards her husband. Because when she loves him, she thinks to herself, he's this wonderful guy and I'm so happy and lucky to have him in my life. And when she hates him, she thinks to herself, he's making me miserable and he's dragging me down and I'd be way better off without him. And she might think, yeah, those two claims cannot both be true. And so I maybe need to go to therapy. and figure out which is the one that I really believe, or maybe actually she believes some third thing, right? And that's what she'll learn in therapy. So I also am open to the thought, no, there's some third slogan that is the right slogan to believe in, but I don't really think we can hold on to both of these as such.

Robin:

Well, you claim that people in fact treat them as sort of fractured values that they can't hold simultaneous or they don't hold simultaneously. But have we shown that they can't mix them, that they are unmixable or just claim that they don't actually typically mix them?

Agnes:

I guess I was hoping to show by way of kind of like intuitive introspection. That is, I don't have any very I don't have any other proof than you trying to get into the mindset of what it would be like to be this woman or what it would be like to be in a debate and be tempted to use a rhetorical trick that you know you can get away with or not bring up an argument that you think could defeat you. Why we would call that temptation and we wouldn't call it a consideration of something to do to weigh against my other considerations. So I was hoping that you would you know, just see that there's just a different way that something can arise for you. And to see that that's what it is to have two things that don't mix.

Robin:

Well, let's take maybe a more familiar example of telling the truth versus lying. Yeah. Can that be mixed? Can we have a mixed framework where we, in each situation, figure out the relative value of telling the truth and lying and then do that particular thing, or must we have fractured frameworks, one of which says you never lie, and another which says to lie in some class of situations? Is that another example of a fractured values?

Agnes:

So it depends on why you want to tell the truth. So suppose your view is that telling the truth usually works out for the best, but in general, you should do whatever will least hurt people's feelings. And that's mostly telling the truth because they might figure out you lied to them and that would hurt their feelings. But in a situation where you're pretty sure that they'll never find out and their feelings will be hurt less if you lie, you should lie. In that situation, you don't view yourself as having any kind of absolute moral injunction against lying. And so you can just weigh the considerations for and against and weigh the likelihood of their finding the thing out, et cetera, and there's no fracture. But if you think, no, I really have a duty not to lie to my loved one about this pretty important thing, then we would describe you as feeling torn. Torn exactly because there are two sets of considerations, and you don't really feel like you can integrate them. You feel like you're either on the one consideration or on the other one. That's what torn means. So I think, yes, lying is something that people actually typically feel torn about. They typically don't have the attitude that I described. People really don't want to lie. And generally, when people do lie, they, I think, very, very often do so under circumstances where they convince themselves that they're not lying. And so we find it easier to change our own minds quickly under the relevant circumstances so that we can be honest.

Robin:

Okay, then in that context, are you willing to say there's a truth of the matter about whether you should never lie or not? Because that's the analogous claim you're looking for in the arguing versus fighting case. So I'm trying to pick an analogous situation that has a similar structure and emotions.

Agnes:

Let's say, let's say you have like a principle that says, like never lie to my loved one about something that is of real significance for them, such, you know, such that If they never find this out, they will have lived a lie or something. They have that principle. But then I also come across something where if I don't lie to them about this, they're going to be really hurt. So I'm torn. I think that what I'm torn about is the question of which of these two principles is correct. I may not deliberate through that question. I may not think about it any further. I probably don't want to think about it much so that I'll probably just do something and then quickly try not to think about it anymore. But yeah, absolutely. I think that I am torn over two principles, both of which cannot be true, and I don't know which one is true.

Robin:

But initially, you described this other point of view where you calculate whether lying is on net beneficial or not with some stable considerations. And from that point of view, you are mixing these frameworks. And then my question is, can we also see a framework from which it makes sense to mix arguing and fighting where it's not a principle? And so then the question is, is there a principle that I must argue in good faith, or is that just a practical strategy? That I should choose when it works best, but not when it doesn't.

Agnes:

So I think that that's. You're totally right that they're analogous and there's absolutely a mixed approach. The mixed approach does not cannot believe in both of the slogans. So there are different ways of mixing them. So one way is to say, look, argument is one of those tools I can use because I can trick people into thinking that I'm really into open debate and intellectual culture. And so when that gets me what I want, when I can put forward the face of being really open-minded, I'll use that. But I'm using it as a kind of fighting, in effect. I'm using it as a tool to get what I want. And as soon as it doesn't get me what I want and everyone stops agreeing with me, I'm going to use the fighting.

Robin:

But conversely for fighting, I will stop fighting.

Agnes:

So I think Socrates believes the converse. Namely, look, sometimes you got to just fight. Literally, he goes to war, and he fights, and he kills people. But basically, you do it to set up arguments. That is, you need a society that's relatively rich and prosperous and where people kind of stick together so that you can walk up to someone on the street and say, hey, what's courage? And I got to do a bunch of stuff to make that happen. I got to do a bunch of stuff to set up these conversations. that I want to have. It might even involve lying to the person. It might involve tricking them. He does that sometimes. He tells someone, oh, you feel sick? You have a hangover? I have a cure for your hangover. But first, we have to have a conversation. So yeah, absolutely, you can. But that's just a way of, say, foregrounding one of the two principles and saying, it's my real principle. I also actually think there's a third possibility, which is you might not believe in either of these slogans. So you might just believe, I'm going to do whatever I want and whatever I can get away with. And I'm number one, I'm not gonna fight for any principles. I'm not gonna argue for any principles. I'm just gonna, you know, pursue my self-interest. Yeah, that's yet another thing. But the question was about somebody who's trying to believe both of these slogans. And that's like the person who's trying to love and hate at the same time.

Robin:

Right, so a key piece of context here, which wasn't clear to me initially, perhaps it was clear to you, was just the idea that a slogan is, a way of expressing a sort of deontological principle, which doesn't admit very much of gradations and trade-offs. It's going to sort of insist on some scope where it's just applied without much in the way of, you know, compromise trade-offs, you know, alternative options mixed in, et cetera. That's the idea of a slogan.

Agnes:

I think that deontological is a bit, I think that prejudices a bit, like that is, I think there are different ways you might be an absolutist and cons is only one way, but maybe a way to think about it is, you know, when you're in the context of argument, like, do you think about the trade-offs of like, maybe some places where you could cut corners in being a little less honest intellectually, no one will notice it, you can get away with it. you know, maybe not revealing this argument, maybe there's one word that's really going to rile up the person you're talking to and then they're going to look really bad, whatever. My experience of you is that you're not constantly doing a complex calculation where you're like, let me take those things in a little bit, like at the margin I might be a little bit dishonest. It seems to me that what you're doing is you're like, no, those considerations are not relevant in this context. I'm going to shut them out. And so if you're willing to call yourself a deontologist about like how to conduct conversations and arguments, then okay, this is deontological.

Robin:

But that... Well, I mean, setting aside the word deontology, it's just the idea that we have these mental systems. Yeah. And when you think within a system, that simplifies things and you make certain assumptions to say that a system is relevant. and that you can have conflicting systems that could both be applied to a situation, but you can either apply them both and do a weighted average of their answers, or you can do a little more, perhaps, complicated integration, which is a little bit more trouble, or you can just choose one of these systems or the other and say, it's the right system.

Agnes:

Right. And pretty much everyone, at least everyone that I've ever met, is going to at least in some context think it's actually super, super important that you just choose one of the systems. You think that about argument at least, which is great because otherwise you would just never believe me that this thing even happens. But that's got to go deep in your model of how human beings operate, that we don't just calculate trade-offs, we have these ethical systems. The slogans telegraph the systems is what I'm saying. That's the work that the slogan is doing.

Robin:

Well, I mean, I would say just even outside of ethics, we often just have systems that is, you know, you're raking your lawn, or you're, you know, shoveling snow, or just doing lots of things. And we often just have a number of different systems, how we do from different parts of the task. So once you get into the shoveling sort of mode, you have a certain sort of pattern you do, and you would just go through it. And then some exception might trigger kicking out of that system and maybe doing more thought, but Unless something unusual happens you're just in the mode of doing a certain sort of system right.

Agnes:

I think there's an important disanalogy between that and what you're doing an argument that is I don't think it's like oh you just get into the habit of arguing and so you're just not in the habit of using rhetorical tricks. If it occurred to you to use when you'd like shut that down whereas you're shoveling. And it suddenly occurs to you that you could just do shoveling a bit better if you did the motion in a slightly different way. Like, maybe you'd be like, I need to stick to my simple heuristic. You might say that. But most people would be like, OK, let me modify it a little bit if I can see a way of doing that. Whereas in the ethical case, there's actually a prohibition. You're like, even if you can see a way of achieving another goal, you're like, no, I can't do that. That would be wrong. I've got to just argue in accordance with the rules of argument. And to the extent that I break the rules of argument and use rhetoric or whatever, I don't think I'm doing that. I deceive myself that I'm not doing it.

Robin:

Okay, so then to summarize here, in many areas of life we often just have a number of different mental tools that we can use to deal with things, and we quite often basically pick a tool for a while and use it, But then at some point, maybe we get to notice two tools are relevant and then we try to mix them or choose between them. But that's just a very practical thing in most areas of life. But then there's these ethically colored areas of life. And in those areas, we also tend to have a number of different systems to think in terms of, but we feel more sensitive about flipping between them or mixing them. We more feel that we should just pick one and one's right and the others are wrong. That's just a interesting feature about ethics. which distinguishes it from other areas of life and raises the question, why is this area different in that way?

Agnes:

OK, that's a really meta way to think about my first order point, that you should stop fighting for what you believe in and just argue for what you believe in all the time, 100% of the time, which might be another way to.

Robin:

Right, but I'm coming at this from saying, well, I'm not sure my ethics should be that different from my other ways of life. Why should I have this tendency to pick a system and not mix them or not fit between them?

Agnes:

I'll believe that you're asking yourself that question when I see you use some argumentative tricks. Until then, it's just words. Just cheap talk.

Robin:

Well, maybe my strategy is to use nice, clean... I mean, so it's like... you know, there are many sports players who basically foul and cheat as much as they can get away with because they know the referees aren't looking that much and they have a certain amount of cheating they can get away with. And maybe other kinds of athletes will just not cheat because that's maybe their strategy. So I'm not so sure whether my not cheating an argument is based on my moral principles or merely my incompetence at cheating or maybe just wanting to have a reputation that if you talk with me enough, you'll see that I'm not taking some strategies and you might approve of that and trust me more, but you know, that could just be a reputational strategy.

Agnes:

But that's not relevant. That is, of course, the causation story behind the scenes of your mind could be, yeah, you evolved to do this, or this is correlated with your reputation or whatever. But you're not thinking about your reputation when you're like, no, I can't use it. When you said to your colleagues, no, it's important to me to present the counter arguments, even if that means fewer people agree with me, you weren't like, because I need to preserve my reputation. You didn't give that as a reason. What you would give as your reason, that's the relevant system. We should stop, but you can have the last word.

Robin:

Uh, that sounds fine as the last word.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

All right. So we talk again.