Jack Haven

"On Our Duty as to False Opinion"

We have the right to express our opinion, no matter what it is. We often take this right for granted because, in our contemporary world, we cannot imagine living without it. This right, however, has not always been ours. Our ancestors had to struggle, fight, and die to obtain it, and their sacrifices have given us a number of laws and institutions that protect our individual human rights from government interference. The United States Constitution was among the first legal documents in existence to recognize this right:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (Amendment 1)

Approximately 150 years later, this right has been recognized again in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (Art. 19)

A right is a justifiable claim that, if denied, can be demanded by individuals by virtue of their humanity. We believe, today, that freedom of opinion and expression are paramount to the existence of a free society. If democracy is to function, then the people, who we call self-governing, must be capable of making their own decisions without interference. The people must be free to opine as they wish, or they are not free.

It is unfortunate that this very right has become interpreted in such a way that it has begun to contradict itself. We encourage all persons to have any opinion whatsoever, and we assure them that they can do so without interference. While at one time "interference" meant simply the act of hindering a person's right to have and express an opinion, it has been redefined to mean the act of questioning a person's opinion. If a person believes something that you or I know to be wrong, we cannot correct him or her without being accused of interfering with the person's opinion. By attempting to set a person right, we violate the person's human rights.

It is now freely argued that opinion should not be questioned because people have a right to their own opinions and to have them be left alone. We are confronted each day by people who have come to believe this; these individuals will voice their opinions and, when questioned about them, will respond that their opinion is theirs and that it is their right to hold it, no matter what we say. Often, they will even refer to the First Amendment of the Constitution to support their claim. It is unfortunate that they have forgotten the words of Thomas Jefferson:

Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself. She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless, by human interposition, disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. (Lipscomb & Bergh 302, emphasis mine)

If every person has the right to his or her own opinion without interference, and we define interference as we have, how can argument and debate be possible? We are rapidly approaching a situation where errors are becoming quite dangerous, since it is becoming more and more difficult to safely contradict them. It is my opinion, however, that a man who believed that error could only be defeated by the natural weapons of truth could not have supported the addition to the Constitution of an amendment that would disarm truth so readily. The right to have one's opinion validated merely by the fact that one has it cannot be defended by using the First Amendment. We must understand the spirit in which the amendment was written.

Right and duties are intimately bound. Right cannot exist unless there is a correlative duty attached to it. If you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; then the people and the government have the duty not to kill you, not to imprison you, and not to hinder your opportunities for happiness. Correlative duties protect rights by ensuring that those powers with the ability to obstruct a person's exercise of his or her rights do not do so. This is why the First Amendment begins with the words, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech," rather than, "The citizens have the right to freedom of speech." The first outlines the duties of Congress, thus ensuring the rights of the people.

By limiting the right of Congress to abridge the freedom of opinion in the United States, a society was created within which speech could not be limited by government or law. This, however, is not the only correlative duty attached to the freedom of opinion. The purpose of this law was to allow truth to come to the surface by ensuring that argument and debate would freely take place. If the purpose of the right to express one's opinion is to ensure the ascendancy of truth, then this right serves to allow opinions to exist together and refute one another until error is defeated and the opinion that best represents the truth rises above the rest. If we are truly to protect the right to our opinions, then we must be ready to refute false opinion, even when the false opinion is our own.

It will be argued that opinion only belongs to the person who holds it: It has nothing to do with truth. Opinions may not have positive proofs attached to them. They are beliefs that are held because they appear most likely to us considering that which we know. But opinion is not baseless. In order to form opinion, we must draw information from somewhere: our parents, our friends, our teachers, television, books, and our everyday observations. Many people, who believe in God, may say that they know He exists because of their observations of nature; others will admit that they came to this opinion because of the way they were raised. When we say that something is beautiful, we draw upon our emotional reactions to a given aesthetic form, which we partly take from our parents and society and partly develop from our observations of the world around us. Every opinion, no matter how personal, draws upon some sense data. Even when we choose a favorite color, we do so on account of an emotional response that seeing the color causes us to feel.

Opinions are interpretations of fact. When one makes an observation, one extracts data from the environment and analyses them. In daily life, we do not generally use instruments to gather data. We use our senses to extract data from the environment. I go outdoors, I feel tingling upon my skin, and I begin to perspire heavily. Based on this data, I opine that I feel hot. I can further opine that, because I feel hot, it is a hot day. This is very subjective analysis. I may very well feel hot, since only I can judge how I feel at any given moment. You may disagree, however, with my opinion that it is a hot day. You may be accustomed to this sort of weather, and you may opine that it is a warm, or even cool, day. A day may be a hot day for me and a cool day for you, but it cannot be both hot and cool for all. If we were speaking generally when we described the day, then one or both opinions must be false because they are mutually exclusive.

Mutual exclusivity is the primary problem with the popular assumption that all opinions are valid. Either the day is hot, or it is not. Either the sky is cloudy, or it is not. Either there is a socioeconomic problem in inner cities, or there is not. Either global warming is occurring, or it is not. Either God exists, or He does not. To say that all opinions are valid is to allow for the widespread paradox of justifying all contradictory statements. Suddenly, the people arguing for gay marriage are just as right as the people who want legislation to prohibit it. All controversies can be put to rest immediately because everyone's opinions are valid, and no one needs to argue about anything because the only criterion for being right is that you feel confident enough that you are.

Whether or not the day is hot seems a small problem. Why should we argue it? In situations like these, the hackneyed expression, "Let's agree to disagree," is predictably brought into the conversation. If we agree to disagree, then all our opinions are valid, and we can go away from one another assured of the fact that we are each absolutely right, no matter how disparate our opinions may have been. Unfortunately, not every situation is as mundane as a hot day. Our opinions form the bases for other opinions. They build upon one another creating webs of thought that rely on one another to survive. One false opinion can lead to another, and another, and another, until the resulting series of opinions forms for the person who holds them a vision of reality that profoundly deviates from what is right.

"Homosexuals disgust me." Many people in the United States hold this opinion. Since most people are the best judges of their own characters, we will assume that this is true. If a person feels disgusted around homosexuals, then we must grant that homosexuals disgust them. Let us say that one person who holds this opinion also holds that, "The Bible condemns homosexuality." The latter opinion can lead to the conclusion that, "God hates gays." Therefore, "I am justified in hating gays," comes about because the person is already disgusted with homosexuals and has found justification in the Bible.

The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas is run by a man named Fred Phelps, who has agitated many people into agreeing with his opinion that God hates gays. Whether this opinion is correct or not is irrelevant; it is his right to hold the opinion that he chooses to have. Consider, however, whether this is an opinion that should be validated simply because it is an opinion. There are many who would disagree with Phelps, and not all of them would disagree that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Many people believe that homosexuality is a sin, yet they still believe that God loves all people, including gays. Of course, there are many people throughout the country that would disagree with both opinions, arguing that God either loves gays or has nothing to say about them either way. Finally, there are plenty of people who believe that God does not even exist, so what He would have had to say on the matter is of little import. These opinions are all mutually exclusive; they cannot all be true.

Coexistence requires that these people, who all disagree with one another, live together in peace. Most of the groups above are capable of coexistence. Religious people who believe homosexuality is a sin rely on prayer and proselytization to convince gays to give up what they opine is a sinful lifestyle. This opinion, right or wrong, is absolutely peaceful. Phelps's opinion that God hates homosexuals, however, justifies his own mad hatemongering. Phelps has preached that the terrorist bombings of New York, Madrid, and most recently London, are all God's way of punishing countries that have given in to the "fag agenda." Phelps has been a supporter of violence against homosexuals and has advocated the death penalty for the sin of homosexuality. Most importantly, Phelps is a preacher. He is outspoken, enraged, and enigmatic. He attracts many people, and though he does not explicitly support murder, his words have led others to precisely this end. Uncontested opinions have this result. When we allow one false opinion to slip past without refutation, we allow a series of opinions to form that can lead to evil consequences: among these, violence and death. Phelps has a right to have his opinion, but we have a duty to refute him. If we believe he is wrong, we cannot sit by and allow him to convince more people that he is right.

We must concern ourselves with opinion because opinions are the bases for action. All our actions are influenced by our opinions; if our opinions are false, then the actions we take may be inappropriate for the real situation we are trying to address. This is true also of our political leaders, though in their case the problem is more often that opinion leads them to inaction. For many years, the U.S. government had stridently denied that there is such a thing as global warming. The empirical data that were being obtained were analyzed, and though they had convinced most scientists that the planetary climate was changing due to human activities, they had convinced some scientists that the climate change that had been occurring was a normal part of the planetary cycle.

The question was, "Is global warming taking place, or not?" It either is, or it isn't. Both opinions are not valid only because someone holds them. If global warming is not taking place, and climate change is a normal part of life on Earth, then we do not have to do anything at all: Our actions are not affecting the planet, so why worry? If global warming is taking place, then taking no action at all is tantamount to spinning the cylinder of a revolver loaded with only one bullet and putting the muzzle to our species' head. The government sided with those who opined that global warming was not occurring. Years of refutation finally led the U.S. government to concede, very recently, that global warming is occurring. Although we had already missed out on a number of excellent opportunities to do something about it, we can now begin to work toward changing the way that we affect the planetary climate.

There is hope for the planet now, but this will not be the last situation upon which there will be disagreement. Though the U.S. government now accepts that global warming is taking place, they are not entirely sure that it is a bad thing. Of course Russia, the tundras of which will be largely turned into fertile land by a global temperature increase, does not believe that global warming is bad. The Netherlands, the entire landmass of which will be submerged by water if the glaciers melt, does not agree with Russia. As long as disagreement on this, or any matter, exists, people must be willing to refute one another's opinions, or truth will lose out.

It may be argued that Truth is not something that can be discovered. How can one person refute another? Is it not hubris to consider oneself so arrogant as to believe that one holds the Truth? This is true. We are biological creatures that interact with reality via five very limited senses. Notwithstanding, we are also similar to one another. As humans, our genetic structure is such that our senses work in very much the same way. With minor exceptions for disabilities such as blindness or deafness, we all see the same thing when we behold something that is green, and we all hear the same thing when a musician plays a B-flat. Most civilizations on Earth, independently from one another, have come to describe a concept known as time, whereby things that happened before the present are set in the past and things that will happen after the present are set in the future. If our sense-based observations are so similar, then it follows that our most basic opinions may not be so different either.

Perhaps, then, Truth is not something we can ever uncover, but we can, through debate and argument, uncover truths that bind us together as a species. We have already done this: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was voted upon by 48 countries in 1948, and it was the basis for two legally-binding conventions later ratified by the United Nations: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It has been translated into over 300 languages and represents a universal agreement on the inalienable human rights of all humankind. There is a great deal more to do, but we will not accomplish anything if we worry too much about the sensibilities of people's opinions and too little for the search for truth via intelligent debate.

Works Cited

Lipscomb, Andrew A., & Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 2. Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905.

United States Constitution. Amendment 1.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Art. 19.