You are not entitled to your opinion

[ciphergoth]

• You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion
  
• Sorry, but you are not entitled to your opinion
  
• Why You Are Not Entitled To Your Opinion

You are, I think, entitled to the right to hold and express any opinion without being shut down by the State for doing so; that is where the entitlement ends.

[Poll #1410915]
(edit: removed Harlan Ellison quote, which doesn't really express what I'm getting at here)

Comments

[hamsterine.livejournal.com]

I found the last article particularly problematic. Statements like "No one is “entitled” to hold an opinion that something is true when patently it is false" translates, as far as I can see, as "I am entitled to assert what I/the majority know to be true. If what another individual or minority of people knows to be true is in direct conflict with the prevailing version of truth, then they are not entitled to that belief."

It is impossible not to have one's own opinion, so in that sense it is more a fact than an entitlement. It is also probably not possible to respect all the different opinions that exist, as some will seem bizarre and/or offensive. I think that giving a basic level of respect to all people, even though you dislike or fail to understand the logic of their opinions, is the ideal response to their "entitlement".

When I am told something like this, I try to take it as a reminder to try and have more humility. There are many things I am so sure that I am right about, I simply have to act on the basis that they are fact. If someone disagrees with such apparently obvious facts and can't show me any evidence that causes me to reconsider, I still take that as a cue to aim for a little humility, the crux of which is:

Remember a time, however insignificant or long ago, when you were convinced you were right and then discovered you weren't, or it wasn't as simple as you thought? There may be loads more occasions like this that you never find out about.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The last article is by far the weakest; it might have been a mistake to add it, but I thought it was interesting all the same.

There's a lot of empirical evidence that we all in general habitually underestimate our chances of being wrong about a lot of things, though I'm trying to change my habits on this after being presented with the evidence. But this is exactly why we should discourage people from having "fully general counterarguments" with which to defend what they believe: it's because of this tendency that we should all be doing our best to make our beliefs as vulnerable as possible to being overthrown by better evidence or better arguments.