It is often claimed that everyone has a right to their own opinion, such that one has the natural and inalienable freedom to hold whatever beliefs they will without fear of persecution. This is typically explained by the alleged fact that opinions cannot be false — they are subjective. I shall argue that this is mistaken, and therefore that an opinion is a legitimate subject of (correct) regulation.
Such a claim may be alarming for dystopian, Orwellian reasons. Does this imply that, for example, certain religions may or may not be practiced, or that there should be an official, state-regulated dogma? It does not. Furthermore, we must be careful not to confuse merely having or thinking an idea with seriously entertaining those ideas. Plato thought literature had no place in a just society because it was false. My view is much less austere. It merely claims that morality applies to anything that we can will, including our beliefs, and not merely the consequences of our actions.
There are four reasons which I take to sufficiently demonstrate that there is not only such thing as a FALSE opinion, but also a WRONG opinion.
1. All beliefs, by virtue of being a belief in the first place, must be either true or false. Mere attitudes like “yum” are not beliefs, but rather, mere expressions of preference. However, all opinions are beliefs (though perhaps with some degree of diffidence). Therefore, all opinions must be either true or false. It seems uncontroversial to me that we should actively avoid false belief.
2. In addition to having truth-value, all opinions are subject to justification. We can have better or worse reason for believing ‘p’ and, as a rule, we should not believe something without adequate justification. Perhaps even more strictly, we should not believe what we are justified in NOT believing.
3. We are in the habit (of irrelevant origin) of understanding “harm” as consisting only in physical or bodily injury. There exists no defense for this position. Rather, it is highly plausible that we can harm people in “epistemological” ways. For example, we can judge people unfairly, we can malign a person in wrongly categorizing them, we can besmirch the reputation and esteem of persons depending on how we treat them, and we can neglect a person’s dignity in the way we understand their identity.
4. The dichotomy between theory and practice seems clear in certain examples, but not in all; it is unobvious that theory and practice are strictly and absolutely demarcated. Theory is capable of — and indeed often responsible for — determining action, and therefore beliefs can surely be INDIRECTLY physically harmful to people.
A short closing remark: we must not conflate a theory’s correctness with the ease (or difficulty) of its application, even if the two sometimes accord with each other. Even if it is difficult to properly and correctly regulate one’s own belief (for it is necessarily possible that we can sometimes be mistaken), we are not absolved of the responsibility as moral agents to do what is right, whether in action, thought, or otherwise, regardless of whether it is to our perceived immediate advantage.
Jacob Caldwell, a contributing writer for the Voice, can be reached at jcaldwell16@wooster.edu