What does it mean to say we are entitled to our opinion?

A redated post. 

What does it mean to say that someone is entitled to their own opinion? People say that a lot, but I am not sure what they are saying when they say it. To say I am entitled to something, I take it, implies someone might want to take it away from me, and either shouldn't or shouldn't be permitted to. But who might be taking out opinion away from us, and what kind of protection do we need from whoever it is that is trying to take our opinion away from us? Further, it isn't clear what an "opinion" is in this context. That can mean a personal preference that can be neither true nor false (country music is better than rock-n-roll), or it can mean a claim which can be true or false, and for which there can be evidence, but is not completely settled to everyone's satisfaction. Consider the "opinion" of Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possesed, who believes that "he who kills himself, becomes God." Is this something that Kirilov is "entitled to," even if it may lead him to suicide (and did, in the novel).
And then we can look at the various means that people might use to get people to stop holding an opinion. We can torture someone to make them change their minds, we can disown them or give them a lot of disapproval and make them feel bad for believing what they do, or we could try to give them reasons why their beliefs are false. Does our being entitled to our opinion mean that no one should attempt to give another person a logical reason for rejecting what he or she currently believes? I would say, certainly not.

This essay is entitled "Sorry, but you are not entitled to your opinion."

I believe I have linked to it before.

It's a matter of opinion

I do think that either there is a hell or there isn't. The term "matter of opinion" is inherently ambiguous, since the phrase is used for things that are neither true nor false (McDonald's burgers are better than Burger King's) and about which evidence is irrelevant, and about things where it is either true or false, where evidence is relevant, and but where there is no overwhelming evidence either way. The question of whether or not there is a God, or a hell, is, in my view, a matter of opinion in the latter sense.

What is means to say something is a matter of opinion

What does it mean to say that something is a matter of opinion? You could mean

1) Claims about subject matter X can neither be true nor false absolutely. Thus, a typical matter of opinion in this sense would be the question of whether McDonald's burgers are better tasting than Burger King's. There can't be any sense of saying that someone erroneously believes that McDonald's burgers are better when they are not, since each person's personal taste decides it for them. This would be a personal, as opposed to a cultural relativism.

Or, you could mean

2) Rational persons can disagree about subject matter X. An reasonable person, examining all of the relevant evidence, could decide the question either way. So, for example, with the question of whether there is life on other planets equivalent in intelligence to our own, many people think that we are not in a position to settle the question for sure one way or the other. However, the question has a true-or-false answer, but we are not in a position to determine which, because we don't have enough information. The question of whether or not there is a God is sometimes thought of being a matter of opinion in sense 2, but most would agree that either there is a God or there isn't.

Why "fact vs. opinion" is BS

Does everything have to fit into facts and opinions? I realize many people learned this "fact or opinion" crap in grade school, but if you go by that, either something is cut and dried (we can prove it conclusively), or it's opinion (however anyone feels about it is just dandy). And that leaves out a whole realm of controversial problems where the claims can be true or false, and we have things that can count as evidence one way or another, but we aren't at the point where all reasonable people agree.




Take whether or not there's a God. Do we want to say that's a matter of fact? Well, people have offered "proofs" on both sides, but there's still a debate. Really smart people disagree. Is it opinion? Well, even if there's no proof one way or the other, don't we at least know that either God exists or God does not exist?



Fact vs. opinion is right up there at the top of my list of pet peeves.