What is the Nature of our Disagreement?

Recent reminders of the challenges and opportunities of learning to disagree

WashU event on Learning to Disagree (Billy Gutierrez for WashU Law)

One of the privileges of having published a new book is the opportunity to speak about it. Since last week’s publication of Learning to Disagree, I have been hosted by a number of law schools and universities, including the University of Texas Law School (Steve Collis), Bethel University (Barbara Bellefeuille), Notre Dame Law School (Rick Garnett), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Jason Mazzone), and my home institution, Washington University (including a public dialogue with Peter Boumgarden, Frank Lovett, Penina Acayo Laker, Jenny Duncan, and John Hendrix).

I have learned a great deal from the generous engagement of these friends and colleagues over the past few weeks, and I plan to address some of these insights in future posts. (For the next few weeks, my substantive posts may be limited as I continue to travel extensively to speak about the book.)

For now, I’d like to address one thought raised by Professor Lovett during this week’s event at Washington University. Professor Lovett wondered whether Learning to Disagree sufficiently articulates the theory of disagreement on which the book relies. This is a particularly important question because different theories may entail different responses.

Professor Lovett speculated that I might be assuming our deep disagreements stem from a lack of empathy and a lack of nuance (failing to understand the complexity of arguments and people). If that were true, as he noted, then greater empathy and greater nuance might lead to better disagreement—and I should add—might even lessen some of our disagreements.

I think, unfortunately, that our disagreements run much deeper. This is the intuition that I explore in a chapter of Learning to Disagree titled “What Happens When We Can’t Compromise?” and hint at in later chapters about the nature of faith and the concept of neutrality.

To the extent that I have articulated a theory of disagreement in earlier work (particularly my 2016 book, Confident Pluralism, and my 2020 article, “Beyond Unreasonable”), it has been that our disagreements stem from deep and largely intractable differences in how we see, experience, and understand the world. These differences are rooted in metaphysical and often theological premises (even when those premises are unstated or unexplored), and they limit our ability to communicate with and understand one another.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes in his important book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity:

[D]isagreement in the application of political and moral concepts arises at least in part from different modes of political and moral practice and extends to disagreement over how such disagreement is to be resolved. So when we advance political and moral claims, we need to know what it is in the beliefs, attitudes, commitments, and capacities for recognition of those whom we are addressing that might make them open to considering our claims and perhaps to finding them rationally compelling.

In many cases and those the most interesting, we cannot learn this without entering into prolonged dialogue with them, and such dialogue requires openness on our part to the widest range of relevant objections that can be advanced by them against whatever case it is that we are making.

If MacIntyre is right, our disagreement runs far deeper than lack of empathy and nuance. Even so, discovering greater empathy and increased nuance through the slow and difficult kind of dialogue he envisions can nevertheless help mitigate some of the relational tensions we experience in our current political and moral divides. That may be a modest goal and a second-best solution to the fact of our differences. But even this modest goal requires a great deal of commitment to cultivating habits and practices that many of us lack today.

---

I am grateful not only to my recent institutional hosts but also to many people engaging with Learning to Disagree in other venues. I’ll try to highlight some of these in my posts on Some Assembly Required. This week, I invite you to take a look at my interview with Megan Johnson at Interfaith America.