Abstract
Arguments involve, at minimum, attempts at presenting something that an audience will take to be a reason. Reasons, once understood, affect an addressee’s beliefs in ways that are in some significant sense outside of their direct voluntary control. Since such changes may impact the well-being, life projects, or sense of self of the addressee, they risk infringing upon their autonomy. We call this the “autonomy worry” of argumentation. In light of this worry, this paper asks whether one ought to seek an addressee’s consent before arguing with them. We first consider the view that arguing of any sort and on any topic requires consent. However, such a view is extreme, and we reject the general requirement of consent because argument contains its own internal permission structure. We find, however, that this permission structure is not always operative, and that consent may nonetheless be morally required in certain kinds of cases.
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Notes
We should note that a use of force to undermine or make futile someone else’s attempts at self-governance is non-arbitrary if it is justified by sufficiently strong moral reasons, concerning for example the well-being of others. This means that the autonomy-based reasons for asking for consent before arguing that we may identify in this paper are always only pro tanto reasons, capable of being outweighed.
We agree that it is difficult to draw a bright line between actions that interfere with autonomy as self-governance and actions that do not. There are easy cases like operating (interferes) and tap** on the shoulder (does not interfere), but there is also a penumbra of hard cases where it is not clear whether acting without asking for consent interferes with autonomy. We do not think that this shows a problem with the conception of autonomy as self-governance as much as reflects the complex and context-dependent way in which moral reasons apply to us.
See (Alston 1988) for a defense of doxastic involuntarism.
It should be noted that on many conceptions of argument—such as Walton’s or Pragma-dialectics—arguments aim at commitments which are (roughly) speech acts and “not anything psychological.” (Walton & Krabbe 1995). As discussed in Casey (Casey 2020, 2022), commitments are nonetheless subject to logical rules independent of the bearer. So, though not involuntary mental states like beliefs, they are nonetheless for the most part involuntarily acquired, maintained, intensified, extinguished and so on.
This happens even if you argue motivated only by some other goal than to persuade. Say, you present an argument only because you want to hear another’s feedback, with no interest in getting them to believe or accept anything. Still, you aim a purported reason at them, so to say, and the rest follows.
On a conception of autonomy as the right to non-interference this would already enough to show that arguing infringes on autonomy.
As this example shows, our conception of autonomous self-governance in the epistemic realm allows for decisions to maintain, or risk maintaining false beliefs as autonomous self-governance. This is because we believe that people can have good higher-order reasons for not wanting to be responsive to their object-level reasons.
At least absent morally relevant reasons outweighing our moral reasons to respect other’s autonomy, such as that a third party’s well-being is on the line.
Importantly, it does this independent of whether the argument indeed presents a good reason, because all of this is dependent only on the addressee’s perception that a reason was given.
Depending on where our reader stands with the permissibility to rely on reasonable assumptions of counterfactual consent, they may further consider mundane arguments harmless because for them, it is usually reasonable to assume that the addressee would give consent to hear them if they were asked. After all, when it comes to mundane arguments, epistemic betterment can usually be assumed to be welcomed because the truth helps us achieve our goals, input is needed from the world in order to identify the best means for one’s goals anyway, and critical engagement is relatively likely to succeed in uncovering bad arguments. We, the authors of this paper, think that people rely on the reasonable assumption of counterfactual consent quite a bit in their daily life – every time they hug loved ones without asking for consent first, for example. However, we accept that this is controversial.
And in fact we often do. At least the authors of this paper can remember many occasions when they asked whether it was permissible to say something before offering arguments regarding other people’s important decisions, deeply held beliefs etc.
See footnote 7.
We thank a reviewer for pointing this out.
This time, “all things equal” refers to reasons to give an argument even without consent because there are strong moral reason why the addressee needs to hear it.
Admittedly, the pragma-dialectical model contains a confrontation and an opening stage at which questions of consent to engage in the discussion at all can be figured out. But as we have remarked above, the need to consider risk to autonomy is ongoing and so it might be necessary to return to these stages frequently, disrupting the critical discussion beyond recognition.
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Stevens, K., Casey, J. Asking before Arguing? Consent in Argumentation. Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10388-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10388-y