Where Differences of Opinion Come From

Are you the kind of person who can’t stand others who disagree with you? After all, wouldn’t they come to the same conclusion as you given the same information? If they don’t, how dare they! The most famous concept describing this is Hanlon’s Razor, which officially posits, “Never attribute to malice that which could be adequately be explained by stupidity.” In more specific terms, the reasoning of someone who is in disagreement with someone else is that the other person is ignorant->stupid->evil (in that order). Because first you try to give more information—the same that led you to your conclusion—and then you assume that they must not understand what you’re saying, and when it finally becomes clear that they do and don’t care, they then must be bad people.

But what’s really interesting about disagreements is why those disagreements exist. Yes, it could be that they are ignorant, stupid, or evil, but there are more than those three reasons. It’s the other reasons that people don’t think about that are the subject of this post.

Reasons Why People Disagree

• Different Desires – If you want or like different things, then you won’t agree on what you want, how to spend your time, or whether certain things in life are meaningful or giant wastes of time. These are differences that will never be reconciled unless you learn to appreciate what the other person likes. The only thing you can do here is live and let live unless that person is doing something that will harm others or that you are absolutely sure that the person doesn’t want what they think they do. In the former scenario, you can stop them before they hurt someone; in the latter, it’s up to you whether you try to influence them…but at some point you have to let people make their own mistakes to learn and grow.
  
• Different Beliefs – This is the most obvious—after all, if you believed the exact same things, then you would be in agreement barring differing information (which takes you down the ignorant->stupid path when you then try to convey that information). The other items will go into why people might have different beliefs, so this point will stick to the fact that you can’t prove everything all the time, and so at some point you have to decide or act based on assumptions about the world. Many of those assumptions will be wrong, but there is no avoiding making them because you can’t predict the future, can’t know everything, and can’t account for every factor or variable (and, even if you did, you’d still be down to percentages and would have to pick based on probability, which could still be incorrect). Things like why we’re here on Earth, how the universe and life came to be, and other big questions about reality are possibly unanswerable, so people are going to draw different conclusions and there’s nothing you can do about it because your guess is as good as anyone’s where things are unprovable.
• Different Ethics – Ethics are a subset of beliefs about what is right or wrong behaviorally regarding other people (or the world around you when it comes to things like the environment). Some people think abortion is a human right, while others think that, because it kills a human organism, it’s evil. So, there’s nothing you can really do to rectify that kind of difference in ethical frameworks. It’s not even necessarily that one side thinks that slaughtering children is wonderful and the other monstrous; it’s that there are competing ethics between freedom and life and one group prioritizes one of the other and vice versa. This is why politics is so heated: politics are applied ethics. If you think taking money by force is immoral, then you’ll see a 50%+ tax rate as effectively slavery (because you work and someone else gets the fruit of your labor); if you think ensuring everyone has food, water, and shelter, you’ll think that taxes are a social contract or a necessary thing that all good people would consent to. You’re just never going to come to an agreement because of different ethical prioritization when ethics conflict.
• Different Definitions – The term, “We’re in violent agreement,” is popular when people actually agree but are arguing as if they disagree. Why does this happen so often, and why do people talk past each other so often? Differing definitions. You see this with words that can mean many different things, such as “freedom” or “service” or “rights” or “abuse”. As such, people will argue more over the definition of a word even if they have the same opinion expressed differently. It’s one of the more interesting things about human behavior. Two people might be in complete agreement about a topic but debate over whether you should call something one word or another when describing it. My personal favorite is when someone says, “I prioritize my freedom,” and the other person responds, “I want to be free, too—free from fear,” to which the first person responds, “That’s not what freedom means.” The latter use of the word is referring to someone wanting to be safe, not free. While some people genuinely define words differently, occasionally one party is intentionally equivocating to win an argument or possibly succumbing to the No True Scotsman fallacy of excluding something that technically fits the definition but doesn’t fit that person’s bar for what qualifies.
• Literal vs. Metaphorical – I once had a conversation where I said, “Love is an emotion,” and the other person said, “Love is a verb.” At first, I didn’t know what to say because she was dead serious. Of course love is an emotion. I wasn’t even sure how to respond to that. I try to be diplomatic, so I said, “I’m being literal; you’re being metaphorical.” In that conversation, the “love is a verb” is a metaphorical statement meaning that you express your love through your actions. That’s not literally love but is the expression of love, but metaphorically it explains how you “truly” (here’s the No True Scotsman fallacy back again) love someone when you show it. So it was kind of hard for me to continue because I was going to get into an argument where we were defining things differently (see the previous bullet) and I was just not going to be able to turn her feeling-based view of love into an intellectual conversation about how human emotions work. Since I don’t really disagree with her intended point that expressing your feelings is one form of demonstrating that you have them, I wasn’t going to argue over semantics. It’s not worth it. If you want to see one of the greatest examples of all-time of arguing over semantics, by the way, this argument about whether Sukihana is a musician or not qualifies.
• Objective vs. Subjective Views – Similar to literal vs. metaphorical, there is the idea that there’s a difference between an objective and subjective view of something. For example, someone might love a piece of art that speaks to them, while someone else just sees it as paint on a canvas. You see this a lot in the world where something may or may not be objectively a quality, but someone subjectively sees something. You see this with things like value, significance, attachment, and other things that have a high degree of subjectivity. Similarly, anyone with bias will possibly never change their minds. Take a tale of two Pittsburgh Steelers plays: the Santonio Holmes catch in the end zone in Super Bowl XLIII and the Jesse James catch against the Patriots in 2017. In the former example, there are clear pictures online with Holmes having both feet touching grass with the ball in his hands, making it an indisputable catch. But, because Arizona fans wanted it to go their way, they don’t believe it and then point to a different photo from another angle taken a fraction of a second before or afterwards where one of his feet are no longer touching as evidence. With the latter example, with seconds left in the game, Jesse James caught the ball and dove into the end zone (a “football move”), crossing the plane (which should be a touchdown according to the rules) but then bobbling it when the ball hit the ground in his hands. The objective rule was that touchdown catches have to survive the ground, and so the interpretation is whether Jesse James’s lunge was a “football move”, thus making it a catch and the crossing the plane was a touchdown before he hit the ground or if it was not and so, when in the end zone, the “surviving the ground” rule had to be enforced (in which case, he clearly bobbled the ball when it hit the ground). In either case, it’s hard to have someone with a subjective view accept the objective reality.
• Relative vs. Absolute Standards – This is a difficult one because humans are different. Because of this, we often adjust things to meet the person we’re interacting with. We might lower our ability to play a sport, for example, to match a child who is still learning. We might let the highest performer get away with things that we wouldn’t let a lower performer get away with. As such, relative vs. absolute standards will always come into play in arguments. You see this all the time where some people (e.g., politicians, celebrities, athletes) are held to different legal standards than others or some people are given better ratings or rewards for less performance or work than others. As such, there will always be disagreements over whether you should hold a rule or policy to the letter or the spirit of it, and there will always be arguments for whether some sort of factor makes the rule need to be relative to the person or situation and not objectively set in a vacuum to be applied in all cases equally.
  

I’m sure there are other possible causes of disagreements, but these are important ones to understand. What you can do with this information is know when and how to “pick your battles”—i.e., when you do need to have a conversation about your difference of opinion or if it’s not worth it. Sometimes, it’s not worth it because it doesn’t change anything; other times, it’s because you actually agree on the important part and disagree on something trivial. No matter what situation you are in where you disagree with someone, it’s important to understand why you disagree so that you can take the best approach to maintain a relationship if that’s what you choose to do. Too many people in society want to dislike or even cut other people out of their lives over a minor disagreement, and that’s not good for people in general—let alone society as a whole. Additionally, by understanding where someone is coming from, you might be better able to persuade them if that’s what you seek to do. Just make sure that you are arguing in good faith and not trying to manipulate someone.

Differences in life are great because other people can be better at things that you are worse at, complementing you and making both of you better off. But, unfortunately, it also leads to disagreements. Try your best to get the benefits of diversity in this world and minimize the risks and issues by cooperating with people who have different perspectives and abilities while being diplomatic when conflicts arise. It might not be worth arguing over, or it might be that you have a fundamental difference that you’re never going to reconcile and so you’re better off taking your attention away from it so you can remain cordial.