Here’s a nice, thought-provoking piece by a philosopher, Agnes Callard, on what a certain kind of unpopular argument is for. In fact this seems to me a large issue that stands behind the ham-handed way that many academics who have not been trained in normative modes of inquiry (that is, in philosophy, or political theory, or theology or religious ethics) typically go wrong in dealing with counter-arguments. It’s also behind a lot of the conflicts about speech and academic freedom today, and about the importance of unpopular opinions. As she puts it, “Devil’s advocacy injects normative rigor into a group inquiry—but in quite a specific way, namely by containing a predictable well of enthusiasm in a given direction.”

What does this mean? Well, she distinguishes between symmetrical and asymmetrical arguments—between arguments that have two plausible views and people arguing for them, and situations where all the plausibility seems to rest on the consensus of the group. As she puts it, in a “symmetrical” argument, “two contestants are vying against one another, offering competing speeches”; in such situations, there is no settled position. In contrast, she says, “a contradictorium is structured asymmetrically: there is, on the one hand, the dominant, group-espoused view, and, on the other hand, a subordinate view that needn’t be espoused by anyone, whose function is to serve as a formal check on the group’s cohesiveness.”

In some of these latter cases—she unfortunately doesn’t explain how to mark the boundaries of this group, which is a rather important thing (she’s not, I think, defending giving racists or ethnic eliminationists academic respectability)—we face a situation where the consensus is actually hiding weaknesses and errors, weaknesses and errors which we would do well to expose and confront.

While she respects the many ways in which we try to “filter” arguments by putting bias-avoiding techniques into place, such as, she says, “research, expert advice, scholarly consensus, prediction markets,” she worries that such filters work “at a cost, namely by avoiding the very thinking that such bias “infects.”” This is an interesting idea—I think the idea here is that real thinking, in almost an Arendtian fashion, the sense of thinking as judgment, is a radically subjective cognitive act, an act of indeterminate intellectual creativity, which is sensitive to reality in many ways but which is nonetheless not simply (not always, for better and for worse) a matter of “mirroring” reality: it is our subjective response to our own construal of reality. As she points out, a lot of the tricks that social sciences have employed in recent years to “filter” out “biases” have in fact effectively removed the subjectivity from the deliberations—which is just what we don’t want to surrender. (I think this is akin to the moment a few years ago when some social scientists were talking about having an aim of removing the need for theory at all--that all we would have is "big data" and that would be enough, we could get beyond theory.)  Here is the key passage:

There are times we care not only about the correctness of the conclusion arrived at, but also about the kind of ownership we can take over that conclusion; those times, these measures won’t do. Deliberation makes us the sources of our own judgments, and this matters when the judgment in question—that so-and-so is a wrongdoer or a saint—has to ground actions of deep moral or spiritual significance, such as punishing or venerating. Those actions need to spring from an understanding the agent—whether it is an individual or a group—can full-throatedly avow.

Thinking together is riddled with pitfalls, but we can’t really claim to live together without doing it. That is why we need devil’s advocates: they safeguard group-deliberation from the inside. The devil’s advocate defends faith and justice by being in the group but not of it: by keeping the group divided against itself, she holds a space for truth against the pressure of consensus. A devil’s advocate is, for instance, well set up to hunt for as-yet unshared information, since for her the sharing of information is never an attempt to be on the same page as other people.

In principle, devil’s advocates allow us to combine the goal of figuring things out together with the goal of commitment to the truth—and they do this by functioning as a check on group consensus. In practice, devil’s advocates often fail to adhere to this subordinate “checking” role—whether it be a spiteful referee for a journal, an online troll or an attention seeking-provocateur, devil’s advocates are prone to excess. Such people are not held back and restrained by the rules of a given office, and they criticize in a way that is counterproductive and excessive.

Take me in 1993. Instead of checking the group consensus by raising some concerns about devil’s advocacy, I took it upon myself to swallow up the group with a persuasive speech. In group deliberation, there will always be those who jump at such a rhetorical opening, tyrannically exploiting the opportunity for cascade. And there will always be others who sow seeds of faction with the destructive aim of splitting the group against itself. The first indulge in an unrestrained quest for unity; the second in an unrestrained quest for division. We tend to respond to the first problem—the dangers of demagoguery—by emphasizing the value of critical distance, and the second—the dangers of sectarianism—by saying that we need to learn to get along. But it’s only if we face both problems at the same time that we see how serious our predicament is.

Whenever people must decide something together—in classrooms and city council offices, in board meetings and on the internet—we find freelance devil’s advocates doing a poor job of it. The asymmetrical structure of these informal contradictoria is fragile, quick to collapse into bad forms of agreement and bad forms of disagreement. Often these come together: oratorically speaking, the cheapest forms of unity are often those purchased by vilifying some subgroup into outsider status.

Indulgence in excess is so easy, self-restraint is so hard. If social media exaggerates these problems, that is also a kind of virtue: perhaps we have never been able to see, so clearly, what it looks like when we all try to get along. It’s not pretty. You can leave Facebook or Twitter, but you can’t really leave the ugliness behind. Technical skill is essential to informing our judgments, but it cannot be the ultimate ground of our getting along with one another. We cannot ask the authorities, experts or science to do all our thinking for us. Sometimes, we need to think as a group, and that means we cannot afford to cynically dismiss “devil’s advocacy” as a term of opprobrium. It has to become an honorific.

If anyone were to notice Callard’s piece, it might get her in trouble. I think that’s a shame, but it’s also predictable.  Or so I think.