1. Where’s the disagreement?

Terms like “relativist,” “postmodernist,” or “nihilist” suggest someone who, like Camus’s “Stranger,” believes that “one thing is as good as another”: someone who has no beliefs or preferences about what is or should be, or at least does not adhere to any consistent standards for deciding between beliefs or preferences.Footnote ⁴ Such a person would certainly be strange, frightening, untrustworthy, and unreliable. Fortunately, they do not exist. Real people, even those few who self-identify as relativists, by the mere fact of their existence must choose between this or that candidate for office (or not voting at all), this or that job, this or that pair of shoes, and indeed whether to get up every morning and eat every day. In choosing and acting, beliefs and preferences become manifest.Footnote ⁵ To refrain from acting is a choice just as much as any other: to not go in to work or not help one’s neighbor put out a housefire shapes the future, just as the reverse choice does. People cannot help but be somewhat consistent about their choices and actions, and principles and standards can be adduced to summarize such consistencies. So, despite their explicit sense, terms like “relativist” tend to be deployed when we encounter people whose habits of action are very different from our own.

To decide whether we ought to deploy such terms in such situations, we have to think about what we hope to accomplish by them. One desired outcome would be persuasion. We would like our interlocutor to change her mind. We would like to convey that the reasons she is dismissing are very important, and perhaps even to suggest that her own stated principles, commitments, or behavior require that she recognize them. To reasonable people like ourselves, we think, this would be obvious. Why can’t she just be reasonable?

I don’t think there’s much argumentative force to this usage, whether phrased in the pleading way I have or in the more condemnatory mode of “relativist” or “postmodernist.” We would not be having our disagreement if we agreed what it means to be reasonable. Saying, in essence, “Have you considered that, in addition to all my specific arguments, I have truth and goodness on my side,” does not offer anything more to recommend our own views. At most it is a statement that we consider this issue very important and would like our interlocutor to reconsider—a request which might be met more generously if offered in a more conciliatory key. If there is some particular piece of evidence we would like our interlocutor to reevaluate, we would do better to point to it specifically, rather than offering a blanket statement that she is unreachable by reason, evidence, or morality.

For example, if we have shown our opponent the climate change literature, and her response is that she does not trust the scientists, adding on grand declarations about reason, empiricism, and the scientific method will not help. Specific suggestions about why these particular scientists are trustworthy would have a better (though perhaps still slim) chance. Better still might be arguments for our preferred actions which do not depend upon climate science, but upon considerations of economics, national security, or clean air and water.

The other possible reason to reach for insults is to declare that we are done with our interlocutor; that we will no longer spend our effort trying to persuade her or perhaps even to coexist with her. If our dispute has an audience, we may hope to convince the audience that this person ought not be taken seriously. This is a major move. It is escalating an argument into at least a verbal, and potentially an economic, legal, or even physical, conflict. This can be quite effective when there is already an overwhelming authority or majority on our side. We need merely signal to such allies that our interlocutor has moved beyond the pale, and a sanction will be leveled—say, in placing restrictions on a vexatious litigant, or excommunicating a heretic priest. But in the absence of such an overwhelming prior consensus, we will need to convince our community, even if not our interlocutor, that things will go better if they join us in applying and enforcing our particular standards of the true, the right, the good, and the rigorous.

This puts us back in the former position. Merely saying, “I have truth and goodness on my side” is not, in itself, a compelling recommendation of one’s ideas about these things. We will need to explain, in terms which speak to our audience’s prior beliefs, intuitions, and values, why our particular standards of reason, morality, and truth ought to be abided by. Insults will not help us to do so. They can invoke the wrath of a majority already onside, but they cannot build a majority not already present. If we wish to convince our audience, or our interlocutor herself, that she is behaving viciously, appealing to the bare name of morality or rationality will do little good. We would do better at least to diagnose the particular vice—e.g., greed, selfishness, cruelty, or shortsightedness. If we do not locate the particular disagreement, our listeners may be at a loss to discern which side they prefer, or the implications of each.

2. Turning toward, or turning away?

Whether we regard our most cherished beliefs as truths vouchsafed by nonhuman authority, as requirements inherent to reasoning or logic, as the hard-won and time-tested traditions of our community, or as mere personal commitments, we must decide what to do when confronted with someone who seems to reject them. We can keep searching for common ground, for ways to negotiate, persuade, or coexist; or we can refuse to do so. My suggestion is that deploying words like “postmodernist,” “relativist,” or “nihilist” is a variety of the latter. Such words do not specify particular points of disagreement or offer arguments as to how to resolve them. They simply reiterate that our interlocutor seems to reject our standards of reason, evidence, or morality, in a more elevated key.

Even with the greatest charity and creativity, there is no surefire and general method of persuasion or conversion. Even the most ardent zealot will acknowledge that some people simply do not buy her arguments, though she thinks they should. The most we can do to work toward persuasion is to keep trying, keep having more experiences with one another, and keep offering more reasons, on our interlocutor’s indulgence; and for her to keep trying, on ours. When one of us gives up on the other, the conversation is over, whatever our beliefs’ evidentiary, rational, or moral warrant. In the face of disagreement, we have no choice but to deliberate, negotiate, compromise, or fight it out.

There is, sadly, no guarantee that compromise and coexistence are possible. In a world of scarcity, some ways of life and aspirations really are incompatible. But this should be a reluctant conclusion. Giving up on persuasion and negotiation is a serious choice. It leaves only the options of uneasy coexistence or of outright conflict. Yet even if conflict must come, we will likely do better if we have bothered to understand how our opponent reasons and chooses, and what she wants.

Accordingly, when we encounter a baffling disagreement, our first response should not be incredulity, but curiosity. How does this person think? What does she care about and trust? What does she want to protect, achieve, or avoid? Can we find any overlap, or a way to coexist? If someone dismisses our arguments or reduces them to mere opinion, she is expressing an offer or a demand, not an epistemological thesis. Live and let live. Don’t tread on me. I’ll do as I please. We may or may not accept such requests. But we would be well advised to recognize them for what they are: refusals to engage. If someone offers this sort of rebuff, before we get into any substance, we will have to convince her that we are worth conversing with at all—that we may have useful suggestions or resources to offer, or useful stories to tell, or useful projects on which to cooperate, or that speaking with us is consistent with her identity or her beliefs. If all else fails, we may remind her that, if she gives up on words, she will have to overcome us by force. That conflict is costly and dangerous is as close as it gets to a universally acknowledged truth in practical human affairs. This is a good reason to avoid conflict, and often accepted—yet not always.

The problem with insults like “postmodernist” and “relativist” is that they abstract away from the specific people and reasons at issue in any particular dispute, in favor of merely doubling down on abstract claims of correctness and authority. They amount to throwing up our hands and declaring that our opponent is too crazy, stupid, or immoral to argue with, let alone to negotiate with or learn from. They are not attempts to persuade; they are indirect admissions that persuasion has failed us. We would do better to be more direct about it. A failure of persuasion or negotiation leaves open the possibility of future, perhaps more fruitful, attempts. In contrast, declaring an opponent irrational forecloses such possibilities. We cannot count on a metaphysical referee to step in and resolve our disagreements if we fail to do so ourselves. The alternative to messy, ugly, unromantic negotiation and persuasion is not a paradise of perfect agreement, but brute physical contestation. If we reject words, we must be prepared to pay the cost of blows.