Saturday, April 02, 2005

Different Opinions, or Evil?

Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information gives some good advice on how to approach & deal with those who hold different opinions than your own:

Absolutely outstanding post by Stuart Buck about one of my pet peeves, the common belief that people who disagree with you are amoral lackwits, rather than putting different relative weights on principles we mostly all cherish:
People often accuse their opponents of being hypocrites when, in fact, they ma simply have been balancing competing principles. We all do this constantly. And the mere fact that someone reaches a different balance than you, or that they decline to treat one principle alone as being absolute, does not prove that they are being hypocritical.
Click here for the whole article.

Excellent advice - people I disagree may be misguided or illogical, but they aren't necessarily evil. Once you start demonizing your opponents, you're no longer discussing things in order to win them over, but instead in order to reinforce your own beliefs.

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