[PuppyTailWags]

Genuinely asking: Is there a limit as to viewpoint diversity that should be tolerated in perceptions of diversity? eg. Should viewpoint diversity be extended to welcoming "women shouldn't have the right to vote" or "black people are not human beings"? If so, how does one value an opinion and also the opinion that some opinions are worth less than others?

[ipaddr]

A discussion around who should have a vote in a system is fair. If we forbid discussion 100+ years ago women would still not be allowed to vote.

Should kids have the right? Should some votes count for more than others? Should animals have a voting share? Should we have a free vote? Should women and/or men have the right to vote?

The original voting system only included landowners. You had to own land and be male to vote. Since this group paid the tariff taxes (income taxes do not exist at this point) they were the ones voting. Society has changed/taxes have changed, the one person one vote movement was won and will continue until a crisis.

[daenz]

You're genuinely asking about the most extreme and uncharitable interpretation of the GP's post? Your question sounds like "If we should be kind to everyone, what about serial killers?" It is so out-of-place in the picture that's being painted, that I (and I'm sure others) am skeptical of the question. Maybe you can first qualify it by explaining how it is relevant in anything other than an extreme thought experiment?

[PuppyTailWags]

I don't personally ascribe to the idea that diversity of thought must be a value without the caveats I've ascribed above. The reason why I ask it is because I don't actually think my examples are that extreme; I've been presented with those literal ideas IRL by people who are otherwise quite normal. It's very common to essentially view other people as subhuman for their demographics. Therefore I'd like to know how to manage this fairly common human thinking pattern which functions to exclude other viewpoints, if we want to ascribe value to diverse human thinking. I've never been able to square this circle myself, therefore I am curious how other people square them.

To be clear, if the answer to "how do we both value human diverse thinking and also modes of thinking seeking to suppress other human diversity" is "well this clearly never happens", I think that entire premise risks being itself an extreme thought experiment with no grounding in reality.

[spawarotti]

I think it is fair to not spend time and resources engaging with such ideas, as long as there is a good "decision record" documentation explaining that this subject was already discussed, decisions were made, and there is no point coming back to it. Same as with flat Earth - have some documentation thoroughly debunking the idea and point to it anybody trying to start the conversation again. Tell them they need to first read through all of it. If they are still not convinced after that, they are free to lay out their argument, but it is on them to make the argument strong, which should be, like, really hard, given the plethora of evidence we have that Earth is not flat.

In the examples you gave the "decision record" would be fairly simple - we assume that human rights [1] are a given.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

[pc86]

How could either one of these viewpoints possibly come up during a job interview?

[PuppyTailWags]

You'd be surprised! I once had lunch with a candidate who was glad no women were interviewing him, because he found salads distasteful.

[pedrosorio]

> was glad no women were interviewing him, because he found salads distasteful

?

[sdsaga12]

Thanks for the question -- it's important to grapple with even though it can be very uncomfortable and answering it is basically one can of worms after another. If you entertain it seriously, it really gets down to the philosophical roots of how to treat others from different moral systems and worldviews.

I don't think this is a problem any society has ever elegantly solved, definitely not permanently, and I think it's a distinct possibility that a solution that feels "clean" the way good software design can is not possible.

Abstractly, a culture consists of core tenets that it considers literally unquestionable. For most of history, this list of tenets would include things like the existence of a god or gods, the moral imperative to respect the rulers, the prohibition of things that were thought to harm the group such as murder, theft, or adultery, and so on. More recently in the Western world, we might include things like "women are equal to men" or "people of all races are equal".

It is very difficult to defend these types of propositions and values in any sort of universal or non-self-referential way.

Even things we assume to be moral universals in the Western world like the sanctity of the individual (bodily integrity, freedom of conscience) or the importance of intent in our judgment of wrongdoing (manslaughter vs. murder) are, if you examine the historical and anthropological record, not actually universal at all. (Check out The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich if you're curious about these specific points.)

The US Declaration of Independence is a classic example of this. It asserts: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If you don't also find those truths self-evident, all following reasoning based on their axiomatic status might very well seem wrong to you. What if you contest the existence of a creator? What if you contest the idea of innate equality of rights and dignity? What if you contest the focus on rights rather than obligations? Or what if you assert the existence of a different creator who explicitly singled out one tribe as the most holy, righteous, intelligent, etc.?

Because the core tenets of a culture are to some extent arbitrary and thus susceptible to replacement with a different set (like Christianity displacing paganism or atheistic rationalism displacing Christianity), there is a strong inclination to defend a particular set of tenets by making questioning them a taboo. That's the underlying purpose of the concept of heresy and its accompanying social shaming.

Unlimited viewpoint diversity does actually threaten the continued existence of a culture if its defenders are not able to meet the arguments of its critics in a way they and their audience find compelling. If you say "I think gays shouldn't marry because it goes against God's will" and your audience mostly thinks "I don't believe your God exists, so that's an absurd argument", you won't convince very many people and soon people will stop adhering to a core tenet of your culture, perhaps eventually leading to the death of that culture altogether.

In the Western tradition, the probing of a culture's foundational values and assumptions has been the domain of philosophy at least as far back as Socrates being sentenced to death or exile for showing impiety toward the gods of Athens and corrupting the city's youth by prompting them to ask questions that must not be asked.

So what does this rambling mean for toleration of viewpoint diversity?

Its absence can prolong injustice (abolitionists faced lots of censorship in the 19th century) and undermine scientific and creative inquiry (see Socrates, Galileo, McCarthyism, etc.). At the same time, its presence leaves all of your holy cows, carpenters, and civil rights vulnerable to ideological attack.

Those are two difficult tensions to reconcile.

I come down on the side of erring toward more viewpoint diversity because I think it encourages reflection into why you hold the values you do and teaches you to defend them vigorously or, sometimes, change them to something you find more compelling.

This isn't something everyone wants to do all the time everywhere, though, so I understand not wanting your company's Slack to devolve into constant philosophical debate or even less productive forms of disagreement.

I think we've been running into such trouble with this recently because many of the existing implicit boundaries separating parts of our culture were washed away by the great cultural homogenization of the internet and especially social media platforms. It used to be more possible to have fierce debates on university campuses about contentious issues without that instantly bleeding over into industry, non-profits, schools, knitting clubs, etc.

It's like Douglas Adams wrote: "the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Sometimes boundaries are healthy.

The best answer I've encountered is moving in the direction of a more federal system in which cultures can live as they think best AND individuals in each culture are empowered to move to different cultures if they don't like where they are.

This is not a perfect solution, though, because it still requires the universal enforcement of certain moral propositions, like people should have the right to their own body and mind and choice of home. Those propositions would not have been accepted in slave-holding societies or even recent collectivist societies like the USSR, which prohibited its citizens from emigrating without permission. This is, realistically, an iterative improvement that would only apply to cultures that already accept foundational Western moral attitudes.