Written by D. E. Tingle   

Thesis:

If A and B are addressing a public issue, each is obligated to respect (without necessarily agreeing with) the opinions of the other — but only to the extent that both are willing to hear and engage all elements of the argument freely and without prejudice.

The general case:

1) A offers a counterpoint to a claim by B. B takes the counterpoint into consideration, studying and evaluating this response by A. (A's counterpoint has been, in its turn, an element of A's obligation to respect B's argument.) A remains under the default obligation to respect B's further response.

Alternatively:

2) A offers a counterpoint to B. B does not substantively engage A's counterpoint, but summarily and without examination rejects its validity. A is thenceforward under no logical or ethical obligation to consider B's opinion.

Discussion:

Currently, the most commonly seen example of failure to engage is by dismissing an interlocutor's argument as evidence of, or an element of, a "conspiracy theory". Here, lifted bodily from Wikipedia, is a definition of that term:

*A conspiracy theory is an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation.*

Note that nothing about the definition merits automatic ridicule or summary dismissal of the theory in question. In fact, by this definition, both the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks official account of 9/11, and the many dissident accounts that infer, for example, Bush Administration collusion in the events, are conspiracy theories. The Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination, and the many dissident versions involving U.S. agency plots, are likewise conspiracy theories.

A refusal to hear anything from either the 9/11 Commission Report or the Warren Commission Report, on the grounds that both are conspiracy theories and not worth thinking about, would strike most well-meaning citizens as eccentric. Yet only a tiny percentage of Americans — and practically none of the U.S. mass media — have ever greeted any substantive challenge to those official accounts except dismissively.

My favorite case in point is the utterly unexplained (to me) pulverization of WTC Buildings 1, 2 and 7 on 9/11. No theory of energy transfer that squares with what I'm pretty sure I learned in high school physics can account for so much as the collapses. The further reduction of concrete to powder is not just implausible in the official scenario; it's at least an order of magnitude beyond being accounted for by the energy present in the system when the collapses began.

Here then comes the establishment, not with a physics lesson that'll tell me where I'm wrong, but with a sad shake of the head that I should be inferring, by extension, a plot so elaborately cynical, large and complex that it could not believably have been hatched, kept hidden, and successfully brought off by anyone.

But I'm not inferring anything. I just want to have the physics explained to my satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of any high school graduate willing to think about it.

Not willing to think about it?

Then I don't give a rat's ass about your opinion on this subject.

And if you're comfortable with swallowing received wisdom unskeptically, I'm suspicious of your other opinions as well.