Rationality

Why do smart people disagree about fundamental questions about life?

Comments

How about because they're hard questions?

Okay, maybe that's a bit quick. But it's close. When a question doesn't have an obvious answer, it's no surprise that people disagree. And if there's no agreed-upon method for getting the answer, it's even less surprising. A lot of what most people would count as fundamental questions about life are like that. For that matter, so are a lot of questions that most people would have a hard time getting excited about. (A good chunk of what you'll find in academic journals deals with questions that hardly count as fundamental issues about life, but the answers aren't obvious and the methods for getting at answers aren't obvious either.)

For some such questions, there's another sort of reason: picking an answer depends on how we rank competing values. Many of the familiar differences between liberals and conservatives are of this sort, for example. And it's not just that questions of value can be hard or that there's not always a clear way to settle them. It may be that in some cases, there isn't a uniquely correct answer.

That might suggest that smart people would stop disagreeing about such things. After all, if you like vanilla and I like chocolate, we don't disagree. We just have different preferences. But to suggest that some value-questions don't have uniquely correct answers isn't to imply that none do. It also isn't to say that all answers are equally acceptable. And even if we agree that there's no real disagreement when you and I pick different acceptable responses, it may not be obvious that we're in that kind of case. In other words, even if there's in fact no one right answer, that fact may not be obvious and it won't stop us from caring deeply about our "disagreements," even if they aren't real disagreements.

So perhaps the original answer still stands with a qualification: it's not just that questions like this can be hard; sometimes they're meta-hard: hard to figure out if they really have answers to begin with.

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