Bias?

People who enjoy argumentative discussions - discussions in which people debate the merits of propositions - often come to believe that their opponents are influenced by some kind of "bias." By "bias," I mean some kind of influence that prevents a person from "objectively" evaluating the evidence or the strength of an argument.

Anyone involved in litigation is familiar with the creation of bias. Once you've taken on a client, worked up their case, and are ready to go to trial, you're essentially in the bag. And most litigators know it, which is why they frequently consult others who are not involved in the case.

Or if you want to see real bias at work - get into a fight with your spouse. There's precious little objective analysis going on there.

Anyway, I once had a discussion with a friend who told me that a mutual friend was undergoing in vitro fertilization. Our female friend is a very conservative Christian woman who, in a conversation with my friend, refered to the fertilized embryos that had yet to be implanted into her womb as "my little babies."

Upon hearing this comment, I causally and impolitely replied, "that's insane." My use of the term "insane" was hyperbole. What I meant was that no rational person who understood what a "baby" is, and what an "embryo" is, would come to that conclusion unless they desperately wanted to believe it for some other reason - i.e., unless they were in the grip of an influence that completely biased their judgment.

My friend rebuked me. "You can't say the her belief is insane. I can understood how she got there." I thought about this later and concluded that, while I also could understand the psychological processes that created our friend's belief, the belief itself, that an embryo is a baby, is indeed the irrational product of an independent ideological committment.

I stand by that judgment today.

The question is, what entitles me (epistemologically) to say or believe this when millions of people feel just as confident that it is I who am under the influence of something that has rendered my judgment unreliable? Something like "secular humanism" or "liberalism," that is systematically distorting my ability to see things the way they really are?

Good question. I'll be thinking about this out loud during the next few days.

Stay tuned.

Joe H.