The value of civil discourse

One of my fellow religion majors is producing a documentary about the intersection of religion, bioethics and politics. The film will feature commentary by Princeton students and faculty on the role of faith in debates over issues like abortion and stem cell research. I was invited to participate in the project by joining in a "roundtable discussion" with three recently graduated alums.

We were supposed to discuss the bioethical teachings of our respective traditions and the influence of those teachings on our policy preferences. We exchanged conflicting views on the meaning of personhood and the moral status of the fetus and embryo. We challenged each other with carefully crafted analogies, counterexamples and thought experiments. Finally, the convenor asked, "How do you think our society can resolve these impasses in our bioethical deliberations?"

One participant was quick to respond: "More conversations like these would probably help." I reflexively nodded my assent. We had, after all, just passed an hour in respectful, rigorous, intellectually honest discourse. The scene was a picture of civility.

But then one of the other discussants pointed out that conversation — no matter how civil — very rarely eliminates (or even mitigates) disagreement. Our own dialogue had been perfectly congenial but provoked nobody to abandon or modify his initial position. And this, we all realized, is the normal case. However open-minded we may (want to) be, we are not easily dissuaded from our most deeply-held ethical convictions.

That isn't to say that reasoned persuasion is theoretically impossible. But we do know empirically that the probability of reaching agreement in certain contexts is really quite low. I highly doubt, for instance, that I or anybody else could convince the Pope to go pro-choice. So the question becomes: What is the value of conversations in which no party actually expects any of the others to budge?

We might readily concede that dialogue can help improve relations among adversaries, even if it doesn't produce principled agreement. Over the course of a sustained interaction, the Pope and the president of NARAL might discover in each other a host of admirable traits. They might even decide to become friends despite their differences. But then why should they start arguing about abortion, if neither of their positions is really negotiable in principle?

College students have a special stake in this question. An implicit premise of our liberal arts education is, after all, that conversation is intrinsically good — regardless of the (im)probability that somebody will be persuaded. In all events, conversation is the royal road to the "examined" life. We can never avoid conversation because our opinions are worth holding if and only if they've withstood persistent criticism.

OK. But this demand may not be as stringent as it seems. Most of us are willing and eager to have our views "challenged," but we generally expect to emerge from each encounter armed with stronger and subtler arguments for what we believed in the first place. Can this be the whole point of conversation? Simply to test and improve our ideological defenses? Surely not. For conversation to amount to something more than intellectual sparring, there must be some reasonable expectation of actually reaching one's interlocutor.

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But it is a mistake to suppose that reaching one's interlocutor means winning the argument. When people disagree on a particular policy or norm, they can often still come to agree on the set of moral considerations that bear on the issue. Conversation is as much about getting all relevant considerations on the table as it is about deciding what the norm should be.

This approach to conversation can yield tangible results. Even if I fail to convince the Pope to support abortion rights, I might still persuade him that the unequal reproductive burden borne by women is a consideration that must be taken seriously. So though a civil conversation is unlikely to turn the Pope into a pro-choice activist, it may conceivably turn him into a certain kind of feminist. He may hold the line on abortion, but commit himself and the resources of the Church to a global campaign against sexism and gender inequality. That may not be the victory sought at the outset, but it's a reason to keep the conversation alive. Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi is a religion major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at golubcow@princeton.edu.