The HBS hosts do NOT agree to disagree.
On the first day of co-host’s Leigh’s classes, she warns her students against (what she calls) “lazy relativism.” The example she gives is of a conversation in which two people have been at odds for a while, they suspect that they are not going to come to an agreement on the matter at hand, and so one of them says: “yeah, agree to disagree” or “everybody has different opinions on this” or, worst of all, “what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me.”
That last iteration, in particular, is an expression of the kind of “lazy relativism” we’re discussing in this episode.
When people repeat this dictum of “what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me,” might it be that what they’re really meaning to communicate is “this is a hard conversation that has come to an impasse, I don’t want to argue with you about it anymore, but I also don’t want to offend you by appearing disrespectful”?
Today, we’re talking about why lazy relativism seems to be the go-to disposition for so many when encountering a disagreement, what exactly is “lazy” about it, and whether or not there are non-lazy forms of relativism.
In this episode we reference the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:
- Sovereign citizens
- Leigh’s blogposts about “lazy relativism” (and replies to objections)
- Our previous HBS episode on “Casablanca” (Season6, Episode 76)
- Eric Hayot, Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. (Columbia UP, 2023)
- The Good Wife “in my opinion”
- Former President Donald J. Trump’s “both sides” claim about Charlottesville
- Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
- Richard J. Bernstein and his concept of “pragmatic fallibilism”
- Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism”
- on Justice Clarence Thomas’ yacht vacations
- Stephen Colbert on “truthiness”
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