Why do some people oppose Roe v. Wade?

June 27, 2022

"March for Life," 2020 (photo in public domain)

Why do some people oppose Roe v. Wade? I tried to figure it out by reviewing the responses to a series of open-ended and multiple-choice questions answered by 49 people in the U.S. who say they're "very happy" that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Here is what they said. I posed the following open-ended questions: 1. "What are your views on abortion?" 2. "If you oppose abortion, why do you oppose it?" 3. "Under what circumstances do you think it should be legal to get one?" The...

Tips for Productive Disagreements

October 6, 2017

Typically when two people disagree, neither makes significant progress in convincing the other, and little or nothing is learned on either side. It's tough to make real-life disagreements productive, but here are my favorite techniques for making it easier to do so. These help more if you are significantly motivated to use the disagreement to deepen mutual understanding of the issue. I'm assuming here that you have control over your own behavior, but not over the other persons, because th...

Finding Our False Beliefs

September 7, 2011

By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we don't know which of our many beliefs are wrong. If we knew that, we should have stopped believing th...