No, you're not entitled to your opinion

In  No, you're not entitled to your opinion, Patrick Stokes argues (quite well) that not all opinions are the same.  It is not enough to say that I have my opinion and you have yours.  There has to be some reason, and as he states: "you are only entitled to what you can argue for." Allowing every possible opinion to be right makes all views correct, and therefore nothing is more true than everything else and we end up in nihilism.  Relativism in morality is difficult enough (and presents problems even for us non-absolutists) but add extreme relativism into aesthetics and knowledge in general and the whole idea of truth is destroyed.  Opinions (at least about the external world [1])  must have some correspondence to reality and its facts.  Furthermore, views- if anywhere near complete and worth holding- must hold some level of rationality that can be argued for.  If one wants to support a right wing candidate because of belief in the super-capitalist view of trickle-down economics, then one must be able to argue why that is the correct course of action (and be able to overcome contradictory evidence found in the facts of data).  Otherwise, your "opinion" cannot be taken seriously.



[1] As Stokes notes, there are matters of taste which involve matters pourely internal to oneself.  What do I like better? - chocolate or vanilla? But this is of no consequence to anyone else. If we are to have discourse with anyone outside of ourselves - then we have to invoke criteria to evaluate competing statements in order for them to have any meaning at all.