Are people really always entitled to their opinions?

Are people entitled to an opinion???? How would you propose to stop anyone from having an opinion? Thought police?

I sense that another argument was lost with someone's parents.

Yes, but it doesn't mean I have to take them seriously.

"But more importantly, are people always entitled to their opinions no matter how wrong, illogical, at times even prejudiced and self-centered, incorrect, etc, they are?"

This is especially why people are entitled to voice their own views, because nearly everyone on this planet believes those who don't share their views are "wrong, illogical, at times even prejudiced and self-centered, incorrect, etc." We, as a species, have this horrible tendency to join up with people of similar ideology and then brainlessly begin parroting anything else we learn from those people. This is the reason appeal to majority is a fallacy, it doesn't matter how many people mindlessly repeat the same things over and over, it's a question of whether those things are right.

More so, deprogramming people who have gotten themselves in these groups is near impossible. They reinforce their beliefs with the knowledge that there are hundreds of thousands of others who believe the same thing and they can't all be wrong.


"How come today, including on public forums such as this, many people MAY come out to challenge them and in others, they are just accepted as an unfortunate statistic, is that normal?"

In terms of group think, it is quite normal for people to attack those whose ideology doesn't match that of the group. It is effective, especially when in person, to use the power of numbers to shift a person's ideology to a new ideology. Why do you think there are so many Trumpers? Part of the lie we tell ourselves is that there are good people and there are bad people and we are "obviously" one of the good. There are just people, they will always naturally gravitate to like ideas but can be made to adopt ideas they never considered in their lives with only a little pressure. Most people don't honestly like thinking, most people are followers who want to be told what to think, who want others to agree with them even when they're objectively wrong...

interesting and i think relevant excerpt from jon rauch's new book 'the constitution of knowledge.'

i'm actually in the middle of reading the 2016 reissue of his 94 book 'kindly inquisitors,' & am absolutely loving it.


"What Locke was doing here was expelling from intellectual respectability—from the epistemic rulebook—claims which, because they are not checkable, are not adjudicable. Those claims, not incidentally, would include most of the theological and metaphysical disputes over which the wars of religion were ostensibly fought. Locke saw how untestable certitudes sparked irreconcilable social disputes. "The strength of our persuasions is no evidence at all of their own rectitude," he wrote, "and men may be as positive and peremptory in error as in truth."

When describing disputes that cannot be addressed empirically, Locke used the revealing word dangerous, at least when the disputes rise to the level of moral conflict: "Nothing can be so dangerous as principles thus taken up without questioning or examination; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men's lives, and give a bias to all their actions."

Locke's empiricism, then, is a social principle, and he understood it as such. It aims not just at knowledge but also at peace. Combined with his principle of toleration, it would have required the religious disputants of his day to seek paths toward resolving or dissolving their disputes; or else to change the subject and talk about something else—something they could resolve by finding facts and comparing experiences, rather than by coming to blows over divine revelation.

Notice how Locke's empiricism dovetails with the political principles of natural rights and basic equality. Because all people have eyes and ears and minds, and because we must check and consult with each other to find truth, the many, not just the few, are entitled to assert their own beliefs and contest others'. Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans."

Yes.....to a certain extent.

Their entitled to their own opinions but NOT their own rules and facts.

Yes ofcourse.