As an example of the first: Once upon a time I told someone I respected that they shouldn’t eat animal products, because of the vast suffering caused by animal farming. He looked over scornfully and told me that it was pretty rich for me to say that, given that I use Apple products—hadn’t I heard about the abusive Apple factory conditions and how they have nets to prevent people killing themselves by jumping off the tops of the factories? I felt terrified that I’d been committing some grave moral sin, and then went off to my room to research the topic for an hour or two. I eventually became convinced that the net effect of buying Apple products on human welfare is probably very slightly positive but small enough to not worry about, and also it didn’t seem to me that there’s a strong deontological argument against doing it.
(I went back and told the guy about the result of me looking into it. He said he didn’t feel interested in the topic anymore and didn’t want to talk about it. I said “wow, man, I feel pretty annoyed by that; you gave me a moral criticism and I took it real seriously; I think it’s bad form to not spend at least a couple minutes hearing about what I found.” Someone else who was in the room, who was very enthusiastic about social justice, came over and berated me for trying to violate someone else’s preferences about not talking about something. I learned something that day about how useful it is to take moral criticism seriously when it’s from people who don’t seem to be very directed by their morals.)
My guess here would be that he felt criticised and simply wanted to criticise back to make himself feel better, so he repeated a talking point he’d heard. Since he likely didn’t actually hold any strong belief one way or the other, you re-entering the argument later only opened him up to potential further criticism, after he already felt he’d got even.
It would be easy to end the thought there and rest happily in the knowledge that him=bad+dumb and you=good+smart, but maybe it’s worth examining your own thoughts also. Were your motivations for going away to research and bring the topic back up later actually as pure as written (i.e. “terrified [of] committing some grave moral sin”)? Or were you partly motivated also by your own chagrin, hoping for a chance to even the score in the other direction by proving that you were right all along? If so, could that even have influenced your final decision that owning Apple products is morally positive?
I don’t mean to criticise you specifically (and I certainly don’t know what you or he were really thinking), but more point out a way people often think in general. It’s worth being careful about how much an argument might come across as an attack, and leaving the other person a way to gracefully admit defeat or bow out of the discussion (I recall expecting that’s what Leave a Line of Retreat from the Sequences was going to be about, but it ended up being about something different). If every argument could be respectful, in good faith, and not based on emotion, things would be a lot better. But alas, we’re only human.
My guess here would be that he felt criticised and simply wanted to criticise back to make himself feel better, so he repeated a talking point he’d heard. Since he likely didn’t actually hold any strong belief one way or the other, you re-entering the argument later only opened him up to potential further criticism, after he already felt he’d got even.
It would be easy to end the thought there and rest happily in the knowledge that him=bad+dumb and you=good+smart, but maybe it’s worth examining your own thoughts also. Were your motivations for going away to research and bring the topic back up later actually as pure as written (i.e. “terrified [of] committing some grave moral sin”)? Or were you partly motivated also by your own chagrin, hoping for a chance to even the score in the other direction by proving that you were right all along? If so, could that even have influenced your final decision that owning Apple products is morally positive?
I don’t mean to criticise you specifically (and I certainly don’t know what you or he were really thinking), but more point out a way people often think in general. It’s worth being careful about how much an argument might come across as an attack, and leaving the other person a way to gracefully admit defeat or bow out of the discussion (I recall expecting that’s what Leave a Line of Retreat from the Sequences was going to be about, but it ended up being about something different). If every argument could be respectful, in good faith, and not based on emotion, things would be a lot better. But alas, we’re only human.