This is ingenious but feels like rather a stretch, compared with the simpler analysis that says that the cop-bribing situation just isn’t really the sort of thing the mistake/conflict dichotomy is meant for. The job of a police officer is to enforce the law, pretty much everyone agrees with this (including e.g. people who think the laws are bad and shouldn’t be enforced, and people who think cops are often bad and not doing their jobs right), and if you want to break the law then you and the police are in conflict, end of story. Favouring “mistake theory” in political arguments doesn’t require anyone to dream up ingenious ways to reframe your relationship with the law and its enforcers that allow them to see that in conflict-free terms.
Favouring “mistake theory” in political arguments doesn’t require anyone to dream up ingenious ways to reframe your relationship with the law and its enforcers that allow them to see that in conflict-free terms.
I don’t primarily think of conflict theory and mistake theory as properties of people. Rather, I primarily think of conflict and mistake as properties of situations, and then one might have different theories about what best describes those situations.
So for example, it is possible for someone to have a conflict theory about the relationship between criminals and society (as you correctly point out most people have, though I would say it seems to me conservatives have this theory more than progressives do, hence “tough on crime”) while having a mistake theory about how politics works.
I think it’s worth distinguishing the general phenomenon where people can have opposed interests to varying degrees (which happens everywhere) from the more specific question of what attitude a person should have or does have towards the people they’re arguing with.
Your interests and those of a police officer who’s just pulled you over for speeding (or, staying closer to Zack’s example, the interests of more-bribeable and less-bribeable police officers in such a situation) may be more or less in conflict with one another, but I don’t see how it helps anything to try to fit that into the same framework as we use for assessing different attitudes to political debate.
There’s definitely lots of distinctions that can be made. The aspect of conflict that I find most important to know about is the “epistemic” part of it. Basically, does Aumann’s agreement theorem apply?
In ordinary non-conflict conversations such as asking someone you are visiting where you can get a cup of water, you can simply copy other’s beliefs and do reasonably well, whereas in conflict conversations such as politics, copying your opponent’s beliefs about factual matters is a serious security vulnerability.
(It doesn’t seem uncommon for mistake theorists to come up with explanations of why Aumann’s agreement theorem wouldn’t apply to politics despite both sides being honest, but nobody has come up with compelling explanations, whereas the conflict theory analysis of it seems compelling and commonly for people to self-endorse.)
This is ingenious but feels like rather a stretch, compared with the simpler analysis that says that the cop-bribing situation just isn’t really the sort of thing the mistake/conflict dichotomy is meant for. The job of a police officer is to enforce the law, pretty much everyone agrees with this (including e.g. people who think the laws are bad and shouldn’t be enforced, and people who think cops are often bad and not doing their jobs right), and if you want to break the law then you and the police are in conflict, end of story. Favouring “mistake theory” in political arguments doesn’t require anyone to dream up ingenious ways to reframe your relationship with the law and its enforcers that allow them to see that in conflict-free terms.
I don’t primarily think of conflict theory and mistake theory as properties of people. Rather, I primarily think of conflict and mistake as properties of situations, and then one might have different theories about what best describes those situations.
So for example, it is possible for someone to have a conflict theory about the relationship between criminals and society (as you correctly point out most people have, though I would say it seems to me conservatives have this theory more than progressives do, hence “tough on crime”) while having a mistake theory about how politics works.
I think it’s worth distinguishing the general phenomenon where people can have opposed interests to varying degrees (which happens everywhere) from the more specific question of what attitude a person should have or does have towards the people they’re arguing with.
Your interests and those of a police officer who’s just pulled you over for speeding (or, staying closer to Zack’s example, the interests of more-bribeable and less-bribeable police officers in such a situation) may be more or less in conflict with one another, but I don’t see how it helps anything to try to fit that into the same framework as we use for assessing different attitudes to political debate.
There’s definitely lots of distinctions that can be made. The aspect of conflict that I find most important to know about is the “epistemic” part of it. Basically, does Aumann’s agreement theorem apply?
In ordinary non-conflict conversations such as asking someone you are visiting where you can get a cup of water, you can simply copy other’s beliefs and do reasonably well, whereas in conflict conversations such as politics, copying your opponent’s beliefs about factual matters is a serious security vulnerability.
(It doesn’t seem uncommon for mistake theorists to come up with explanations of why Aumann’s agreement theorem wouldn’t apply to politics despite both sides being honest, but nobody has come up with compelling explanations, whereas the conflict theory analysis of it seems compelling and commonly for people to self-endorse.)