The marketplace of ideas assumes an empathetic fallacy

The argument

This argument identifies an assumption buried in the marketplace-of-ideas model and contends that the assumption is false. The model infers that notions of common humanity, decency, and rationality will prevail in open competition against ideological forces like racism, sexism, classism, and other prejudices. That inference is doing all the work: it is what licenses the conclusion that bad ideas need only be met with better ones, because listeners are expected to recognise the better argument and be moved by it. Proponents call this the empathic fallacy, and treat it as an empirical claim rather than a logical necessity — which means it can be tested against what actually happens when prejudiced ideas meet rational counter-argument. On their reading the test has been run. One need look only to contemporary movements around Black Lives Matter or the gender pay gap to see that prejudice thrives despite rational arguments against it, and often thrives in precisely the conditions of open circulation the model treats as corrective. The arguments were made, were widely available, and did not displace the prejudice they addressed. If empathy and reason are not reliably decisive, the argument continues, then the marketplace loses its guarantee. There is nothing to say that encouraging all ideas equally will not instead lead to deepening prejudice and the further spread of hateful ideologies, since the same openness that circulates a rebuttal circulates the claim it answers. A belief in some basic threshold of human empathy that will assert itself in the end is, on this view, naive, and bears little relation to the lived experience of many people world-wide. Because the model rests on an assumption about human responsiveness that observed outcomes do not support, the argument concludes that the marketplace of ideas does not work.

Context

The empathic fallacy is defined as “the belief that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative narrative, in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take over.”

Premises

Counter-arguments

The marketplace of ideas is about showcasing ideas and giving them a platform. That is important to protect free speech, but only those that stand up to scrutiny will survive. Those that do not, will not. Empathy is less important than the soundness of an argument in many cases. And the Western social consensus on what this means, is largely based on liberal principles that promote equality and reason, over hate and hierarchy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise sets the model an unreasonable test: the marketplace-of-ideas claim is comparative — that open contest handles bad ideas better than the alternative of an authority deciding which may be heard — so showing that prejudice persists does not defeat it unless suppression is shown to do better. [Rejecting P2] The examples also cut the other way, since the movements named are themselves instances of argument and testimony shifting public opinion; and the model as usually defended rests on scrutiny and error-correction rather than on an assumed threshold of empathy, so the fallacy identified is not one the position's opponents need.