Staying in contact is the only position from which anyone is persuaded

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from how views of this kind actually change. On their account such convictions are rarely abandoned because of an argument won by a stranger, a public rebuke or an exclusion. They erode slowly, through repeated contact with people whose judgement the person already respects and whose good opinion they want to keep. A family member occupies exactly that position, and almost nobody else does. The argument therefore treats cutting contact as a decision with a predictable consequence. A person removed from the relationships that might have moderated him is left with whatever company remains, and what remains is disproportionately the company that agrees with him. Proponents hold that this is not a speculative risk but the ordinary pattern: isolation hardens a view, while continued contact with someone who plainly disagrees keeps a question open that would otherwise close. On this reading the relative who stays and says what they think each time the subject arises is doing more against the conviction than the one who leaves, and has taken on the harder task rather than the easier one. Proponents are careful to distinguish maintaining a relationship from endorsing a view, and they accept a limit. Where the relationship involves ongoing abuse of family members, or where contact is unsafe, they agree there is nothing to preserve and nothing to be gained. What they deny is that holding the view, however repugnant it is, settles the question on its own, since the effect of settling it that way is to remove from the person the only people with any prospect of changing their mind.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument makes the relative into an unpaid and unqualified reformer, and that it rarely works. Most people who stay in contact do not challenge the view each time it appears; they change the subject, because that is what keeps the peace at a family table, and the result is a relationship that transmits tolerance rather than pressure. Critics also object that the person who bears the cost of this strategy is usually not the one proposing it, since the relatives expected to keep attending are often the ones the contempt is aimed at. A hope of eventual influence is a poor return for that.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics hold that exclusion does sometimes change a view, by making the cost of holding it plain in a way that argument does not. [Rejecting P2] Occupying a position from which influence is possible is not the same as using it, and most relatives who stay in contact change the subject rather than challenge. [Rejecting P3] The company that remains is a consequence of the person's own conduct rather than of a relative's decision to leave. [Rejecting C] A prospect of eventual influence is a weak justification when the relatives asked to keep attending are often the people the contempt is aimed at.