Estimated reading time: 3 minutes.

As online debate becomes more and more common I’ve been observing how hard it is for two people to have an effective dialogue without being face-to-face. (Not that all face-to-face debates go well either!) I want to offer several dialogue tips to help you have more effective dialogues in any medium.

Authors note: The embedded image in this post contains very mild language, and the article I’m linking to has language as well.

It’s not always easy to tell why a given online exchange goes badly. Sometimes it just feels like nothing is being accomplished, even if the debaters aren’t antagonistic toward each other.

I think sometimes this is because online debaters are too direct with each other. A significant portion of communication happens nonverbally, and that is all lost online. In my experience, you need to add some niceties and hefty doses of common ground to keep an online dialogue from ending with people just getting angry at each other.

This is too direct.

But sometimes something else gets in the way, and I think most of the time, one or both people are not disagreeing well. I stumbled upon a wonderful essay by Paul Graham on different ways to disagree with people, in their order of effectiveness. You should read the entire essay, (language warning,) but I’ll summarize it here.

I was talking with a Life Report fan recently about one of her family members who claims to be pro-life, but doesn’t care very much about abortion. I suspect this is a relatively common thing and can be very confusing for pro-life people who believe that the unborn child is fully human and worthy of legal protection. I offered her four possible explanations why somebody who claims to be “pro-life” may not care about abortion very much. I suspect that you know at least one person that would fall under each of these categories, and I want you to have some tools for engaging each of them. I’ll cover the third reason in today’s post.

1. She is pro-life, but falsely thinks that all social issues are equal.
2. She is pro-life but thinks that other social issues are more important than abortion.
3. She only thinks the unborn are semi-valuable, like a golden retriever.
4. She believes that while the unborn are fully human, abortion shouldn’t be made illegal because of women’s bodily autonomy rights.

#3: She only thinks the unborn are semi-valuable, like a golden retriever

When I was living in Georgia with my wife, we found a dog in our apartment complex. I think she was part golden retriever, part mutt. She was very friendly and had a license on her. We knew we couldn’t keep the dog, but wanted to return her to her owner. We called the number on the license tag, but nobody called back. A few days later I called an animal shelter who said they would try to find the owner for us, and to bring the dog to them. On my way to the shelter the dog’s previous owner finally called me! The dog is literally lying on the other seat next to me in the car, and I excitedly answer the phone only to have a confusing and frustrating conversation. It turns out the owner had purposefully let the dog run away and didn’t want her anymore. He refused to take her back. Not knowing what else to do, I finished my trip to the animal shelter only to find out they were going to euthanize her unless I kept her. We just couldn’t keep her at that time. We were living in a tiny apartment complex with a policy against pets. So I drove away, knowing that the dog wouldn’t survive the night. I actually wept as I drove home, even though this was just a dog. A dog I had only known for three days.

Last year I flew my friend Trent Horn who now works for Catholic Answers to Fresno to record some episodes of Life Report. During one of the episodes he made the comment that some people believe that the unborn are valuable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they think the unborn are AS valuable as other human beings. They think the unborn are more valuable than a rock, but less than a human being. They may think the unborn are about as valuable as a golden retriever.

This would make sense of some people’s view that abortion is sad, but it shouldn’t be illegal. If you actually believe that the unborn are somewhat valuable, that would make abortion a sad thing, just like a stray dog being euthanized is a sad thing. But even most animal rights activists agree that sometimes it is necessary to euthanize animals. Few think that animal euthanasia should be illegal.

I was talking with a Life Report fan recently about one of her family members who claims to be pro-life, but doesn’t care very much about abortion. I suspect this is a relatively common thing and can be very confusing for pro-life people who believe that the unborn child is fully human and worthy of legal protection. I offered her four possible explanations why somebody who claims to be “pro-life” may not care about abortion very much. I suspect that you know at least one person that would fall under each of these categories, and I want you to have some tools for engaging each of them. I’ll cover the second reason in today’s post.

1. She is pro-life, but falsely thinks that all social issues are equal.
2. She is pro-life but thinks that other social issues are more important than abortion.
3. She only thinks the unborn are semi-valuable, like a golden retriever.
4. She believes that while the unborn are fully human, abortion shouldn’t be made illegal because of women’s bodily autonomy rights.

#2: She is pro-life but thinks that other social issues are more important than abortion

Again, when I use the term “pro-life” here, I mean that this person truly believes that the unborn is a valuable human being, and thinks that the unborn should be legally protected.

I don’t need to defend the fact that there a lot of issues out there that involve innocent people being hurt. Human trafficking, teen bullying and racism are just a few of them. As I briefly argued in part one, (and there’s much more that could be said about this,) not all issues deserve equal amounts of resources.

I told a story where because of the situation (debating capital punishment as a lone Protestant speaker in front of a large Catholic audience in a Catholic church) I chose to make a purely quantitative argument about the number of people killed in abortion far outweighing the numbers killed with capital punishment. But there are more aspects to consider when weighing the moral gravity of a harmful act, and many of them would fall under a qualitative category of how much harm is being done to the victim or victims.

When weighing two issues, start by assessing the harm done to the victim in each case. Throw away the numbers and just consider the two single cases. For example, an act of rape is clearly more harmful than an act of mild teen bullying. I just made a qualitative assessment, and if rape also happens more often or to more people, than it seems like that’s a pretty open and shut case about which issue should be fought by more people and/or resources.

I was talking with a Life Report fan recently about one of her family members who claims to be pro-life, but doesn’t care very much about abortion. I suspect this is a relatively common thing and can be very confusing for pro-life people who believe that the unborn child is fully human and worthy of legal protection. I offered her four possible explanations why somebody who claims to be “pro-life” may not care about abortion very much. I suspect that you know at least one person that would fall under each of these categories, and I want you to have some tools for engaging each of them.

Here’s the full list, but I’ll only discuss the first one today to keep the length of the blog post down. I’ll finish the rest in the next two weeks. Make sure you’ve subscribed to my email list to be alerted when new posts show up.

1. She is pro-life, but falsely thinks that all social issues are equal.
2. She is pro-life but thinks that other social issues are more important than abortion.
3. She only thinks the unborn are semi-valuable, like a golden retriever.
4. She believes that while the unborn are fully human, abortion shouldn’t be made illegal because of women’s bodily autonomy rights.