These and these: what Talmudic argument can teach us about disagreeing with a peer

Friends bring me their disagreements all the time. A brother and sister who cannot agree about their mother's care. Two board members, equally thoughtful, who read the same budget and reach opposite conclusions. Underneath many of these conflicts is a question philosophers have recently taken up with great precision: what should you do when someone you have every reason to respect, someone as informed and careful as you, believes the opposite of what you believe? I want to set out the philosophical answers and then place beside them the practice of a tradition I have spent my life inside, Talmudic argument, which I think offers something the philosophical debate has mostly overlooked.

The philosophical debate

The contemporary discussion uses the idea of an epistemic peer: someone as likely as you to get the question right, working from the same evidence. David Christensen's well-known example involves friends splitting a restaurant bill. Each does the arithmetic carefully, and they get different answers. What should each now believe?

Conciliationists, such as Adam Elga with his "equal weight view", say you should move substantially toward your peer. The disagreement is evidence that one of you has made a mistake, and you have no more reason to think it was she than you. In the bill case almost everyone agrees: both should lower their confidence and check again.

Steadfast views say you may sometimes hold your ground. Thomas Kelly has defended a "total evidence" view: what you should believe depends on all the evidence, including the original evidence and the reasoning from it, not just the bare fact of disagreement. If you reasoned correctly and your peer did not, that matters.

The difficulty is that most of us are conciliationist about arithmetic and steadfast about ethics, politics and religion, which are exactly where peers disagree most. Either that asymmetry can be justified, or we are least consistent where consistency matters most.

The Talmudic practice

The Talmud is, among other things, a vast record of disagreement between peers. Hillel and Shammai, around the turn of the Common Era, their schools after them, and generations of later sages argued about law, ethics and interpretation. What is striking is how the tradition treats those arguments.

First, it preserves them. The Mishnah, in tractate Eduyot, asks why the opinion of an individual is recorded alongside the majority's when the law follows the majority, and answers that it is so that a later court may rely on it if it comes to agree. The losing view is not discarded. It is kept as a live option.

Second, it separates the ruling from the question of truth in a way that is easy to miss. The best-known passage reports that the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel disagreed for three years, each saying the law followed them, until a heavenly voice declared:

These and these are the words of the living God, and the law follows the House of Hillel. (Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b)

Both views are affirmed, and a practical decision is still made. The Talmud then asks why the House of Hillel merited having the law follow them, and its answer is not that their arguments were stronger. It is that they were gentle and humble, that they taught both their own words and the words of the House of Shammai, and that they even mentioned the House of Shammai's words before their own.

Third, the tradition has a criterion for which disagreements are worth having. Pirkei Avot teaches that a dispute for the sake of Heaven, like that of Hillel and Shammai, will endure, while one that is not, like the rebellion of Korah and his company, will not. What matters is not whether people disagree but what they are disagreeing for.

And in another famous story, the oven of Akhnai in tractate Bava Metzia, Rabbi Eliezer calls on miracles and finally a heavenly voice to support his view, and Rabbi Joshua answers with a verse from Deuteronomy: "It is not in heaven." The law, once given, is decided by human reasoning and by the majority, not by appeals to a higher certainty.

What this adds

I want to draw three lessons from this practice for the philosophical debate.

Separate belief from decision. The peer-disagreement literature mostly asks what you should believe. But in life, and in the Talmud, disagreements often end in a decision that must be made together. The rabbis decide for practice, and decide firmly, while leaving the question of truth open and the minority view on record. That suggests a position that is neither purely conciliationist nor purely steadfast: conciliate in action, by accepting a fair procedure for deciding, while remaining free, perhaps even obliged, to keep the losing argument alive.

Make humility a procedure, not a mood. Conciliationism treats humility as a matter of adjusting your confidence. The House of Hillel's virtue was more concrete: they stated their opponents' view first, and taught it to their students. Classical Indian debate had a similar rule, that the opponent's position must be set out fully before it is answered. A peer whose view you can state as well as they can is a peer you have actually listened to. Before deciding how much weight a disagreement deserves, you should be able to pass that test.

Ask what the dispute is for. The steadfast side fears that conciliationism makes us spineless; the conciliationist side fears that steadfastness makes us arrogant. The criterion in Avot cuts across both. A dispute pursued for the sake of truth and the common good is worth sustaining, and its persistence is not evidence that either side is foolish. A dispute pursued for status should be dissolved, whatever anyone's degrees of confidence.

Conclusion

I do not claim the Talmud solves the problem philosophers have posed. Its sages believed in a revelation that grounded their whole conversation, and a secular epistemologist will not share that starting point. But the practice they built speaks to anyone. The restaurant bill is easy: check the arithmetic. The cases that matter, about a mother's care, a community's budget or the meaning of a law, are ones in which we must act together while still disagreeing. For those, the most useful counsel I know is the one the tradition credits to the House of Hillel: decide, but keep the other view; and teach it, before your own.