Epiphenomenal Arguments

 If remainers hope to achieve and win a second referendum, it is crucial that they get their arguments, tone and strategy right. But in order to do this, they have to get a sense of the motivations of those they wish to convince. This is a less straightforward task than it may at first seem. The most obvious port of call might be to simply look at what is said. This means looking at stated priorities in opinion polls, whatever information can be obtained from focus groups, or, if nothing else, listening to public debates and seeing what kinds of arguments seem to work with an audience. Public debates suffer from the specific defect that they tend to select for the most unreasonable speakers and audience members. But the problem that almost any data will have is that it will tend only to provide stated views, motivations and justifications. The difficulty here is manifold.

Firstly, stated opinions are not always honest. Proponents of Brexit may find it easier to say you in favour of ‘control’ of immigration rather than reducing it. It was similarly easier at the time of the case put forward by Gina Miller to say you were in favour of proper parliamentary procedure, rather than the impact you might hope this would have on the outcome of Brexit.

Secondly, even when arguments are sincerely believed, this does not mean they accurately describe people’s motivations, or that refuting them is necessarily all that useful. Many stated beliefs are in fact epiphenomenal: they have very little causal impact on people’s actual behaviour. We see this all the time in our lives. Argue against a strongly held belief and even in those rare instances where you actually refute a justification, the person comes back 10 minutes later with another, completely new justification for their beliefs. If the justification in question actually mattered, you would expect at least some of the time for the belief to change when the justification was found not to work. There are many possible explanations of this phenomenon. Sometimes we may see this as a kind of psychological fallacy. But in a sense it is difficult to see how things could ever be otherwise. We cannot always know or and certainly cannot store all the information about how a personal belief is formed, but certainty that a valid justification exists may be a useful. This is particularly so given that a lot of knowledge is socially enmeshed. As a non-specialist I might well have no good response to someone who claims that natural selection would be highly unlikely to produce something like the eye. If I was inclined to think about this further, I would likely grab the first plausible sounding answer from a scientific source. But I would be reasonable enough in assuming that there is a decent explanation out there, even if I don’t know it. If you believe other people have decent, and well thought through Brexit plans, perhaps the WTO might sound like the sort of thing which could form the basis of that decent plan, even if you didn't know anything about it previously.  Finally, some of the time the literal content of a justification may just be part of the way we talk about how we feel. Religious and secular discourses of morality all tend to prohibit unlawful killing, and whether you talk about God, religious texts, with terms borrowed from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals or any secular vocabulary is pretty immaterial.

This matters a great deal in the Brexit debate. Stated justifications for or against the legitimacy of a second referendum might well turn out to be largely epiphenomenal. We know that key leavers, Mogg, Farage and Redwood in particular, were perfectly in favour of a second referendum when they thought they might lose the first. We also know that many remainers, who I suspect quite sincerely talk about the need for further democratic involvement through a second vote, would have been quite against having a referendum on the topic in the first place. Or take the argument that constitutional changes should require a super majority: how many remainers would that argument convince if the argument were put forward that since going forward with Brexit is now the status quo, changing course should require a super majority in a second referendum.  Constitutions and legal norms shape the way in which we think about political legitimacy, but in this case, because we essentially have none, and because of the complex and long durational nature of the task at hand, there are plausible enough moral justifications for your position on a second referendum whatever it happens to be. Talk of the importance of upholding a result can easily give way to talk about the need of democratic systems to facilitate changes of mind, but only at the point at which minds actually change. The motivation comes from your own desires, and the sense of legitimacy comes from the perception that most people agree. The actual content of the arguments about legitimacy may not be all that important. The revelations of illegality from Vote Leave and Leave.eu may be exceptions, but even here, what is significant may be the attitudes people have to the revelations themselves, not the persuasiveness of arguments about whether these revelations should mean in terms of a second vote.

In terms of campaigning, remainers need think very hard about which arguments to focus on, which opposing arguments need to be countered, and which are best ignored. The legitimacy argument has likely been important, but more as a way of giving those who may want a second vote but a wavering the confidence of their convictions that it is a reasonable course of action. The specific content of the argument does not matter, merely that it is plausible enough and readily available to those who want to hear it. In terms of convincing those who are still unsure, what really matters is convincing them that remaining in the EU is still a good idea. The belief that it is legitimate to do so will come soon enough.