"I'm entitled to my opinion" (or "I have a right to my opinion") is an informal fallacy in which someone dismisses arguments against their position by asserting that they have a right to hold their own particular viewpoint. Alt URL The statement exemplifies a red herring or thought-terminating cliché. The fallacy is sometimes presented as "let's agree to disagree". Whether one has a particular entitlement or right is irrelevant to whether one's assertion is true or false. Where an objection to a belief is made, the assertion of the right to an opinion side-steps the usual steps of discourse of either asserting a justification of that belief, or an argument against the validity of the objection. Such an assertion, however, can also be an assertion of one's own freedom from, or a refusal to participate in, the rules of argumentation and logic at hand.For example:
Philosopher Patrick Stokes has described the expression as problematic because it is often used to defend factually indefensible positions or to imply "an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise". Further elaborating on Stokes' argument, philosopher David Godden argued that the claim that one is entitled to a view gives rise to certain obligations, such as the obligation to provide reasons for the view and to submit those reasons to contestation; Godden called these the principles of and , and he developed a classroom exercise for teaching these principles.
Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in his 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses:
See also Aumann's agreement theorem
Diṭṭhigata upādāna – Attachment to views in Buddhism
Relativist fallacy
References