Debate as Dispute Resolution

In Iceland, and elsewhere

Disputes are a part of the human condition. People will dispute things.

Sometimes these disputes can’t be resolved by “agreeing to disagree” or moving on without resolution. For example, disputing about stolen property is as ancient as ancient Egypt: In the tale of the eloquent peasant, a peasant wanders into the estate of a wealthy lord and has his stuff taken from him by the lord. So the peasant lodges a dispute with the juridical authorities to get it back! (Spoiler: The Pharoah himself gums up the process because the peasant is so eloquent the Pharaoh wants to hear more eloquent arguments rather than resolve the dispute.)

When a dispute can’t be resolved by other means, such as mediation or negotiation, people regularly resort to debate as a dispute resolution mechanism. This can be highly specialized as is our modern court system, or it can be by convention, like they did in medieval Viking Iceland:

To settle disputes that inevitably arose, the Icelanders set up four regional assemblies, or things, and once a year, every summer, they met in one major assembly known as the Althing. Part country fair and part judicial proceeding, the things were a spectacle. The chieftains would name judges to hear the cases, and render rulings based in tradition and common sense.¹

The populist roots of the law pleadings and court cases were accessible to anyone who was attending the thing. This is quite a bit different to modern court cases where the judicial language relies on knowing a highly technical jargon of legal terms derived in large part from the Greek and Roman jurist tradition. … In Iceland, the law was made for public consumption and participate at the things.²

This is a class of dispute where both parties do not want to concede the uncertainty of their position – the two sides are committed. There’s no expectation that they will sit down and hash things out in good spirits.

You’ve probably encountered situations like this. For example, you’ve probably encountered people who are stubborn and single-minded – the sort of person you know you will not be able to rationally persuade out of their position in this lifetime. Perhaps there are other ways of persuading them, like charming them or bribing them or threatening them. But to persuade them rationally won’t work – you don’t agree on enough shared premises, or your relationship is one of extreme distrust, or they just aren’t reasonable.

Instead, both parties can submit their dispute to a mutually-agreed third party who will hear the two parties arguments and make a call.

There are three conditions that tend to generate debating as a mechanism for resolving disputes between committed disputers: importance, urgency, and the undesirability of violence.

If an issue doesn’t matter, people can generally let things slide, agree to disagree, or resolve the dispute informally in other ways. If the issue can wait, there may not be enough pressure for the disagreement to culminate in a rhetorical battle over the fate of the question.

Violence, coercion, or immediate unilateral action must also be unattractive or off the table. If two people dispute something and there’s no coercive state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, they might put their dispute to a debate – but they might also resolve the dispute by force.

And in Viking Iceland, no such state exercised a monopoly on violence, so courts served a practical rather than justice function:

When the Vikings developed their law, they did not have a clear sense of “for the common good’ as the Greeks would define it. The Vikings had other ideas about common good. The Icelandic courts did not move necessarily with the idea of the just and the unjust. For this reason, the Viking court did not attempt to attack the character or motives of the defendant. They simply said that someone had taken an action and deprived someone of life or property, and it needed to be redressed. If not, a feud would erupt, and the consequences might be severe.³

Disputes do not always turn into debates, and it seems more common and natural to resolve questions like these by other means: Dialogue aimed at forming consensus, negotiation, mediation, violence. But if the gap between the parties’ positions is too wide, presumably because the issue is important, and continued delay in resolution is a major problem (so there’s urgency), and violence is unattractive, then debate becomes the organic category of dialogue people have throughout history independently arrived at to resolve disputes.

1. Rhetorics in the Rest of the West (Chapter: The Viking Forensic Tradition), pg. 84

2. Ibid. pg. 88.

3. Ibid. pg. 88-89.