Patience and Argumentation

Abstract Patience can help us navigate deep disagreements but asking for patience in argumentative settings also raises concerns about injustice. This chapter develops an account of how to nurture the virtue of patience in ways that are attentive to the injustices of our descriptive reality and construct better argumentative practices. Patience can facilitate the well-being of individual arguers as well as the development of trust and understanding in argumentative situations in the following ways: (1) patience can help individuals better navigate when and how to engage, (2) individuals with patience can help facilitate more effective spaces for deliberation, (3) patience is key to continuing to engage in argumentation rather than dominating, coercing, or otherwise manipulating individuals into accepting new beliefs, on the one hand, or disengaging, on the other hand. The aim of this chapter is to develop an account of the practices of a patient arguer, such as taking a pluralistic view of effective argumentation, aiming to understand more about where interlocutors are coming from, and cultivating argumentative situations that are fruitful for the exchange of ideas. This is accomplished by using patience to examine how we should better understand argumentation itself, what it means to flourish as an arguer, and how patience can help us understand a bit about why many might fail in various ways to flourish in this domain.