Arguing for a Better World

How to Talk About the Issues That Divide Us

By: Arianne Shahvisi

Narrated by: Arianne Shahvisi

Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

An antidote to division: a book that arms you with the ability to build good arguments and find a path through conflict and confusion.

Can you be racist to a white person?

Does cancel culture exist?

Is it ever okay to laugh at jokes that rely on racist, sexist or homophobic stereotypes?

Is it sexist to say 'men are trash'?

These questions tap into some of today's most divisive issues, and finding an answer can often lead to confusion and resentment.

Political and generational divides often dictate how questions such as these are answered, and when asked most people give automatic answers that roughly align with the broader position they believe is right - though many flounder when asked to detail their reasoning. This creates cultural and political tribes, makes people nervous about engaging at all, or leads to the issues to be trivialised or attributed to the excessive sensitivity of 'snowflakes' to 'identity politics'.

Arguing for a Better World cuts right to the heart of these tensions, with the aim of demonstrating the importance of rigorous definitions and distinctions, revealing the arguments that break the stalemates, and equipping listeners with the tools to identify and defend their positions. Drawing on Shahvisi's work as a philosopher, and using live controversies, well-known case studies, and personal anecdotes, this audiobook reveals and analyses the power relations that shape our social world, and offers powerful ways to challenge them.

©2023 Arianne Shahvisi (P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

Often entertaining and funny; always concise, exacting, logical, readable, authoritative and un-put-downable. An everyday manual on how oppression came about, how it works, why it persists, and how to defeat it (Danny Dorling, author of Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists and A Better Politics)

We live in an age of information overload, and unfortunately, 'information' is often misinformation. We often don't know how to think about social problems, let alone what to think. Arianne Shahvisi's book cuts through the noise with an eminently sensible discussion of key contemporary 'culture war' issues. It shows us how philosophy, far from being irrelevant, is essential for navigating today's world of client journalism-manufactured, social media-manipulated outrage. It also provides much-needed reassurance that in the struggle to create a better world, being able to 'show our workings' is much more important than always being right (ALISON PHIPPS, author of Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism)

Shahvisi is a bold and necessary new literary voice whose work has the power to transform our world for the better (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred)

The author shamelessly presents ideas of other thinkers and philosophers as her own all the way through the book

“Show your working” is how the book starts, yet. The author shamelessly presents ideas of other thinkers and philosophers as her own all the way through the book.

Why would Penguin Round House publish a text that is inciting violence? Clearly calling for a diverse tactics of violent methods in her arguing for “better world”.

“Arguing for the better world” is the title. Yet, the author does not define what “better world” is. Which would be the absolute basic requirement for writing a book with a title like that. Which turned the entire book into “a guide to household virtue signalling”. If the author would look for genuine change, they would define the goal. Without a logical goal, any action becomes a meaningless virtue signalling.

The circular logic of the argument is the key to plausible deniability inserted in every chapter of the book. The card “oh, this is a reverse racism, not racism”. Because there are always a lot of stereotypical groups above in the hierarchy of suffering.

According to the author, person’s suffering is the ultimate virtue. As long as a person’s suffering is relatively lower on author’s hierarchy, anything goes. This is a circular logic fallacy that infected the pages and the author herself. The method allows the following to thrive on the pages of this book: homophobia, sexism, dog whistling, racism, whataboutery, transphobia, fig leafing and incitement of violence.

I want my money back. However, the capitalist structures, shamelessly and strategically used by the author, will not make that happen. The author will drive profit through her sloppy and intellectually dishonest labour for years to come.