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Notes -
Are you?
If I don't want you to make my fingers start moving, what do you think happens next?
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
The number of "steps" isn't a well-defined concept (if I go into arbitrarily fine detail about the mechanism of a human body I can extend you "having my brain send a signal down my arm" into infinity steps) - I think the only coherent thing this idea corresponds to is how easy it is for you do it.
But there are systems where someone other than yourself could make you close your fists with just the effort of sending brain signals to their voice-box and jaw to speak. They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
Yes, threats could in theory make me close my fist against my own will.
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Seems obvious that this all comes down to having to physically interfere with 'my' body to make the thing happen, if I don't want it to happen. I'm the only one that has the actual 'entanglement' with the matter that composes my body that lets me control it with nerve impulses alone.
You can of course claim this is a distinction without a difference if defined properly. "The Universe" makes no distinction between "me" and "you."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosophizing it.
Well, then you get killed by the gangster, so in this formulation you maintain "ownership" of your body (at least before you die, then they control it)
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
I'm sure you would be happy to just allow people to do many of the things on my list, but I disagree that it is some obvious "easy, fundamental, universal concept" that no reasonable person could oppose, on the level of, say, "not torturing people to death because you like to hear them scream"
There it is! When I read the first paragraph I quoted here I was confused. I actually know full well that at least I am capable of not capitulating to threats, and it is crazy to assert, 5 years after covid, that no one would use the threat of deadly force to make someone 'close their fist' - aka give up bodily autonomy in a trivial way. That is not a convoluted thought experiment, it's actually slightly less crazy than what many governments in the world tried to do to their citizens. But you wanted to paint the people who refused to capitulate to the abrogation of their bodily autonomy as the ones harming society.
I don't understand - are you saying that in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating? And that during COVID you actually didn't follow the rules about distancing, masks, vaccines, etc? (didn't you get in trouble?)
I understand you hold some kind of libertarian principles that make you respond negatively to such acts of government coercion. But surely you are exaggerating here? At least in the COVID case, there was a supposed benefit for this restriction of rights (but in the fist closing example - it is literally just a gangster being drunk on his own power)
So, in the specific case of COVID, I weakly believe that the government response (at least in the UK/US) was disproportionate to the actual severity of the pandemic. I haven't done any research or calculations here, this is just a hunch based on my lived experience (but given your comment, I think you agree with this point, so I'm happy to go along with this premise)
But this is a more general discussion about the principle of bodily autonomy, and in the general case it just seems straightforwardly true that an anti-vaxxer would be harming society. If there is a disease that really is sufficiently deadly (i.e. the mortality rate outweighs the major inconveniences to the entire population of mandatory vaccines, lockdowns, etc), and there is a vaccine that is sufficiently safe and effective - then yes, the government should vaccinate people against this illness (and if they refuse, they should be met with escalating consequences that eventually peak in their death, as is the case for any other illegal activity)
Given what you wrote, I assume you are against the mandatory vaccination purely on the liberatarian principle of bodily autonomy. I agree with you that the feeling of freedom is a good thing, that we all want to have. But I think, like all other good things, it is just N utility points (and N is on a scale of more mundane things, like being able to have a delicious meal each day, or being exposed to lots of sunlight and fresh air), and can just be traded for other kinds of utility. Do you disagree with this? (Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I get the impression that libertarians, and sometimes also normiecons, view "liberty" as something kind of sacred, that is incomparable to other kinds of good things, e.g. New Hampshire's motto)
As fc explains below, the principle of precommitment is sacrosanct to me. If I am not willing to suffer for my beliefs, I don't believe them. But there is a bit more to it than that of course - prior experience suggests a member of organised crime won't shoot over something so trivial, so yeah, I'd call the bluff. My fate was sealed in this hypothetical, but it has actually been an outrageously successful tactic irl, I wish I'd employed it a lot more during my life, everyone capitulates far too easily these days.
At first I thought my fate was sealed during covid too - I practice social distancing and proper hygiene because illness doesn't care about principles, but I live in Queensland and during the mask mandates and lockdowns I went out every single day, just like I had before, and I didn't wear a mask. I let the gold coast council bully my market into forcing masks on people for two weeks, then told them to shut us down if they didn't like us letting people do what the pleased (we would have had to shut down anyway if we'd kept doing it, I'm not claiming to be Terry Toughnuts, just explaining another covid rule that was primarily about throwing weight around). I got pulled over by a cop once, but no punishment, because the cop thought it was a stupid policy too (I assume, she didn't say that of course but she looked embarrassed pulling me over and barely even waited for me to give my lazy food situation excuse before letting me go.)
So I am not anti-vax (although I am anti covid vax) but I am not willing to force it on others. I might not like it when it goes against what I want, but I always respect people who are willing to throw there life away for there beliefs. I do think a high trust society could make an argument for vaccine mandates, but I don't think we live in a high trust society. We live in a society where they will mandate untested vaccines and lock people in their homes based on bad science, then refused to acknowledge their errors until they had no choice. That's a society that should not be trusted. That's probably the major disconnect between us it looks like (aside from our moral frameworks of course). I don't get the impression you think we have a high trust society though - do you see high trust societies as institutional facts in the Searle sense, sort of self fulfilling prophecies? Because I do think that's true, but we definitely don't live in a high trust society, and I am not willing to play along until I see something to trust again. I'm not saying all of society has to become deontological... But I can also think of worse ways we could go.
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One of Hlynka's core arguments was that this was in fact the proper way to begin one's political reasoning from: not what you are willing to kill for, but what are you willing to die for. What comes above utilitarian calculus?
Both of these feel like a strange and arbitrary place to start my political reasoning from (I would start from "what does my Utopia look like?", and then see how close we can practically get to that Utopia when constrained by the laws of physical reality and conflict theory)
But it's a reasonable question anyways, so I'll answer it. I am indeed willing to die for some things, examples off the top of my head:
But doesn't all of this just fit neatly into utilitarian calculus? If you just assign utility -N for your own death, then if you are willing to die for X, that just corresponds to ~X having a utility -M < -N. I'm not pretending to be some genius rationalist robot man who calculates everything in utilons to make decisions, but the idea of utilitarian calculus is just that all of the rational (in the weak sense, where we don't use logic that leads to contradictions) decisions an agent can make boil down to maximising some utility function (or in practice, a protocol that approximates this maximisation)
Seriously? You're saying if some dictator came into power, and tries to violate your rights (even if you don't even care that much about the object-level thing - like literally just clenching your fists), then you would just steel yourself up, and deny him. That you wouldn't back down - even as the situation escalates to the point where some agent of the state is literally holding a gun to your head? In this situation, you'd just grit your teeth, look your executioner in the eye with righteous anger, and be "nobly" shot in the head - not to avoid even mild physical suffering, or to protect the life of a loved one - but literally just because you've decided that freedom "comes above the utilitarian calculus"?
I don't think so, no. Utilitarian calculus breaks down with infinites, and this is about infinites. This is not "this has [negative_bignum_utilons] for me", this is "I will not accept this." It's a decision, not a calculation. It's a willingness to accept loss/failure, not another move in the game, and the more absolute it is the better it works.
Where to draw the line is an open question. But there is a line, and the capacity to both draw the line and stick to it, come what may, are extremely important. It's well-known that small compromises lead to larger ones, and it is in this fashion that one moves from compromising to being compromised. By drawing the line, you move from "I will resist if it seems profitable" to "I will resist no matter what." Precommitment, in other words, the most durable sort of commitment. And such commitments are often decisive, especially in a crisis.
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Yes you've proven that if someone is willing to use their control of their body to enact violence on yours, you can 'lose' control of your body.
On the other hand, the gangster can't very well object if I pull out a gun and use my body to enact violence on his, thereby maintaining control of my own.
Willingness to do violence to defend your own body is a helluva deterrent.
This gets to why having a framework of ownership, and via ownership exclusion is useful!
Nudists can have spaces where they are nude all day and they can exclude prudes who would be upset by this. Everyone else can have spaces where they exclude nudists.
We've already seen that its possible to exclude people on basis of vaccination status.
Likewise, you can exclude people with 'ugly' tattoos or require them to cover up (but now you've smuggled in the topic of aesthetics which, hoo boy).
"Society" can be built on a framework of people agreeing to respect property boundaries and agreeing to abide by rules set by the owners under penalty of exclusion.
And this is strictly superior to the scenario where everyone fights constantly over every single matter because there is no set framework for delineating boundaries for who controls what.
I agree with your point about ownership, and generally just being allowed to "control your own body" being a useful social construct in most cases. I just disagree with your claim that it is some kind of elegant "natural" law, because actually we all live in a shared reality and all of our actions effect other people, and vice-versa (but often the externalities are so negligible, we can just use the approximation of "live and let live" - e.g. pseudononymous users arguing about politically incorrect topics on an obscure web forum)
How do you interpret the nudists not being allowed in public spaces? Is it that you see the public spaces as being owned by the government, so it is the government's right in this case (not as specially privileged actors, but just as the group that happens to own this particular space) to exclude the nudists?
(If that is what you think, can we not just remove people's rights in practice by using the loophole of "excluding" everyone who does(n't) do X from using any kind of public space - "let the transphobes/communists/Catholics construct their own parallel society, without any help from the existing one of course, where they can be transphobic/communist/Catholic all day long")
But do you think this is morally okay? (why can't the anti-vaxxers "control their own body"?)
From public? I haven't heard of any such laws, not even laws requiring people to cover up tattoos in public (I've certainly seen people walking around with tatoos!)
I didn't mean to smuggle in aesthetics. But even if we allow for the sillier tattoos as having some kind of artistic value, I can think of deliberately shocking and obscene tattoos that I think almost everyone would find "ugly", in the sense it would upset them to see it (perhaps a hyperrealistic image of a penis being split apart by a modified pear of anguish in the urethra)
It can (it could also be built on a framework of "equality of outcomes", or "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, or even "we should minimise suffering, so we should sterilise everyone and start encouraging people to OD on heroine), but why? I don't see how this framework handles anti-social behaviour that harms society as a whole (like not vaccinating yourself, loitering in public spaces, public nudity, public drug use, etc)
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Therein lies the real proof of ownership, really. I agree with you that it's an universal concept but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
If I want something from you and can't take it, then you own it. If I want something from you and can take it, then you don't own it.
This is physical reality and one's physical body isn't exempt from this. Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
That's just the most convenient way to demonstrate since people usually have their body present when you're discussing things with them.
I mean, I see the point. But if there's any 'person' left in the brain, unless they're the poor sucker from Johnny Got His Gun, the brain is still in control of 'something.'
And the only way people can take that control is by directly and physically interfering. Which is to say, by exercising control of their bodies and using that to incarcerate you, restrain you, or damage you.
The strongest refutation of 'self-ownership' I can think of that actually exists are the cases of conjoined twins. We've got entangled nervous systems where maybe neither person really 'controls' the parts they share. But its still way more convenient for them to agree to coexist.
Otherwise, unless there's some entity out there that can unilaterally override your brain's functions and direct how your body is used regardless of your own will and wishes (hence: a hivemind species), it seems to me there's no way to overcome the conclusion "I own myself" because any actions taken to refute it would inherently prove it true.
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