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Congratulations, by driving in a car you have now signed up for a lifetime as a quadriplegic due to an accident. It was a risk you knew was possible. Please don't do anything but accept the consequences of your choice.
Sex != baby-making. Sex carries the risk of baby making.
Yeah, so? I also do that as a passenger of a car with a responsible driver. Or by walking down a staircase. I voluntarily take on risks every day, and live with the consequences.
Why not? That sounds reckless and/or defeatist.
I'll mitigate the risks as much as practical. If that fails, I'll minimize the consequences then deal with them as best as I can. As an example, physiotherapy is a good way to deal with the consequences of some of my actions. Is an abortion a good way to deal with the consequences of my actions? Who knows, but at least we're asking the right question now.
Because the entire argument around risk of pregnancy -> you need to carry it to term is this argument: Taking a known risk automatically creates an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk.
Mitigating risks or minimizing the consequences is getting an abortion...
Who's making that argument? I'm saying it's not zero, and you are the one that can't imagine anything less than infinity.
The Violinist argument essentially goes:
I reject #2 because you weren't kidnapped by music lovers in a typical pregnancy. You weren't an uninvolved bystander or innocent victim, and that causal link changes the situation. Is it enough to change the headline results? Again, who knows, but at least it's the right question.
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Yes, when taking part in risky activities I accept the risk. I’m not sure what the alternative would be?
In the framework you gave, abortion for an accidental pregnancy would be permissible, but one for an intentional pregnancy would not.
I fail to see how this is different than the current accepted practice? People intentionally getting pregnant don't then go get abortions. Abortions happen when pregnancy occurs accidentally (due to risks) or when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.
Or in cases of fetal abnormality. These span a spectrum from absolutely non-viable cases (like anencephaly) to clearly viable babies who are likely to be severely disabled (like Down's) but Christian pro-lifers want abortion to be illegal in almost all of them and normies with an ick about abortion think they are some of the good examples of legitimate abortions.
I'd assume Christians are also against euthanasia of infants in these cases, so...
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I suppose one can contrive a scenario where a woman could have an elective abortion refused because her prior actions indicate the pregnancy was intentional. For instance, if she took active steps to restore her fertility not long before the pregnancy; not just forgetting to take a pill or not wearing a condom, but something like reversing a tubal ligation or removing an IUD without a medical justification.
I have to wonder how rare those scenarios are though.
I think that would be an actually interesting philosophical question, especially if we examine our response to other situations where people engage in actions intentionally that effect other people but then change their mind. In some situations like contract law, we enforce the prior agreement, but in others like a promise to aid or a charitable donation we don't enforce compliance.
It's a question of how much bodily autonomy you have depending on the cost of your bodily autonomy on other people.
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I’m guessing some number of abortions are because the mother changes her mind, and it seems very counterintuitive to say that the intent of the parents influences the morality of the abortion.
To be clear, I’m broadly pro-choice, but I don’t think sex and pregnancy can be neatly decoupled, any more than driving and car crashes can.
I mean I don't think they can be neatly decoupled, one is a risk that is of the other. But we as a society accept other risk pairings as both legally correct and morally ok. This idea that babies are the direct and singular causal response to sex is just not based in reality. Pretending it is, is an attempt at motivated reasoning. Which I was calling out.
EDIT:
I suppose this is probably true, I do wonder what the breakdown in cases between the three would be. Regardless I am pretty pro-choice from a fairly radical bodily autonomy perspective.
Funny, from the same principle I believe the reverse: „Every child wants to be born“; the body of another human being is harmed (well, murdered) -> This is anathema.
#Libertarians. Ask 10 Libertarians for an opinion and get 13 answers.
The body of human is being enslaved for another -> this is anathema.
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Are you saying that driving != getting into accidents?
I'm saying that driving carries the risk of getting into accidents. But yes that driving != getting into accidents. Sex is to Pregnancy as Driving is to Accidents.
Yeah, not everyone having sex “intends” to get pregnant. But the passenger in the vehicle doesn’t intend on winding up in a clinic with a medical certificate attached to his/her name either.
I think the passenger analogy doesn't really apply well here because the passenger in a car still displayed agency in determining the risk/reward of getting into the car. A baby doesn't display any agency on being conceived.
But if you want me to stake a position, then even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no. It's my body and you can't morally compel me to use it.
Of course a baby doesn’t display agency, because it ‘can’t’. Therein lies the problem.
The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body. You’re the one who chose to commit the act. What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.
The baby is dependent on me for survival. If I wish to use my body for something other than its survival and would like to remove it, I am within my rights to remove it. If someone else would like to put it in their body or test tube for its survival they may. It's not my concern. If the baby would like to form a contract with me to exchange value for its continued use of my body, then it should make an offer.
I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.
I forgot the "fighting for existence" is such a moral rectitude that it permits the overriding of any other beings rights. Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"
You brought up the point about organ donation. You’re not engaging in “organ donation” in the normal process of pregnancy. “Your body” is no longer “your body,” at the point it involves the life and death of someone else. That’s the entire point.
Precisely. You chose the risk. And now you live with the consequences of said risk.
You realize fighting was in quotation marks, right?
We are going to disagree irrevocably about this. "My Body" is always my body, morally it is wrong to remove bodily autonomy from a being regardless of the reason. I don't think you can convince me that any form of slavery regardless of the cause will ever be ok. I'm not a consequentialist, and am not a utilitarian. The freedom to bodily autonomy is a quintessential natural right and it requires Tyranny to override that.
I'd go as far to say you benefit from this as we currently aren't harvesting your organs against your will because it will save the lives of multiple other people. Afterall "your body" is no longer "your body".
I also did not bring up organ donation, please highlight where I did.
Show me the law or the penal colony where we condemn smokers to die of lung cancer without any chance of treatment.
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This is just patently false.
Driving exists to get you from place to place.
Sex exists to reproduce life.
Sex is literally FOR babies, and the feeling good is a side effect. Driving, on the other hand, is literally FOR moving around, not crashing.
I must have missed the part of health class where they discussed how human females are fertile 24/7 365 days a year. Instead of the short window around the ovulation cycle. Or that how when females are not fertile it is not possible to have sex with them. You should submit your new revolutionary information to the latest medical journal, this could be a major breakthrough on human bodily functions!!
Sarcasm aside, you are smuggling in a moral argument to a functional argument that does not follow it. Just because you believe that sex = babies doesn't mean its actually true from a purely biological functionality fact(which you are also wrong about). I think I could construct several purely biological functional arguments for various other things that you would strongly disagree with.
You are essentially using arguments as soldiers for principles you don't actually care about. Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
Sex is for reproduction. Different animals graft different parts to the single most important drive in the living world.
Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction. But sex isn't the only way to reproduce. We could be pollinators, or reproduce like fish by spraying semen everywhere, or another strategy altogether. We could be crystalline entities forming and reforming in patterns as we reshape the strata in an ever-expanding zone. But not for us, not for this particular class of mammalian vertebrates. We have sex, and we have babies.
I mean, Thou Shall Not Kill is right there, but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children. That's the real argument: yes, it's killing, and no, you don't have cause to kill someone because you simply choose to.
And before humans (+ tree shrews) decided to torture themselves, chili peppers produced capsaicin to repel mammals, ergo eating modern kimchi is morally impermissible because it’s a profanation of its natural function?
The opposite, eating makes sense as it is desensitizing/training up against the plant defenses.
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Nonsense the bible says the earth is 6,000 years old and humans were formed directly by God in the garden of Eden. The only ancestor of human women is Adam's rib. Stop cherry picking the bible...
Then why don't humans have a 24/7 365 fertility window. Other animals have it. Obviously sex is ONLY for reproduction. Except apparently not. Listing different forms of reproduction isn't really an argument. You've made a claim that sex is only for reproduction, give some evidence of this, listing a risk/probabilistic outcome of sex doesn't suddenly prove that.
And besides a sky-hook, what moral evidence do you have that this view is the moral correct one. It's not like Christians have never killed children either. Why are children considered so innocent that they demand special consideration? Would Alien Children warrant the same consideration?
I don’t think there are any animal species, certainly no mammals, who have this trait.
But your argument surprisingly does check out, as human men (and all male apes) are in fact 24/7 365 fertile! Following your reasoning this explains that male sexuality is indeed all about reproduction/impregnation. But female sex is not (or only around a sixth as much). Which explains much about sexual customs and men/women.
Considering it take two people to engage in reproduction, the correct formulation would be 1/1 (male) * 1/6 (female) = 1/3 of sex is about reproduction. (Formula simplification is intuitive and left to the reader as an exercise) From a purely mathematical standpoint.
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The exploration of the purpose of things is called teleology. We assert that things have inherent natural purposes. A knife exists so that it might cut things. You could use a knife for other things, say, as a paperweight, but you are losing the sense of what is means to be a knife if you cannot distinguish these ends.
Aristotle's classic example is the acorn, whose intrinsic telos is to grow into an oak tree. That's what the acorn is "supposed to do". Now, you might use an acorn for other things such as decoration in resin or feed for pigs. But these are closer to technology, in the sense that we have manipulated the acorn. We've changed it. What Aristotle would call the "final cause" of the acorn is to become a tree.
The final cause of sex, its telos, is reproduction. Sex has other ends besides and you obviously don't have to have a child every time you have sex. But you essentially can't talk about sex at all without talking about reproduction because that's its telos. That's what it's for.
Because children are innocent by definition. They aren't fully-formed adults, they are presumed not to have had sex, they haven't fully interacted with the world. They aren't morally culpable in the way an adult is. They can't be legally guilty in the way an adult can be. That's basically the definition of innocence. It's like asking why oranges are considered orange, well it's inherent in the category.
There is no such thing as a knife in nature, at least if you exclude human intent from nature.
If you include human intent into nature, then the inherent natural purpose of an apple is to be eaten and the seeds thrown into a landfill where it will most certainly not grow into an apple tree.
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I link you to this Other Post. I understand what teleology is, but I disagree on your authority to tell me what the telos of something is. Sex is complicated and it will never be decoupled from reproduction but the belief that the telos of sex is solely reproduction is smuggling Christian moral values that are not given. Sex is also about pair-bonding, pleasure, marital alliance, kinship formation, status/politics, ritual or cosmic symbolism and sometimes exchange or obligation within a social system. Many cultures and many religions have a very different teleology about sex, what is your evidence that yours is the correct one?
This is a common problem with Christians and cultural Christians. They are close-minded in that they believe their morals are the one true moral system. Then they argue from that stance without ever identifying that the moral precepts of Christianity are not universal or with the understanding that their moral precepts are even Christian-derived in the first place.
Again, you are using the Christian moral definition of innocence. As a non-Christian, I lack the same moral foundation and definitions you do, so trying to use them to tell me what is and what is moral is not tenable. Make an argument stand on its own two feet instead of just dictating your definitions from a book. I disagree definitionally that children are innocent. Children as a class are merely human spawn. They have as much innocence as any human. Ork babies are no more innocent than Ork adults, Goblin children, elven children, borg children, romulan children, klingon children, Yuuzhan Vong children and all permutations otherwise.
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Driving exists to burn gasoline in the engine. Making wheels roll is just a useful side effect.
This is according to the base function that a mechanism can be stripped down to.
According to "the purpose of a system is what it does", the vast majority of sex acts are for pleasure while minimizing the possibility of conceiving, while the vast majority of driving is for getting from place to place while minimizing the possibility of crashing.
According to God or other source of objective telos, well, you can quote them once you present them.
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Is playing Russian roulette != blowing a hole in your skull?
Yes... Would you say that "Blowing a hole in your skull" is the singular causal outcome of playing Russian roulette? Or just a risk?
I'd say a statement like "I didn't mean to shoot myself in the head, I was just playing Russian roulette" sounds pretty dumb.
Probably because a 1/6 chance of killing yourself is a risk that most people think is too much. Especially when there is only a marginal reward.
I don't think that risk/reward ratio really applies in Sex or Driving.
That would really depend on the kind of sex.
As the new Tyrant of America is is now my degree that premartial sex is limited to Anal or Pegging only. Anyone caught doing something as disgusting as "a penis in a vagina" before marriage shall now be forced into 18 years of indentured labour.
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