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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

A story from Canada today that, by its very nature, maximizes heat. I will try to keep my own emotions about this story in check. Sitting at the intersection of gay rights, abortion rights, surrogacy rights, and ultimately the violence upon which all government force is founded, I bring you: Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect

https://nypost.com/2026/07/14/world-news/couple-sues-surrogate-who-refused-to-abort-their-baby-over-a-minor-birth-defect/

Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues). Last I'll say of my own emotions on this is that this strikes me as outright demonic behavior and if I say anything more about my feelings I'm going to drift into fedposting so I'll stop here.

The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."

For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction? And why, if you're able to articulate. For me at least, to quote the meme an old friend shared in our edgy groupchat the other day, "Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs".

No, the Slippery Slope is not a fallacy; the very concept of "informal fallacy" is just stealing valor from logic, done simply because "You committed Fallacy X!" "wins" debates, while "Well, I just don't agree with your assumptions" does not.

Firstly, "If we let gay people get married, it's just a slippery slope to letting people marry their dogs" isn't even an argument; at most, it's a Major Premise, how can it be fallacious if there's not even an argument? Secondly, the error in reasoning lies entirely on the person stripping the assertionof its context; people advocating that gay marriage would be a slippery slope were claiming so in light of previous relaxations of taboos and erosions of cultural norms, and the obvious downsides that came from that. It is absurd - to be frank, dishonest - to claim that the analog is actually thinking a barber would proceed from hair to limbs; this is done for purposes of derision of the opposition, not honest engagement.

One of these days I keep meaning to do a sort of mini-review/effortpost of a Harvard Law Review article that comprehensively talks about the 'slippery slope', but it's far more dense and intricate than the issue first appears. However, I will say that as a rough overview, the author categorizes "cost-lowering slippery slopes" and "attitude-altering slippery slopes" and "boiled frog/inattentive slippery slopes" and "political power/momentum slippery slopes" as all distinct from one another.

Of course slippery slopes can be real! But I'm inherently a bit more suspicious of the attitudinal slippery-slopes in particular, even if they appear at first to be the most convincing types (and may well be most powerful in the long run) because of how weak the evidence or proposed mechanism tends to be about their occurrence. So my criticism of your take would be more along the lines of you seem to be presenting this as if it were an attitudinal slippery slope when I'm not really at all convinced that's the most proper framing for what's going on here in Canada (at least, without more details).

Short answer: yes, of course. The slippery slope argument says that violating one principle will cause further violations of that principle. In this case, you have two separate principles which can be violated independently.

Arguing that violating one will make more opportunities to violate the second is a utilitarian approach, not a slippery slope.

Longer answer: I think the NYPost is a trash outlet and I don’t want to slog through their coverage, so I’m going to assume it’s perfectly fair and accurate. Please forgive me if I get the details wrong.

the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered

No, they don’t. They wish she didn’t exist, which sometimes but not always implies murder. In your model, fulfilling that wish would have required murdering the fetus. In their model, it did not. I can’t stress this distinction enough.

Thank you for not fedposting, by the way.

various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again

Could you elaborate? From where I’m standing, this incident wasn’t caused by leniency higher up the slope. If Canada executed all its gays instead of letting them adopt surrogates, it wouldn’t have mattered. Straight couples are perfectly capable of violating a second, separate principle about the moral value of the fetus. The same judge would (probably) make the same decision. Conversely, you could win that battle regardless of your principle on homosexuality. The two are not on the same slope.

have your feelings on the matter changed?

I guess so? I gained political awareness in the pre-Obergefell era, and viewed the situation with a typical teenage self-assurance. The outgroup were obviously picking on gays because they felt threatened, maybe closeted, right? But they were already losing out, and it was firmly not my problem.

Now I’ve seen the culture wars metastasize, polarize, accelerate the discovery of new and exciting ingroups and outgroups. I think that attacking homosexuality has gotten more politically useful even as Americans have, as individuals, gotten more tolerant. So I suppose I’ve become more inclined to argue (and vote) for gay rights.

No, they don’t. They wish she didn’t exist, which sometimes but not always implies murder.

ಠ_ಠ

I strongly disagree with your stress, this is a distinction without a difference. And those worthless wastes of constituent parts are almost certainly unable to elucidate why that distinction matters.

In your model, fulfilling that wish would have required murdering the fetus. In their model, it did not. I can’t stress this distinction enough.

I am sure the victims of the Aztecs were overjoyed to know that per the beliefs of the priests, it was a moral necessity to cut out their hearts.

If I'm ever attacked, I'll be sure to ask the person if they believe murder is wrong, and if they don't then I'll just have to lay down and take it.

How is there no difference?

Moving an actual child from existence to nonexistence requires murder. Moving a potential child from nonexistence to nonexistence does not.

I understand that you disagree with the couple’s assessment of “actual” versus “potential.” You can call their actions murder, but you would be wrong to say they wanted murder, because their wants used their assessment.

I am no longer sufficiently liberal to think that all opinions are valid in their own ways and must be judged on their own terms. What they wanted was the nonexistence of a human being and beyond that it's just commentary and word games.

"By their definition it's not murder" okay well then can I just define away their humanity and it's not murder? No? Hardly seems fair, does it?

I don’t care how liberal you aren’t. I’m not asking you to agree with them. I am objecting to the insistence that they “wished their child had been murdered,” which posits a state of mind that was (as far as I know) completely absent.

I think caring about their state of mind requires a degree of moral relativism I no longer find tolerable, which is why I brought up the other factors.

Several years ago and a few towns over, a young boy was shot in the head because his basketball rolled onto his neighbor's lawn. I don't care about the neighbor's state of mind. I don't think it's relevant, in any way. Likewise here. I don't care about their state of mind! I think caring about their state of mind is offensive to the soul. There are Moral Truths, and subsuming them is Bad.

Does it make me worse at understanding them? Possibly! So be it. They do not need to be understood, and I am quite confident they wouldn't give the slightest shit about trying to understand anyone that doesn't agree with them, either.

If there is a Moral Truth out there, is it well served by slander?

I was working on an elaborate hypothetical about militant vegans, but I’m not sure it was actually helpful. I guess I’m envisioning a “hate the sin, love the sinner” position where someone’s crimes don’t forfeit all their rights, or your own obligation to do good. I don’t think that’s relativism.

The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."

You can get an abortion at any gestational age in Canada for any reason. Google tells me that really the only restrictions are resources, that you might not be able to get an abortion past 24 weeks due to lack of facilities. Not due to gatekeeping. There is already no limiting principle on abortion, you are already at the bottom of the hill, that is the case regardless of surrogacy.

Recognizing where on the hill we are starting at, how can we additionally fall down with the introduction of surrogacy? If the contention is that we will slip down into allowing donors to compel the pregnant woman into abortion for arbitrary reasons this doesn't really seem like a good example of that, they were not able to do that. The limiting principle against that is that the woman gets to choose, and that is what is backed up by Canadian law. And if the woman always gets to choose, what on top of that are the surrogates? Like it seems to me your issue should mostly be with Canada's elective abortion rules and not with the surrogates who were not able to pressure the mom into an abortion.

Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues).

The National Post article linked in the NYP piece starts out with:

"A Canadian couple is suing the surrogate mother who carried their son, two years after she refused their request to abort the fetus because of a cleft lip and possible genetic abnormalities."

If the possible genetic abnormalities indicated to the parents were something like down syndrome or "your kid might be a vegetable" to me that has a lot different moral valence than "our kid has cleft lip, abort him". It is not clear from either article what the potential genetic issue was, but from the following we can see the parents changed their mind when they learned the baby was generally healthy beyond the lip:

"The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip."

If your objection is to abortion in general then the above will not allay you, but to me aborting a child halfway through pregnancy because of serious health issues is much more understandable than doing the same for a cosmetic defect.

It is absolutely a fallacy, but one that can be overcome with a bare modicum of evidence. Especially when you can point towards recent historical precedent and/or a smaller scale examples of said slope occurring.

So I view the slippery slope fallacy as a call to provide some actual evidence of the slope's existence, and delivery of such evidence then shifts burden back to the other party.

The sort of argument I look for to completely refute a Slippery Slope argument is "yes we're doing [X] which creates the risk of [Y] but we have created [Z] safeguard as a means of preventing a further slide into disaster." Cutting off the tail risk and arresting the fall, and creating a path to climb back up the slope if we actually slip.

But too often the safeguard is mostly for show is or is under-powered compared to the danger itself. Adding a gambling addiction hotline number to sports gambling ads is woefully inadequate, for example.

In any event, one should always look for Skin in the Game on the part of the person defending the slope in question. "If we go tumbling over the edge into oblivion, you're strapped to us so you'll take the fall too, right?"

As much as I hope and pray that I will one day live to witness the Day of the Rake, I simply cannot in good conscience support the abortion of a child just because a uterine blood test revealed him to be a Canadian. That’s sick.

How do you know, are you sure, really, that Canadians have souls?

Look, I'm experiencing qualia! Look, there was one, right there! Honest!!

"Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs"

This is me. In college I was an edgy libertarian who thought the Wicca creed of "though it harm none, do as you will" was the height of wisdom. As I've matured, it has become clear that certain ways of being are simply better. And then I came (returned, really) to Christ which has increasingly made me a radical in the eyes of the secular world.

Just last night, in fact, I was approached by my senior pastor about taking a teaching role at my church, with the idea that I would eventually take his job. So I've got a lot of thinking to do about many of these issues, and how to address them in a compassionate but biblical way from the pulpit. My pastor says he was advised, for instance, to never teach the book of Romans, because when you teach Romans 1 (which condemns homosexuality among other things) you will lose half your congregation. He teaches it anyway :) This may not be that relevant to you all or to the discussion but I just wanted to share.

My feeling is anyone who would split with a church over a plain reading of the Bible isn’t really Christian enough to be worth catering to. In short, they place their own opinions above all else and would likely leave over some other issue anyway. So I’d say ignore them and teach what the bible says, and the traditions as they existed. If it makes people uncomfortable good, they needed to hear it.

I'm with you in theory. However in practice many people have beliefs that are influenced by secular culture, so I think it's important to have a considered approach when you introduce ideas that people may struggle with.

The other pastor who gave the advice not to teach Romans has had a lot of success growing his church, while the church I attend has stayed quite small. But I actually left that larger church for this smaller one partly because of lack of depth in the teaching. So, what's more important - reaching more people with the basic gospel message of salvation, or tending to a smaller group of more devoted faithful? I don't think there's an obvious answer. Probably we need both. "But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it." 1 Cor 3:2 - Lots of infants in Christ out there nowadays!

What does it mean to "not be Christian enough"? This sounds more like a political division than the faith that all are saved if they follow Jesus Christ.

All are saved if they repent their sins and seek forgiveness and salvation through Jesus Christ. As prerequisites this requires

  1. A basic understand/belief of Jesus, including his Divinity, Sacrifice, and offer of Forgiveness.
  2. A basic understanding of sins., including what they are, why they're bad, and why you specifically are a sinner.

Any distorted version of Christianity which teaches "Jesus was a wise human Prophet" or "You only have to apologize for sins that you personally agree are bad" is unlikely to result in salvation. There is some debate about exactly how strict the requirements for salvation are, but making up your own rules because you think you know better than God is not what they mean by "repentance".

Well, what does 'follow Jesus Christ' mean, then? Ignore everything he said but think fondly of the nicer parts?

Well, that's the whole question, isn't it?

Matthew probably captures the historical Jesus's message best. Follow the Law more righteously than the scribes and Pharisees, in preparation for the imminent kingdom. The trouble is that he was talking almost exclusively to other Jews, and never makes it clear what he expects from Gentiles.

Yes. It would be terrible to find ourselves in the position of trying to figure out how to live Christian lives by interpreting the Bible from this extremely-removed modern perspective.

Yes. It would be terrible to find ourselves in the position of trying to figure out how to live Christian lives by interpreting the Bible from this extremely-removed modern perspective.

Well, it depends what the Bible is.

Ancient book written by ancient Near Easterners for ancient Near Easterners, or inspired, incorrupt and infallible guide for all men of all times and places?

If the latter, then it should be indeed comprehensible for all human beings, applicable to any situation and should not require explanations and footnotes longer than the original text in cases where the original context obvious to all people in ancient culture changes meaning of story or parable rather drastically.

Ancient book written by ancient Near Easterners for ancient Near Easterners, or inspired, incorrupt and infallible guide for all men of all times and places?

Well, I'd say neither. The NT at least was written by the Church for the Church and meant to be interpreted within the Church and its living tradition. C.f. 2 Thessalonians 2:15.

Re: the rest, I don't think it's fundamentally possible to write any text such that e.g. someone from a culture which intentionally raises people to be hostile towards and incapable of understanding that text, can be expected to receive it well and understand it. I think it would make sense to say that, even if the Bible were 'inspired, incorrupt, and infallible' (it's clearly not; indeed there is no one 'Bible' in the first place), it would be reasonable to expect some degree of contextual literacy and adoption of the mindset of its authors to be intelligible. Otherwise the claim is that someone raised to believe 'down' means 'up' should instantly be able to understand that the text means what it means.

And at that point you're essentially arguing that the text on the page should flow or shift around to become intelligible to people who don't even speak the language; who perhaps can't even read; who perhaps are blind and deaf and can't even hear it spoken.

That this seems like a tall order isn't pertinent in the context of (alleged) divine action. We even see something like that described at Pentecost! But I think it more appropriate, and instructive, to notice that Christians throughout history have never held such expectations for the Bible, up until the Reformation at least, which is indeed a point against that movement.

See also Acts 8:26-35. And in that light, the only thing crazier than a non-Christian who insists the Bible fails on its merits because it's not immediately-intelligible to the uninitiated, is a Protestant who insists that it is, actually.

If you are teaching Romans 1 after teaching Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3 on biblical gender roles and the numerous passages (including the Gospels) on the indissolubility of Christian marriage, I doubt you will lose any additional congregants that you haven't already lost.

If you are teaching Romans 1 before teaching those passages, that is probably the wrong order given the relative damage different sexual sins are doing in today's society.

If someone were to teach Romans 1 without teaching those passages, I would assume that they don't actually care about biblical sexual morality and are just a homophobe or a grifter appealing to homophobes.

Romans isn't an obscure book of the Bible, and the first chapter is typically where one would start.

Precisely - Romans is immediately after Acts in the conventional order, so if (as @FlailingAce appears to be required to do) you teach the New Testatment from front-to-back, Romans 1 is the first Pauline epistle you get to. And if you want an unequivocal declaration that Jesus is not the hippie he appears to be based on some readings of the Gospels, Romans 1 works. But if you are trying to teach Christian sexual morality to people who are receptive to it but not familiar with it, "God curses people who deny him by turning their wives lesbian" isn't the best place to start.

Paul was writing for a society where the Christian ideas about marriage (the Christian idea of marriage is similar to, but not the same as, the pagan Roman idea of marriage) and the family were not countercultural, so he doesn't need to point to the centre of the thing he is pointing at before he can point to the edges. This is the Bible we are talking about, so all of Christian sexual morality is in there, and it forms an intellectually coherent whole. But the presentation was optimised for a time and a place. (Well, a set of places that Paul was writing to.)

But in a world where "marriage" as it was understood from the dawn of time to the 1960s is a somewhat-eldritch piece of lost technology, the logical sequence to teach the material is:

  1. God's plan for marriage and the family - both what it is and it's additional significance as e.g. a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church.
  2. The role of sex and sexual attraction in same.
  3. Specific teachings on specific types of sexual immorality, of which the prohibition on male homosexuality is one of the most important.

"Christian sexual morality is basically normie-American sexual morality except we don't like gays" is not true, and empirically doesn't work as a seeker-sensitive white lie either.

The tradition in apostolic churches is to introduce the Christian teaching on marriage with John Chrysostom for that reason.

I know that Protestants do not do patristics to nearly the same extent. But before saying things like ‘Christian marriage was the norm in ancient Rome’ it’s probably worth looking at what ancient Christian preachers were criticizing in marriages.

That's good advice. I attend a Calvary Chapel where we teach the Bible chapter by chapter, so the order is somewhat pre-determined. However, I agree that this is the sort of context that needs to be brought in as part of that teaching to avoid coming across as crassly homophobic.

The student evangelical group that almost* managed to convert me taught Ephesians first after the Gospel - the official reason given was that it is the most important of the Epistles if you want to learn quickly how to live a Christian life.

But in any case, you need to ram home the message that God is not a hippie. I suppose hitting Romans 1 immediately after the Gospel and Acts is actually a reasonable way of doing it. In today's society, the "order and hierarchy is good actually" message of Ephesians 4-6 is probably even more countercultural than Romans 1, and "God does not provide an easy remedy in this world for abuse of secular authority" definitely is.

* It wasn't the social conservatism that put me off. It may have been the "low church" character of the group (such that Catholics would have had a better chance) but I think ultimately I am the kind of person who struggles to believe in the supernatural given the world now makes sense without it.

I am the kind of person who struggles to believe in the supernatural given the world now makes sense without it.

You might be interested to know, then, that the distinction between 'natural' and 'supernatural' is fairly recent, artificial, and peculiarly Western. In Orthodox Christian theology we see the whole concept as a tragic, and frankly idiotic, mistake.

But also I've gotta disagree. The world makes no sense no matter how I look at it. The concept of The God is great for filling in gaps, such as how the material universe exists at all or how we're conscious, but opens up a lot more questions. Take that away though and I'm fairly puzzled by those things, plus why there are physical laws, etc. in the first place.

I think an important question is whether there is such a thing as objective 'good' and, if so, what that is and how we might know. 'Natural' explanations obviously can't touch this, and I don't see how life can be lived without it.

I think ultimately I am the kind of person who struggles to believe in the supernatural given the world now makes sense without it.

I am right there with you! I struggle to accept when people at my church attribute God's intervention to things that could have happened naturally. But then when I take the inside view on my own life it seems clear that turning and following God had tangible effects, and that things often line up in ways that indicate a guiding hand at work. That includes what I consider an actual miracle: how I met my wife. A story that, when I tell it to others, seems unremarkable!

I think that's the nature of the beast, that another's testimony is insufficient evidence to sway a skeptic, yet may be all the evidence that person needed. Or to put it another way, you won't see the evidence of God's work in your life until you start a relationship with him. I know that sounds like a recipe for self-deception, but it also lines up with my limited understanding of divine hiddenness. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.

I don't have anything to add specifically on the slippery slope question. Surrogacy arrangements are one of those things where yes, if you go into it with consenting, emotionally stable adults who all clearly agree on the terms, then it's hard to articulate a reason against it. But one problem is that emotionally stable adults are actually quite rare in my experience. I think some people overestimate their emotional stability and/or aren't truly prepared for the emotions that will come up throughout the process. I guess my point is, if you find a woman willing to carry an unrelated baby for you, she's either the most altruistic, selfless person on the planet, or something else is going on.

The other problem is the terms of the contract. Human beings are messy, biologically, and so are their relationships. I feel an instinctive revulsion at the idea of contracts that interfere in matters of marriage, fertility, sex, etc. And yet contracts are the instrument by which two parties agree on terms, they ensure terms are equitable, and they give the party remedies for violation of the contract. On a broader level, US law doesn't allow you to sell your kidney or other organs but somehow surrogacy doesn't have the same restrictions even though it's just as huge an issue of bodily and medical autonomy. In fact surrogacy should have even tighter restrictions because a new life is involved. But as I noted, real life is messy, and it's hard and uncomfortable to over-regulate delicate issues. So contracts don't cover key points or aren't written for every conceivable scenario, and people will get emotional and irrational about the outcomes if things haven't gone according to plan. I'm really surprised more cases like this don't make headlines.

Surrogacy arrangements are one of those things where yes, if you go into it with consenting, emotionally stable adults who all clearly agree on the terms, then it's hard to articulate a reason against it.

"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult. There are also some more complex arguments that boil down to "a child has a right to a mother and a father" that require some elaboration to cover the special cases, but they're not that hard to follow either.

But one problem is that emotionally stable adults are actually quite rare in my experience.

I don't think that's the issue. There's lots that are emotionally stable, the actual problem is the same that's people run into when discussing polyamory or prostitution:

  • Emotionally stable people are unlikely to do them
  • The acts themselves are emotionally destabilizing.

the actual problem is the same that's people run into when discussing polyamory or prostitution:

There's probably also the luxury belief issue: the people who promote the ideas are probably more stable than the average person who ends up doing them.

"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult.

Surrogacy needn't be a paid service. I actually know a gay guy (with a steady partner) who had a child with a platonic female friend of his, with the understanding that the child would primarily be raised by the two men, purely out of friendship. Not a typical case, of course - both due to the lack of a financial arrangement, and the fact that the mother is still very present in the child's life in practice - but clearly recognizable as surrogacy without actually involving anything that could be described as selling people.

Surrogacy needn't be a paid service.

  • Ok, but it overwhelmingly is, and
  • this is where the second argument comes in

and the fact that the mother is still very present in the child's life in practice - but clearly recognizable as surrogacy

Depending on what you mean by "very present" I might disagree about it being recognizable as surrogacy. Is she legally recognized as the child's mother? If not, then I don't think it meets the criteria.

Some time ago I ran into a "dating site" for people who specifically want to hook up for the purpose of having a kid (here's an American example. On the female side it was unsurprisingly full of "T: -10s" on the biological clock women, but what I found interesting (though obvious in retrospect) was that on the male side a good chunk was obviously gay guys. From what I could tell the end goal was both sides keeping rights to the kid, but they could use the site to negotiate how much either side wants to be involved. All in all I still find it pretty degenerate, but it's orders of magnitude superior to surrogacy.

"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult.

Is it morally wrong for MLB teams to sell and/or trade players too each other? Is it morally wrong for a temp agency to sell their workers to a factory?

Calling surrogacy "selling people" is technically correct, but obtuse. "Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter, they have less rights than others, there is typically violence or coercion involved. Its evocative of slavery or sex trafficking. The bad things that are inherent or understood to be inherent in slavery / trafficking don't really apply to surrogacy. Yeah there are surrogacy horror stories like in OP, but the modal surrogacy case by far doesn't look like OP and there is not reason it should.

Is it morally wrong for MLB teams to sell and/or trade players too each other? Is it morally wrong for a temp agency to sell their workers to a factory?

I don't think that's remotely comparable. You are talking about an employment contract, the fact that you think this can be placed in the same category as motherhood is already morally repugnant to me. But even if you think consent is the only valid moral factor, these contracts were entered into voluntarily, and the player / worker can refuse to be "sold".

"Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter

Like the children...

they have less rights than others

like the children...

there is typically violence or coercion involved.

the only reason it doesn't is that the child is too weak to put up any kind of violent resistance. Also the mothers' material situation is often taken advantage of, which may be on the softer side of coercion, but it still plausibly fits in the same category.

The bad things that are inherent or understood to be inherent in slavery / trafficking don't really apply to surrogacy.

They absolutely do. Slavery is not considered abhorrent because the masters always and everywhere mistreat their slaves, in fact "but we always treat aware slaves with kindness" was a staple pro-slavery argument back in the day, and it was rejected because treating people as ownable and sellable was considered immoral. That argument applies to surrogacy 1:1.

I don't think that's remotely comparable. You are talking about an employment contract, the fact that you think this can be placed in the same category as motherhood is already morally repugnant to me.

I know its not remotely comparable, that's why I said lumping them all together as "selling people" was obtuse. Selling slaves and surrogacy for money and MLB trades can all be described as "selling people", that those things are not (morally) comparable is my point. Because these "selling people" scenarios have wildly different moral valences "It's morally wrong to sell people" obviously has a little bit of nuance to it.

But even if you think consent is the only valid moral factor, these contracts were entered into voluntarily, and the player / worker can refuse to be "sold".

First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team. It happens all the time, and it not possible for him to refuse.

Second is that in both the particular surrogacy in question and the practice at large are also contracts entered into voluntarily. If you are going to argue that the baby gets a say - no, it doesn't. Does a baby get a say on if it is adopted? No. Has any baby ever had a say as to if or when or how they are born? No. Its never been the case, so why is it here?

"Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter

Like the children...

Ok this one by me was maybe not precise, but I have a feeling you get the gist of what I am saying. I am referring to something like Kunta Kinte being shipped off to the deep south against his will, people generally think that is mean and bad. Given that no newborn child at any point in history has ever had a say in any matter I hoped that you realized that I was referring to something like Kunta instead of something unremarkable and due to the inherent nature of newborns.

they have less rights than others

like the children...

I am going to assume you weren't talking about the fact that children and adults have different rights because that's not remarkable or the point of contention here.

What right does a non surrogate child have that a surrogate child does not? The right to a mother? Baby has a mother. How could it be born if it didn't have a mother? That it is adopted by two gay men, one being the father, does not strike the mother from existence.

there is typically violence or coercion involved.

the only reason it doesn't is that the child is too weak to put up any kind of violent resistance.

Really? I don't believe you. You couldn't possibly know this, its not falsifiable, did a baby tell you this? No, you just made it up.

Also the mothers' material situation is often taken advantage of, which may be on the softer side of coercion, but it still plausibly fits in the same category.

  1. The woman in question is not the babies mother. The egg was not hers, it was a donor's.
  2. The woman in question was not coerced or pressured into surrogacy, per the article in Canada surrogates are not allowed to be paid anything beyond costs for their surrogacy.
  3. You are making a fully general argument here - anyone can be coerced about anything, you can argue against anything by saying that "oh someone's martial situation could be taken advantage of here so its coercive"

They absolutely do. Slavery is not considered abhorrent because the masters always and everywhere mistreat their slaves, in fact "but we always treat aware slaves with kindness" was a staple pro-slavery argument back in the day, and it was rejected because treating people as ownable and sellable was considered immoral. That argument applies to surrogacy 1:1.

The surrogate was not any given money for the kid. Per the article she was not even given money for the costs she incurred.

The parents don't own the kid beyond the extent every parent or guardian "owns" their kid. One of them is the actual father! Its his kid!

If that argument applies to surrogacy 1:1 then why doesn't it here?

First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team. It happens all the time, and it not possible for him to refuse.

This isn't true, though. MLB players can choose to have no-trade clauses in their contracts with their teams. An MLB player who "can't refuse" a trade is an MLB player who already consented to being "sold" to another team by his choice to sign the employment contract that didn't include the proper no-trade clauses that would have given him the right to refuse.

First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team.

He can't, in the sense relevant here. "Selling" him to another team might be legal, but it's still a contract and the courts won't enforce specific performance. If he is sold to another team and refuses to play, the remedy is to sue him for damages, not to force him to play.

Good luck suing the baby for damages.

it was rejected because treating people as ownable and sellable was considered immoral. That argument applies to surrogacy 1:1.

Only if the mother is the only "owner" no? If the father donated sperm then it's not selling the baby from one owner to a new one, the father is already the (part) "owner". Where it's a donated egg and sperm even more so as the surrogate is not the owner at all. It's essentially just renting space in the womb.

So it's definitely not 1:1 as an argument.

Only if the mother is the only "owner" no?

So it's definitely not 1:1 as an argument.

You too have it backwards. Slavery wasn't declared wrong because we decided that somewhere, along the way, ownership was misattributed, otherwise you'd still be allowed to sell yourself into slavery. It was decided that ownership of people is invalid in it's entirety, you can't do it at all.

If you could own another person, and if a mother owned her child, then she could sell, and there would be no issue with surrogacy to begin with.

If the father donated sperm then it's not selling the baby from one owner to a new one, the father is already the (part) "owner".

The father has every right to the custody of the child as well, he does not have a right to buy out the mother from her part. He especially does not have a right to commission the creation and birth of a child for the specific purpose of buying out the mother's custody right.

Where it's a donated egg and sperm even more so as the surrogate is not the owner at all. It's essentially just renting space in the womb.

The process of birth creates a bond between the mother and child, and the idea you can ignore that and act like it's possible to "rent space in the womb" is morally insane.

The process of birth creates a bond between the mother and child, and the idea you can ignore that and act like it's possible to "rent space in the womb" is morally insane.

It is not.

What is asserted without argument may be dismissed without argument.

Under which moral framework? Why? You're just throwing boo words out without actually justifying your position.

You might be right! But you can't just claim your opponents are insane and expect people to nod.

And that is why I was using quotes for owner. The mother is not the actual owner, but whether we call it ownership or not parents have huge ability to decide what should happen to their children up to and including having other people raise them and abdicating their parental rights entirely. Every day parents give their kids up for adoption. It is clear whatever bond there may be is not inviolable.

So a man can indeed have a child with a woman with the idea that he alone will raise him and vice versa. That follows from a chain of logic. Parents can give up custody. They can give up custody before birth. They can give up custody after birth. They can abandon their family entirely.

If I want a child and find a woman who is willing to let me have sex with her on the proviso that I will take and raise the child and she wants nothing to do with it, that can happen right now with no money changing hands. She can sign away her parental rights, leaving me in sole custody. She has the right to do so. I have the right to do so.

So is it just the money that makes it morally insane? Can you at least detail your belief system a little more here?

It is not.

Ok man, have fun advocating for reducing penalties for rape to those for unpaid rent.

What is asserted without argument may be dismissed without argument.

Under which moral framework? Why? You're just throwing boo words out without actually justifying your position.

Sorry mate, I'm not playing with people who only do skepticism. Show me your moral framework, and I'll show you mine.

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Okay, but infants already have less rights than other people and don't have a say in much of anything, whether they are "sold" or not.

He's the one that tried telling me these criteria don't apply, I didn't rest my case on them. My case is that the child has a sacred bond with it's mother, that can only be broken in extreme circumstances, which "here's some heckin' dolarinoos" doesn't clear.

That argument applies to surrogacy 1:1.

Perhaps in the world before, when children were factual property of the head of the house. Today, as some lament, we do not own our children.

You have it backwards. If children were property of the parents, there could be no objection to surrogacy, because you can sell your property.

How do you define surrogacy as selling children if at no point does the child become the new parent's property?

What? My entire objection to surrogacy is that it does, in fact, make children into property. It's the only way surrogacy is even possible.

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I feel an instinctive revulsion at the idea of contracts that interfere in matters of marriage, fertility, sex, etc.

But marriage itself is a binding legal contract!

Yes and no. There is almost no contract freedom, even prenups are heavily limited. Marriage is more akin to legal status such as citizenship - as opposed to commercial contract. Which is kind of the point. If the law was changed so that spouses could add clauses such as "baby with genetic defect has to be aborted by my wife or she pays for emotional damage" into marriage contract, OP would probably also call that as revulsive interference in marriage.

Marriage was a contract historically, at least until it's become more like a suggestion in many countries.

I feel like the compromise would be to let the surrogate give birth to the baby in the case of birth defects against the wishes of the couple (her body, her choice and all that), but have the surrogacy contract stipulate that in that case the surrogacy turns into an embryo donation, so she gets to keep the baby and is not entitled to any compensation beyond the abortion indication.

That way, everyone wins: the couple does not have to raise a child with birth defects, and the surrogate does not need to abort against her wishes.

One might even go one step further and allow the surrogate (or really any woman with an unwanted pregnancy) to auction the surrogacy contract. A market-based solution to the abortion question, if you will. If anyone is willing to pay the surrogacy fee, that is a strong indicator that it is in the baby's best interests to be born, because they consider it viable and willing to spend money on it.

Agreed.

Well, the auction part sounds pretty psychotic. On the other hand, that’s kind of inherent to contract law. Even marriage contracts generate some insane implications.

That was pretty much my first thought. If you sign up for surrogacy, by all means keep the baby even if they're gonna be half-braindead, but don't expect to be paid for the job.

If anything here can be called demonic (as in, driven by alien forces beyond mere human wickedness), it is not the act of purchasing a child from a woman individually (rather than in lifelong contract), but the use of courts to arbitrarily litigate sums in vast excess of the original contract from, as far as I can tell, thin air.

That was pretty much my first thought. If you sign up for surrogacy, by all means keep the baby even if they're gonna be half-braindead, but don't expect to be paid for the job.

Disagree. The surrogacy is the service that was induced by the promise of the payment, and it's not reasonable to expect a warranty on a baby unless explicitly agreed to. She should get the money no matter what, but they should be able to refuse delivery.

Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

Logically, it can be. A -> B does not imply B -> C. Depending on the context it can or can't be.

However, in the context where a fallacy is alleged, statements are often not really about logic. Saying "slippery slope fallacy" is often not merely a statement about incorrect logical inference, but rather an attempt to claim that second-order effects won't happen. Often they do end up happening.

The slippery slope is often a disguised reductio. The argument is for B, because of principle A. The person making the slippery slope argument points out that principle A also supports actions C, D, E, and so on through Z which are basically extensions of B.

It is often use as a rhetorical trick to shift the burden of proof on the counterparty. Imagine somebody saying: just because I did not pay the last small $100 debt does not mean that I will not pay this $1000 debt that I am asking for now. This is just slippery slope - prove that I will not pay it!

So again, it is a rhetorical trick to selectively turn off deduction, risk assessment by switching burden of proof. In fact in these CW discussions the other side also relies on deduction and risk assessment, just the other way around: "Ah, the excesses will be curtailed by institutions and law." One can also say: "Really? Give me a proof that the brakes will work."

As someone who supports fathers' rights to an abortion, I see nothing wrong with the story. Surrogacy is an unfortunate intermediate step to proper artificial wombs, like Uber drivers. In both cases, we should treat any disputes as if we have already reached the final destination. If you rented an artificial womb and wanted to abort your embryo, you should be allowed to, unless the contract with the lessor explicitly forbids it.

Putting aside my feelings on your end destination, this doesn't work logically. It's like saying that you are looking forward to factories being entirely roboticised so right now we should enforce that workers toil 24/7 without stopping and lose all labour disputes.

The fact that people aren't machines and have feelings and rights is the point.

Not exactly like this, but I think that trying to maintain full employment so that people can buy food if the end goal is automating all labor is the wrong priority.

I am unmoved. Or, I think a clearer contract should have been established. It's wrong to force someone to get an abortion, but the gay couple should certainly have a line that says "under circumstances X, we are under no obligation to assume parenthood, and the surrogate can either get an abortion at our expense or raise the kid herself." Probably some edge cases there I wouldn't like, but you get the idea. It's fundamentally about expectations: everyone here failed to establish a shared understanding of expectations.

It entirely makes sense for someone who thinks all abortion is bad to object. But if it's fine for a het couple to abort a fetus with a cleft palate? Then people should be able to make that kind of consensual contract.

Even going to adoption, potential adoptive parents almost certainly have a strong preference for normal babies. Is that some terrible evil?

Though, all that said, the gay couple took the kid in the end. So there is negotiating power on the part of the surrogate who wants to have the kid but doesn't want to raise it.

I don't know. Many societies (e.g. Germany) have decided to not acknowledge a right to contractually sign away your bodily integrity (e.g. you can't sell your arm, while you are alive; the person taking it will be criminally liable for the mutilation regardless of your consent). I don't think there are obvious reasons why this is bad, beyond an easy-to-draw Schelling fence around "consenting adults shall not be restricted in their dealings with each other" which never actually existed anywhere. Once you have this, though, making reproductive autonomy another thing that a woman may not contractually sell is not a far leap.

That doesn't seem bad to me, if the implications are as I imagine it. I.e. if the surrogate reneges and doesn't want to deliver the product by wanting to keep the baby or aborting it, then the purchasers are SOL. Or if the purchasers change their mind and don't want that particular baby, the surrogate is SOL. A smart, mutually agreeable payment schedule would help ensure trust.

Might even be better than compelling a certain type of contract. I'd want everyone involved to not face government punishment for changing their minds.

People can sue for whatever reason.

Ironically

The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.

(Anyways, I think people should be allowed to sue for whatever reason, but it should really be more common that the accuser pays the defendant for a frivolous lawsuit, especially when the accuser is richer.)

Binding mandatory arbitration clauses in individually-negotiated contracts are benign and should be encouraged - even if they specify a Shariah judge or a Beth Din as the arbitrator.

That said, the objection to commercial surrogacy is that you should not be able to contract to sell children at all, not to the way a specific contract is enforced.

Binding mandatory arbitration clauses in individually-negotiated contracts are benign and should be encouraged - even if they specify a Shariah judge or a Beth Din as the arbitrator.

Why? It seems like an easy way to confuse the other party, for example by giving them favorable terms that are effectively false because any complaint goes to a biased arbitrator, meanwhile judges are experts at interpreting documents fairly and textually.

Iunno.

Judges are people and people are not necessarily fair or without bias. Ideally, a judge is fair and without bias, but ideally, this goes for a qadi or a dayan in much the same way.

I would rather not allow immigrant or diaspora communities to establish their own law systems, but that's not because I think those law systems are necessarily unfair, or more so than ours, though of course they may be. It is because I think we should remain in control of our own countries. For this same reason I would rather not allow companies to do the same thing either.

But it is historically quite common that a contract would specify under which of several competing legal systems any disputes would be resolved, and this would make complete sense if there are in fact multiple competing legal systems.

The briefest glimpse of surrogacy will show it's an utter house of horrors, and seeing all the nicey-nicey finger-wagging progressives and liberals defend it, was when the last bits of rationalism and liberalism left my body. It was oddly liberating, too. To think I spent all this time worrying about the moral judgement of people who don't bat an eye at a child being sold, and literal Handmaiden's Tale stans who somehow see no issue with it.

For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction?

I lost quite a bit of patience with "gay rights" when "love is love" and "they're just like us" crashed into the reinforced concrete wall of meeting actual gay people. I especially don't want to hear another word about the "AIDS """crisis"""", but all things considered I can still get behind the idea of tolerance.

Abortion is an interesting one. I was never a fan of it, but being libertarian for a good chunk of my life, I figured it's best to "keep the government out of it". Cases like this are interesting, because they show the Garden of Earthly Delights-esque path from "anything goes between consenting adults" and "my body, my choice" to "women are just incubators" - the very thing feminists thought pro-life thought implies.

I think it's fair to say that the AIDS crisis has long disappeared as a culture war issue.

It's not culture war, but I still hear people bring it up occasionally, with a very somber tone, and I'm over it.

The weirdest thing is the ads for AIDS medications on standard TV channels. I barely watch TV, but I was staying at a hotel a little while ago, flipping through channels, and apparently this is commonplace now? And we are collectively paying for it through health insurance... Fantastic.

After watching the most recent season of Top Chef, I am convinced that people with HIV are the core demographic for the show. A shocking proportion of the ads were for HIV meds.

literal Handmaiden's Tale stans who somehow see no issue with it.

Handmaid's Tale isn't horror, it's porn. Wishcasting. Subverting itself. A dystopian low-fertility future in which any random chick who can pop out a kid is a precious resource to be hoarded by the nearest warlord? Why that's just like the Old Days.

Handmaid's Tale isn't horror, it's porn. Wishcasting.

As a side note, I tend to agree with this. I just don't think it's a coincidence that the lead character (1) is highly valued by society; (2) is forced into copulation (and concubinage) with a high status man; (3) these types of things are very common fantasies among women.

“Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible, laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.”

Except from one of my favorite book reviews of all time, from Exiled a defunct Russian online magazine in the year 2000.

Funny enough they made an episode of the TV show recently called “exile” which made searching online for this review extra difficult and I’m almost certain that was done purposely because this review, and in particular this excerpt, has been shared online amongst literary types for years and years.

Took me like thirty minutes to find it when it used to be one of the top links on any search engine.

Edit: @TIRM, I see you’re a man of culture as well.

You can filter google results from before a certain year. Add before:2019 or before:xxxx date to your search query and it will return results that have not been updated since that date.

Thank you that’s very helpful, I’m pretty bad at these sorts of things.

I should mention that we had a discussion on it about a year ago. Fun times.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1121/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/240829?context=8#context

Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

Yes. Any argument for anything decent can be attacked with "this is a slippery slope towards..."

Building infrastructure like mass surveillance that can be used for good and evil is not a fallacy, but I wouldn't call it a slippery slope. The fallacy is, for example, arguing that a (completely optional) OS-level setting "is this user a child?" that gets sent to websites is a "slippery slope" towards mass surveillance.

Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect

Here, obvious issues are the couple, that they were allowed to go through surrogacy in the first place, the frivolous lawsuit, and that apparently Canadian surrogates are cheap and can be further ripped-off by forced arbitration.

There's a good argument against surrogacy in general: the state foster care system. Personally, I believe surrogacy is OK if the parents choosing it demonstrate extreme willingness and capability to raise their child (by going through extensive, tedious, and long screening, then paying something like $100,000), because then they would statistically better than the median birth parent. I still strongly believe gay couples who go through screening (not these men) should be allowed to adopt, because of the state foster care system: I'm confident a capable gay couple would raise a child much better than an incapable straight couple (even birth parents) and much better than Canada.

But let's get to the real argument: that the relaxing of social norms including gay marriage and abortion was a slippery slope towards the FUBAR state of Canada, which manages to spawn scenarios this catastrophic. I actually think there is something here, but it's not "gay marriage and abortion caused the failed state of Canada", that's a correlation error; it's that the world has changed, in ways that eliminated unimportant religious taboos, in ways that eroded religion in ways it was important, and in ways that created terrible bureaucracy and enabled frivolous lawsuits. The world was going to and will continue to change inevitably, and these changes can't be reversed, only repaired differently, like patching a stuffed animal. I doubt for example repealing gay marriage and abortion will reestablish good social norms, because they didn't cause those to erode in the first place but were a side-effect; instead, I think they must be solved in a completely novel way.

Abortion kills babies? Wow, you're telling me now for the first time.

I'm not really sure what makes this any worse than a mother deciding to abort her own personal child for birth defects. The fact that the rights to make decisions on the fate of the pregnancy were (allegedly) sold doesn't change anything apart from making the whole situation darkly amusing.

I wouldn't put ending voluntary abortion on my top 10 list of political ambitions, but it does warm my heart every time I pass by the abandoned ruins of what used to be the metro Planned Parenthood.

Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

It's an informal fallacy, which means it's all about whether there are other (usually unstated) assumptions doing the work. If you explain why the slope is slippery (e.g. it's lathered in grease), then that's not a fallacy but an argument. Most accusations of the slippery slope fallacy are just people deflecting the argument. It's actually very rare for someone to argue that because something has begun that it will inevitably escalate further like that's some general law of the universe, because nobody anywhere believes in such a law. They almost always think that there is some reason why the thing will escalate, though the reasons may not always be made explicit. The slippery slope fallacy is almost always bullshit.

I'm starting to get concerned about surrogacy for gay men specifically, intentionally creating a baby without a mother. We've had 15 years now I'd like to hear the real consequences studies of children raised without mothers at this point (from surrogacy and adoption). It feels like every couple of months we get these horrific child abuse stories about men adopting children and raping them to death, I'd really like to know if the average outcome is significantly worse or if these are outliers. That is NOT me saying that I'm morally opposed to homosexuality, just concerned by a trend.

Some of the 'every couple of months' numbers come about because the same cases are re-reported at each stage of the legal process. The Preston Davey case has been front page news everywhere from the initial allegations to procedural crap to the convictions (legitimately! that's a cw: worst thing imaginable), and I wouldn't be surprised or upset when the killers eventual 'fell down a staircase' ends up news, too.

That said, the denominator for gay surrogacy are low enough that it's still concerning with small N. Fermi estimate, I'd give less than 80k children of surrogacy or adoption living with gay male parents, and probably well under 40k. The "safer biological father" metric is still compared to the 'get the heavy flamethrower' numbers for stepfathers, but while I'd give moderately high confidence we don't have 400 rapes of surrogate- or adopted-children by gay men in the last fifteen years, I can't say the same for 40. So whether they're riskier is going to depend on what you think the base rate for monsters is.

For the broader question, there's a lot of studies, but they're pretty useless for anything short of piranha-level problems. Tiny numbers, massively self-selected on top of the normal selection pressures for surrogates, and a lot of evidence of p-hacking for what's reported versus what isn't. And, because gay surrogacy was incredibly rare before 2010, you're measuring for effect in middle schoolers, using very crappy tools. Still, when the massive problems are "gay dad having to buy tampons for his daughter is even worse than divorced dad", you're at least not seeing some massive BPD or autism effect.

I could imagine effects pushing in both directions for this, but isn't it also possible that gay parents abusing their children is more likely to become a polarizing headline in the first place, and thus increase the availability heuristic around gay parents being abusers?

When a straight father or stepfather sexually abuses or murders his kids, that's "dog bites man", and has hardly any staying power as a culture war issue. There is broad societal agreement that it is a tragedy, and while a particularly bad case during a slow news week might be reported by a local news station, it will rarely become national news. But when a gay teacher and sales manager abuse and murder their adopted child, there is more fuel for a culture war fire.

EDIT: Typo.

Yeah, that's likely to impact the visibility, especially if you're solely looking at news coverage. RAIIN's numbers are survey-based and victim-oriented, which probably overcorrects, but it's still an oranges-to-grapefruit comparison.

Just a nit: A quick search shows that there are about 500 filicide cases in the U.S. annually. That’s rare enough that I would expect almost all of those to make at least the local news, even if they don’t become national stories. Sexual abuse, sure, that’s distressingly common.

Without getting into the specifics of this individual case...

As Freddie said long ago, social conservatives have a really good track record when it comes to predictions. Generally they predict some consequence (which they consider negative) to a social change, the social change happens, and then the consequence happens exactly as predicted.

When I was a teenager, I was pretty thoughtlessly liberal on all the major social issues - or at least, on all the ones that I understood. I grew up in an atmosphere where it was just taken as axiomatic that of course social conservatives are wrong, and usually motivated by a combination of fear, ignorance, and bigotry, and all of history is a long scroll of them being wrong about everything. As I got older, I started to realise that that isn't always true, and then eventually realised that, hang on, they have in fact mostly been right. They haven't been correct in every single instance, but they have gotten most of them.

Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.

I remember a few months ago running into a tweet where someone said that they won't take conservatives seriously until they admit they were wrong on gay marriage and apologise. Naturally the conservatives say, "well, no, because we weren't wrong on gay marriage", and really, with every year that passes, I feel like the evidence is mounting that they were right.

Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.

My favourite example of this was when Scott recounted an anecdote in which he was talking to a friend and saying that he couldn't understand the classical prohibition on homosexuality, and his friend pointed out that the destigmatisation of homosexuality directly precipitated one of the worst pandemics in human history, killing young men in their millions. Even living in the Bay Area, in a social milieu with a disproportionate share of LGBT people; even being an avid GK Chesterton enjoyer; even being a qualified medical doctor who has probably read experimental studies about antiretrovirals and PrEP, it still didn't occur to him how the AIDS epidemic completely and utterly vindicated the stigmatisation of homosexuality. This isn't even a case where he failed to see how tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence could have hypothetical negative consequences down the line: this is where tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence did have extremely negative consequences decades prior and still does, and yet it didn't occur to him, even though it's a reality he's confronted with every day.

The article I was thinking about was "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" (archive link):

A while ago I was talking about this kind of cultural evolution idea to a conservative friend. I admitted I found them interesting, but also didn’t want to take them too far. Sure, tradition warned us against communism. But it also warned us against homosexuality, so it obviously also contains a lot of stupid stuff about what ancient people hated for no reason. We have to be selective in what we accept so we don’t keep the stupid stuff along with the ancient wisdom.

My friend pointed out that the obvious cultural-evolutionary-justification for homosexuality taboos was to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, which spread somewhat more easily through gay compared to straight relationships. Our ancestors didn’t have germ theory, so the best that cultural evolution could do was make people really against homosexuality for stupid-sounding illegible reasons. And within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US, hundreds of thousands of people were killed by a particularly awful disease, transmitted in large part through homosexual contact. From here:

By 1995, one gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1,600,000 men aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died – a literal decimation of this cohort of gay men born 1951-1970… In 1990, AIDS caused 61% of all deaths of men aged 25-44 (born 1946-1965) in San Francisco, 35% in New York, 51% in Ft. Lauderdale, 32% in Boston, 33% in Washington, DC, 39% in Seattle, 34% in Dallas, 38% in Atlanta, 43% in Miami, and 25% in Portland, Oregon.

Was improved tolerance and equality worth 100,000+ deaths? Honestly, both answers to that question would be equally horrible, so I’m not even going to try. On the other hand, now we have good anti-retroviral drugs, AIDS is mostly conquered in rich countries, people have been openly gay for decades, getting gay married, having gay adoptions, and nothing further has gone wrong. My guess is at this point the anti-gay traditions really are obsolete, the same as it would be silly to insist on nixtamalizing our corn the old-fashioned way now that we know the important thing is getting enough niacin to avoid pellagra. In fact, given how badly the religious groups that continue to insist on homophobia are doing, and how many of them are switching to the opposite position, one could even say that cultural evolution has spoken.

But still – the point at which the relevant sexual taboos switched from Untouchable Ancient Wisdom to Obsolete Bronze Age Bigotry was…the development of good anti-retroviral agents? How were we supposed to know that beforehand?...

The worrying thing isn’t just that the more intelligent, educated, and willing-to-use-Reason-to-debate-things you were, the more likely you would have been to say there was no possible downside to increasing tolerance of same-sex activity. It wasn’t just that I missed yet another a case of an apparently stupid/evil tradition actually having an illegible justification. It wasn’t even that I missed the case so egregiously that I used it as my knockdown example of “obviously some traditions lack justification”. It was that I missed it even after the problem had very publicly happened. I didn’t just fail to predict which cases of breaking traditions could have negative consequences, I couldn’t even retrodict it until a friend basically rubbed my face in it.

The passage quoted above is taken from the archive link. If you go to the version of "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" on the website, it's gone, with the note: "Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including." Never change, Scott.

One could argue that the problem was that same-sex relationships weren't de-stigmatised enough.

If there hadn't been such a large and powerful fraction of society opposed to the existence of gay people:

  • AIDS might have been treated as more worthy of public attention, rather that being initially ignored as only affecting people they thought didn't matter;
  • the public health advice might have been less "Stop being gay" and more "Either form exclusive relationships like straight couples do, or if you insist on having coitus with strangers, use a condom";
  • a lack of the former type might have made the latter more credible, with less pushback against the notion of any public health interventions from people suspicious that they were a camel's nose for eliminationist attitudes towards gay people (the Holocaust was well within living memory at the time);
  • less persecution of gay people in general might have led to them being less defensive of the only places where they could be themselves.

You could, but it would be quite stupid. Even today, with gay marriage sanctioned nationwide, and basically no stigma associated with gays outside of very niche communities 67% of new HIV infections are homosexual men. This is in spite of even the uninfected largely using PREP and the infected using antiretrovirals. And, oh by the way, those arent cheap drugs! They are state of the art medicine. John Schilling, who used to post on SSC, DSL, here, and ASX estimated the cost of 1 year of male buttsex exceeded the cost of refusing a Covid shot for the same year. Buttsex is still really bad and you shouldn't do it!

This has the same "Republicans pounce!" energy as those people arguing "the only reason people are aware of trans is because of anti-trans people talking about it!"

AIDS might have been treated as more worthy of public attention, rather that being initially ignored as only affecting people they thought didn't matter;

I read an article recently arguing that this claim is essentially a myth invented by LGBT activists, must see if I can dig it out.

the public health advice might have been less "Stop being gay" and more "Either form exclusive relationships like straight couples do, or if you insist on having coitus with strangers, use a condom";

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from cultural evolution. Joseph Henrich et al. argue that cultures which survive will be those that develop memes optimised for survival. The cultures may have explanatory hypotheses for why these memes are effective, those hypotheses may be dead wrong, and yet the memes themselves still work. Cultures organically converged on the idea that gay sex is dangerous centuries prior to the discovery of germ theory or the invention of reliable latex condoms. Their explanations for why gay sex is a bad idea were factually in error, but "gay sex is bad because Allah does not will it" and "gay sex is bad because you will catch a disease which will kill you in a matter of years" both suggest the same course of action: don't have gay sex.

Gay men in the 1970s might well have asked "well, why shouldn't I have unprotected sex with dozens of men who are all doing the same thing?" Most likely their family and friends wouldn't have been able to articulate a specific casual mechanism by which this was a bad idea. That doesn't mean their family and friends were wrong about it being a bad idea.

Scott was living two blocks from downtown Hiroshima and asking why everybody got so nervous about nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold. (I really wanted to gloss his complaint as “fake and gay,” but figured that could be mistaken for mockery). There’s clearly some sense where he’s correct, and HIV will see use as a political lever long after everyone who knew a victim is also dead.

I’m not sure how to square this other than a rather uncomfortable model: the amount of suffering around us at all times is literally inconceivable, but your brain works really hard to filter it out. Turn off too many of those filters and you end up going mad and/or effective altruist.

On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold.

No, I'm saying it was self-inflicted, and doesn't deserve more thought than a "men purposefully hitting their own balls with a hammer" epidemic. That the expectation that society would drop everything and save people who refused to take the barest of precautions, when their own lives were on the line, and they only did so for the purpose of sexual gratification (which they didn't even have to abstain from, just limit to a reasonable level), was deranged, as was the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral judgement when society failed to act fast enough.

Decades later we put half of the world under lockdown over a glorified flu, and anyone who didn't wear a mask when they were entering a restaurant, where they could sit without it for hours, was seen as a moral freak, but somehow we have to look at the AIDS episode as a giant tragedy, because it got in the way of a bunch of guys having unlimited orgasms. Then, to add insult to injury, we immediately dropped all Covid-era moral norms, when the same community brought in monkeypox.

How far had the destigmatisation of male homosexuality got in blue states when AIDS turned up in the early 1980's? It looks like blue states and libertarian-inclined red states repealed their antisodomy laws in the 1970s but most of the South still had them. And of course that is only the first stage in destigmatisation.

In the UK, homosexuality was still broadly stigmatised, even in left-wing circles, well into the 1980's. (The Labour Party was still dominated by blue-collar unions at the time). For example, Section 28 (which prohibited public-sector organisations promoting homosexuality) was broadly popular when it was introduced in 1988

According to Wikipedia, homosexuality in the UK was partially decriminalised in 1967. This article by Peter Tatchell claims that ~100k men were convicted of homosexual offenses between 1885 and 2013, of which 15,000 were convicted after 1967 i.e. an average of over 1,000 convictions a year before 1967 vs. 326 after. Obviously the UK population was much higher in 2013 than in 1885, so convictions per capita in the two periods would be much more disparate. Taking the population sizes at the beginning and end of the two periods and averaging them suggests the period 1885-1967 saw 2.2 convictions/100k population/year, while the period 1967-2013 saw 0.5/100k population/year. In other words, a gay man was more than four times more likely to be convicted for his sexuality in the period 1885-1967 than he was in the period 1967-2013.

This certainly seems consistent with the claim that increasing liberalisation and tolerance for homosexuality was a precipitating factor for the AIDS crisis.

I'll give a caveat that the really simple version, literally "within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US", doesn't line up the timeline right. The progression from HIV to AIDS to fatality takes the better part of a decade, the initial infection spike predated the normalization of homosexuality, the initial infections were probably WWII-era transportation results (and that difference explains a lot about the limited benefits of a Cuba-like quarantine), and to make it work you'd have to have the tail end of the Reagan era as the break of the taboo against homosexuality, to the surprise of Bowers v. Hardwick.

There's a stronger version that focuses less on the stigmatization and more the actions, especially in a more mobile world. But then the stigmatization didn't work, and arguably concentrated the fuckpile into three or four major cities where enforcement of the stigma become impossible and the disease could run far more rampant.

And there's a steelman about injuries and disease more generally, although that turns the confusing bit from "effective antivirals" to "consistent access to clean running water, antibiotics, good diet, and cheap lube".

So the Israelites knew about STDs, but not the Romans and Greeks?

Homosexuality prohibitions didn't stop 10% of Victorian Britain from getting syphilis.

The Israelites definitely knew about STDs, Leviticus contains specific regulations for dealing with what was probably gonorrhea.

So the Israelites knew about STDs, but not the Romans and Greeks?

Haven't you ever wondered why the latter two empires collapsed?

Homosexuality prohibitions didn't stop 10% of Victorian Britain from getting syphilis.

Yes, and yet you will notice that syphilis is far less lethal than HIV.

…unlike the first, which had such a great time over the next 2500 years?

And no, I think I’ve got a decent understanding of the Roman collapse. It really doesn’t line up with a narrative of (social) decadence and tolerance. Centuries of geopolitical pressure and food distribution far outweighed any trends in buttsex.

…unlike the first, which had such a great time over the next 2500 years?

Seems like a great argument for the tenacity of their memes (including prohibition on homosexuality) in the face of overwhelming hostility from literally every other tribe they came into (come into) contact with. The story of Jewish success is really a story of their having superior memes to their competitors: it's no wonder they've wielded such power and influence in Hollywood for so many decades.

And no, I think I’ve got a decent understanding of the Roman collapse.

Admittedly, my ascription of the collapse of these empires to that cause was somewhat facetious. But it is interesting that both empires collapsed or were absorbed into other tribes, while the Israelites are still going strong and a distinct cultural tribal grouping many thousands of years later.

Attributing the ascendancy of a particular species to a specific gene is foolhardy: it's a particular package or constellation of genes that wins out over its competitors. Likewise with memes: no single meme is necessary and sufficient. Cultures which survive and thrive are those with an evolutionarily fit package of memes, of which prohibition of homosexuality was likely one, but prohibition of homosexuality is not necessary and sufficient in its own right. A tribe which prohibited homosexuality but encouraged all its members to sterilise themselves or to eat hemlock could not reasonably expect to outcompete a tribe which did none of those things.

Yes, the Roman Empire heavily prohibited and criminalized homosexuality after the reign of Constantine. While pre-Christian Rome had complex social norms that tolerated certain same-sex relationships under strict conditions of dominance and class, the Christianization of the empire led to systematic legal and social bans

Hmm....

Yes, and yet you will notice that syphilis is far less lethal than HIV.

Sure, most STDs before HIV was not particularly lethal. But that would go against the idea that prohibitions on homosexuality were created because of devastatingly lethal STD epidemics.

STDs do impact female fertility though.

Sure, most STDs before HIV was not particularly lethal.

STDs that we know of. The Joseph Henrich argument is that cultures with memes optimised for evolutionary fitness will outcompete cultures without. For all we know, there could well have been ancient cultures in which homosexuality and free love were tolerated, and which hence went extinct at the hands of some sexually transmitted pathogen that modern medicine has never encountered.

I also think your rebuttal rests on an implicit Nirvana fallacy. Yes, cultures in which homosexuality was aggressively stigmatised still had STDs. Is your contention that, had they not stigmatised homosexuality, the rate of syphilis transmission in Victorian Britain would have been the same or lower?

Well, judging by the modern world, the pro-homosexuality meme has thoroughly defeated the gay bashers.

I don't know what this means.

More comments

It was also new- syphilis had not been in Europe prior to the discovery of the new world.

People are very good at not noticing things that are taboo. It’s the same thing every time- Scott just lives in a bubble where stigmatizing homosexuality is taboo.

I’d argue the overall situation is even worse because a) the leftist promoters of said social changes either denied that such negative consequences will take place or simple remained silent on this matter because they were aware that the majority will be either hostile or ambivalent towards these changes b) the long-term negative consequences that social conservatives predicted were in fact worse than this commie blogger makes it out to be and were still right in the end.

I have very mixed feelings about surrogacy. A friend of a friend offered to be surrogate for my friend and her husband, because my friend's medical conditions made it impossible for her to safely become pregnant. This strikes me as an incredibly selfless act and I don't have a moral problem with it, and I think the two main reasons are that the surrogate is known to the parents, and both parents' gametes are still involved in conception. But our society cannot keep anything "safe, legal, and rare", and I think it is realistic to worry about the moral risks of commercialized surrogacy, which I consider literally human trafficking. The "parents" are literally paying money to order a baby! And sadly for the ones who would be good fathers, I consider gay surrogacy to be way too high-risk to allow. There was the gay dads making content mocking their baby who was asking for "mama", Britain's first gay surrogate father getting charged with child sex offenses, the Australian gay couple who used a surrogate to purchase a child to abuse (archive of original article, journalist's "reflections"), and I'm sure I've seen more in the past.

There is also a literal horror story of gay couple - including public school teacher - who tortured 13 month old adopted boy to death in UK. Be warned, my wife who is otherwise cynical attorney was crying and had trouble sleeping after reading that shit. My blood boils even thinking about it. The whole chain ranging from how the boy was taken from his incarcerated mother, how his grandma was denied adoption for no reason, through how UK CPS, doctors and even colleagues of gay teacher ignored obvious signs of child abuse, down to literal satanic shit that these monsters did to the boy. It vindicates social conservatives in every step. Do yourself a favor and don't read it, just believe it is a horrific shit.

There was the gay dads making content mocking their baby who was asking for "mama",

Your link here is behind a paywall, but I will mildly defend this. While I don't think any parents should be mining their children for content online, and I would support strong social norms against it in general because of all the abuses we know happen when parents do this (and that's mostly straight parents!), it is simply not the case that that baby was asking for its "mama."

Some of the first sounds babies are capable of making are "mama" and "dada" / "papa" / "baba", and most human cultures have decided to treat those sounds as referring to the baby's parents. Some languages even reverse the mappings. A quick search shows that Georgian uses "mama" for "father", and "deda" for mother.

If the baby was saying "mama" and then started crying in the video, it was not the primal cry of an infant for its biologically female progenitor. It was the first babbling sounds of an infant, and if the two fathers treated it as a funny thing, it still probably functioned to teach the baby an early lesson about the rudiments of language, which will be just fine for its linguistic development.

There was the gay dads making content mocking their baby who was asking for "mama",

How is this much different from the career women whose babies cry when handed back from the nanny, other than those epic girlbosses having the good sense not to post tiktoks mocking it?

I am morally opposed to surrogacy- but you prove elsewise as well.

having the good sense not to post tiktoks mocking it

This does make the difference. What people do in private as individuals doesn't matter all that much. But they are actively ragebaiting on behalf of their whole group; not only did they think this was a good idea but their group seems to accept this kind of behaviour. They are going to get it back in their faces.

If there were career women going around celebrating in public that their babies cry and claiming this was women's empowerment, then no doubt people would start gaining opinions on women having careers. But they don't do that.

If you're obviously part of some group, no matter which one it is, then your actions will reflect on the group as a whole, unless the rest of them actively and visibly act to stop you.

(This is a more general principle: if someone misbehaves and his family doesn't seem to disapprove, you will think badly of the whole family, and this is still true in a homogeneous society without subgroups.)

You and @vorpa-glavo both make good points. Perhaps I have been too outrage-baited.

If you oppose two gay guys renting a woman for her body and then getting a lab to artificially inseminate her so they can live out their dreams of owning a baby but then it's not the baby they hoped for so they ask her to kill it and when she doesn't they try to sue her- if you oppose that, and your only argument against it is "it might get weirder in the future," you've already surrendered.

If you opposed any of the precursor policies 20 years ago, and the argument you settled on was "it might get weird in the future," then you surrendered back then. Saying "This is a slippery slope" at the start of the argument is a good opener, but saying it at the end of the argument (which trads ended up doing on all these issues) is a form of sulking surrender, like "Oh you'll be sorry one day." Well it's one day now and none of the winners are sorry. They just keep winning bigger and bigger, which makes invoking the slippery slope even funnier to them.

If you care about this stuff, you need to go to war or give up on the West, and especially the East, where they love abortion and suicide even more than we do. Accept that you live in a society where the average person has been totally given over to evil and futile hedonism, and react accordingly.

I don't know what "accordingly" means, but most people have settled on "I will live exactly like everyone else does except I will not kill my baby or my old aunt" which seems like cope. If the sort of situation described in the article is possible, there's something a lot deeper going on in society.

The argument wasn't "it might get weirder" it was (and is) "it will get weirder" and it will get weirder in very specific, predictable ways (plus some new man-made horrors beyond our comprehension and ability to predict). And it was hardly the only argument against gay marriage, legal abortion, etc.

If you care about this stuff, you need to go to war or give up on the West, and especially the East, where they love abortion and suicide even more than we do. Accept that you live in a society where the average person has been totally given over to evil and futile hedonism, and react accordingly.

That's an option, but without a critical mass of people on your side it's not a realistic possibility. One of the other options (and these are not all mutually exclusive) is to create your own pocket of sanity and stability in the world for you and yours, while preparing for when other, more decisive solutions to the issue become more feasible.

This is a bit of a one-sided spin.

According to the suit, filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by the National Post, the parents claim the surrogate didn’t adequately keep them informed about the baby’s health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality and caused them emotional distress.

[…] The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip.

But tensions flared again between the surrogate and the parents when she insisted on a home birth performed by midwives rather than in a hospital, as the parents requested due to the cleft lip.

The child had breathing difficulties during delivery but recovered when he was given oxygen, and that an ambulance was summoned to take him to the hospital, the report said.

After their child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate, who asked them to cover around $10,000 in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs and skipped contributions to her pension plan.

The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.

On one hand, I agree that the customers in this case shouldn't have any power to compel abortion, and "emotional distress" is just obnoxious litigiousness; the most they should be able to threaten is cancellation of the contract and the transfer of the baby's custody rights to the mother (not sure how the Canadian law currently works in such cases). But the fact that the child had a real medical problem which, by the way, could have led to lifelong brain damage is an important factor, and they seem straight up correct and responsible in demanding hospital birth.

Siding with a poor exploited woman against dem gay perverts is a very easy way to signal prosociality, and rather hollow, given that embryos not being people and having no right to life is a general societal consensus. Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's? As with Grindr-Tinder, the deviants mostly accelerate the propagation of the cynicism's frontier.

I find both parties corrupt here.

P.S. In fact, this specific detail might point to an ironic conclusion that half-assed Chesterton's fences are worse than committed social engineering from scratch. If you're turning childbirth into a services market and don't want gratuitous cruelty, you should regulate it like factory farming. Pull all soul out of it and replace with low-friction procedure. Hate abortions? Delegitimize cozy home birth with midwives. Surgery-maxx, develop in utero treatment. Actually, remove the mother entirely and speedrun to artificial wombs. The stable state of a post-Christian society is not quasi-Christian.

It seems obvious that a surrogacy contract should cover birth defects. If I were a client, there is no way I would sign something that did not give me an out: an explicit abortion scenario or, as you suggest, the transfer of custody and legal rights/obligations to the surrogate as the surrogate's option, possibly with further financial support in the contract depending just how rich I am. I also would not sign something that did not let me require a hospital birth or even c-section, with these again being problems that can be solved with money.

when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's

A couple of weeks ago. Some of us are actually pro-life.

when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's?

Yesterday, if you'll allow (presumptive) early-teenagers. It happens every couple months or so, it's not common but not exceptional either.

Claude says 1/630 live births have Down's and about 50% abortion rate (with bad tracking/stats), which suggests 1/315 conception rate. Compare it to 1/790 live birth rate in the 1970s (same source), and increased screening+abortion isn't even keeping pace with the increased incidence due to aging parents.

This is surprising to me. I guess Americans really re pro-life. I've stopped seeing young Down's years ago. Subjectively it seems they've been decimated in Russia, and probably many other places.

When I went to Catholic Spain a few years ago I was surprised by the much higher number of Down's syndrome kids I saw in public.

decimated

extirpated, you mean?

fair. I guess it's something in between, 50-80%, the surviving ones might just have low visibility.

Canada, not the US, but close enough. One very strong confounder is that we aren't seeing a representative sample of society. Even if there was the same rate in different areas (and we both saw the same number of people out and about), they might stay at home or be institutionalized in one country and "in the community" in another.

Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's?

I hate the Europoor eugenicists who have mostly eradicated kids with Down's on a similar level to how much I hate the people in this story, so what's your point?

I find both parties corrupt here.

"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby, but she chose to do a home birth instead of a hospital birth (which was not contractually required) despite the adoptive parents wanting one so they're both corrupt". I don't find anything corrupt or objectionable in the surrogate mother's behavior (other than agreeing to the surrogacy in the first place).

Europoor eugenicists

From an actual eugenicist perspective, raising a sterile mutant like a Down's baby is merely a waste of resources that could be used to raise healthy siblings. The chav mother with three (fertile) chav babies is doing far more damage to the long-term health of the race.

"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby

This seems to be fake news as they've abandoned this angle upon getting the medical conclusion that the defect is NBD.

I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and morally inconsistent with the opposition to abortion; and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.

Home births(or non-hospital birthing centers, which I suspect this actually was) aren't that dangerous. They're fairly common in the US(which Canada, whether or not it likes it, is enough of a suburb of that the same should apply)- certainly common enough that if they were particularly dangerous, this would be well known and called attention to by major medical bodies.

I don't protest home births in principle, but in this case it seems to have been ill-advised.

Yeah, I'll second this. The gay guys letter saying that they 'wish' for an abortion when they thought the medical defect was likely to be serious (which I'd find that really objectionable) was ill-advised, and the surrogate's home birth decision was ill-advised, and neither of these seem to really matter for the actual lawsuit/arbitration, which is mostly about compensation for additional costs and fees. Which is its own very stupid mess and everyone involved needs to grow up, but it's not very specific to surrogacy in ways that the home birth or 'do you abort under X conditions' questions are.

This is fake news.

My apologies, "We asked her to do it, and since she didn't we are suing her for a bunch of the problems we're claiming we have to deal with because she didn't do it" might be more accurate.

I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.

Home births with a midwife in the US (and I assume Canada) are often (though not always) safer than hospital births, at least in terms of maternal and child outcomes (selection effects and other things obviously play a role here). Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.

Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.

Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.

Indeed they are not, but nitpicking aside – they're less dangerous in the case of births for which we have a high prior about medical complications. If I were a parent-to-be, I'd be quite paranoid about breathing difficulties. Babies are sort of built to recover from oxygen deprivation, but there's a limit to that.

Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.

No I agree with you, it was a false claim on my part.

EDIT: Specifically, the news article I linked presented it that way and I accepted the idea uncritically, which was an error on my part, and I'm sorry about that.

It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing. Do you see evidence of an epidemic of surrogates being pushed by their clients to abort? Do you have any particular reason to believe that things like that, or things that you would find worse than this, did not happen in the past? My vague impression of humanity in general and European history in particular (which I am of course more familiar with than the totality of humanity) is that there was never a shortage of any of the ingredients here, like sexual compulsion, inferiors being made to bear children for superiors, abortion and actual infanticide out of convenience. It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth. But if it did, when exactly did we supposedly slip down a slope?

Impregnating slaves and then committing infanticide was the first moral crusade of the Christian church; it was acceptable in Rome and Greece, but strongly opposed by both Christianity and Judaism. This is well recorded as a controversy in the christianization of Scandinavia.

It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing.

It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.

This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.

It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth.

And in the past such behavior was punishable by law. Are you being intentionally obtuse here?

It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.

This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.

Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"? With the particular case at hand, I doubt a lot of progressives are particularly happy with what is going on either; it's just that they would pin their displeasure on the surrogacy aspect of it, not the abortion one. If almost nobody wanted an outcome and it happened in one instance, is that enough to make a slippery slope? In that case, there are really a lot of slippery slopes everywhere. Is every gun murder and mass shooting is at the bottom of the "slippery slope" that started with the 2nd Amendment? Is the entirety of the Anglo-American legal system a slippery slope that led to OJ Simpson walking free? If not, what's different there?

the past

Actually, I have to apologise there - I expected to find a particular shape of scenario (like "some nobleman forces his mistress to get an abortion") but after putting in some time to search it did in fact not seem to have occurred (at least not in a way that left any evidence known to us today). The closest-in-vibes stories I can find are Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, a variety of "queen used her legal authority to torture pregnant mistresses" stories, and the whole lot of sexual violence in American slavery (though I guess someone very upset at abortion in particular would find compelled impregnation/reproduction much less reprehensible than compelled abortion?). Mea culpa, my claim that similar things must have happened in the past was unsupported.

Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"?

Absolutely. For example, I'm pretty much a second amendment absolutist, but I'm more than willing to admit that certain negative things like mass shootings are inherently downstream of the mere existence of firearms, let alone the right to keep and bear them. I consider this a worthwhile tradeoff for the benefits the right of an individual to keep and bear arms provides. The difference between that and the arguments over abortion, gay marriage, etc. is that there was a massive contingent of the left who were effectively saying "Nuh uh! That totally won't happen" as opposed to "Yeah that will happen but it's worth it" or even "Yeah that will happen but it's actually a good thing too". I'm sure there are 2nd amendment nuts who claim that gun violence and mass shootings are worse in Europe or something silly like that, but they seem like a tiny minority compared to overwhelmingly monolithic voices 20 years ago insisting that stuff like gays adopting babies to rape them would totally never happen (one I personally heard tons of times back then).

I'm sure there are 2nd amendment nuts who claim that gun violence and mass shootings are worse in Europe or something silly like that

Ooh, I'll volunteer to be a silly nut!

WWII military fatalities in the European theater were around 15 million; something like 3.5 million of those were from small arms. (far more were from "guns" as a whole, but I'll spot you that unstated distinction, while still retaining the stated distinction between "gun violence" and other killing)

In the 80 years since WW2, the USA has had around 2.5 million suicides and homicides from small arms (mostly suicides, which IMHO are generally bad but not as bad as homicides, but again we'll stick with "gun violence" in general), roughly proportional to the population difference.

Europe's way lower on the gun suicide and homicide rates (maybe 0.5 million cases in the same time frame), but it's only fair to add that to the total, as well as maybe a hundred thousand from small arms in Russia/Ukraine/Chechnya/Yugoslavia/etc. wars., which probably (there are wide error bars on a lot of these numbers) puts them over the line to "worse". (within that time frame, but try to extend the time frame back and you aren't going to reach parity before you reach WWI)

There's room to argue for days over whether "small-arms violence is worse in Europe" is the right question to debate to inform policy, or what question would be most meaningful instead, but I just find it darkly ironic that when we reach for two of the most pro-European metrics we can think of, the one of greater magnitude may not technically be pro-European! Same energy as when I first learned that the most deadly mass shooting (of non-soldiers) in the US was a gun confiscation gone wrong.

Re: 2A there’s a pretty large ‘guns keep people safer’ contingent which is essentially what you’re describing.

I'm happy to accept that refusing to publicly concede that there is such a thing as a tradeoff at all, and their policies might not be all upsides, is an endemic vice of US progressives as well as many other movements that code left. I'm not sure if it's so much a left-wing thing as it's a "progressive and in power" thing, where if you have some utopian vision that you are already ramming through and just want to ram through faster against the feeble protestations of a browbeaten conservative opposition, conceding that there might be downsides at all is tantamount to surrendering to those voices who are begging you to slow down and reconsider (and you suspect are just angling for some more time to extract value under the curve of their evil ways before they are reduced to zero).

Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"? (and if they said "it will happen but that's a good thing"/"worth it" that would be enough to make it an "unfortunate consequence"?) Not only am I not sure I've seen evidence that the proponents actually addressed this specific case, it seems a bit strange to me to pin such a great distinction in evaluating a policy and its consequences not on anything about the policy and consequences, but instead on the honesty of the propaganda of its proponents.

Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"?

I'm saying that, when social conservatives said "This thing will probably (or will absolutely) happen" progressives often countered with "No it won't, that's the slippery slope fallacy!" I'm simply saying it's not a fallacy in this case. Someone acknowledging that it will happen and it's worth the tradeoffs or it will happen and actually it's a good thing are recognizing that the slope is in fact slippery, that the principle they are using to argue X also applies to Y, etc. etc.

...but doesn't that mean you don't in fact make the distinction? You seem to be saying that the cases of undesirable outcomes I mentioned (guns, procedural acquittals) are in fact all instances of slippery slopes, and there is just nobody making the claim that expecting the slope to be slippery is fallacious.

(When I say "slippery slopes", I really do mean what I understand that lemma to mean, not shorthand for "instances of the slippery slope fallacy". My view is that neither of the three cases in discussion (abortion, guns, procedural acquittals) should count as an example of having slipped down a slope, because there was no widespread slipping - guns caused a rounding-error number of mass shootings and still approximately nobody likes mass shootings, and legal abortion plus surrogacy are now producing a rounding-error number of surrogates being pressured to abort, which also approximately nobody likes)

Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

Eugene Volokh wrote a paper arguing how the answer could be no.

I would say that not only is it not a fallacy but many slopes are slippery. If A->B and A->C and A->D and so on to A->Z, you cannot consistently support A and oppose Z... and it is likely that eventually you will not.

The use of the term "Demonic" is off-putting.

I know. But there are no demons complaining about being painted in bad light, so I guess we could let is slide.

But if you want to make it properly demonic - The followers of Slaanesh (i do hope they didn't live life reckless enough to be of Nurgle) try to rent Daemonculaba, and the thing expectedly goes to shit and is litigated before Tzeentch.

It's not so much off-putting as ambiguous. Some people believe that these things are caused by literal actual demons, the kind that are repelled by holy water and ecclesiastical Latin. Does OP think that the appropriate solution here is the faithful application of the official Catholic Church manual of exorcism? Inquiring minds want to know.

I prefer hellfire as a solution. Hellfire missiles, in particular.

From "Are Demons Real?" by the Dreaded Jim:

There is also an excellent practical reason for believing in demons. It makes the behavior of our ruling elite so much more intelligible, and thus enables you to put on the armor of God, protecting you from being driven crazy by their craziness.

As Charlie Kirk, martyr for Christ, told us, the proposition that Church and Easter are inessential activities, but bars, race rioting, and burning down Wendy’s are essential activities makes so much more sense if you assume our rulers are possessed by demons. Really, it is hard to explain Fauci weaponising a formerly harmless bat virus any other way, and even harder to explain why he has not yet been executed for crimes against humanity.

Charlie Kirk’s assassin was radicalised by hanging out on forums full of trannies, and a whole lot of trannies give an overwhelming impression of being dead bodies controlled by hostile alien entities. When one runs into a trannie, it is sometimes hard to disbelieve in demons.

I find most of the post you linked pretty bad.

Scott Alexander has written enough about culture-bound disorders that I don't find it implausible that several Western psychological disorders are psychogenic on some level (while allowing for a core to some of them that will happen regardless of culture), but I don't really find the framing of depression or PTSD as "demons" to be very helpful.

Even if it turned out that from a God's eye view, that it is better for Western society's collective mental health to not allow therapy speak or knowledge of disorders like depression and PTSD to be widely disseminated, that still wouldn't justify thinking that all of these labelled mental illnesses are best characterized as demonic influence.

From a Christian standpoint, aren't we living in a fallen world tainted by sin? Why can't COVID, PTSD and depression be as "natural" of a consequence of Adam and Eve's transgression as death or pain in childbirth? Why do they have to be demons specifically? The gospels do feature Jesus casting out a lot of demons, but sometimes there is no demon and he just removes the cataracts in a blind man or ends the constant menstrual bleeding that a woman has been suffering for 12 years. Why is it better/more helpful to view COVID/PTSD/depression as the former kind of issue, and not the latter kind?

Your daily reminder that the Catholic Church does not waste exorcist’s time with cases that haven’t been signed off on by a shrink as ‘yes, is possessed, not just crazy’- and every case of a psychiatrist claiming to have seen exorcism work is because he(and this is normally a man) was contracted by the Catholic Church to do this.

From a Christian standpoint, the whole world is essentially the domain of Satan and his demons. For instance, Satan is referred to as the 'prince' of the world, and offers worldly power to Jesus when he tempts him.

Certainly, many physical events are not tied to the action of angels and demons, since the world generally follows material laws. But Christians will talk often about 'spiritual warfare', which is when the influence of demonic forces coming against the will of God or the work of the Holy Spirit. Because the world is fallen, the demons have influence here, and it seems that this is the way God has set things up. He could, of course, redeem the world and cast down all the demons - indeed, He has promised that He will do this when Jesus returns - but until then, the demons continue to have influence. I would also argue that most demonic influence comes through people, not through them causing earthquakes or the like (disease might fall somewhere in the middle).

As to why this is a helpful view? Firstly, if it's true then it will help you understand the world. Second, it accurately describes how many people act. The 'demonic' is often seen in self-interest, cruelty or callousness, the kind of behavior that we pretend is not normal. Having a perspective that includes the demonic will allow you to better predict human behavior, because it overcomes a positivity bias that many people have i.e. 'thinking the best of people'. Thirdly, people have better psychological outcomes if they see purpose in the things that happen to them. This is a bit of a cynical take, but it can actually be more healthy for many people to believe in demons than to believe that bad things happen with no reason.

OK

Slippery Slope is absolutely not a fallacy and I'm convinced that its inclusion as a fallacy in high school/college curriculums is some sort of psy-op to create a population that will continue to give away their rights again and again and again.

Many of the formal fallacies - if not all of them - can be actually useful. Just go through them. Genetic fallacy of discounting argument based on source. Yeah, because nobody believes in arguments of their good friends over some randos. Fallacies of Tu Quoque specifically but also Ad Hominem generally: yeah, because it is so irrational not to invest into this otherwise sound looking investment opportunity, if the seller himself did not do it. Or why should I not discount schizo meth addict's opinion on almost anything.

In real life you have limited capacity to evaluate information, you don't know what you don't know, many decision are probabilistic and not exactly provable by formal logic, so you just use various heuristics when it comes to practical decision making including informal fallacies. Knowing of them fallacies is still good, but it is not some stone-etched principle that should railroad you. In fact, they are often used by skilled people for pure rhetoric - blaming somebody of committing fallacies left-and -right is by itself used as ad hominem, attacking their person as trustworthy source.

I don't have any conclusion besides surrogacy being deeply and unfixably evil. It's just plain human trafficking, and there's no way around it. Treating humans like livestock to be bred and purchased is genuinely evil, and I haven't found anywhere (besides Italy) that even pretends to grapple with this.

a minor birth defect (the article doesn't specify what)

It says "a minor heart defect" farther down in the article.

palette

palate

Thanks for the corrections, I missed the heart defect part.

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