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Destiny's line of argument here sounds quite a lot to me like confusing the map for the territory. Murphy probably has 1000 reasons that sex work is bad, all of which add up to a belief that sex work in general is bad. Go after any one reason and prove that it doesn't apply to everyone, and that doesn't invalidate the other 999.
There's very rarely actually a principled reason why a word is always morally wrong in 100% of cases. You could do the same thing with things seen as straightforwardly bad, like rape. "The problem is lack of consent? So what if one person withdraws consent but the other has no way of knowing, is that wrong? So your problem isn't REALLY lack of consent then, is it?" The endless search for noncentral but epistemically pure hypotheticals detracts from the overall process of truth-finding. It's a rhetorical tool, nothing more.
In an ideal world people would admit this ("okay there are situations where sex work/racism/rape/abortion is moral") but then they lose ground. There is no incentive to do so, especially in the face of uncharitable questioning by a hostile interlocutor.
This is precisely why people actually go to great efforts to understand and explain what is going on in cases like this. See, for example, the major works of Wertheimer/Westen on consent to sexual relations. I have zero doubt that if you tried this gotcha on them, they would have an immediate thirty second response. I happen to disagree with some of their positions, generally, as I don't believe in a consent-only sexual ethic, but I have no doubt that they have thought about the issue in significant enough detail to be able to easily reply. I think it, frankly, is an indication that a person hasn't sufficiently thought through an issue if they get caught out this easily on it.
Of course, that shouldn't be surprising when it comes to political talking heads. The sheer range of issues they are setting themselves out to address means that they're almost certainly to get caught out sometimes. Think of this general discourse as watching top-tier chess tournaments. The participants may actually have thought about it far more than lay folks, but the game is so incredibly broad, you still regularly see folks just get totally caught out by some opening prep idea. Of course, when that happens and they get embarrassed publicly, they immediately go home and study it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Compare to academic types, who are more like what chess players could get away with in the pre-computer-prep era - the guy who played the same opening every time and just knew it better than you.
I think the lesson we should take often depends on which type of person it is, which type of game they're prepping for, and what the result looks like. Thinking of chess again, in the computer era, even a specialist in an opening can get absolutely wrecked if they get stung with dynamite novel computer prep. But we're not going to see them just get absolutely bamboozled by just some basic shit in an opening that we know they have to have realized was likely.
Rufo is 'prepped' for talking about Marcuse, modern discrimination law, etc. Jefferson is a not-insignificant sideline, but it's definitely a sideline. Iain Anderson? Dude got blown off the board by a beginner who learned like the most common first six moves of the Sicilian.
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Can you name a single view, or thing, that has a thousand clearly distinguishable 'reasons', of approximately equal importance, that aren't (when considered properly) part of a broader and more relevant reason? I can't.
Why is welfare good? Because people can buy food, get electricity, not get sick, buy cars that help them get their own jobs, ... you could list a thousand things like this, but they all have something in common! A reason of "use money to improve peoples' material conditions, which is an end in itself" neatly sums it up.
Why do we have lines on freeways? There are a few reasons, but not 999. Why do humans have blood vessels? Well over thousand different things are transported, sure, but ... 'transporting stuff' sure does sum all of them up, and you'd say that in an argument, not listing every nutrient and waste product. Why do animals want to have sex with other animals? You could list every neuron, or every potential ancestor who didn't reproduce due to non-horniness, but ...
The things we do and use are mostly purposeful, encapsulation and patterns makes them easier to understand and use, whether you're a human or the blind idiot god of evolution, and as a result the ways they interact or go wrong are usually relatively simple to describe, at a high level. At the very least things have a clear hierarchy to them. Why does too-high temperature damage humans, or why does water damage a phone? There are a thousand low-level reasons ... but the high level reason of 'changing temperature changes a lot of chemistry, and humans depend on a lot of chemistry, and natural selection operated in a certain temperature range' works quite well.
The closest example of something that has 'many equal importance causes' are the output bits of a hash algorithm - which exists precisely because it's impossible to understand what parts of the input cause any particular bit to be set!
Also, in practice OP just makes excuses for a gish gallop. How can we ever come to any conclusions if you can have 999 good reasons for something? At a minute each, thats' 16 hours...
Any argument about welfare that's more sophisticated than "buys food, food good" is going to apply differently to the items in that list; they're going to have different tradeoffs and incentives, to the point where no nontrivial argument can be made for them as a group. Yes, you can sum up the group and rephrase it as one item, but pretty much no legitimate argument applies to that one item. (But sophistry often does apply to that one item, as in the Jefferson racist example.)
I do think 'it is a fundamental good to help people', and decreasing marginal utility of money, applies to the entire group and is a legitimate argument often made for social support / wealth redistribution?
Even beyond that, there are a lot of specific nontrivial arguments that apply to the entire group. Eg "welfare disincentivizes work" is fairly uniform across what the welfare is for because money is fungible.
And the ways the subtopics differ are hierarchically grouped - we can differentiate essential needs like food/medicine and discretionary wants, and say we want the former but not the latter. That's still two reasons, not a thousand. There's structure that makes OP's '999 reasons, knocking out one doesn't matter' not work.
(note that every object-level argument I'm writing here is mention, not use)
That fails to be more sophisticated than "food good", except it's "help good" instead. Not just because it contains few words, but because it implicitly assumes that there's no need to balance the benefit from the help against anything else.
er, that's what 'decreasing marginal utility of money' is about. we're evenly weighting personal well-being or happiness or w/e, and the balance is that taking money away from high-earners lowers their utility less than it increases the utility of low earners. In non-robot terms, that means "joe affording an android phone is worth denying Sarah her 20th dress of the month", or even "bill affording two nights at a a cheap bar is worth jeff not having one night at an expensive bar".
And I think that this, while obviously complicated, like everything, is a "single, coherent reason" in a way that avoids the 999 reasons thing
(if this isn't a specific nit and it relates to a larger-scale point about my original post, it's going over my head)
There are other things to balance against than the benefit to high earners. "What bad incentives does it create", for instance. And if you're going to argue for welfare in such general terms that you're making one argument for the entire category, you haven't actually restricted it to situations where the money is taken from high earners in the first place.
The larger point is that "my side of the argument" is different from "the argument". If you don't need to defend your argument, it's easy to state it in very broad terms that apply to a very broad category. If you do have to defend it, this is no longer so.
I agree. But if we engaged in a debate about 'is welfare good', we could nail down the primary benefit (marginal utility, increasing total welfare), and then move onto potential countervailing issues - you'd probably agree that there are that and 0-5 other general things that make welfare potentially bad, and then we could go into detail on those.
Sure, but the broad statements help scope the more detailed defense. You may have hundreds of distinct points to oppose welfare, but they can all be grouped into broad categories - which you'd name when Destiny asked you 'what are your reasons for opposing it', and if he said 'would you be fine with welfare without those' you'd say 'yes' or 'yes, but that's an impossible hypothetical' (which is what i'd say in that circumstance), and then the discussion would narrow into one of your points.
With Megan, he can't do that - he can either engage with her on 'it's about women' or 'it's about penetration', and then if he wins that argument megan will just say 'yeah but its still bad without those' an hour later, and then both parties will run out of time, unsatisfied.
The broad statements help scope the more detailed defense, yes, but the more detailed defense is still important enough that answering one objection doesn't necessarily mean, and often doesn't mean, answering another. You can't just say "the welfare argument is about helping poor people, and either you do or you don't agree with that" and claim it's some kind of gotcha when someone specifically objects to, for instance, building homeless shelters, because "don't you think it's good to help poor people?"
If you mean that the number of arguments isn't literally 999, sure.
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The broader and more relevant reason in this case is just "sex work harms those who engage in it." I never claimed that all 1000 reasons are of equal importance or cannot be summed up, but that finding an example where 1 reason does not apply does not invalidate the other 999.
Your hypothetical begs the question. In a debate there's no way someone waits for you to rattle off all 999 reasons. They will engage with the first few, then come up with a few more general counterarguments of their own. If your first few claims are easily defeated, then it stands to reason the other few hundred are of similar or inferior quality. Finding exceptions to any one claim though doesn't actually defeat that claim.
"Use money to improve people's material conditions, which is an end in itself" is not actually the part of welfare that people disagree with. Same with lines on freeways, blood vessels, etc. All of those examples are very unlike the debate being had here, because people generally agree with your phrasings of them. A better example would be something like "is drinking alcohol unethical." It makes people more abusive, it makes them waste money, it causes drunk driving, etc. but are any of those an actual principle making alcohol immoral? There are certainly exceptions to all of them. In reality, most people's genuinely held ethical positions are simply agglomerations of more fundamental principles. If something is bad enough often enough then it's simply unethical.
I expect this is Murphy's actual position. Sex work can be OK, but only under circumstances rare enough that it's much easier and better to ban it altogether than to give the bad actors a pretext for their less virtuous actions. I don't think Murphy is as intelligent as people on here seem to think (especially @ymeskhout, who's referenced her like 10 times) and I doubt she (or her interlocutors, to be fair) are capable of actually recognizing this. So how would you suggest they go about conducting this debate, if not by directly engaging with (rather than finding rare and unrepresentative exceptions to) a few of her claims about the supposed harm sex work causes to sex workers?
The idea is that - if you're making an argument, the onus is on you to present the broadest and most convincing reasons up front. If the first reason you present is one of the smaller reasons, only responsible for .5% of your belief - why even mention it? Mention one of the big 'classes of reasons' (which is itself a "reason").
I mean, that's three things, and they're all broadly within "alcohol makes people behave badly". There's another important factor, which is "alcohol is physically unhealthy". So that's two large-scale reasons, each of which have three to six big more specific reasons within them. That's reasonable. It works with my above comment, and isn't a gish gallop.
A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!
Tbh I spent most of the comment trying to come up with a reason I believed for "why don't some things have 1000 different reasons", because it seemed true but I wasn't sure why, as opposed to thinking about arguments.
That's only true now because people broadly agree with welfare, it's popular, and widely implemented. Some (including me, to an extent) do disagree with that.
Sure, but on any specific topic those principles are, at a high level, relatively simple, there aren't a few thousand of them. I think this is true about sex work, too! For some people the 'one reason' is that God or Traditional Values said NO. For others the reason is sex is for reproduction and porn isn't reproduction. For others (feminists) it's bad because it exploits women and propagates social values that exploit women, or something. For even more all three of these, and one or two more, mix together.
I basically agree with Destiny and ymes that megan's both a bad debater and doesn't have a coherent source for her points of view.
Part of why Megan responded poorly to destiny's approach is she's not a systematic thinker and is a normal person who doesn't like having her ideas 'attacked'.
I think the right move if you're trying to convince her is to try to meet megan where she's at right now, and try to come up with a narrative for her points of view that she'll agree with but is fairly concrete, and even show sympathy for and agree with parts of it - and hopefully she'll feel positive about you at that point - and then try to show its inadequacies by exploring some of the consequences for it, trying to connect it to other beliefs she has or experiences she's had.
Even if you don't want to do that, and more want to own her for an audience, I think destiny's approach isn't ideal, it seems a bit autistic, and Destiny and most people here probably know the good anti-porn arguments better than Megan does so making her awkwardly spell them out in response to hypotheticals isn't really necessary other than to own her.
I don't get why we're still talking about this. I agree with you here. Meghan also did this and then was later asked to clarify her position, which was when she got into the specifics. It was there that Destiny looked for exceptions rather than engaging with the examples provided.
I don't think the whole "penetrative sex" excerpt is representative of the whole debate, but even in reference to just that section, this comparison still isn't very accurate. A better comparison would be something like:
Meghan: "I dislike alcohol due to its negative effects on people."
Destiny: "Like what?"
Meghan: "Like abuse."
Destiny: "What about women drinking alcohol? They can't abuse men."
Meghan: "Yes they can, especially on alcohol."
Destiny: "What about female children?"
Meghan: "How many alcoholic little girls have you heard of? Besides, I think it's bad for them to be alcoholics too."
Destiny: "So there we go, abuse has nothing to do with why you actually think alcohol is bad. I still have no idea why you think it's unethical."
You can see why this whole tactic is disingenuous, right? Meghan's a bad debater, yeah, but Destiny is outright dishonest.
At this point she could have brought up a separate reason why it's bad for little girls to be alcoholics, but then she'd cede the ground about how abusive alcoholics aren't a big issue. She could have talked about the noncentral fallacy, but I doubt she's even heard of that, and she'd already tried to do so a few times with her references to talking about a "fantasy world" vs reality. So instead she quit.
Yes, and at a high level, Meghan articulated her main belief, which was that the porn/prostitution industries enable quite a lot of exploitation. Destiny dug into that and started getting into hyperspecifics, so it's unfair to blame Meghan for coming up with answers to his questions about those specifics. It's totally fair to have a thousand reasons for why porn causes harm, and for the very first reason cited to not cover literally 100% of possible cases.
Agreed, but I think a bigger part is that he was just being disingenuous. He kept coming up with extreme exceptions ("you don't think a girl selling foot pics is the same as a 9-year old getting gangraped, do you?") and then getting upset when she objected to his characterization of her point, because if she refuses to engage with his noncentral examples then her central examples must be dodging the question. He really wanted to equate the overall porn industry with the most milquetoast parts of it, and any attempts by her to steer the conversation towards central examples such as pornhub were met by derision and accusations of bad faith.
If I were trying to change her mind, I'd have attacked the Nordic model she favors. The thing about her position is that it is in essence a criticism of the status quo. You can't really debate that without defending the status quo, which really does have many issues. So the thing to focus on would be "how would you fix things" and then discuss the weaknesses with that. This is more rhetorically powerful, more direct, more likely to actually change her mind, and much more productive.
Rewatched this part of the debate - this was directly in response to (compressed)
Destiny's using a lot of hyperbole, but it's not really dishonest, as it's in response to Megan unreasonably conflating porn and prostitution while arguing they're bad due to risk of exploitation. It'd be more dishonest if it was unprompted, because he'd be implying megan was conflating them - but she kinda was!
==
His first hypothetical is a direct question of: "if there was a company with no exploitation, would you be fine with i?t", in response to her bringing up exploitation in the past. She waffles on this question. He then explains he's asking because he's heard her claim she wants almost all pornography outlawed - and he believes quite a bit (i'd guess >25-50% from his statements) of existing online sexual content weighted by revenue is currently not exploitative, so her arguments don't justify the claims she's made elsewhere.
Then
I think this is also reasonable from Destiny. He's trying to figure out what the shape of her view is - how much does the 'woman' part really contribute? It's not implied that 'if she thinks prostitution/porn is bad, she must think it's bad for men', as it kinda is in your hypothetical - she's free to take either direction in the fork.
You could argue this is somewhat dishonest - maybe she thinks female matters a bit but there are other factors too - even so, it's a more reasonable claim than every inference Megan has made in the past five minutes of the debate. But it's not dishonest in the context of a broader claim that he's making, and has explicitly said - even if he wins on every factual argument Megan makes, she'll keep jumping from argument to argument (as she has) because she isn't in this due to arguments.
The massive difference between Destiny's argument and your example is - his hypotheticals are in direct response to claims Megan has made. In your dialogue, Destiny brings in the 'female' and 'children' distinctions - in the above dialogue, Megan introduces the 'vulnerable' and 'female' distinctions.
About then she ragequits.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong. Destiny's approach here isn't actually going to tease out why Megan dislikes porn, it's just going to make her look stupid. It's probably better to assume she means 'female vulnerability makes a bad situation worse', even if that is a steelman, and debate that instead (while still mentioning that you're doing that). I think you can do that while still making her look stupid, although idk if my video would blow up like his did!
I think I would have, instead of going all logic-bro, told detail-rich stories about the kind of solo-content only onlyfans model destiny mentions, or boyfriend and girlfriend who make content with themselves and threesomes, and then gotten her to directly denounce those, and then explored the tension between her claims of exploitation and the stories.
==
Aside from that last sentence, this is a funny discussion because neither of us care about the object-level issue of 'was destiny slightly dishonest in the debate', unlike CW questions, it's just exploring a very mild disagreement out of technical interest in the disagreement.
Yeah I think we're on the same page, or close enough anyways. Still, I do have a few quibbles.
Well what she says is that selling sex is selling sex. His immediate response is to bring up porn which isn't selling sex. You could look at this as an attempt to pinpoint her position, but to me it seems more like a disingenuous argumentative tactic. At this point in the discussion he knows what her central point is, and is choosing to call her out on these little details rather than engaging with it at all.
I think her claims make a lot more sense in the context of her original claim, which was that the porn industry has a lot of exploitation. That is the most important reason porn is unethical, as she has stated, and he goes looking for another one as if she hasn't provided one already.
She comes up with reasons porn is bad, he finds exceptions, rinse and repeat. I'd have more charity towards him if he engaged with any of her points rather than finding exceptions to all of them. Of course, she can defend herself (well, she can't, but it's her job to) and if she were competent she could have called him out on that better.
In the end this terrible muddled mess is kind of what they both asked for though. They both make money stirring up controversy, not discovering truth, and in that they're both experts regardless of their skill at debate.
I'm fascinated at how much you and @curious_straight_ca dissected this exchange. I'll repost a relevant comment I made elsewhere that also includes how I would construct an "honest" version of Murphy's objections:
The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.
There's a pattern here. She just moves on to another, then another, then another etc. all without any acknowledgement. It's hard to tell what she actually believes in because she just keeps mechanistically cycling through her repertoire! The "coercive because money" argument got immediately thrown out without any acknowledgement and never made a re-appearance, and that's because Murphy knew she'd have to admit that all jobs are coercive. We didn't get much of an epilogue for the "coercive because sex" argument, but I'm guessing she realized she'd have to admit that hetero sex is at least somewhat rapey. I also gather that after already confirming she believes males engaging in sex work is also unethical, she realized she wouldn't be able to offer a reason for that position (I can't think of one based on what she said, but maybe you can?).
If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of her argument, it might be something like this:
"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."
I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).
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Yeah, close enough.
I actually don't think exploitation is the main reason porn is unethical - it's that it subverts the productive instinct towards reproduction in favor of something meaningless. But I don't think the puritan moral rage you generally see from reactionaries at this is a well-calibrated way to fight it.
Destiny's been a lot better in the past few years at attempting to discover truth instead of stirring up controversy, and most of his conversations aren't heated or adversarial like this one was (whereas in the past he was a lot more debate bro-ish). Imo ideally, heat/conflict and accuracy don't have to be incompatible, but a lot of social incentives make them so in practice.
Yep, agreed. I meant to imply that Meghan's view was that exploitation is the main issue, not that that was my own view.
Do you have any good examples of Destiny being more fair? I'd love to see one. Ideally he'd be interviewing / debating someone across the aisle (rather than just someone who is a Marxist rather than a socialist for example).
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It's why I'm glad people like Robin Hanson exist, or else we wouldn't have oeuvres like Gentle Silent Rape
Hanson is either trolling or socially clueless. "Gentle silent rape" implies that central examples of rape are gentle and silent.
How does it do that? Hanson quite explicitly narrowed his questions about rape in general to "gentle silent rape":
A few hours later he called out again that gentle silent rape differs quite a lot from standard rape:
So no, Hanson is not implying anything of the sort.
The title doesn't contain any disclaimers and it's far more prominent than the place in the article where he does have the disclaimer, simply because titles work that way. He's doing it that way because he knows very well that people will read the title as being offensive, and he's trolling people by tricking them into making reasonable in context interpretations and then saying "see, that's not what it literally says, if you read the fine print, so you're literally wrong".
There's a reason why we have the concept of clickbait titles.
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