This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/
This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.
But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.
I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.
Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.
Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.
Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.
That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.
I’d say this is a pretty uncharitable way of describing the pro-abortion position.
More importantly, there’s a symmetry. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers have to defend their beliefs? Why is it obvious that conception is the important point, and not implantation, heartbeat, brain activity, premature viability, birth, sexual maturity, or first tax return?
You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.
Some of these positions are frankly pretty insane. Others are just unreasonable. I’d say both “conception” and “birth” are in the latter category. Not coincidentally, policy tends to fall somewhere in between, because it’s not actually an obvious question.
I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.
A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.
You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.
So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.
It’s the same reasoning that makes the “but for” test so common in law. Lots of normal intuitions about causation and liability are covered, but you can still get to some pretty perverse results.
Something like 30-50% of eggs fail to implant. That probably compares favorably to acorns, but the fact remains: those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg. Are they immoral for taking the action?
Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?
Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?
A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action. Demanding she let the mechanical process continue looks unjust. But so does killing the child for the sins of the literal father. Hence the disaster that is “victim blaming” discourse.
Combine the two, and you end up with something like the Violinist argument, where the victim had no expectation of being used to support another human. Pulling the plug is framed as a return to the last state she expected.
Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?
Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?
Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.
Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".
I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.
Hey, somebody in the other thread pointed me to search.pullpush.io! I wanted to share the existence of a working search tool.
I found my previous conversation on the violinist here. Not sure if you're any of the other participants.
Thanks for being a good sport about this discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
I do remember our previous discussion regarding the rope. With Reddit’s decisions to cripple search tools, I can’t find it either. I remember having some objections to the metaphor, but I’ll agree that it avoids the main pitfall of the violinist.
That said, the only reason I mentioned the violinist was to point out that a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything. Especially if one wants to account for expected outcomes. But at the same time, expected outcomes are really important.
In the case of a couple genuinely trying to conceive, they can still expect a >30% chance of failure to implant. They’re increasing the chance of a dead embryo from 0% to 30%. The only way to avoid that outcome is abstinence. But it’d be outrageous to assign blame based on that reasoning. Why?
Is it because they’re trying their best? We don’t have any way to create children without that 30% rate. A necessary evil. I am very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, which still doesn’t provide a good way to decide which ends merit such a gamble.
I think it’s worth considering whether those embryos really are as valuable as their implanted—or born—cousins. Or that intentionality isn’t enough to settle the argument.
Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.
Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.
You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link