To say “I don’t see the use of this” is often a euphemism for “I see the harm this does, and it does not appear to achieve any counterbalancing benefit. Indeed, its purpose appears to have always been to cause harm, and so it should be cleared away expeditiously.”
Um, people generally don’t build fences to gratuitously cause harm.
Um, people generally don’t build fences to gratuitously cause harm.
That’s either trivial, or false.
It’s trivial if you define “gratuitously cause harm” such that wanting someone else to be harmed always benefits oneself either directly or by satisfying a preference, and that counts as non-gratuitous.
It’s false if you go by most modern Westerners’ standard of harm.
There was no reason to limit Jews to ghettos in the Middle Ages except to cause harm (in sense 2).
There was no reason to limit Jews to ghettos in the Middle Ages except to cause harm (in sense 2).
Er, this looks like a great example of not looking things up. Having everyone in a market dominant minority live in a walled part of town is great when the uneducated rabble decides it’s time to kill them all and take their things, because you can just shut the gates and man the walls. Consider the Jewish ghettoes in Morocco:
Usually, the Jewish quarter was situated near the royal palace or the residence of the governor, in order to protect its inhabitants from recurring riots.
When you tell people to look things up, be sure you first looked it up correctly yourself. That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
Since I lost karma for that, I’d better elaborate. Your specific quoted line shows that protection was the reason for the ghetto’s placement, given that they were going to have one. It does not say that protection was the reason for having a ghetto.
Your own link says that “Jewish ghettoes in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Christian environment”. The only mentionthat is anything like what you claim is halfway down the page, has no reference, does not name the location of the ghetto, and neither 1) says whether Jews could live only there or 2) if so, gives a reason for why they were prevented from living anywhere else.
That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
It seems to me that we should separate the claim that the actual historical motivation of creating ghettoes was to cause harm to Jews, and the claim that there was no reason to make them besides causing harm to Jews. If there is one reason that Jews benefit from living separately from Christians or Muslims, then we can’t make the second argument.
But I don’t think we can make the first argument, because we can’t generalize across all Jewish quarters. In some cities, the rulers had to establish an exclusive zone for Jews in order to attract the Jews to move in, which suggests to me that this is a thing that Jews actively wanted. It makes sense that they would: notice that a function of many Jewish religious practices is to exclude outsiders and make it more likely for Jews to marry other Jews. Given the fact that Jews were on average wealthier than the local population and wealth played a part in how many of your grandchildren would survive to reproductive age, that’s not just raw ingroup preference. (Indeed, Jews moving from a city where a Jew-hating ruler had set up a ghetto to keep them separate might ask a Jew-loving ruler to set them up a ghetto, because they noticed all the good things that a ghetto got them and thought they were worth the costs.)
As for whether or not people voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, consider, say, Chinatowns in the US. Many might have been caused by soft (or hard) restrictions on where Asians could live, but I imagine that most residents stay in them now because they prefer living around people with the same culture, having access to a Chinese-language newspaper, and so on.
Notice what I said: to limit Jews to ghettoes. Voluntary segregation and creating Jewish areas to attract Jews does not limit Jews to ghettoes. In general, creating ghettoes to benefit Jews is not a reason to limit them to ghettoes. Furthermore, since I was using ghettoes as a counterexample, even if I had not phrased it that way voluntary segregation still wouldn’t count, because in order to have a counterexample it only need be true that some ghettoes were created to harm Jews, even if others were not.
The word “generally” in there is another of those things which makes a statement true and trivial at the same time. For one thing, it depends on how you count the fences (When you have a fence about not being a gay male and another about not being a lesbian, does that count as one or two fences?)
A more reasonable interpretation is to take “generally” as a qualifier for how wide the support is for the fence rather than for how common such fences are among the population of all fences—that is, there aren’t fences with wide support, the majority of whose supporters wish to cause harm. “Mandatory ghettoes” are indeed a counterexample to the statement when read that way.
There was no reason to limit Jews to ghettos in the Middle Ages except to cause harm (in sense 2).
The medieval allegations against Jews were so persistent and so profoundly nasty that they constitute a genre of their own; we still use the phrase “blood libel”. It seems plausible that some of the people responsible for the ghetto laws believed them.
They were entirely wrong, of course, but by the same token it may well turn out that Chesterton’s fence was put there to keep out chupacabras. That still counts as knowing the reason for it.
That falls under case 1. It is always possible to answer (given sufficient knowledge) “why did X do Y”. Y can then be called a reason, so in a trivial sense, every action is done for a reason.
Normally, “did they do it for a reason” means asking if they did it for a reason that is not just based on hatred or cognitive bias. Were blacks forced to use segregated drinking fountains for a “reason” within the meaning of Chesterton’s fence?
No, I don’t think it does. We can consider that particular cases of what we now see as harm may have been inspired by bias or ignorance or mistaken premises without thereby concluding that every case must have similar inspirations. Sometimes people really are just spiteful or sadistic. This just isn’t one of those times.
It seems clear to me, though, that Chesterton doesn’t require the fence to have originally been built for a good reason. Pure malice doesn’t strike me as a likely reason unless it’s been built up as part of an ideology (and that usually takes more than just malice), but cognitive bias does; how many times have you heard someone say “it seemed like a good idea at the time”?
Um, people generally don’t build fences to gratuitously cause harm.
That’s either trivial, or false.
It’s trivial if you define “gratuitously cause harm” such that wanting someone else to be harmed always benefits oneself either directly or by satisfying a preference, and that counts as non-gratuitous.
It’s false if you go by most modern Westerners’ standard of harm.
There was no reason to limit Jews to ghettos in the Middle Ages except to cause harm (in sense 2).
Er, this looks like a great example of not looking things up. Having everyone in a market dominant minority live in a walled part of town is great when the uneducated rabble decides it’s time to kill them all and take their things, because you can just shut the gates and man the walls. Consider the Jewish ghettoes in Morocco:
When you tell people to look things up, be sure you first looked it up correctly yourself. That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
Since I lost karma for that, I’d better elaborate. Your specific quoted line shows that protection was the reason for the ghetto’s placement, given that they were going to have one. It does not say that protection was the reason for having a ghetto.
Your own link says that “Jewish ghettoes in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Christian environment”. The only mentionthat is anything like what you claim is halfway down the page, has no reference, does not name the location of the ghetto, and neither 1) says whether Jews could live only there or 2) if so, gives a reason for why they were prevented from living anywhere else.
It seems to me that we should separate the claim that the actual historical motivation of creating ghettoes was to cause harm to Jews, and the claim that there was no reason to make them besides causing harm to Jews. If there is one reason that Jews benefit from living separately from Christians or Muslims, then we can’t make the second argument.
But I don’t think we can make the first argument, because we can’t generalize across all Jewish quarters. In some cities, the rulers had to establish an exclusive zone for Jews in order to attract the Jews to move in, which suggests to me that this is a thing that Jews actively wanted. It makes sense that they would: notice that a function of many Jewish religious practices is to exclude outsiders and make it more likely for Jews to marry other Jews. Given the fact that Jews were on average wealthier than the local population and wealth played a part in how many of your grandchildren would survive to reproductive age, that’s not just raw ingroup preference. (Indeed, Jews moving from a city where a Jew-hating ruler had set up a ghetto to keep them separate might ask a Jew-loving ruler to set them up a ghetto, because they noticed all the good things that a ghetto got them and thought they were worth the costs.)
As for whether or not people voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, consider, say, Chinatowns in the US. Many might have been caused by soft (or hard) restrictions on where Asians could live, but I imagine that most residents stay in them now because they prefer living around people with the same culture, having access to a Chinese-language newspaper, and so on.
Notice what I said: to limit Jews to ghettoes. Voluntary segregation and creating Jewish areas to attract Jews does not limit Jews to ghettoes. In general, creating ghettoes to benefit Jews is not a reason to limit them to ghettoes. Furthermore, since I was using ghettoes as a counterexample, even if I had not phrased it that way voluntary segregation still wouldn’t count, because in order to have a counterexample it only need be true that some ghettoes were created to harm Jews, even if others were not.
Azathoth123 said that people generally don’t build fences to gratuitously cause harm, not that they never ever do.
The word “generally” in there is another of those things which makes a statement true and trivial at the same time. For one thing, it depends on how you count the fences (When you have a fence about not being a gay male and another about not being a lesbian, does that count as one or two fences?)
A more reasonable interpretation is to take “generally” as a qualifier for how wide the support is for the fence rather than for how common such fences are among the population of all fences—that is, there aren’t fences with wide support, the majority of whose supporters wish to cause harm. “Mandatory ghettoes” are indeed a counterexample to the statement when read that way.
The medieval allegations against Jews were so persistent and so profoundly nasty that they constitute a genre of their own; we still use the phrase “blood libel”. It seems plausible that some of the people responsible for the ghetto laws believed them.
They were entirely wrong, of course, but by the same token it may well turn out that Chesterton’s fence was put there to keep out chupacabras. That still counts as knowing the reason for it.
That falls under case 1. It is always possible to answer (given sufficient knowledge) “why did X do Y”. Y can then be called a reason, so in a trivial sense, every action is done for a reason.
Normally, “did they do it for a reason” means asking if they did it for a reason that is not just based on hatred or cognitive bias. Were blacks forced to use segregated drinking fountains for a “reason” within the meaning of Chesterton’s fence?
No, I don’t think it does. We can consider that particular cases of what we now see as harm may have been inspired by bias or ignorance or mistaken premises without thereby concluding that every case must have similar inspirations. Sometimes people really are just spiteful or sadistic. This just isn’t one of those times.
It seems clear to me, though, that Chesterton doesn’t require the fence to have originally been built for a good reason. Pure malice doesn’t strike me as a likely reason unless it’s been built up as part of an ideology (and that usually takes more than just malice), but cognitive bias does; how many times have you heard someone say “it seemed like a good idea at the time”?