First, you don’t let people switch gender simply by saying “I’m a ---- now”.
I think that’s what “applying the principle of charity and taking others’ claims about how they feel about their bodies at face value” means.
Perhaps, e.g., you (1) require an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria (this will eliminate some would-be abusers, but no doubt some will be convincing enough to pass this filter),
That’s not letting people define their own identities but letting experts define their identities. Fluttershy clearly spoke about letting people define their own identities. Don’t let yourself get mindkilled because it’s a political topic.
I’m suggesting that applying that principle in general doesn’t have to mean applying it exactly the same to imprisoned criminals.
(Similarly, I am in general strongly in favour of letting people communicate freely and privately with others, but if we choose to restrict and/or monitor the calls of people in prison then that makes some sense.)
That’s not letting people define their own identities but letting experts define their identities.
It’s intermediate between the two: letting people define their own identities but giving experts a veto in a case where the risk of abuse is especially severe. Again: a general principle of letting people define their own identities may need amendment when dealing with people we have locked up in the name of public safety, just as general principles of free speech and free association and so forth get amended when dealing with those people.
Don’t let yourself get mindkilled because it’s a political topic.
Thanks for the advice. I commend it to all. Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak? (You have disagreed with me and I think “X might have bad consequences if applied unaltered to dangerous criminals, so proposing X in general is wrong” is a terrible argument; should I conclude that you’re getting mindkilled?)
Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak?
Yes, that you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
The debate whether or not a XY transexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male is a quite different question from the debate whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
I have the impression that the political nature of the subject prevents you from distinguishing the two issues and that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.
you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
Well, I may or may not be mindkilled but I’m certainly confused. The only mention I made of hormone therapy was to suggest that in the special context of prisoners wanting to move to a different prison on account of gender transition, being on hormone therapy might be a useful criterion for being demonstrably serious. (Not for being actually male/female. The point is that it is evidence of the sincerity of the prisoner’s claim, which we need because in this situation insincere claims might otherwise be a problem.)
So far as I can see,
the debate whether or not an XY transsexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male
simply hasn’t come up in this discussion, or at least not the bit of it you and I have been engaging in. Accordingly, I have no idea how anything I’ve written can suggest that I’m failing to distinguish that debate from any other debate. I also don’t think the question was ever quite
whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
although obvious that isn’t a mile from what Fluttershy was saying.
So it looks to me as if there’s a failure of communication here. Let me attempt to say clearly and explicitly what I think the issues are. My apologies for the length of what follows.
Underlying question #1: under what circumstances, if any, is someone who is anatomically/chromosomally/hormonally male “really” female?
I’m not sure this is the sort of question that has a definite answer. There are multiple somewhat defensible ways to use words like “male” and “female” and the answer could be different for them (even without bringing transgender into it; intersex conditions are pretty complicated).
Underlying question #2: how should we use terms like “male” and “female” in cases where there’s divergence between those features and others such as the person’s (expressed and/or internal) “gender identity”?
My own opinion is that we get a healthier and happier society by usually taking “gender identity” as having priority over anatomy, chromosomes, etc., and accordingly that if someone identifies as (say) male then in most contexts we should treat that person as male.
There are plenty of exceptions. Your example of prison might be one. So might competitive sports. So, for sure, might medical care.
Fluttershy’s proposal was to answer question #2 with “according to expressed gender identity”.
Fluttershy didn’t say anything about difficult cases where there’s ground to suspect that expressed and internal gender identity might differ (e.g., someone trying to exploit the system), where taking someone at their word might be more than averagely dangerous (e.g., when the person in question is a violent criminal), etc.
One possibility is that Fluttershy simply believes we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word on this issue. I think that is unlikely; in any case, if so then I disagree. (See above.)
Another possibility is that Fluttershy was proposing a general policy, which might need modification in unusual cases (e.g., prison), but stated it briefly without all the caveats that it might need.
My money is firmly on the second of these, and in particular I am fairly sure Fluttershy was not saying that the mere act of saying “I am a woman” makes someone a woman.
Your response, though, was to point to an unusual case as if it demonstrated the badness of Fluttershy’s proposal.
If you were taking Fluttershy to be claiming that we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word, then I think that is a needlessly uncharitable interpretation, enough so that I will gently suggest you consider that I might not be the only person in this discussion vulnerable to politics.
I pointed out that “hard cases make bad law”; that the fact that a policy of always taking people at their word might work badly when the people in question are serious criminals is little objection to a more reasonable policy of generally taking people at their word, while being more cautious in some special situations—like prisons.
I made some concrete proposals for safeguards one might apply in prisons. As you say, those safeguards mean that we would not be simply and naively taking prisoners at their word as soon as they say “I’m a woman”. They do, however, go a considerable way towards accommodating transgender prisoners.
That doesn’t mean that I regard the proposal with the safeguards as giving a sensible criterion in less dangerous situations. I don’t.
One remark about the context for all this. Fluttershy was responding to a comment from VoiceOfRa which takes it for granted that what’s going on with transgender people is (and I quote) “delusions and hallucinations”, on a par with someone who believes himself to be simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon.
I suggest that it is not reasonable to take Fluttershy’s comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between “a person’s gender is whatever they have most recently said it is” and everything else, any more than it is to take VoiceOfRa’s comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between “a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and nothing else” (or whatever, in fact, VoR’s position is; if he’s made that clear, then I haven’t seen it). One comment was a response to the other. And my comment was attempting to address both.
that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.
Well, you’re entitled to your impression. I confess I’m unsure how you got it. In particular, I don’t see that you made any such detailed arguments; in fact, the principal point of my original comment was that you failed to distinguish between “what should we do in general?” and “what should we do for the more difficult and dangerous case of imprisoned criminals?”.
My own opinion is that we get a healthier and happier society by usually taking “gender identity” as having priority over anatomy, chromosomes, etc., and accordingly that if someone identifies as (say) male then in most contexts we should treat that person as male.
I think the situation is a going to become bit more difficult if we confine out attention to the cases where gender/sex matters. Just declaring yourself to be a male/female/lizard overlord/banana is nothing particularly exciting and is likely to lead to shrugs or, at most, some eye-rolling. But once you demand some rights as a member of that particular group, the situation becomes much muddier.
As you point out, there are “plenty of exceptions” to the my-gender/sex-is-whatever-I-say approach. The interesting question is whether most circumstances where gender/sex matters turn out to be such “exceptions”.
A very reasonable question, but note that for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it. They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women’s clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it, and even if those don’t look to the rest of us like “circumstances where gender/sex matters” I’m pretty sure it’s a different story when you’re looking at it from the inside.
There are rights that accrue to people of one sex but not of the other (to play in one sports team rather than another; to use one bathroom rather than another; …) but I’m really pretty sure no one goes through the angst and nuisance and embarrassment of gender transition so that they can use a different bathroom.
for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it.
Yes, of course, but he issue is whether that imposes obligations on other people beyond politeness.
We can try to generalise that question beyond sex & gender: if you are weird, non-average, out of the mainstream—to which degree should society bend and accommodate itself to your strangeness?
I think politeness is a pretty big deal, and a large fraction of what transgender people want is basically politeness plus ordinary decency.
I confess it’s not clear to me what “the issue” actually is here. VoiceOfRa was evidently annoyed or offended or something by that list of false/oversimplified things people believe about gender, but rather little of the list is actually about transgender people or involves what he describes as “a man claiming to be a woman” and as “delusions and hallucinations” and I don’t know what sort of accommodation it is that VoR finds it irksome to be expected to make. (Perhaps he finds it irksome to be expected not to describe transgender people as crazy on the same level as someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and Lennon.)
I confess it’s not clear to me what “the issue” actually is here.
Well, it looks to me that VoiceOfRa is mostly interested in equating gender self-identification with delusions and other mental disorders; you are arguing that transgender people might be a bit unusual, but are harmless and we can all live in peace; while I am curious about shifts in sociopolitical power and the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes.
Mandatory in what sense? You can say all the same things VoR does, point and laugh at anyone you see whom you think might be trans, etc., and not get into any sort of legal trouble in any country I know of.
“Politeness and decency” may be becoming socially mandatory, in the sense that if you say certain kinds of things then many people will think you’re a bigot, but that’s hardly a new phenomenon—though of course the details shift over time; e.g., it’s more acceptable than it used to be to be rude about Christians and less acceptable than it used to be to be rude about gay people.
OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don’t think these examples are good support for worrying about ‘the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes’, and I’ll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.
The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can’t help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.
How would you feel about that case? Here’s how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people—e.g., black people, women, gay people—have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it’s not like 5% of businesses would say “no blacks” and another 5% “no whites”, 5% “no gay people” and 5% “no straight people”; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.
If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it’s about whether there’s more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group’s interests matter more than another’s.
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I’m not sure that “enforced mandatory attitudes” is a good description; what’s happening is that Mozilla’s employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.
(I’d guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it’s atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there’s little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn’t a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)
They are not support, the are examples. I am not trying to persuade you to start worrying, I’m explaining my position.
what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency
Well, yes, of course. I’ve been trying to generalize the issue out of the intently-peering-at-the-genitals niche. Yes, I would feel similarly about a mixed-race couple.
If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage;
I think you are mistaken about that. There is a fair amount of literature on the topic, but let me make two brief points. First, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient. Even besides potential social backlash, if you refuse to serve a portion of your market and your competitor is fine with it, guess who has the advantage in the notoriously ruthless darwinian capitalist world. Second, take a look around. Imagine that it becomes legal for store owners to discriminate against, say, Indians and Pakistanis. What proportion of stores do you expect to put up signs “No Paks allowed” in their windows?
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them.
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company. Mozilla, evidently, does. A great deal of the US academia, to pick a relevant example, does, too.
My concern is with intolerance, not with which particular sin is deemed worthy of excommunication and burning at the stake.
Firstly, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
What proportion of stores [...]
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company.
I very strongly suspect they do, and I think you should assume that expressing the wrong political views can disqualify you for advancement in any given company. Though usually (I hope) this is less of a deliberate litmus test and more a requirement that “leaders” avoid “drama”. Being feared or loved can be nice, but if your plan is to take people’s money you want to be invisible.
They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex
There are actual woman who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.
People are quite free to want to be addressed in different ways. On the other hand there also a freedom to address someone in multiple ways.
By default we use pronouns via intuition. If a person seems male to us we use “he” is they seem female we use “she”. Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.
They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women’s clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it
I don’t think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress regardless of whether they identify as male or female.
There are actual women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.
True enough, I didn’t choose the best example male name. This seems about as relevant to anything else I was saying as the fact that “women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex” is ungrammatical is to anything else you are saying. I should have said “Alexander” or “Adam” or “Alfred” or something.
Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.
Sure. Did I ever claim otherwise?
Suppose you meet someone who looks male to you. It turns out that actually the person is a woman, with two X chromosomes and a uterus and all. I’m guessing that once you discover that you’ll refer to that person as “she” despite the small cognitive cost of doing so, and it probably won’t even occur to you to think it an unreasonable imposition to be expected to do that. And the chances are that, actually, you won’t insist on inspecting her chromosomes and reproductive organs before adopting the appropriate pronoun.
If your attitude is different in the case where a near-identical-looking person has XY chromosomes and was called “Alfred” when born but now goes by the name of Angela and considers herself to be female, even though the cognitive cost is exactly the same in the two cases, then I suggest that the cognitive cost is not the real objection.
I don’t think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress
No one’s demanding anything. I can’t speak for ChristianKI, but I think that
no one should be laughed at for wearing a dress
people should not in general be forbidden to laugh at other people for wearing dresses
and I see no contradiction between those positions. (What there is is the possibility for values to clash; if people are free to laugh at one another, sometimes they will, even if I think they shouldn’t. But there’s no avoiding that sort of thing, other than by having no values at all.)
What I said was: “I think that no one should be laughed at [...]” and the meaning of “I think X should happen” is something like “my values prefer X to not-X”.
Sometimes when I think X should happen I try to make it happen despite others’ preferences. Usually I don’t. (Just as: Sometimes when out of self-interest I want X to happen I try to make it happen despite others’ preferences, and sometimes not.)
I wouldn’t try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude. 2. If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.
What I said was: “I think that no one should be laughed at [...]” and the meaning of “I think X should happen” is something like “my values prefer X to not-X”.
What ethical theory is this based on?
I wouldn’t try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude.
I would suggest you’d be being an obnoxious jerk by doing so.
If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.
Ok, so if I was an employer I’d do my best to avoid hiring you, and certainly not let you anywhere near a position where somebody might be reporting to you.
I don’t think it’s based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
It occurs to me that there is an ambiguity about “I think no one should do X”. Taken literally it means something like “I prefer a world in which no one does X”, but of course one can imagine a lot of different sorts of world in which no one does X. The most probable such world is probably one in which everyone is prevented from doing X, but that isn’t what I had in mind (and I think it’s very seldom what anyone who says things like “I think no one should do X” has in mind).
you’d be an obnoxious jerk
Your opinion is noted. I’m not sure to what extent you’re seriously stating your position, and to what extent you’re attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum (since “I would suggest you’d be being a jerk” is kinda symmetric with “I’d suggest they’d be being rude”, etc.) -- but if you mean what you say, then apparently you think laughing at someone for their choice of clothes is less obnoxious than saying someone’s being rude by doing that. I wonder why?
I’d do my best to avoid hiring you
I think I could have predicted that with some confidence a priori.
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill. If someone comes into your shop and you laugh at them, that is not likely to be good for the business. They might prefer their employees not to behave in ways that prevent effective teamwork. If one of your colleagues comes into work and you laugh at them, you’re less likely to be able to work well together, which is also not good for the business.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I did not have in mind cases like the following: X is a software developer; X is sitting at his computer thinking about the design for some code, notices a news article in another window that includes someone wearing a dress, thinks they look silly, and laughs. That might or might not indicate opinions or attitudes I think they’d be better off without, but it’s not likely to be rude or discriminatory and it’s none of my business.)
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill. If someone comes into your shop and you laugh at them, that is not likely to be good for the business.
However, that could end up being a tragedy of the commons when it comes to incentives. Each time an employer fires someone for something like this, it personally benefits the employer (since the employer gains in customers and goodwill). But it also creates incentives for more potential customers to reduce their threshold for taking offense, which harms shops in general (and everyone). The magnitude of that effect may mean that overall, we’re better off if nobody fired such employees than if everyone did, but since the gain to the employer benefits the employer while the loss is to a generalized group, employers will not stop doing this on their own initiative.
Yup, certainly possible. (How plausible? I don’t know. Most people don’t encounter many cases of people getting fired—or nearly getting fired—for being insensitive and don’t get enough details of those cases to justify a change one way or another to their offence thresholds. It’s not perfectly obvious, by the way, that having more cases like this creates an incentive to be more easily offended. It might go the other way: “No one is getting fired for being mean to us! We must make more fuss!”)
I think it’s very seldom what anyone who says things like “I think no one should do X” has in mind
I don’t know about “seldom”. For example, I have a feeling that many people who say “I think no one should be racist” do have in mind a world where others are prevented from being racist.
Not my impression, for what it’s worth, but it’s probably difficult to tell. (What evidence, if any, would change your mind? E.g., if someone asked a lot of such people and they all said that wasn’t what they had in mind, would you believe them?)
Evidence would change my mind. I’m not asserting an article of faith, but a claim about empirical reality. Yes, appropriate polls would count (subject to the usual caveat that poll results are REALLY sensitive to how exactly you formulate the questions). And, of course my position would need to be better delineated and firmed up before it becomes falsifiable, right now it’s kinda wiggly and fuzzy :-)
I don’t think it’s based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
So do you have a calculation why laughing at someone for dressing in a funny way lowers total utility?
Your opinion is noted. I’m not sure to what extent you’re seriously stating your position, and to what extent you’re attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum (since “I would suggest you’d be being a jerk” is kinda symmetric with “I’d suggest they’d be being rude”, etc.) -- but if you mean what you say, then apparently you think laughing at someone for their choice of clothes is less obnoxious than saying someone’s being rude by doing that. I wonder why?
The simple answer is because it’s not rude. While the choice of clothing in question was funny.
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill.
I agree. I don’t think this applies to the current example. For example, the “humorless corporate drone” type of employee is widely disliked.
Only in the rather hazy sense in which I do for most other ethical questions. It goes something like this: if X wears a dress and Y laughs at X for it, X gets to feel insulted, belittled and maybe threatened, Y gets the satisfaction of laughing at someone they find risible, and anyone else around maybe gets encouraged to think ill of either X or Y. X’s utility loss here looks a lot bigger than Y’s utility gain. (From, e.g., my experiences of laughing at other people and being laughed at, and what I’ve heard of other people’s.)
because it’s not rude.
That seems obviously wrong. Maybe we just have a big disagreement as to values, but I’m wondering whether we mean different things by “rude” or are envisaging different scenarios?
humorless corporate drone
The mere fact of not laughing at someone wearing a dress doesn’t make a person a humorless corporate drone
Only in the rather hazy sense in which I do for most other ethical questions. It goes something like this: if X wears a dress and Y laughs at X for it, X gets to feel insulted, belittled and maybe threatened, Y gets the satisfaction of laughing at someone they find risible, and anyone else around maybe gets encouraged to think ill of either X or Y. X’s utility loss here looks a lot bigger than Y’s utility gain. (From, e.g., my experiences of laughing at other people and being laughed at, and what I’ve heard of other people’s.)
That’s a universal argument against all humor.
The mere fact of not laughing at someone wearing a dress doesn’t make a person a humorless corporate drone
True, however, it goes a good way in that direction and applying your logic consistently certainly would.
It most certainly isn’t a universal argument against all humour. It’s an argument against laughing at people (in case it isn’t clear, btw, what’s mostly in view here is laughing at people in their presence) but that’s very far from being all humour.
it goes a good way in that direction
I cannot recall a single instance in which I, or anyone else known to me, formed a bad opinion of a corporate representative because they didn’t laugh at someone else. Still less, of course, specifically because they didn’t laugh at someone for wearing a dress.
It most certainly isn’t a universal argument against all humour. It’s an argument against laughing at people (in case it isn’t clear, btw, what’s mostly in view here is laughing at people in their presence) but that’s very far from being all humour.
Well look at the effect of the campus PC on campuscomedy.
I cannot recall a single instance in which I, or anyone else known to me, formed a bad opinion of a corporate representative because they didn’t laugh at someone else.
Can you recall all the exact reasons for your exact opinion level about any corporate representative, or anyone for that matter? Or, as seems likely, is that statement pure bullshit in Frankfut’s sense?
look at the effect of the campus PC on campus comedy
So you’ve completely changed the subject: originally you claimed that “we should generally not laugh at other people in their presence because they’ll dislike it more than we like it” is a universal argument against all humour, and now you’re saying that “campus PC” has made some comedians not want to perform at universities.
Can you recall all the exact reasons [...]
Nope. But I can, e.g., be pretty confident that my opinions about corporate representatives were never the result of thinking they were secretly alien lizard-men. And that I never thought ill of a corporate representative because they were too intelligent. Because those would be really weird reasons, and I would expect to remember having them.
pure bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense
Nope. I don’t do that. Your consistent disinclination to answer requests for clarification and evidence makes me wonder, though, whether perhaps you might be projecting a little when you ask me that question.
Wow, this discussion really took off! I mainly replied to VoiceOfRa’s comment in order to encourage people to be nice to trans people in general, rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.
I think that’s what “applying the principle of charity and taking others’ claims about how they feel about their bodies at face value” means.
That’s not letting people define their own identities but letting experts define their identities. Fluttershy clearly spoke about letting people define their own identities. Don’t let yourself get mindkilled because it’s a political topic.
I’m suggesting that applying that principle in general doesn’t have to mean applying it exactly the same to imprisoned criminals.
(Similarly, I am in general strongly in favour of letting people communicate freely and privately with others, but if we choose to restrict and/or monitor the calls of people in prison then that makes some sense.)
It’s intermediate between the two: letting people define their own identities but giving experts a veto in a case where the risk of abuse is especially severe. Again: a general principle of letting people define their own identities may need amendment when dealing with people we have locked up in the name of public safety, just as general principles of free speech and free association and so forth get amended when dealing with those people.
Thanks for the advice. I commend it to all. Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak? (You have disagreed with me and I think “X might have bad consequences if applied unaltered to dangerous criminals, so proposing X in general is wrong” is a terrible argument; should I conclude that you’re getting mindkilled?)
Yes, that you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
The debate whether or not a XY transexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male is a quite different question from the debate whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
I have the impression that the political nature of the subject prevents you from distinguishing the two issues and that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.
Well, I may or may not be mindkilled but I’m certainly confused. The only mention I made of hormone therapy was to suggest that in the special context of prisoners wanting to move to a different prison on account of gender transition, being on hormone therapy might be a useful criterion for being demonstrably serious. (Not for being actually male/female. The point is that it is evidence of the sincerity of the prisoner’s claim, which we need because in this situation insincere claims might otherwise be a problem.)
So far as I can see,
simply hasn’t come up in this discussion, or at least not the bit of it you and I have been engaging in. Accordingly, I have no idea how anything I’ve written can suggest that I’m failing to distinguish that debate from any other debate. I also don’t think the question was ever quite
although obvious that isn’t a mile from what Fluttershy was saying.
So it looks to me as if there’s a failure of communication here. Let me attempt to say clearly and explicitly what I think the issues are. My apologies for the length of what follows.
Underlying question #1: under what circumstances, if any, is someone who is anatomically/chromosomally/hormonally male “really” female?
I’m not sure this is the sort of question that has a definite answer. There are multiple somewhat defensible ways to use words like “male” and “female” and the answer could be different for them (even without bringing transgender into it; intersex conditions are pretty complicated).
Underlying question #2: how should we use terms like “male” and “female” in cases where there’s divergence between those features and others such as the person’s (expressed and/or internal) “gender identity”?
My own opinion is that we get a healthier and happier society by usually taking “gender identity” as having priority over anatomy, chromosomes, etc., and accordingly that if someone identifies as (say) male then in most contexts we should treat that person as male.
There are plenty of exceptions. Your example of prison might be one. So might competitive sports. So, for sure, might medical care.
Fluttershy’s proposal was to answer question #2 with “according to expressed gender identity”.
Fluttershy didn’t say anything about difficult cases where there’s ground to suspect that expressed and internal gender identity might differ (e.g., someone trying to exploit the system), where taking someone at their word might be more than averagely dangerous (e.g., when the person in question is a violent criminal), etc.
One possibility is that Fluttershy simply believes we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word on this issue. I think that is unlikely; in any case, if so then I disagree. (See above.)
Another possibility is that Fluttershy was proposing a general policy, which might need modification in unusual cases (e.g., prison), but stated it briefly without all the caveats that it might need.
My money is firmly on the second of these, and in particular I am fairly sure Fluttershy was not saying that the mere act of saying “I am a woman” makes someone a woman.
Your response, though, was to point to an unusual case as if it demonstrated the badness of Fluttershy’s proposal.
If you were taking Fluttershy to be claiming that we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word, then I think that is a needlessly uncharitable interpretation, enough so that I will gently suggest you consider that I might not be the only person in this discussion vulnerable to politics.
I pointed out that “hard cases make bad law”; that the fact that a policy of always taking people at their word might work badly when the people in question are serious criminals is little objection to a more reasonable policy of generally taking people at their word, while being more cautious in some special situations—like prisons.
I made some concrete proposals for safeguards one might apply in prisons. As you say, those safeguards mean that we would not be simply and naively taking prisoners at their word as soon as they say “I’m a woman”. They do, however, go a considerable way towards accommodating transgender prisoners.
That doesn’t mean that I regard the proposal with the safeguards as giving a sensible criterion in less dangerous situations. I don’t.
One remark about the context for all this. Fluttershy was responding to a comment from VoiceOfRa which takes it for granted that what’s going on with transgender people is (and I quote) “delusions and hallucinations”, on a par with someone who believes himself to be simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon.
I suggest that it is not reasonable to take Fluttershy’s comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between “a person’s gender is whatever they have most recently said it is” and everything else, any more than it is to take VoiceOfRa’s comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between “a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and nothing else” (or whatever, in fact, VoR’s position is; if he’s made that clear, then I haven’t seen it). One comment was a response to the other. And my comment was attempting to address both.
Well, you’re entitled to your impression. I confess I’m unsure how you got it. In particular, I don’t see that you made any such detailed arguments; in fact, the principal point of my original comment was that you failed to distinguish between “what should we do in general?” and “what should we do for the more difficult and dangerous case of imprisoned criminals?”.
I think the situation is a going to become bit more difficult if we confine out attention to the cases where gender/sex matters. Just declaring yourself to be a male/female/lizard overlord/banana is nothing particularly exciting and is likely to lead to shrugs or, at most, some eye-rolling. But once you demand some rights as a member of that particular group, the situation becomes much muddier.
As you point out, there are “plenty of exceptions” to the my-gender/sex-is-whatever-I-say approach. The interesting question is whether most circumstances where gender/sex matters turn out to be such “exceptions”.
A very reasonable question, but note that for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it. They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women’s clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it, and even if those don’t look to the rest of us like “circumstances where gender/sex matters” I’m pretty sure it’s a different story when you’re looking at it from the inside.
There are rights that accrue to people of one sex but not of the other (to play in one sports team rather than another; to use one bathroom rather than another; …) but I’m really pretty sure no one goes through the angst and nuisance and embarrassment of gender transition so that they can use a different bathroom.
Yes, of course, but he issue is whether that imposes obligations on other people beyond politeness.
We can try to generalise that question beyond sex & gender: if you are weird, non-average, out of the mainstream—to which degree should society bend and accommodate itself to your strangeness?
I think politeness is a pretty big deal, and a large fraction of what transgender people want is basically politeness plus ordinary decency.
I confess it’s not clear to me what “the issue” actually is here. VoiceOfRa was evidently annoyed or offended or something by that list of false/oversimplified things people believe about gender, but rather little of the list is actually about transgender people or involves what he describes as “a man claiming to be a woman” and as “delusions and hallucinations” and I don’t know what sort of accommodation it is that VoR finds it irksome to be expected to make. (Perhaps he finds it irksome to be expected not to describe transgender people as crazy on the same level as someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and Lennon.)
Well, it looks to me that VoiceOfRa is mostly interested in equating gender self-identification with delusions and other mental disorders; you are arguing that transgender people might be a bit unusual, but are harmless and we can all live in peace; while I am curious about shifts in sociopolitical power and the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes.
Mandatory in what sense? You can say all the same things VoR does, point and laugh at anyone you see whom you think might be trans, etc., and not get into any sort of legal trouble in any country I know of.
“Politeness and decency” may be becoming socially mandatory, in the sense that if you say certain kinds of things then many people will think you’re a bigot, but that’s hardly a new phenomenon—though of course the details shift over time; e.g., it’s more acceptable than it used to be to be rude about Christians and less acceptable than it used to be to be rude about gay people.
Both in this sense and in this as well.
Of course not. Intolerance is a perennial feature of human societies :-/
OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don’t think these examples are good support for worrying about ‘the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes’, and I’ll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.
The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can’t help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.
How would you feel about that case? Here’s how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people—e.g., black people, women, gay people—have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it’s not like 5% of businesses would say “no blacks” and another 5% “no whites”, 5% “no gay people” and 5% “no straight people”; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.
If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it’s about whether there’s more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group’s interests matter more than another’s.
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I’m not sure that “enforced mandatory attitudes” is a good description; what’s happening is that Mozilla’s employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.
(I’d guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it’s atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there’s little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn’t a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)
They are not support, the are examples. I am not trying to persuade you to start worrying, I’m explaining my position.
Well, yes, of course. I’ve been trying to generalize the issue out of the intently-peering-at-the-genitals niche. Yes, I would feel similarly about a mixed-race couple.
I think you are mistaken about that. There is a fair amount of literature on the topic, but let me make two brief points. First, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient. Even besides potential social backlash, if you refuse to serve a portion of your market and your competitor is fine with it, guess who has the advantage in the notoriously ruthless darwinian capitalist world. Second, take a look around. Imagine that it becomes legal for store owners to discriminate against, say, Indians and Pakistanis. What proportion of stores do you expect to put up signs “No Paks allowed” in their windows?
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company. Mozilla, evidently, does. A great deal of the US academia, to pick a relevant example, does, too.
My concern is with intolerance, not with which particular sin is deemed worthy of excommunication and burning at the stake.
OK, understood.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
So why did you reply to the comment, then?
Presumably to express disapproval of your making the comment?
For a “Fuck you” this seems rather underwhelming… :-/
To say that your example is a ridiculous one that reveals your status quo bias yet again.
I don’t believe I gave any examples when I mentioned “the recent focus on criminalising certain kinds of speech”.
You seem to be majorly confused and angry.
I very strongly suspect they do, and I think you should assume that expressing the wrong political views can disqualify you for advancement in any given company. Though usually (I hope) this is less of a deliberate litmus test and more a requirement that “leaders” avoid “drama”. Being feared or loved can be nice, but if your plan is to take people’s money you want to be invisible.
Advocating, maybe, but just “expressing”, understood as a non-advertised relatively minor donation to a state referendum that was more or less 50-50?
Can you provide other examples of high-ranking corporate officers being forced out of the company in similar circumstances?
There are actual woman who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.
People are quite free to want to be addressed in different ways. On the other hand there also a freedom to address someone in multiple ways.
By default we use pronouns via intuition. If a person seems male to us we use “he” is they seem female we use “she”. Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.
I don’t think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress regardless of whether they identify as male or female.
True enough, I didn’t choose the best example male name. This seems about as relevant to anything else I was saying as the fact that “women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex” is ungrammatical is to anything else you are saying. I should have said “Alexander” or “Adam” or “Alfred” or something.
Sure. Did I ever claim otherwise?
Suppose you meet someone who looks male to you. It turns out that actually the person is a woman, with two X chromosomes and a uterus and all. I’m guessing that once you discover that you’ll refer to that person as “she” despite the small cognitive cost of doing so, and it probably won’t even occur to you to think it an unreasonable imposition to be expected to do that. And the chances are that, actually, you won’t insist on inspecting her chromosomes and reproductive organs before adopting the appropriate pronoun.
If your attitude is different in the case where a near-identical-looking person has XY chromosomes and was called “Alfred” when born but now goes by the name of Angela and considers herself to be female, even though the cognitive cost is exactly the same in the two cases, then I suggest that the cognitive cost is not the real objection.
Neither do I, but apparently some people do.
Sorry, you don’t have a right to do silly things and then demand not to be laughed at.
No one’s demanding anything. I can’t speak for ChristianKI, but I think that
no one should be laughed at for wearing a dress
people should not in general be forbidden to laugh at other people for wearing dresses
and I see no contradiction between those positions. (What there is is the possibility for values to clash; if people are free to laugh at one another, sometimes they will, even if I think they shouldn’t. But there’s no avoiding that sort of thing, other than by having no values at all.)
What meaning of “should” are you using there? Also why?
What I said was: “I think that no one should be laughed at [...]” and the meaning of “I think X should happen” is something like “my values prefer X to not-X”.
Sometimes when I think X should happen I try to make it happen despite others’ preferences. Usually I don’t. (Just as: Sometimes when out of self-interest I want X to happen I try to make it happen despite others’ preferences, and sometimes not.)
I wouldn’t try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude. 2. If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.
What ethical theory is this based on?
I would suggest you’d be being an obnoxious jerk by doing so.
Ok, so if I was an employer I’d do my best to avoid hiring you, and certainly not let you anywhere near a position where somebody might be reporting to you.
I don’t think it’s based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
It occurs to me that there is an ambiguity about “I think no one should do X”. Taken literally it means something like “I prefer a world in which no one does X”, but of course one can imagine a lot of different sorts of world in which no one does X. The most probable such world is probably one in which everyone is prevented from doing X, but that isn’t what I had in mind (and I think it’s very seldom what anyone who says things like “I think no one should do X” has in mind).
Your opinion is noted. I’m not sure to what extent you’re seriously stating your position, and to what extent you’re attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum (since “I would suggest you’d be being a jerk” is kinda symmetric with “I’d suggest they’d be being rude”, etc.) -- but if you mean what you say, then apparently you think laughing at someone for their choice of clothes is less obnoxious than saying someone’s being rude by doing that. I wonder why?
I think I could have predicted that with some confidence a priori.
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill. If someone comes into your shop and you laugh at them, that is not likely to be good for the business. They might prefer their employees not to behave in ways that prevent effective teamwork. If one of your colleagues comes into work and you laugh at them, you’re less likely to be able to work well together, which is also not good for the business.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I did not have in mind cases like the following: X is a software developer; X is sitting at his computer thinking about the design for some code, notices a news article in another window that includes someone wearing a dress, thinks they look silly, and laughs. That might or might not indicate opinions or attitudes I think they’d be better off without, but it’s not likely to be rude or discriminatory and it’s none of my business.)
However, that could end up being a tragedy of the commons when it comes to incentives. Each time an employer fires someone for something like this, it personally benefits the employer (since the employer gains in customers and goodwill). But it also creates incentives for more potential customers to reduce their threshold for taking offense, which harms shops in general (and everyone). The magnitude of that effect may mean that overall, we’re better off if nobody fired such employees than if everyone did, but since the gain to the employer benefits the employer while the loss is to a generalized group, employers will not stop doing this on their own initiative.
Yup, certainly possible. (How plausible? I don’t know. Most people don’t encounter many cases of people getting fired—or nearly getting fired—for being insensitive and don’t get enough details of those cases to justify a change one way or another to their offence thresholds. It’s not perfectly obvious, by the way, that having more cases like this creates an incentive to be more easily offended. It might go the other way: “No one is getting fired for being mean to us! We must make more fuss!”)
I don’t know about “seldom”. For example, I have a feeling that many people who say “I think no one should be racist” do have in mind a world where others are prevented from being racist.
Not my impression, for what it’s worth, but it’s probably difficult to tell. (What evidence, if any, would change your mind? E.g., if someone asked a lot of such people and they all said that wasn’t what they had in mind, would you believe them?)
Evidence would change my mind. I’m not asserting an article of faith, but a claim about empirical reality. Yes, appropriate polls would count (subject to the usual caveat that poll results are REALLY sensitive to how exactly you formulate the questions). And, of course my position would need to be better delineated and firmed up before it becomes falsifiable, right now it’s kinda wiggly and fuzzy :-)
So do you have a calculation why laughing at someone for dressing in a funny way lowers total utility?
The simple answer is because it’s not rude. While the choice of clothing in question was funny.
I agree. I don’t think this applies to the current example. For example, the “humorless corporate drone” type of employee is widely disliked.
Only in the rather hazy sense in which I do for most other ethical questions. It goes something like this: if X wears a dress and Y laughs at X for it, X gets to feel insulted, belittled and maybe threatened, Y gets the satisfaction of laughing at someone they find risible, and anyone else around maybe gets encouraged to think ill of either X or Y. X’s utility loss here looks a lot bigger than Y’s utility gain. (From, e.g., my experiences of laughing at other people and being laughed at, and what I’ve heard of other people’s.)
That seems obviously wrong. Maybe we just have a big disagreement as to values, but I’m wondering whether we mean different things by “rude” or are envisaging different scenarios?
The mere fact of not laughing at someone wearing a dress doesn’t make a person a humorless corporate drone
That’s a universal argument against all humor.
True, however, it goes a good way in that direction and applying your logic consistently certainly would.
It most certainly isn’t a universal argument against all humour. It’s an argument against laughing at people (in case it isn’t clear, btw, what’s mostly in view here is laughing at people in their presence) but that’s very far from being all humour.
I cannot recall a single instance in which I, or anyone else known to me, formed a bad opinion of a corporate representative because they didn’t laugh at someone else. Still less, of course, specifically because they didn’t laugh at someone for wearing a dress.
Well look at the effect of the campus PC on campus comedy.
Can you recall all the exact reasons for your exact opinion level about any corporate representative, or anyone for that matter? Or, as seems likely, is that statement pure bullshit in Frankfut’s sense?
So you’ve completely changed the subject: originally you claimed that “we should generally not laugh at other people in their presence because they’ll dislike it more than we like it” is a universal argument against all humour, and now you’re saying that “campus PC” has made some comedians not want to perform at universities.
Nope. But I can, e.g., be pretty confident that my opinions about corporate representatives were never the result of thinking they were secretly alien lizard-men. And that I never thought ill of a corporate representative because they were too intelligent. Because those would be really weird reasons, and I would expect to remember having them.
Nope. I don’t do that. Your consistent disinclination to answer requests for clarification and evidence makes me wonder, though, whether perhaps you might be projecting a little when you ask me that question.
Wow, this discussion really took off! I mainly replied to VoiceOfRa’s comment in order to encourage people to be nice to trans people in general, rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.
In general I do practice the principle of charity on LW in the sense that I think that other people on LW try to advocate well-thought-out positions.
There no reason that there much to be gained by trying to speak on LW for a position in a way that isn’t well-thought-out.
Yes, your idea of what constitutes being “nice” to people is problematic to say the least.