Let’s get a bit meta. I posit that there are certain political discussions where rational debate is entirely useless, because they largely consist of choosing an axiom. Abortion is the most obvious of these—people who believe the right to life begins at conception(usually for religious reasons) are almost universally pro-life, and people who do not are almost universally pro-choice. It is not possible, even in principle, to convince either side of the other’s position, because there’s no argument that can change an axiom.
It’s good to keep our limitations in mind.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t claim that rational debate is useless at discussing issues around abortion, I claim it’s useless at changing the minds of someone who has a strong position on the issue. The only people I have ever seen switch sides on this issue are politicians(who are obviously lying) and religious converts(which is in principle achievable from rationalism, but which is in practice a pretty rare result).
Even if we’re talking about axiomatic disagreements, rational debate is still useful. Eg, we can still use rationality to help identify which axioms we’re disagreeing with.
Case in point is your abortion example. I think you’ve messed up your lines of cause and effect there. Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn’t begin at conception.
Let me posit an axiom that causes anti-abortion. Instead of the whole ‘soul’ thing, lets go with “Women deserve to be punished for having sex,” and that ‘life-begins-at-conception’ is just a rationalization. If this were true, anti-abortion should coincide with religiosity (it does) and pro-abortion should coincide with women’s rights (also does). Both axioms correctly fit the existing data. How could we tell the difference… which axiom is the true axiom?
My rationalist shoes say we’d want to identify a differentiation point where these two axioms would cause different results. Have there been any occasions where “reduce number of abortions” and “punish women for having sex” come into conflict? Here’s one. Turns out free access to birth control slashes the abortion rate. Less punishing women, less abortions. Cool, we’ve identified a point of differentiation.
As you note, we’ve still got an axiomatic disagreement. In order to change the opposing side’s mind we still need to shift their axiom. However, rationality has let the pro-abortion side aim their rhetorical firepower at the correct target. Instead of talking about the neural activity of fetuses, they can start making people feel more comfortable and accepting of sex. Once they’re correctly targeting the true axiom, they’ll have a lot more luck in shifting the opposing side’s position.
Instead of the whole ‘soul’ thing, lets go with “Women deserve to be punished for having sex,” and that ‘life-begins-at-conception’ is just a rationalization.
Every pro-lifer I’ve ever met has shared two characteristics: they don’t think women who have abortions should go to jail, and they think that women who have abortions are worse off than women who choose to give birth. That doesn’t fit with the pregnancy-as-punishment theory.
(It does however, expose another type of misogyny: they refuse to believe a mature woman in a sound mind could ever choose abortion.)
“don’t think women who have abortions should go to jail”
I’d be open to it personally (though I think prisons have a slew of their own problems) but it makes for lousy arguments if your goal is to slowly shift public opinion. rather than being scrupulously consistent.
Many religious objections to birth control consist of “It’s actually abortion, just a bit more subtle”—preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo is the same as a surgical abortion, if you don’t distinguish between a day’s gestation and two months’. Most of the rest seem like generalized objections to sex—human biology being what it is, the punishment for that will inevitably fall largely on the shoulders of women. It doesn’t seem like it’s just a female-specific objection, though—I doubt your average religious objector would get too worked up at the thought of alimony or a shotgun marriage, and most seem to actively encourage adoption.
As for your proposed strategy, it seems like it’s basically trying to do the same thing, given how liberalized sex and liberalized religion are so tightly bound in practice.
The objections there are mostly “It’ll lead to evil nookie!”, and to a lesser extent “It’s not 100% reliable”(as though anything in life is...oh wait, abstinence can’t lead to pregnancy, because the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down—how could I have forgotten?). They’re stupid objections, but to people who literally believe that sex outside of marriage will lead to an eternity of torture, I can sort of see how they connect the dots.
If there are objections on the soul level, you should still expect to see a hierarchy based on preventing/allowing fertilization per birth control.
For example: Going by pure number of ‘abortions’ (counting as any termination of a fertilized ovum), there is a continuum for birth control. IIRC it’s pill → patch → condoms → spermicide+condoms → shot → implant → IUD → surgery. Implants and especially IUDs cause up to an order of magnitude fewer of these ‘instant abortions’ compared to the pill.
We should expect to see pro-life campaigns saying “get an IUD, NOT the pill!” (Or supporting vasectomy / tubal ligation, but fat chance on those.) But again, we don’t see that. Because those 99.9% effective things will lead to sin.
Turns out free access to birth control slashes the abortion rate. Less punishing women, less abortions. Cool, we’ve identified a point of differentiation.
Okay, so what did most of the ‘pro-life’ side go with? Shit, turns out they went with punishing women instead of fewer abortions and again and again and again. Well, that’s not cool. For fairness’ and balance’s sake, I’ll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
This isn’t necessarily a good argument given that they have theological objections to birth control. This maybe indicates a general value which is an objection to technological modification of issues connected to reproduction as part of what may be a general reactionary attitude. This is consistent with for example, the early objections to IVF and the use of anesthesia in pregnancy. However, the second one of these could also be construed as a “punish women” goal, even as it has become uncommon. It might be noteworthy in this context that the IVF issue still is an issue for Catholic official doctrine but not almost any Protestants, and the objection to anesthesia in pregnancy is essentially gone completely. On the other hand, maybe looking at something more connected to male biology might help: if this is purely an objection to technical intervention in sex, then one would expect objections to Viagra and similar drugs. But they don’t exist. So that’s an argument against the technical intervention hypothesis.
Another possibility is that trying to understand is part of a general attempt to give broad explanations for what amounts to an attempt to modify old theology to handle modern technologies and dilemmas. Thus the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic. One example that might prove an interesting contrast in this context to the Christian right outlook is that of Orthodox Judaism. In some respects, Orthodox Judaism has more of an objection to birth control than it has to abortion. Fitting this sort of norm into any of the above hypotheses really seems like shoehorning.
Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn’t illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist (and get almost no media coverage compared to religious objections to comparable procedures in women).
Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn’t illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist
So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis. But I suspect that in fact the reason vasectomies aren’t used as an example are far the same (actual) reason that they don’t have nearly as much objection: they aren’t that common.
Thinking more about this though, there’s another interesting hypothesis that hasn’t been discussed yet: the goal might not be punishing a specific gender for having sex, but punishing sex in general. That seems by and large consistent with almost all of the discussed issues here with viagra being possibly a counterexample.
So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis.
If you’re thinking about US politics in 2012, most of the “objection to birth control” was objection to Obama’s mandate that insurance companies to fully cover birth control for women, but not men.
More generally, in the US there’s much more objection to birth control. This is a long-term trend independent of any recent issues. Moreover, the objections made about the recent health-care mandate were not made by and large based on gender equality issues.
Moreover, the objections made about the recent health-care mandate were not made by and large based on gender equality issues.
Sure. My point was that no one was requiring employers to cover vasectomies, so of course no one will get angry about having to provide vasectomy coverage.
Vasectomies(and tube-tying) tend to be used very differently than temporary birth control. Usually they’re done either in the context of a married couple who has as many kids as they want, or someone with serious enough medical issues that reproduction would be ill-advised. As such, the impact on casual sex is dramatically different than the impact of the Pill or abortions.
I’m not sure that state laws mandating specific corporate policy make a good basis for defending corporate policies.
That said, even if it were true, I am not sure it’s really that objectionable. Viagra is intended to treat a dysfunction of the body, whereas birth control is intended to prevent a function of the body; they’re not comparable in kind, even if they both enable the same behaviors.
This isn’t necessarily a good argument given that they have theological objections to birth control.
Given that there’s no god to specify what theology you get, this just raises the question — why do they have those theological objections? You’re proposing what amounts to a null hypothesis in your notion that “the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic”.
One example that might prove an interesting contrast in this context to the Christian right outlook is that of Orthodox Judaism.
Or the various cultures wherein are found the murder of women who have extramarital sex and other forms of “honor” violence. The differences do not seem to be described well as theological differences, since some of the same behaviors exist across different religions in some regions of the world.
It is easy for atheists to come to the conclusion that religious people do nasty things because of religion. I suspect that it would be more accurate to say that religion provides a set of powerful rationalizations for certain emotional reactions; and that which reactions a person manifests has as much to do with other elements of culture as with their theology.
For fairness’ and balance’s sake, I’ll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
Funny, from my point of view this evidence suggests that pro-lifers are actually more concerned with controlling women’s sex lives, than with saving unborn babies.
I bet the down votes are for re-iterating the parent comments main point as if it were novel and original to you?
Didn’t you understand what this meant: “lets go with “Women deserve to be punished for having sex,” and that ‘life-begins-at-conception’ is just a rationalization”?
Re-reading the grand-grand-grand-grand-parent post, yes, I now see that you’re correct that that was what he was trying to get at—although he certainly wasn’t being particularly clear.
But regardless, downvoting someone for conceding a point to someone they’re engaged in debate with is pretty lame.
Your model assumes that all people believe in a position for the same reason. In my debates with different people about abortion different people seem to hold their positions for different reasons.
Thinking that all people who disagree with you are on one side and think exactly the same is a good way to prevent rational debate.
Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn’t begin at conception.
It’s not obvious a priori that being anti-abortion isn’t caused by believing that life begins at conception (but I agree that, except for people deep down the valley of bad rationality, it’s way less likely that their morality depends on their definition of the English word life than the other way round).
I don’t think it’s a matter of different axioms—humans aren’t expert systems after all!
It’s more about a tension between two systems for regulating reproductive behavior.
In system A, girls are expected to abstain from sex until marriage, girls that don’t are shunned, men are discouraged from marrying “used goods”, and anything promoting sexual promiscuity is dangerous. Parents are expected to have an important input into they’re children’s decisions, and women are expected to be mostly dependent on a man. This is what you’d get in traditional “farmer” communities, i.e. most of the civilized world in past centuries.
In system B, Marriage is about Love, which is considered kind of mysterious and spontaneous; sex is not frowned upon, though it’s expected that girls will take the reasonable steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The law also steps in to make sure fathers take their responsibilities.
Basically, both feature ways of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, though system A is much more gung-ho about doing so; probably mostly because in a village a couple centuries ago, having a fatherless child would be one of the worse things that could happen to a girl.
But many of the norms in this are not considered as “ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies”, but rather as things that are valuable of themselves (and the norms are supported by connotations in the language, common stories, etc.) - they are lost purposes. So from the point of view of someone raised mostly with System A values, abortion looks like something that reduces the bad consequences of immoral behavior, and thus encourages immoral behavior, so of course it’s bad! They ignore the fact that the main reason such a behavior is considered immoral is because it leads to those consequences!
… or at least, that’s one part of the story. There’s also a good deal of identity conflicts involved (religion and culture more than politics), and of course it’s entirely possible that overall, System A does work better than System B.
For a better example of a case where rational debate is useless, I’d take an exiled Tibetan and a Chinese Nationalist debating about the status of Tibet.
I think that’s somewhat more amenable to rationality—the “Screw Tibet, free China!” bumper sticker I once saw comes to mind here. But I mostly picked abortion because it’s the most prominent such example and the one I’ve thought most about, not because it’s necessarily the best illustration.
If someone believes something about the moral implications of conception, that is something they likely just took in as a social truth, and then later learned and crafted a rationalization for. I don’t think we have moral instincts about cellular organisms.
To the extent that their in group remains constant, it would take a lot of serious moral argument to overcome that social truth. The problem with political arguments is that people don’t seriously have them. They volley a couple of bumper stickers at each other, and then go off in a huff. They may do it a million times—but a million bogus arguments designed to achieve nothing individually will likely achieve nothing in the aggregate as well.
The social truth remains intact—no serious moral arguments oppose it—why would we ever expect a change?
Where you might expect a change—when one moves between social groups, or when one commits to and is capable of serious moral argument.
The social aspect is at least theoretically testable—how big are the moral shifts when people change in groups? I suspect pretty large.
And in the relatively rare ideologue class, the shifts are often pretty big too. I knew a gal who went from seminary->Leninism->WIcca/EnviroProgressivism. Lots of atheist ideologues are former fundamentalists. Conservatives who were former marxists.
Arguments work on people who engage in them. I’d guess that a changing social truth works even better on most.
And in the relatively rare ideologue class, the shifts are often pretty big too. I knew a gal who went from seminary->Leninism->WIcca/EnviroProgressivism. Lots of atheist ideologues are former fundamentalists. Conservatives who were former marxists.
This kind of stuff happens very often among people in their late teens in my home town. (Most but not all of them just support political ideologies the way they’d support football teams.)
A small class of people care about and are interested in ideas. You can change their minds through argument. The vast majority are Green Team Blue Team, and they change their ideology if required by a change in their social affiliation.
Actually there are many more possible position in the abortion debate than pro-life and pro-choice. The fact that the position exist like this in US society is a result of the fact that the issue didn’t get resolved democratically via congress but via the Supreme Court.
Different European countries have different abortion laws and it makes sense to discuss with laws around the issue are best. If you want to have a senisble discussion about the topic, don’t treat it binary.
You look at a bunch of different legal solutions to the abortion issue and start comparing which laws you prefer over which other laws.
Restrictions on procedures can take a lot of shades, but the basic choice of yea or nay is pretty binary. For comparison, Canada also had abortion law determined by the Supreme Court(it was legal but heavily restricted before, and now we have literally the loosest abortion law in the world—there are no restrictions whatsoever), but the issue is nowhere near as controversial. I think the difference has a lot less to do with the Supreme Court, and a lot more to do with the US level of religiosity.
Accepting that a woman, who was raped and has complications with her pregnancy that would mean that she would die if there was no abortion, is a long way from accepting that every pregnant woman in a late stage pregnancy can just decide to have an abortion.
When you start talking rationally about the shade of gray of different laws it also becomes easier to have a rational discourse about the extremes.
One exemption to anti-abortion views I’ve seen expressed almost universally among pro-lifers is that abortion is okay if the mother’s life is at risk(because at that point, abortion isn’t murder, any more than an operation that kills one Siamese twin to save the other is). A lot of people try to start blocking out other exemptions for semi-random reasons, mostly because of the hemisphere fallacy, but the arguments are usually the sort of incoherent nonsense you only hear from politicians.
That’s why it makes sense to give them multiple laws that regulate abortion and ask them to rank them instead of asking them for their ideal abortion law.
They will have to give you reasons about why they prefer one exception over another even if they would reject both exceptions in a perfect world. That usually requires them to reason in a way that’s more than just reiterating talking points.
Agreed, that seems like a good approach to teasing out details of a stance. (Most real people will just ignore you in various ways, of course, but if you can make them sit still long enough it’s viable)
If you tell people that they are doing things wrong, they usually dont ignore you but get emotional about what you are saying.
If people just ignore you, maybe you are arguing against straw mans or otherwise not addressing the real reasons of why they acted the way they did in the past.
Let’s get a bit meta. I posit that there are certain political discussions where rational debate is entirely useless, because they largely consist of choosing an axiom. Abortion is the most obvious of these—people who believe the right to life begins at conception(usually for religious reasons) are almost universally pro-life, and people who do not are almost universally pro-choice. It is not possible, even in principle, to convince either side of the other’s position, because there’s no argument that can change an axiom.
It’s good to keep our limitations in mind.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t claim that rational debate is useless at discussing issues around abortion, I claim it’s useless at changing the minds of someone who has a strong position on the issue. The only people I have ever seen switch sides on this issue are politicians(who are obviously lying) and religious converts(which is in principle achievable from rationalism, but which is in practice a pretty rare result).
Even if we’re talking about axiomatic disagreements, rational debate is still useful. Eg, we can still use rationality to help identify which axioms we’re disagreeing with.
Case in point is your abortion example. I think you’ve messed up your lines of cause and effect there. Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn’t begin at conception.
Let me posit an axiom that causes anti-abortion. Instead of the whole ‘soul’ thing, lets go with “Women deserve to be punished for having sex,” and that ‘life-begins-at-conception’ is just a rationalization. If this were true, anti-abortion should coincide with religiosity (it does) and pro-abortion should coincide with women’s rights (also does). Both axioms correctly fit the existing data. How could we tell the difference… which axiom is the true axiom?
My rationalist shoes say we’d want to identify a differentiation point where these two axioms would cause different results. Have there been any occasions where “reduce number of abortions” and “punish women for having sex” come into conflict? Here’s one. Turns out free access to birth control slashes the abortion rate. Less punishing women, less abortions. Cool, we’ve identified a point of differentiation.
Okay, so what did most of the ‘pro-life’ side go with? Shit, turns out they went with punishing women instead of fewer abortions and again and again and again. Well, that’s not cool. For fairness’ and balance’s sake, I’ll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
As you note, we’ve still got an axiomatic disagreement. In order to change the opposing side’s mind we still need to shift their axiom. However, rationality has let the pro-abortion side aim their rhetorical firepower at the correct target. Instead of talking about the neural activity of fetuses, they can start making people feel more comfortable and accepting of sex. Once they’re correctly targeting the true axiom, they’ll have a lot more luck in shifting the opposing side’s position.
Every pro-lifer I’ve ever met has shared two characteristics: they don’t think women who have abortions should go to jail, and they think that women who have abortions are worse off than women who choose to give birth. That doesn’t fit with the pregnancy-as-punishment theory.
(It does however, expose another type of misogyny: they refuse to believe a mature woman in a sound mind could ever choose abortion.)
The first characteristic, even if it doesn’t fit the pregnancy-as-punishment theory terribly well, fits far worse with the abortion-as-murder theory.
“don’t think women who have abortions should go to jail” I’d be open to it personally (though I think prisons have a slew of their own problems) but it makes for lousy arguments if your goal is to slowly shift public opinion. rather than being scrupulously consistent.
Many religious objections to birth control consist of “It’s actually abortion, just a bit more subtle”—preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo is the same as a surgical abortion, if you don’t distinguish between a day’s gestation and two months’. Most of the rest seem like generalized objections to sex—human biology being what it is, the punishment for that will inevitably fall largely on the shoulders of women. It doesn’t seem like it’s just a female-specific objection, though—I doubt your average religious objector would get too worked up at the thought of alimony or a shotgun marriage, and most seem to actively encourage adoption.
As for your proposed strategy, it seems like it’s basically trying to do the same thing, given how liberalized sex and liberalized religion are so tightly bound in practice.
What about ways to prevent the ovum from being fertilized in the first place, e.g. condoms or vasectomy?
The objections there are mostly “It’ll lead to evil nookie!”, and to a lesser extent “It’s not 100% reliable”(as though anything in life is...oh wait, abstinence can’t lead to pregnancy, because the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down—how could I have forgotten?). They’re stupid objections, but to people who literally believe that sex outside of marriage will lead to an eternity of torture, I can sort of see how they connect the dots.
If there are objections on the soul level, you should still expect to see a hierarchy based on preventing/allowing fertilization per birth control.
For example: Going by pure number of ‘abortions’ (counting as any termination of a fertilized ovum), there is a continuum for birth control. IIRC it’s pill → patch → condoms → spermicide+condoms → shot → implant → IUD → surgery. Implants and especially IUDs cause up to an order of magnitude fewer of these ‘instant abortions’ compared to the pill.
We should expect to see pro-life campaigns saying “get an IUD, NOT the pill!” (Or supporting vasectomy / tubal ligation, but fat chance on those.) But again, we don’t see that. Because those 99.9% effective things will lead to sin.
This isn’t necessarily a good argument given that they have theological objections to birth control. This maybe indicates a general value which is an objection to technological modification of issues connected to reproduction as part of what may be a general reactionary attitude. This is consistent with for example, the early objections to IVF and the use of anesthesia in pregnancy. However, the second one of these could also be construed as a “punish women” goal, even as it has become uncommon. It might be noteworthy in this context that the IVF issue still is an issue for Catholic official doctrine but not almost any Protestants, and the objection to anesthesia in pregnancy is essentially gone completely. On the other hand, maybe looking at something more connected to male biology might help: if this is purely an objection to technical intervention in sex, then one would expect objections to Viagra and similar drugs. But they don’t exist. So that’s an argument against the technical intervention hypothesis.
Another possibility is that trying to understand is part of a general attempt to give broad explanations for what amounts to an attempt to modify old theology to handle modern technologies and dilemmas. Thus the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic. One example that might prove an interesting contrast in this context to the Christian right outlook is that of Orthodox Judaism. In some respects, Orthodox Judaism has more of an objection to birth control than it has to abortion. Fitting this sort of norm into any of the above hypotheses really seems like shoehorning.
Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn’t illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist (and get almost no media coverage compared to religious objections to comparable procedures in women).
So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis. But I suspect that in fact the reason vasectomies aren’t used as an example are far the same (actual) reason that they don’t have nearly as much objection: they aren’t that common.
Thinking more about this though, there’s another interesting hypothesis that hasn’t been discussed yet: the goal might not be punishing a specific gender for having sex, but punishing sex in general. That seems by and large consistent with almost all of the discussed issues here with viagra being possibly a counterexample.
If you’re thinking about US politics in 2012, most of the “objection to birth control” was objection to Obama’s mandate that insurance companies to fully cover birth control for women, but not men.
More generally, in the US there’s much more objection to birth control. This is a long-term trend independent of any recent issues. Moreover, the objections made about the recent health-care mandate were not made by and large based on gender equality issues.
Sure. My point was that no one was requiring employers to cover vasectomies, so of course no one will get angry about having to provide vasectomy coverage.
Vasectomies(and tube-tying) tend to be used very differently than temporary birth control. Usually they’re done either in the context of a married couple who has as many kids as they want, or someone with serious enough medical issues that reproduction would be ill-advised. As such, the impact on casual sex is dramatically different than the impact of the Pill or abortions.
Someone started a rumor last decade that a large portion of health insurers cover Viagra but not birth control. It’s not true.
I’m not sure that state laws mandating specific corporate policy make a good basis for defending corporate policies.
That said, even if it were true, I am not sure it’s really that objectionable. Viagra is intended to treat a dysfunction of the body, whereas birth control is intended to prevent a function of the body; they’re not comparable in kind, even if they both enable the same behaviors.
Given that there’s no god to specify what theology you get, this just raises the question — why do they have those theological objections? You’re proposing what amounts to a null hypothesis in your notion that “the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic”.
Or the various cultures wherein are found the murder of women who have extramarital sex and other forms of “honor” violence. The differences do not seem to be described well as theological differences, since some of the same behaviors exist across different religions in some regions of the world.
It is easy for atheists to come to the conclusion that religious people do nasty things because of religion. I suspect that it would be more accurate to say that religion provides a set of powerful rationalizations for certain emotional reactions; and that which reactions a person manifests has as much to do with other elements of culture as with their theology.
Funny, from my point of view this evidence suggests that pro-lifers are actually more concerned with controlling women’s sex lives, than with saving unborn babies.
Can’t it be both?
Yes, I suppose so. Good point.
Edit: Seriously? Downvotes? For conceding that my political opponent made a good point? Seriously?
I bet the down votes are for re-iterating the parent comments main point as if it were novel and original to you? Didn’t you understand what this meant: “lets go with “Women deserve to be punished for having sex,” and that ‘life-begins-at-conception’ is just a rationalization”?
Re-reading the grand-grand-grand-grand-parent post, yes, I now see that you’re correct that that was what he was trying to get at—although he certainly wasn’t being particularly clear.
But regardless, downvoting someone for conceding a point to someone they’re engaged in debate with is pretty lame.
Your model assumes that all people believe in a position for the same reason. In my debates with different people about abortion different people seem to hold their positions for different reasons.
Thinking that all people who disagree with you are on one side and think exactly the same is a good way to prevent rational debate.
It’s not obvious a priori that being anti-abortion isn’t caused by believing that life begins at conception (but I agree that, except for people deep down the valley of bad rationality, it’s way less likely that their morality depends on their definition of the English word life than the other way round).
I don’t think it’s a matter of different axioms—humans aren’t expert systems after all!
It’s more about a tension between two systems for regulating reproductive behavior.
In system A, girls are expected to abstain from sex until marriage, girls that don’t are shunned, men are discouraged from marrying “used goods”, and anything promoting sexual promiscuity is dangerous. Parents are expected to have an important input into they’re children’s decisions, and women are expected to be mostly dependent on a man. This is what you’d get in traditional “farmer” communities, i.e. most of the civilized world in past centuries.
In system B, Marriage is about Love, which is considered kind of mysterious and spontaneous; sex is not frowned upon, though it’s expected that girls will take the reasonable steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The law also steps in to make sure fathers take their responsibilities.
Basically, both feature ways of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, though system A is much more gung-ho about doing so; probably mostly because in a village a couple centuries ago, having a fatherless child would be one of the worse things that could happen to a girl.
But many of the norms in this are not considered as “ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies”, but rather as things that are valuable of themselves (and the norms are supported by connotations in the language, common stories, etc.) - they are lost purposes. So from the point of view of someone raised mostly with System A values, abortion looks like something that reduces the bad consequences of immoral behavior, and thus encourages immoral behavior, so of course it’s bad! They ignore the fact that the main reason such a behavior is considered immoral is because it leads to those consequences!
… or at least, that’s one part of the story. There’s also a good deal of identity conflicts involved (religion and culture more than politics), and of course it’s entirely possible that overall, System A does work better than System B.
For a better example of a case where rational debate is useless, I’d take an exiled Tibetan and a Chinese Nationalist debating about the status of Tibet.
I think that’s somewhat more amenable to rationality—the “Screw Tibet, free China!” bumper sticker I once saw comes to mind here. But I mostly picked abortion because it’s the most prominent such example and the one I’ve thought most about, not because it’s necessarily the best illustration.
If someone believes something about the moral implications of conception, that is something they likely just took in as a social truth, and then later learned and crafted a rationalization for. I don’t think we have moral instincts about cellular organisms.
To the extent that their in group remains constant, it would take a lot of serious moral argument to overcome that social truth. The problem with political arguments is that people don’t seriously have them. They volley a couple of bumper stickers at each other, and then go off in a huff. They may do it a million times—but a million bogus arguments designed to achieve nothing individually will likely achieve nothing in the aggregate as well.
The social truth remains intact—no serious moral arguments oppose it—why would we ever expect a change?
Where you might expect a change—when one moves between social groups, or when one commits to and is capable of serious moral argument.
The social aspect is at least theoretically testable—how big are the moral shifts when people change in groups? I suspect pretty large.
And in the relatively rare ideologue class, the shifts are often pretty big too. I knew a gal who went from seminary->Leninism->WIcca/EnviroProgressivism. Lots of atheist ideologues are former fundamentalists. Conservatives who were former marxists.
Arguments work on people who engage in them. I’d guess that a changing social truth works even better on most.
This kind of stuff happens very often among people in their late teens in my home town. (Most but not all of them just support political ideologies the way they’d support football teams.)
That’s it.
A small class of people care about and are interested in ideas. You can change their minds through argument. The vast majority are Green Team Blue Team, and they change their ideology if required by a change in their social affiliation.
Actually there are many more possible position in the abortion debate than pro-life and pro-choice. The fact that the position exist like this in US society is a result of the fact that the issue didn’t get resolved democratically via congress but via the Supreme Court.
Different European countries have different abortion laws and it makes sense to discuss with laws around the issue are best. If you want to have a senisble discussion about the topic, don’t treat it binary. You look at a bunch of different legal solutions to the abortion issue and start comparing which laws you prefer over which other laws.
Restrictions on procedures can take a lot of shades, but the basic choice of yea or nay is pretty binary. For comparison, Canada also had abortion law determined by the Supreme Court(it was legal but heavily restricted before, and now we have literally the loosest abortion law in the world—there are no restrictions whatsoever), but the issue is nowhere near as controversial. I think the difference has a lot less to do with the Supreme Court, and a lot more to do with the US level of religiosity.
Accepting that a woman, who was raped and has complications with her pregnancy that would mean that she would die if there was no abortion, is a long way from accepting that every pregnant woman in a late stage pregnancy can just decide to have an abortion.
When you start talking rationally about the shade of gray of different laws it also becomes easier to have a rational discourse about the extremes.
One exemption to anti-abortion views I’ve seen expressed almost universally among pro-lifers is that abortion is okay if the mother’s life is at risk(because at that point, abortion isn’t murder, any more than an operation that kills one Siamese twin to save the other is). A lot of people try to start blocking out other exemptions for semi-random reasons, mostly because of the hemisphere fallacy, but the arguments are usually the sort of incoherent nonsense you only hear from politicians.
That’s why it makes sense to give them multiple laws that regulate abortion and ask them to rank them instead of asking them for their ideal abortion law.
They will have to give you reasons about why they prefer one exception over another even if they would reject both exceptions in a perfect world. That usually requires them to reason in a way that’s more than just reiterating talking points.
Agreed, that seems like a good approach to teasing out details of a stance. (Most real people will just ignore you in various ways, of course, but if you can make them sit still long enough it’s viable)
If you tell people that they are doing things wrong, they usually dont ignore you but get emotional about what you are saying.
If people just ignore you, maybe you are arguing against straw mans or otherwise not addressing the real reasons of why they acted the way they did in the past.
Upvoted, beacause I agree in principle, but I don’t actually see any examples of this in this thread.
I agree with you, but I’m not sure that “moral value conflict” is the mainstream position in this community (or in society in general).
I think the mainstream position in society is “People who disagree with me are evil”, so that’s not saying a lot. But fair point.