For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I invented that arbitrary claim [...] to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims.
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
“I think he made one law of that kind [sc. one with no obvious reason why obeying it is a good idea] in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? [...] Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you to do something for which His bidding is the only reason? [...]
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
...wrong?
The canonical exchange, IIRC goes as follows:
-- What kind of woman do you take me for?!
-- I think we’ve already established that, now we’re just arguing about the price.
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
Would anyone believe that killing a newly born baby is murder without the influence of religion?
Actually, religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion.
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
I was referring to ritual child sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures.
But cultures with relatively low population counts compared to centuries of populous Christian countries.
Given ritual adult sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures, what does this prove?
In general, that religiosity does not prevent atrocious behavior, and if you need some special insight to stop killing babies, religion is not it.
Dozens? I only know of one, the pre-Jewish Semites.
Assorted examples from other cultures.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.