The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I’d like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I’m 4-3, ie as balanced as it’s mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of “abortion is murder” would be “forced pregnancy is slavery”; TGM suggests below it “denying euthanasia is torture”. These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying “Abortion Is Murder!” on my way to work every day. I don’t know who exactly it would be helping to give “Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery” equal billing with “Abortion Is Murder” here and let my readers conclude that I’m arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as “abortion is murder!”, I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it’ll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they’re both “war”, but that one doesn’t come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.
Why? Isn’t that just Pretending To Be Wise by flattering the prejudices of the two major sides? Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article’s purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
Using this, I’d argue that “Corporations are not people” is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.
I fail to see the connotation in the “not-speech” for the third example though, and I don’t quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money—the label / categorization doesn’t seem like it would sway anyone either way.
The money is not speech argument is used (just like the corporations are not people argument) to protest against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. The claim is that although speech is constitutionally protected, this does not mean that wealthy individuals have the right to spend large amounts of money to get their poltiical views heard (by, say, contributing to SuperPACs). The idea is: although it’s true that the government should not be allowed to prevent people from expressing their opinions, the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
I think this is an example of the WAitW. The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech. Wealthy people claim that this means they can spend their considerable wealth in order to broadcast their opinions. After all, if the government can’t restrict my speech, surely that means the government can’t prevent me from utilizing my own resources as a medium for that speech. But, the leftist responds, the government can totally prevent wealthy people from doing this, because the wealthy people are spending money in order to get their opinions broadcast, and hey, money is not-speech, so like many other examples of not-speech, restricting its use is not a violation of the Bill of Rights.
the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech.
More conveniently, it prohibits Congress from regulating the freedom of the press, i.e. the printing press, i.e. the technological means of reproducing ideas so that others may consume them, as in television ads.
Which is why I found the Citizens United decision so baffling- the reasoning they used to reach their conclusion was not at all the reasoning I would have used. (But, then again, I would rule the vast majority of laws Congress outputs unconstitutional, which is one of the many reasons I have not been nominated to the Supreme Court.)
Now that sounds like “Money is speech” which is also a fit to WAiTW.
This highlights an ambiguity in what we mean by “Money is not speech”. It could mean “Money is a subset of (non-speech)” which is false since Money does talk in some cases.
Or it could mean “It is not the case that money is a subset of speech” which is more debatable, and definitely not WAItW. Expressed as a Venn diagram, Money and Speech may be overlapping circles with neither strictly contained in the other.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
I agree with all three examples as WAITW even if the last two are negative. It’s also very rare that you can settle policy questions through the negation of a categorization. Corporations aren’t typical people and money isn’t typical speech, but neither of those observations settle the policy question or even debate it—these are just slogans.
The negative examples are different because they don’t suggest an argument, only a counterargument. If X is an apple then various conclusions (typically/intuitively) follow, for instance, that X is edible. But if X is a non-apple then nothing much follows from that; it only serves to block the apple-->edible argument (and suggest that X is not necessarily edible).
“Money is speech” implies that all of the protections that get applied to speech should be applied to spending. If money is not speech, then who knows? Nothing much follows directly from that (it’s not as if there’s some general principle that things which are non-speech should be banned); it just suggests that we don’t necessarily have to apply the speech protections to spending. It’s more similar to the “MLK was not a criminal” counterargument than to the “MLK was a criminal” argument (note that being a non-criminal doesn’t make someone especially admirable), but it doesn’t fall into the trap of being obviously false.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don’t we feel averse applying it to say age?
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of life!”
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren’t really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it’s wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can’t remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it’s conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is “Meat is murder”. I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment)
I was surprised people didn’t notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat “right wing”. I think a key thing might be that perception of “right” and “left” are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don’t often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
“Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech!”. Many anti-queer statements are hate speech, e.g. promotion of murder, but others are along the lines of “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...”. Quite a few conservatives complain that the latter form of argument is dismissed as “hate speech”, even though “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is never taken to mean you hate SUV drivers.
That’s not the worst argument in the world. “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...” is closer to the central archetype of hate speech than “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is. And the full argument is probably something like “Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech, and therefore harms homosexuals.” — which is a sloppy argument, but a cleaned-up version would be “Arguing against homosexuality encourages people (through the magic of virtue ethics) to view homosexuals as vicious. And it legitimizes (through the affect heuristic) the established pattern of homophobia. Therefore, you should not argue against homosexuality. By the way, hate speech shares these features.”
So this may be more complicated than I thought, in that all of the examples below seem really bad to me, but that might just be an example of my personal bias. I think if any of them get, let’s say, more than ten upvotes I’ll assume they’re generally agreed to be a good argument and I’ll put them in—does that sound like a reasonable bar? That means upvote them if you think they’re worthy of inclusion.
I was trying to think of further liberal examples, and I think some references to “human rights” might qualify—for example, “health care is a human right”. The meaning of “human right” that allows us to assert this seems very poorly defined, whereas the meaning of “human right” that allows us to say that negative rights like free speech are human rights seems well-defined, even though I don’t agree with it. So calling health care (or housing, or something) a “human right” might be a way of trying to claim that we should view health care as exactly like free speech, free religion, etc, even though it is quite different in that it requires positive action by other people.
I’m not quite willing to include that one just because the total ambiguity in the definition of “human right” makes it pretty hard to pin down exactly how the argument is being made.
EDIT: Just saw “Property is theft” has 15 upvotes. Do people think this one should be added?
“Human rights” are poorly defined, but I guess the closer we have to a formal definition of them is Universal Declaration of Human Rights which does include health care and right to education at the same level than free speech or fair trial.
But I agree it’s a very poor defense of universal healthcare, the UDHR is a political document that can carry weight of authority, but it doesn’t make something ethical or unethical by itself. The only way I use the UDHR in a political discussion is with a reasoning like « UDHR includes right to healthcare, and UDHR was accepted by most countries of the planet, so it’s not a completely lunatic position. Now, please stop your authority arguments like “the only natural rights are freedom and ownership” and listen to my actual arguments for universal healthcare, and I’ll listen to your real ones against it », which doesn’t in itself justify healthcare, but can help giving me at least a chance to expose my arguments.
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
An official of the Russian Orthodox Church on Thursday said supporters of the band bear a moral responsibility for the gruesome killings in the city of Kazan.
There are similar Western examples with Wikileaks/Anonymous.
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
I lost a lot of faith in contemporary philosophy when I heard “A Defense of Abortion” was “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy”.
Interesting example. I’m trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely “as though it also had those features even though it doesn’t”
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
Things like gay marriage or adoption rights don’t fit those archetypical examples—hence the rather silly counter-argument by its opponents that “gays are already allowed to marry—they’re allowed to marry people of the opposite gender.”
I’m saying all this as a huge supporter of gay rights, btw.
Ah I see now, thanks. I don’t its nearly as common as “abortion is murder” though. Actually I’m quite embarrassed that I can’t think of any liberal examples of the worst argument in the world with regard to social issues that people actually use regularly. I don’t like any that I’ve seen so far.
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
It’s not as different as it might seem. Initially, only property owners could vote, and so only letting men vote was effectively “one vote per household”. With the “sensible” assumption that everyone is married and truthful with their spouses, giving votes to both spouses means either one candidate gets two votes, or they vote for different people and thus might as well have stayed home. Since the only difference there is that the folks counting the votes would have to do twice as much work (since spouses usually agree about everything), it would not be helpful to give every household 2 votes instead. People could have argued at the time (I’m not sure whether they actually did) that women do have the right to vote—the husband is voting for both of them (this is of course complicated by the fact that women could not own property).
Equal right to property works similarly—unmarried women could own property, but married women could not.
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
If only 100 barrels of oil ends up being worth a human life, clearly we ought to invade Iran. Or Equatorial Guinea if we can only scrape up a couple of million dollars for the coup.
I’d quibble about “clearly,” even in context. Wars are just too damn random.
Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I’m mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways—unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.
I am not entirely convinced that a foreign-backed violent coup, even against a truly heinous dictator, is necessarily a good idea. This seems like one of those cases for ethical injunctions, because the visible upside is so clear (the dictator is gone), but the downside is more complicated: violent coups, for whatever reason, very rarely end up producing good governments.
The premise was that human life is ethically cheap, and the conclusion wasn’t that backing a coup was a good idea, but that outright invasion would be.
Personally, I don’t think that the cash value of the oil (discounted as normal) is greater than the cash cost of the war plus the reconstruction needed to get the oil. I could be wrong on my estimates, because I don’t think the relative monetary cost is a significant factor in the moral calculus, so I didn’t spend much time or effort estimating the values.
I looked at it considering that the coup attempt never started, and figured that he was claiming that someone dropped a tip and stopped it.
I don’t know if ~80 people could complete a coup; it would seem that if the military is loyal to the existing regime, it would fail, and if the military was disloyal no mercenaries are needed.
Nope, wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just amused by the point that anyone who wants to save as many lives as possible, but has only a finite amount of oil, must be able to state some consistent value of human life in terms of barrels of oil, since otherwise you could rearrange the oil to save more lives.
So, are the downvotes because these are, or because they are not, exactly what was asked for? And is −3 too much of a hair trigger for the karma fine for replying, or about right?
I didn’t downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn’t because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
“Rethuglican” is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don’t like, but it doesn’t pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It’s an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
“We are the 99%” doesn’t share much of the WAitW features. It doesn’t try to sneak in connotations, it doesn’t attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I’d like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I’m 4-3, ie as balanced as it’s mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of “abortion is murder” would be “forced pregnancy is slavery”; TGM suggests below it “denying euthanasia is torture”. These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying “Abortion Is Murder!” on my way to work every day. I don’t know who exactly it would be helping to give “Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery” equal billing with “Abortion Is Murder” here and let my readers conclude that I’m arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as “abortion is murder!”, I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it’ll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they’re both “war”, but that one doesn’t come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
“Property is theft”
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
American liberals aren’t that kind of left. And Proudhon did mean “property is wrong for the same class of reasons theft is”.
Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.
Why? Isn’t that just Pretending To Be Wise by flattering the prejudices of the two major sides? Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article’s purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
As a leftist, this seems like a useful exercise. Here are a few claims I’ve heard more than once from fellow leftists that might qualify.
A fetus is a clump of cells.
Corporations are not people.
Money is not speech.
The first one is a good leftist example of the WAitW… and with a bit of shame I’ve to admit I used it in the past.
I wouldn’t say the other two qualify because they are negatives. “X is not Y” is quite different from a rethorical perspective than “X is Y”.
Let Y = (Not Z)
X is Y.
Using this, I’d argue that “Corporations are not people” is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.
I fail to see the connotation in the “not-speech” for the third example though, and I don’t quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money—the label / categorization doesn’t seem like it would sway anyone either way.
The money is not speech argument is used (just like the corporations are not people argument) to protest against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. The claim is that although speech is constitutionally protected, this does not mean that wealthy individuals have the right to spend large amounts of money to get their poltiical views heard (by, say, contributing to SuperPACs). The idea is: although it’s true that the government should not be allowed to prevent people from expressing their opinions, the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
I think this is an example of the WAitW. The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech. Wealthy people claim that this means they can spend their considerable wealth in order to broadcast their opinions. After all, if the government can’t restrict my speech, surely that means the government can’t prevent me from utilizing my own resources as a medium for that speech. But, the leftist responds, the government can totally prevent wealthy people from doing this, because the wealthy people are spending money in order to get their opinions broadcast, and hey, money is not-speech, so like many other examples of not-speech, restricting its use is not a violation of the Bill of Rights.
Buckley v. Valeo disagrees.
More conveniently, it prohibits Congress from regulating the freedom of the press, i.e. the printing press, i.e. the technological means of reproducing ideas so that others may consume them, as in television ads.
Which is why I found the Citizens United decision so baffling- the reasoning they used to reach their conclusion was not at all the reasoning I would have used. (But, then again, I would rule the vast majority of laws Congress outputs unconstitutional, which is one of the many reasons I have not been nominated to the Supreme Court.)
I thought the more common claim is that spending money just is self-expression, and therefore protected.
Now that sounds like “Money is speech” which is also a fit to WAiTW.
This highlights an ambiguity in what we mean by “Money is not speech”. It could mean “Money is a subset of (non-speech)” which is false since Money does talk in some cases.
Or it could mean “It is not the case that money is a subset of speech” which is more debatable, and definitely not WAItW. Expressed as a Venn diagram, Money and Speech may be overlapping circles with neither strictly contained in the other.
The choice of what to spend on, not the act of spending.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
Or even go one step further: a group of people threaten to boycott companies that advertise on shows saying politically incorrect things.
I agree with all three examples as WAITW even if the last two are negative. It’s also very rare that you can settle policy questions through the negation of a categorization. Corporations aren’t typical people and money isn’t typical speech, but neither of those observations settle the policy question or even debate it—these are just slogans.
The negative examples are different because they don’t suggest an argument, only a counterargument. If X is an apple then various conclusions (typically/intuitively) follow, for instance, that X is edible. But if X is a non-apple then nothing much follows from that; it only serves to block the apple-->edible argument (and suggest that X is not necessarily edible).
“Money is speech” implies that all of the protections that get applied to speech should be applied to spending. If money is not speech, then who knows? Nothing much follows directly from that (it’s not as if there’s some general principle that things which are non-speech should be banned); it just suggests that we don’t necessarily have to apply the speech protections to spending. It’s more similar to the “MLK was not a criminal” counterargument than to the “MLK was a criminal” argument (note that being a non-criminal doesn’t make someone especially admirable), but it doesn’t fall into the trap of being obviously false.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don’t we feel averse applying it to say age?
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
Doesn’t sound as evil no?
Either this is a joke or you mean “odd”.
You saw nothing!
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren’t really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it’s wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can’t remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it’s conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is “Meat is murder”. I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
I was surprised people didn’t notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat “right wing”. I think a key thing might be that perception of “right” and “left” are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don’t often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
Of course not!
MLK was a Communist philanderer. That’s worse. ;)
“Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech!”. Many anti-queer statements are hate speech, e.g. promotion of murder, but others are along the lines of “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...”. Quite a few conservatives complain that the latter form of argument is dismissed as “hate speech”, even though “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is never taken to mean you hate SUV drivers.
That’s not the worst argument in the world. “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...” is closer to the central archetype of hate speech than “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is. And the full argument is probably something like “Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech, and therefore harms homosexuals.” — which is a sloppy argument, but a cleaned-up version would be “Arguing against homosexuality encourages people (through the magic of virtue ethics) to view homosexuals as vicious. And it legitimizes (through the affect heuristic) the established pattern of homophobia. Therefore, you should not argue against homosexuality. By the way, hate speech shares these features.”
So this may be more complicated than I thought, in that all of the examples below seem really bad to me, but that might just be an example of my personal bias. I think if any of them get, let’s say, more than ten upvotes I’ll assume they’re generally agreed to be a good argument and I’ll put them in—does that sound like a reasonable bar? That means upvote them if you think they’re worthy of inclusion.
I was trying to think of further liberal examples, and I think some references to “human rights” might qualify—for example, “health care is a human right”. The meaning of “human right” that allows us to assert this seems very poorly defined, whereas the meaning of “human right” that allows us to say that negative rights like free speech are human rights seems well-defined, even though I don’t agree with it. So calling health care (or housing, or something) a “human right” might be a way of trying to claim that we should view health care as exactly like free speech, free religion, etc, even though it is quite different in that it requires positive action by other people.
I’m not quite willing to include that one just because the total ambiguity in the definition of “human right” makes it pretty hard to pin down exactly how the argument is being made.
EDIT: Just saw “Property is theft” has 15 upvotes. Do people think this one should be added?
I’m not fond of any, either. See if you can find something you like here.
“Human rights” are poorly defined, but I guess the closer we have to a formal definition of them is Universal Declaration of Human Rights which does include health care and right to education at the same level than free speech or fair trial.
But I agree it’s a very poor defense of universal healthcare, the UDHR is a political document that can carry weight of authority, but it doesn’t make something ethical or unethical by itself. The only way I use the UDHR in a political discussion is with a reasoning like « UDHR includes right to healthcare, and UDHR was accepted by most countries of the planet, so it’s not a completely lunatic position. Now, please stop your authority arguments like “the only natural rights are freedom and ownership” and listen to my actual arguments for universal healthcare, and I’ll listen to your real ones against it », which doesn’t in itself justify healthcare, but can help giving me at least a chance to expose my arguments.
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
For example, something like “we should support racial diversity because of the benefits of ideological diversity”?
Not quite any wing: the jailed Pussy Riot members should stay behind bars because a killer requested their release.
There are similar Western examples with Wikileaks/Anonymous.
Judith Jarvis Thomson? (Well, she didn’t use the word slavery but still.)
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
I lost a lot of faith in contemporary philosophy when I heard “A Defense of Abortion” was “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy”.
How about “Gay rights are equal rights”?
Interesting example. I’m trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely “as though it also had those features even though it doesn’t”
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
Things like gay marriage or adoption rights don’t fit those archetypical examples—hence the rather silly counter-argument by its opponents that “gays are already allowed to marry—they’re allowed to marry people of the opposite gender.”
I’m saying all this as a huge supporter of gay rights, btw.
Ah I see now, thanks. I don’t its nearly as common as “abortion is murder” though. Actually I’m quite embarrassed that I can’t think of any liberal examples of the worst argument in the world with regard to social issues that people actually use regularly. I don’t like any that I’ve seen so far.
It’s not as different as it might seem. Initially, only property owners could vote, and so only letting men vote was effectively “one vote per household”. With the “sensible” assumption that everyone is married and truthful with their spouses, giving votes to both spouses means either one candidate gets two votes, or they vote for different people and thus might as well have stayed home. Since the only difference there is that the folks counting the votes would have to do twice as much work (since spouses usually agree about everything), it would not be helpful to give every household 2 votes instead. People could have argued at the time (I’m not sure whether they actually did) that women do have the right to vote—the husband is voting for both of them (this is of course complicated by the fact that women could not own property).
Equal right to property works similarly—unmarried women could own property, but married women could not.
No blood for oil!
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
This is the subjective value of one’s own life. The market value of human life, i.e. the price for which one life can be saved, should be much lower.
If only 100 barrels of oil ends up being worth a human life, clearly we ought to invade Iran. Or Equatorial Guinea if we can only scrape up a couple of million dollars for the coup.
Incidentally, there appears to be an important list of unsung humanitarian heroes here.
I’d quibble about “clearly,” even in context. Wars are just too damn random.
Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I’m mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways—unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.
I am not entirely convinced that a foreign-backed violent coup, even against a truly heinous dictator, is necessarily a good idea. This seems like one of those cases for ethical injunctions, because the visible upside is so clear (the dictator is gone), but the downside is more complicated: violent coups, for whatever reason, very rarely end up producing good governments.
The premise was that human life is ethically cheap, and the conclusion wasn’t that backing a coup was a good idea, but that outright invasion would be.
Personally, I don’t think that the cash value of the oil (discounted as normal) is greater than the cash cost of the war plus the reconstruction needed to get the oil. I could be wrong on my estimates, because I don’t think the relative monetary cost is a significant factor in the moral calculus, so I didn’t spend much time or effort estimating the values.
I’m not sure how to interpret Eliezer’s “unsung humanitarian heroes” comment other than as an endorsement of the coup attempt.
Or maybe I’m just missing some sarcasm.
I’ll take option B, in the form of reductio ad absurdum, on the claim that a human life is worth 100 barrels of oil.
I was baffled by that too. They attempted to overthrow a nasty dictator . . . but they did it for the oil money they’d get from the new government.
I believe your sarcasm detector may be improperly calibrated.
I believe Eliezer is more concerned with whether the coup would have led to an increase in utility than the motives of the plotters.
I looked at it considering that the coup attempt never started, and figured that he was claiming that someone dropped a tip and stopped it.
I don’t know if ~80 people could complete a coup; it would seem that if the military is loyal to the existing regime, it would fail, and if the military was disloyal no mercenaries are needed.
By the same logic, doesn’t everyone who steals X money, where X happens to be higher than the value of life, become a humanitarian hero?
By which I mean that I don’t understand your point. You seem to indirectly accuse me of commiting a fallacy, yet I don’t know which one.
Nope, wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just amused by the point that anyone who wants to save as many lives as possible, but has only a finite amount of oil, must be able to state some consistent value of human life in terms of barrels of oil, since otherwise you could rearrange the oil to save more lives.
I am probably becoming a bit paranoid lately.
“Bankers are parasites.”
“We are the 99%.”
“Rethuglican.” (You’ll see the “is” if you unpack the word.)
So, are the downvotes because these are, or because they are not, exactly what was asked for? And is −3 too much of a hair trigger for the karma fine for replying, or about right?
I didn’t downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn’t because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
“Rethuglican” is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don’t like, but it doesn’t pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It’s an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
“We are the 99%” doesn’t share much of the WAitW features. It doesn’t try to sneak in connotations, it doesn’t attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.