Once again, I bring up the exchange from Gideon’s Crossing, where a black doctor advises a deaf woman to give her deaf daughter cochlear implants:
Mother: You’re saying that hearing people are better than deaf people! Doctor: I’m saying it’s easier. Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
For those that don’t catch the analogy: yes, life might be easier if you were hearing rather than deaf, but gaining the ability to hear would change a fundamental part of your identity and separate you from your “native culture”.
Not endorsing this view, just trying to give a better intuition for it.
It’s interesting that obvious moral of your anecdote is supposed to be that no black person would want to change into a white person, even though life would be easier. I mean, I agree it’s probably true, but it seems mysterious to me, like something that needs to be explained. One explanation is that a single black person changing to white would in a sense be betraying all her black friends, or legitimizing the idea that being black is worse than being white, but I can think of a contrived scenario where those explanations don’t seem to apply.
Suppose that we had a machine that could change people’s skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people—discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it’s not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.
I’m white, and I don’t think I would object too much if the coin came up as “all whites have to change to blacks.” I could see some white people objecting on aesthetic grounds, that they’ve been conditioned to think white people are more attractive and don’t want to be in bodies they would view as less attractive. I could imagine a whole bunch of white people objecting just to be contrary. But overall I can’t think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
But I know that part of white privilege is the privilege of thinking race doesn’t make that much difference, so I predict that black people would want to think much harder about the case where all blacks have to change into whites. They’d probably have the same aesthetics and general contrariness objections as the white people, but if the rest of the thread is any indication there might also be an objection surrounding “black culture”.
One could say that whatever black people like about black culture, they could continue to like if they had white skin. I guess the counterargument would be that black culture needs a certain critical mass to survive, and that if there were no artificial division between blacks and whites forcing them into different communities and different “meme pools”, it would get overwhelmed by the more common white culture. But this seems like it’s also a good argument against any attempt to fight racism or end segregation. And although I am almost sure someone is going to scoff really hard at me for saying this and explain why it’s totally not appropriate, lots of white people seem to like a lot of black culture and even be pretty good at some “traditionally black” forms of expression, and vice versa.
I’d be really interested in hearing from some minority—whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever—who wouldn’t want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
But overall I can’t think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
Is “my bodily autonomy is more important than your dreams of social justice” just being contrary?
I’d be really interested in hearing from some minority—whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever—who wouldn’t want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
What would such a coin toss look like for sexuality? If it comes up heads, everyone becomes straight, and if tails everyone becomes gay? That would have significant extinction concerns. Everyone becoming bisexual on tails is more reasonable, but it doesn’t map onto the same sort of concerns, because now it’s asymmetric: straight guys who become bisexual can still be attracted to women, but gay guys who become straight can’t still be attracted to men. So maybe heads is everyone stays the same? But that’s just odd- “we have this option, and either we’ll do it or we won’t.”
I wouldn’t mind moving from gay to bisexual, and I wouldn’t mind gay culture disappearing. I suspect that everyone becoming bisexual would lead to a net social loss, though, even though I might be better off.
What would such a coin toss look like for sexuality?
That’s a good point, and it made it more obvious to me what the problem is. Equalizing everyone forces them to all play the same status game, and it being zero-sum, minority groups would lose. Before, I only competed with the rest of my small community, afterwards, I compete with everyone. (See also The Melancholy of Subculture Society.)
(Incidentally, my answer is “stop the game”. As an asexual, I’d be very much opposed to being forced to play sexuality, no matter what side I ended up on.)
Incidentally, my answer is “stop the game”. As an asexual, I’d be very much opposed to being forced to play sexuality, no matter what side I ended up on.
I also don’t think I would terribly mind becoming asexual, but again, I wouldn’t want everyone to be. (Definitely not before we have artificial uteruses, and still possibly not afterwards.)
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments, especially when you consider sexual jealousy. If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with half the population- if everyone were bisexual, I would now have to consider the possibility that my wife/husband were cheating on me with literally everyone s/he knows, and s/he would have the same worry.
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly. I’m not sure what would happen with sexual frustration- there would be more desire but also probably more fulfillment.
Then you get to other measures, like STD transmission or population growth. If you give all men the desire to have sex with other men, given the increased willingness of men to have casual sex compared to women it seems like you’ll get fewer stable couples, fewer child-raising couples, and more promiscuity, leading to dramatic increases in STDs.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people > without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments,
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
especially when you consider sexual jealousy.
Options: Non-monogamy. Trusting your partner. Communication with partner, ascertaining whether emotional needs are likely to be met in this relationship. Accepting that sexual jealousy happens because humans are emotional animals and that its mere existence does not constitute a failure mode.
If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with > half the population-
Or you could actually trust each other. What kind of trust is it that depends upon the other player being unable to defect? And are you so entirely sure your wife couldn’t be bisexual?
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly.
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
I have no doubt that I unconsciously evaluate every person I interact with; where else would the label “cute” come from?
Options: Non-monogamy.
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant. That is, many people would choose many varieties of non-monogamy, and the existence of jealousy would complicate those choices.
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
Sure. But remember that policy debates should not appear one-sided. Having to deal with unrequited attractions is a cost, even if people get good at doing so. The question about net loss or net gain is about balancing losses and gains. There are a number of benefits to everyone becoming bisexual, but also a number of costs, and when I eyeball them I reckon the costs as larger than the benefits.
Do you evaluate kittens, small children, and the like as potential partners as well, then? “Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant.
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people. I wasn’t advocating monogamy as an additional button-press to fix the problem you see, I was pointing out that the problem you’re talking about already has solutions that don’t disappear if we press this button, and that the problem as you stated it seems to have more bearing on you specifically than on humanity in general.
“Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
You’re right, “sexy” would have been a better word to use there.
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends. If everyone were bisexual, my dating pool would be massively larger and my male friends might be interested in me, and thus I would probably be better off.
But when I look at straight people around me, and ask myself what their difficulties are, and ask if bisexuality is likely to make them worse off or better off, it seems to me unlikely that the gains would outweigh the losses. The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not, and it’s not clear to me if bisexuality being the norm makes them more likely to be employed successfully.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends
Small size of the dating pool where you are specifically, or your perceptions of its small size generally? It’s an important distinction...
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not
I guess I just don’t see how an uptick in unrequited attractions is a fundamental issue. If most people couldn’t find a suitable partner, then it would be more obviously an issue, but...hell, I get unrequited feelings for people all the time, it sucks and it hurts, sometimes a lot, but does it really impair people in a long-term sense? In a way that existing coping mechanisms couldn’t account for?
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
It is unpleasant to have desires no amount of planning or effort could deliver, and not be able to convince the source of that desire of that desire’s futility without risking something. It is a sad thing to lose a friend by asking them out, and a sadder thing to be in turmoil over when and how.
does it really impair people in a long-term sense?
Does it need to be long-term for it to be a cost?
Were I to explain my intuition about the long-term and broad consequences, I would talk about things like reduced population growth, increased STD prevalence, and possibly decreased social harmony. Talking about something like social harmony is easier to do if you start off with the short-term and small-scale, though.
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive. People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates, and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive.
That would be my point in its entirety, yes.
People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates
Does not follow at all. People who like, or seek some subset of those qualities might still be considered very desirable in the eyes of a large number of others.
(Hell, I can think of several past and present partners of mine who were positively spoiled for choice, and mostly dated folks who weren’t those things, and still found me interesting as a mate...)
and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
Yeah, no. I think you have a straw model of attraction here.
I think as a good Bayesian you actually DO have to view every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance, and every potential partner around your Significant other as, to some degree, a competitor.
I often wonder if first order rationality is actually beneficial in this matter. I may instinctively trust my partner, but at what rate do trusting people get cheated on relative to non-trusting people? That’s all the strength of evidence that my trust can offer me.
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Edit: Also,
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
Relevant...?
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals? Oftentimes, they don’t. Being interested in a single gender is essentially ‘asexuality lite’ in that you both have the prospect of fulfilling sexual relationships and there are groups in which you can just set sex aside and focus on other things. The convenient thing about being straight is that the sex-free group is people similar to you- one of the awkward things about being gay is that the sex-free group is people dissimilar to you. (The group is also very tiny, ignoring asexuals: once you add a second lesbian, now there’s a chance the two of them will be attracted to each other.)
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
You might have a point about STDs, but I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures. Mostly I was talking about the assumptions underlying your concern with jealousy / trust / cheating, unrequited connections, stable couples / childraising couples, and promiscuity.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals?
Yes, but the point was more like: it goes both ways. If you have it, the advantages seem to outweigh the flaws; if you don’t, it seems the other way around.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing. Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures.
Which is all I need to show something in the loss column, neh?
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.” Obviously, modern society is not the EEA, but it’s a better place to start from than idealism.
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.”
Gaining with respect to our utility functions is not what evolution selects for. If evolution has a choice in the short term between more miserable people who have more successful offspring and happier people with fewer successful offspring then evolution will have more miserable people. Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
I’m not. Societies don’t have utility functions; they propagate forward in time through a blind process similar enough to evolution. As mentioned in an ancestral comment, I suspect I personally would be better off in a society where everyone were bisexual, but suspect that the overall society would be worse off.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing.
Intuitively, I would have thought of this as a good thing, but
Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
is a good point.
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.”
??? Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
My original claim was “net social loss.” Such a term is purposefully vague, but I suspect it should be uncontroversial that something that leads to collapse or replacement counts as a net social loss.
I wouldn’t want transgendered people to all make a switch to identifying with the binary gender assigned to them at birth.
Sure, nobody would be picking on us for being trans, because we wouldn’t be trans anymore. We wouldn’t have to deal with any of the awful crap that society presses on us. We wouldn’t have to deal with feelings of discomfort and alienation from our bodies (those of us that have such—it’s not a completely universal trait). We wouldn’t have to worry about things like costly surgical procedures, the availability of psychologically-stabilizing hormone treatments, whether we’ll be able to find clothing that fits and looks good, whether or not we want to aim for passing and how well we can do at that, and so on.
Those are things that make my life difficult, and they’re often pretty horrific.
But the thing is? I also wouldn’t be me. It is conceptually nontrivial to propose “a version of Jandila who isn’t trans”—that is a hypothetical individual who is a fundamentally different person, who experiences the world differently, who doesn’t have my memories and my experiences of the world. Whole different person. Sure, you can speculate what’d have happened in some counterfactual timeline where the person born to my parents never wound up displaying this trait, but then so much of their life would have been so different from mine.
This is a problem for me because if the goal is to do well by people who are still alive, we have to actually listen to them to some extent about their preferences and needs. I wouldn’t suffer so much or have as many challenges if I pushed a magic button that made me cis, but a lot of my problems don’t have to be this way.
I wouldn’t need to worry about surgery the way I do if it were something health insurance covered—my condition is considered medical by all my providers and doctors and insurers, yet surgery to remediate it is handled not by meaningful standards of best practices and studied in medical schools or offered at a typical hospital. Instead it’s a bit like buying a collector’s item—a lot of money, up front in cash, buyer’s remorse is entirely your risk, it’s considered a vanity rather than a necessity no matter what said medical profession’s consensus is otherwise, and exceptions are thin on the ground.
Trans people wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble getting hormone replacement therapy if our own medical needs were taught alongside other parts of endocrinology, and if medical research into our health was mostly directed at longitudinal studies of outcomes, treatment modalities and the like, and not predominantly focused on “what makes trans people trans?” (unhelpful to most actual people who are, but a great way to monopolize what little funding is available for research relevant to trans people)
I wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about never getting a job, or being assaulted or harassed, if trans people and acceptance thereof were more normalized in popular culture, if it weren’t limited to the “deceptive/pathetic transsexual” dichotomy most of the tiny number of portrayals of us fall into—because more people would be familiar with the idea, and (I can hope) might think of something other than those stereotypes.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that various entities already extant in the world could do that would make it a lot easier for trans people to exist, without just offering us a magic “turn cis in a flash” pill. Yes, if we were like you we’d not be persecuted for being us, but we’d also not have to be persecuted that way if, y’know, people didn’t persecute us. If people could recognize that we’re targeted as a perceived group, lumped together whether or not we prefer to identify and live that way, and that even those of us who have no strongly-felt affiliation with any trans-specific cultural entity still suffer the effects of being perceived as part of that group.
Counterfactuals about making [minority who suffers/is persecuted/has disproportionately bad outcomes] go away by ensuring no more of them come into existence look a lot squickier when you’re a member of that minority who can think of a few much less drastic things the majority could do to accomplish similar ends.
I think that tribalism expands to cover any differences. Some experience among various Orthodox Jewish groups is one piece of information in my background. Ideological divisions are unimportant within a group half the size of a congregation and important within a group the size of a congregation, regardless of the ideological diversity in the congregation.
Mothers can tell identical twins apart. Anything less than an extreme reduction in differences won’t do much to reduce Schelling point in-group/out-group division.
Speech patterns are part of culture, and you mentioned them as one of the things which would be changed.
That objection could probably be covered by adding speech patterns rather than eliminating them.
How about religion? Would the atheists here be comfortable with a coin toss approach to being religious or not?
I’m ethnically Jewish (personally agnostic). I’m uncomfortable with Christianity in a way which I think is different from the way people who were raised Christian and who’ve had bad experiences are. I haven’t had personal bad experiences with Christianity, but I’m not only edgy about it, but it’s like Gandhi and the murder pill—I’m not comfortable with the idea of fading out my discomfort, even though I can’t see that it’s doing me any good.
Being Jewish carries a lot of memories with it. I only go to a service if it’s an important event for someone else, but if I do, I’m reasonably familiar with the ritual. I still like the Jewish folk songs I learned in Hebrew school. I suppose I could keep all that (from this paragraph) if the coin toss came up Unitarian, but not otherwise. It’s not as though the folk songs are a secret, but no one else especially bothers to learn them.
The general point is that these differences aren’t just pasted-on labels for the most part. (The exception I’m thinking of is a news story I read about an anti-Semite in Eastern Europe who found out he had Jewish ancestry, gave up anti-Semitism, and became observant. People are very strange.)
I’m not sure how useful arguments from completely imaginary tech are.
Other free association: I’ve read about an exercise where people were asked to list the labels they identified with, and the list tended to mostly include things they’d been hurt about.
Religion seems different insofar as some people think it has a truth value. If I believe Jesus is the Son of God, that’s a very strong argument for not using a machine that turns me into an atheist—once I’m an atheist, I would be wrong on the Jesus question.
I also am ethnically Jewish, but I don’t consider that to be an interesting test case of the principle. Part of why I find the black case interesting is that black people could continue to perpetuate black culture even if they had white skin. Since Jews don’t look very different from the majority population, it’s unclear what a machine to make me “not Jewish” would mean other than that I lose Jewish culture and ritual and so on, which makes it a totally different case.
Being made not Jewish would presumably also mean that you wouldn’t identify as Jewish.
I apparently look Jewish. I’ve been handed $20 by someone in a Western state because of a Bible verse that nations which are friendly to Jews will flourish. I told her I wasn’t observant, but she didn’t care.
A street musician spontaneously played Hatikvah (the Israeli national anthem) for me.
In order to be thoroughly not Jewish, I’d have to look different.
How much is one’s identity in oneself, and how much is in other people’s minds?
One piece of black culture is about hair—having different hair would change the culture.
How much is one’s identity in oneself, and how much is in other people’s minds?
A large majority of German Jews before WWII were fully assimilated and considered themselves Germans, until they were rather sternly reminded of the difference. The situation was very nearly repeated in the Soviet Union around 1953, though Stalin’s death interfered with the planned forced displacement and possibly worse. Still, the resulting anti-Jewish sentiment there never went away completely.
So, other people’s minds often matter more than your own.
I’d be really interested in hearing from some minority—whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever—who wouldn’t want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
I’m white and I wouldn’t be favourable towards the coin toss idea, but I’ll answer anyway since some of the reasoning might be the same.
Suppose that we had a machine that could change people’s skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people—discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it’s not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.
Firstly, changing surface appearances wouldn’t necessarily end racial discrimination (i.e. physical similarity doesn’t guarantee the absence of tribal identification; discrimination may be based on alleged biological differences that are not limited to surface characteristics). Furthermore I don’t see how pair bonding and attraction, and personal identity could be adequately preserved (for people in general) through substantial changes in physical appearance. For the sake of the thought experiment I suppose we can ignore this, though.
I would nonetheless object to the idea on the basis that it is needlessly illiberal. Why not just allow anyone to use the machine if they want to do so? If someone feels he is being discriminated against, then he is free to use the machine. If he is unwilling to use the machine, presumably the problem isn’t bad enough to merit trampling over the personal liberty and aesthetic values of others.
I’m white, and I don’t think I would object too much if the coin came up as “all whites have to change to blacks.” I could see some white people objecting on aesthetic grounds, that they’ve been conditioned to think white people are more attractive and don’t want to be in bodies they would view as less attractive. I could imagine a whole bunch of white people objecting just to be contrary. But overall I can’t think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
I presume that “conditioning” refers to social conditioning, i.e. being told or being subjected to media and insinuation that one ethnic group is more attractive than another.
Other (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
Said aesthetic judgements are not purely due to “conditioning”, but are (at least in part) formed by the same mental processes as other aesthetic judgements in general.
There are certain modules of the mind that render humans likely to form tribal attachments to their ethnic groups (non-EEA condition—just how the adaptations are expressed today). The in-group/out-group dichotomy influences sincere aesthetic judgements.
Humans are on average naturally attracted to somewhat similar-looking mates. This influences aesthetic judgements of other ethnic groups in general. Unpacking “natural”, genetic causes might interact with early environment e.g. the ethnicity of the humans to which someone is exposed as an infant. #2 and #3 might be closely related causes.
I don’t see why aesthetics shouldn’t be considered a good reason for objecting to the change, whatever the case may be. I suppose humans might be expected to have second-order preferences in favour of allocating relatively little priority to aesthetic preferences that are merely socially conditioned—perhaps—but I don’t see any reason to assume that this is true of the aesthetic preference in question.
Furthermore, homogenising humanity might be considered an aesthetic disutility independent of any comparison between the aesthetic qualities of different ethnic groups – much in the same way that it is a shame when attractive and unique animal species become extinct. Human ethnic groups differ less than different animal species but as humans, the value that many of us attach to diversity and distinctiveness within the human species is magnified.
But overall I can’t think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
My haaaaaaaaair!
(Lest I be accused of not taking this seriously, note that “My haaaaaaaaair!” is also the first objection I generate to the prospect of coming down with cancer, even though I know that is stupid.)
I don’t think the anecdote (parable?) requires or implies that no black person would want to become white, just that a black person could feel that way, and wish to keep other blacks from making such a conversion, without being obviously malicious.
At least, I find that view (for black or deaf people) much more understandable than the view that drives the humans in the good ending of Three Worlds Collide [1], which is widely agreed with here.
[1] that view being, basically, that the loss of a planet of humans is an acceptable price to pay to preserve human “growing pains” (romantic strife, embarrassment, etc).
The best objection I can come up with is really more of a generalized diversity argument: that heterogenous genetic populations tend to be more robust against environmental stresses, and that the same is probably true for their memetic analogues. But there’s nothing coding that objection to any particular phenotype, minority or otherwise, and I can certainly imagine scenarios where it might be outweighed by circumstances.
I don’t think I’d personally care too much in the scenario presented—it’s conceptually squicky, but I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack—but then again I’m a white dude, so any of Yvain’s caveats could just as well apply to me. My first impulse when I imagine painlessly homogenizing various points of contention where I do fall into the minority is to appeal to something similar to the above, though.
I’d be really interested in hearing from some minority—whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever—who wouldn’t want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
Hm.
So, I think that if actually offered such a coin toss for sexuality, with some kind of proviso that kept me from suddenly no longer being sexually attracted to my husband or vice versa (and that avoided similar problems for everyone else), I would ultimately conclude that the benefits of accepting such a coin toss outweighed the costs, and thus would want my community to accept it. (Note that this is a different question from whether I would impose the results of such a coin toss on my community.)
I’d be really torn, though, and the truth is I don’t know how well I can predict my actual behavior in the event.
The same thing is true for being Hispanic, but I’m more confident that I’d endorse the cointoss there. Unsurprisingly, I identify less as Hispanic than I do as queer.
The same cointoss for Judaism is somewhere in between, and my anxiety considering it is high enough that my confidence that I can actually predict it is again pretty low.
As for where the anxiety/resistance comes from… I don’t think it’s anything surprising. Cultural identities feel very important and they are associated with whatever attributes they are associated with. Mess with those attributes, you mess with the associated identities, which feels threatening.
And, of course, in real-world situations (which don’t have the magic properties you’ve posited for your thought experiment) such feelings of threat have historically often been justified. That is, historically, eliminating the distinctions between majority M1 and minority M2 frequently turns out to mean eliminating M2 altogether, or trying to. And, hey, if M1 is going to act against M2′s collective interests, then M2 had damned well better be prepared to act collectively in their mutual interests, or they’re going down… so it’s not too surprising that our instincts trend that way. (of course, one can come up with evo-psych justifications for anything, so that’s not worth much.)
In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I’m not saying they have more moral worth, I’m saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can’t. The latest iPhone (to pick a piece of technology with a recognizable progression in quality) is better than the iPhone 3G. It has a faster processor and various other doohickies that improve its function. It’s not morally superior, but it IS objectively better, as, as far as I can tell, the ability to hear is objectively better to deafness.
Deaf people can also do things that hearing people can’t. They are completely immune to noise and auditory distractions. I can imagine a future in which people pay for getting an implant that grants them voluntary deafness powers. I’d buy it.
Apart from that bit of pedantry, I agree with your comment.
Earplugs: imperfect, uncomfortable, annoying to “turn on and off” and gross. And, I suppose, that in many social contexts using them could end up causing you to be labeled a passive-agressive weirdo. Headphones are better in some ways and worse in others. I think they provide weaker isolation and require you to actually listen to music if you want to really stop hearing outside stuff but I never had high-end headphones so I don’t actually know.
No, it doesn’t. It would only sound that way if the claim were that deafness is better on net (as is claimed of mortality), rather than pointing out one particular benefit of being deaf.
(Minor nitpick: people labeled “deaf” can still pick up very low-frequency vibrations, and if they’re next to a really wild party, can still get annoyed by the bass. Similarly, people with “no light perception” still get fried by lasers.)
I don’t think that is absolutely true. Consider the following policy followed by Omega:
“Whenever life is discovered on a planet, all the life is extinguished and the planet is destroyed.”
Where are the good consequences of such a policy? This reminds me of “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” an aphorism meant to make people feel better but not actually based on fact. Ask a polio victim if they’re feeling stronger.
Less pain on that planet. Depending on the extermination method, possibly awesome fireworks.
The badly dehydrated do love getting water, but no one (?) seeks to be badly dehydrated. Those who were dehydrated and say it was wonderful but do not lock themselves away from water frequently are probably expressing sour grapes towards those who never went without water for days. The pleasure of getting the water is still real.
These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.
Actually—the senses we use to shape our map of the world in a very strong sense alter the ways in which we understand the world. It has long been demonstrated that in patients who lack a specific sense, the neural mass normally dedicated to that sense begins to “bleed over” into the remaining senses, giving them more ‘processing power’ than would otherwise normally be the case. What this, in turn, means is that the perceptual world of a deaf or blind person is very strongly different from the one that we who have all five senses would otherwise understand or know.
What does all of this imply? The deaf truly perceive the world in ways that we who have all of our senses cannot today comprehend, in any true sense—though we can extrapolate from considering cases such as color-blindness; I can imagine that to a deaf person I am effectively color-blind to a whole range of visual depth that I can no more know than could a profoundly color-blind person ‘know’ the reality of red and green being profoundly separate colors.
In restoring hearing to such a person, if we are to truly argue that such a thing would be solely augmentative in nature, we should endeavor to ensure that such depth of perceptual capability was not lost in the process.
As a diagnosed autist, I very often wonder what it would be like to be what many of those of my condition refer to as “neurotypical”. But I definitely would never want to live my life as ‘one of you’; I am quite proud of the insights and demonstrably variant modes of thinking my condition has granted me.
As a transhumanist, I very often find that the notion of neurodiversity; of having the freedom to define for one’s own self what one’s cognitive processes should be shaped after, at any given time, is a more realizable near-term goal (morally, if not technically). It bypasses many of these problems.
Deafness is not death. If you die, you can’t do anything at all, because there isn’t a you left to speak of.
If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don’t have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don’t go away, and social acceptance is not total.
As an autistic person with serious auditory sensitivities, I can see the draw of being able to shut down my sense of hearing voluntarily. If I lost it (I may as I age; there’s some family history) I think I’d just prefer to bank against that possibility by learning ASL now, which—bonus! -- gives me some linguistic access to interacting with people I’d find difficult to talk to before, rather than get a cochlear implant or a hearing aid.
Neurally, this is true; they possess the same amount of gray matter dedicated to processing sensory input but it has fewer signals to work with. We who possess all five senses can do something similar by using sensory-deprivation tools to note the “sharpening” of a particular sense we pay attention to.
In terms of apparatus, however, simply being deaf doesn’t suddenly eliminate near-sightedness.
But is the ability to distinguish a discrete and limited number of tones that you have to learn to interpret properly to have any benefit from at all (even more so if the person in question was born deaf) worth an invasive medical procedure?
All things being equal, you are of course correct. If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn’t be an issue at all. The issue is precisely the fact that all things are not equal.
But is the ability to distinguish a discrete and limited number of tones that you have to learn to interpret properly to have any benefit from at all (even more so if the person in question was born deaf) worth an invasive medical procedure?
If the true objection was the invasiveness of the procedure, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
And I bet you it would be an issue. There are people out there who force female genital mutilation to their children—that’s an invasive procedure right there that is meant to deprive their children of an ability. And yet millions of people do it to their children.
It’s not about the invasiveness of the procedure—it’s about cultures that choose to do evil in pursuit of their self-perpetuation.
If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
You’d be surprised. Mostly from what I’ve gathered, they discuss the cost of the acquisition of hearing—at all—as compared to their current condition. There are significant differences in how the brain processes sensory input from a profoundly deaf/blind/etc person as compared to a hearing/seeing/etc. Having even 50% hearing restored would ‘cost’ a deaf person the depth and richness of their other perceptions. It really can be boiled down to a question of net expected utility.
But then there are also those folks that stubbornly identify around the culture dedicated to the absence of a given sense and as such can be seen as something of a ‘permanent victim’ mentality—at least, that is my perception.
In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I’m not saying they have more moral worth, I’m saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can’t.
You’re conflating being better at something with being better. “In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination.” How is that a useful observation?
Deaf people’s disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf. Black people’s disadvantage comes about because a lot of people, at least implicitly, believe (possibly correctly) that being black correlates with other traits that are undesirable in and of themselves.
Deaf people’s disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf.
I disagree that there can be innate disadvantages, except for to the extent the utility function addresses those properties directly. See:
St Addahad’s Symptoms. A small group of symptoms including fleshy growths, nerve clusters and neural pathways which result in a near permanent state of distraction as patterns of air pressure change are translated into thoughts and inserted into the mind with disruptively high priority. “Sounds” from all around, indoors and out, near and far, from nearby footsteps to distant thunderstorms or even one’s own bodily functions all combine to make a state of prolonged focus nearly impossible to achieve, though this ability can be regained somewhat with practise.
As with many curses, St Addahad’s sufferers describe benefits as well, such as being able to know things are happening without needing to see them, and to know which direction they are happening in, and some even report being able to balance without handholds. These trivial sounding benefits appear so addictive that most refuse to be treated. Efforts are underway to cause the onset of these symptoms by technological means, but there is debate on the moral issue of such experiments on humans as the necessary interventions cannot wait until the age of consent.
No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability—a confusion arising because English has the inconvenient fact that it uses the word “good” to mean moral worth (he’s a good person), and great ability (a good musician).
How is that a useful observation?
Well, here we tend to be a group of people that prefer the world to be improved, because we currently believe it’s highly subpoptimal. Does that make it clear to you why we don’t want people to be forced to stay blind or deaf or mute?
No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability
I don’t think I’m doing that. In the instrumental sense that “ceteris paribus, hearing people can do more than deaf people,” it’s also true that “ceteris paribus, white people can do more than black people (due to discrimination curtailing opportunities).” Both are purely instrumental claims, and both are fairly trivial in themselves. In the deaf case and in the racial case, all else is not equal. Otherwise, we’d want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, just pointing out that the reasons given are incomplete.
They can still be relevant when we’re not talking about any particular person, though. They’re especially relevant when we’re discussing future people, who we can’t come to a good understanding of but must decide whether or not to affect anyway.
Which isn’t to say that we can’t take other factors into account too.
Otherwise, we’d want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving.
Do you know of a way where something like this could be practically done and be successful? If so, then we might discuss the pros and cons of such a scheme.
If you don’t know any such way, then this is a mere distraction and diversion at best—or worse yet, an attempt to use the taboo topics of racial politics in an attempt to mind-kill.
Do you know of a way where something like this could be practically done and be successful?
This is a moral question. It might be the case that we don’t have any practical ways of convincing people that death is bad, but that doesn’t mean that death isn’t bad.
If you don’t know any such way, then this is a mere distraction and diversion at best—or worse yet, an attempt to use the taboo topics of racial politics in an attempt to mind-kill.
Silas Barta introduced an anology between the deaf case and the hearing case. Atorm responded with a potential disanalogy, and I responded to him by saying that the disanalogy he provided didn’t straightforwardly work. Do you seriously think I’m trying to “mind-kill” anything? I feel you’re being unfair.
I don’t see a question mark anywhere in your comment. What is this moral question? “Why don’t we encourage black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?” “How is this different from encouraging black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?”
Make exact what this moral question is for me—but let me warn you that your analogy is currently much more likely to convince me that we should discourage black people of conceiving, than that deaf people have the moral right to force their children to remain deaf even if there’s a cheap safe method to restore said hearing.
So it’s bad for deaf people to impair their children’s hearing abilities, because all else being equal, hearing people can do more. By the same token, is it also bad for us to create black rather than white children, since “all else being equal,” discrimination allows white people to do more?
More generally, how do we figure out what to hold fixed—that is, what precisely the “else” is to hold “equal”—when comparing the worthiness of two lives?
By the same token, is it also bad for us to create black rather than white children,
“Us”? I’ve not created any black children, and most black people don’t have the capacity to create white children. And child-creation hasn’t been collectivized yet, it’s still an individual process.
If someone deliberately created a child with the explicit desire of having it be socially disadvantaged enough that they’d need to partake in the culture its parents belong to, instead of having more options available, that’d be evil.
More generally, how do we figure out what to hold fixed—that is, what precisely the “else” is to hold “equal”—when comparing the worthiness of two lives?
What does worthiness have to do with anything? This is about allowing children to hear, not about who is “worth” what. About quality of life, not about justice.
“Us”? I’ve not created any black children, and most black people don’t have the capacity to create white children. And child-creation hasn’t been collectivized yet, it’s still an individual process.
I think you’re missing the point. Please substitute the word “you” with whoever would be faced with such a situation (a black couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a black baby, a deaf couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a deaf baby, etc.).
What does worthiness have to do with anything? This is about allowing children to hear, not about who is “worth” what. About quality of life, not about justice.
I am using “worthiness” to refer to an informal measure of how much we should actualize certain lives relative to others, which includes considerations like quality of life. Maybe “choiceworthiness” would’ve been a better word.
a black couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a black baby
You mean a black couple that were given the choice to conceive a black baby or a white baby, and choosing “black” instead of “white”?
I guess that depends on their motivations for this choice, and whether it’s for the perceived benefit of the child or the perceived disadvantage of the child. If they perceived blackness as an inherent disability on the level of deafness, that’d be wrong, yes.
edit to explain: I slightly edited the post shortly after I posted it, which explains the small discrepancy before the current text of the comment, and the quoted text in the response to it.
I guess that depends on their motivations for this choice, and whether it’s for the perceived benefit of the child or the perceived benefit of their own selves, or their culture. If they perceived blackness as an inherent disability on the level of deafness, that’d be wrong, yes.
They believe that a black child will face certain social difficulties that a white child wouldn’t, but that he’d nevertheless lead a happy, flourishing life and love his culture and skin color, and moreover that the added diversity would be a net good for humanity.
but that he’d nevertheless lead a happy, flourishing life and love his culture and skin color and moreover that the added diversity would be a net good for humanity.
Are we still discussing this as an analogy with deaf people? Because I don’t think that most deaf people love their deafness, and though I like diversity of skin colors (and genders, and hair colors, and eye colors) I don’t believe that the existence of deafness or of blindness or of leprosy or of AIDS is a net good for humanity.
Because I don’t think that most deaf people love their deafness
I honestly can’t cite any statistics, but there are many, many, many congenitally deaf people who view their condition as a fundamental part of who they are and don’t want it to change. Maybe that attitude is pathological or something, but there it is.
I don’t believe that the existence of deafness or of blindness or of leprosy or of AIDS is a net good for humanity.
I think the existence of deaf people who want to be deaf is arguably a net good for humanity. Deaf culture is as real as black culture. Few people with AIDS or leprosy are glad they have it, however.
I honestly can’t cite any statistics, but there are many, many, many congenitally deaf people who view their condition as a fundamental part of who they are and don’t want it to change.
Doesn’t it tell you something if it’s only people who are congenitally deaf and thus have never experienced hearing who are the only ones that don’t want to experience it?
I think the existence of deaf people who want to be deaf is arguably a net good for humanity.
How?
Deaf culture is as real as black culture.
You keep using the word “culture” as if it’s supposed to drive away all my objections. Fine it’s real—how does that show it to be good that it exists?
There are lots of cultures that I wish had never existed—and when they exist I wish they were eradicated. Female-genital-mutilation cultures, because I wish there was no female genital mutilation. Aztec human-sacrificing culture, because I want there not to be any human sacrificing. Deaf culture, because I don’t want there to be any deafness.
I understand this perspective, but the analogy seems rather inapt. I can imagine societal changes that ameliorate the relative stigmatism of dark skin. I have difficulty imagining changes that would allow deaf people to enjoy music, for example. I can imagine technological changes that would allow deaf people the benefit of communicating with a much broader portion of the population without restoring their hearing, but am uncertain how resistant the deaf would be to that for cultural reasons
I think a better analogy for the deaf parents here is to people in the developed world who argue for leaving uncontacted tribes isolated. They think the tribespeople would be losing something by being exposed to the modern world around them, just as the deaf parents think something of their culture would be lost by easy access to the hearing world. I’m not particularly sympathetic in either case.
Once again, I bring up the exchange from Gideon’s Crossing, where a black doctor advises a deaf woman to give her deaf daughter cochlear implants:
Mother: You’re saying that hearing people are better than deaf people!
Doctor: I’m saying it’s easier.
Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
For those that don’t catch the analogy: yes, life might be easier if you were hearing rather than deaf, but gaining the ability to hear would change a fundamental part of your identity and separate you from your “native culture”.
Not endorsing this view, just trying to give a better intuition for it.
It’s interesting that obvious moral of your anecdote is supposed to be that no black person would want to change into a white person, even though life would be easier. I mean, I agree it’s probably true, but it seems mysterious to me, like something that needs to be explained. One explanation is that a single black person changing to white would in a sense be betraying all her black friends, or legitimizing the idea that being black is worse than being white, but I can think of a contrived scenario where those explanations don’t seem to apply.
Suppose that we had a machine that could change people’s skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people—discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it’s not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.
I’m white, and I don’t think I would object too much if the coin came up as “all whites have to change to blacks.” I could see some white people objecting on aesthetic grounds, that they’ve been conditioned to think white people are more attractive and don’t want to be in bodies they would view as less attractive. I could imagine a whole bunch of white people objecting just to be contrary. But overall I can’t think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
But I know that part of white privilege is the privilege of thinking race doesn’t make that much difference, so I predict that black people would want to think much harder about the case where all blacks have to change into whites. They’d probably have the same aesthetics and general contrariness objections as the white people, but if the rest of the thread is any indication there might also be an objection surrounding “black culture”.
One could say that whatever black people like about black culture, they could continue to like if they had white skin. I guess the counterargument would be that black culture needs a certain critical mass to survive, and that if there were no artificial division between blacks and whites forcing them into different communities and different “meme pools”, it would get overwhelmed by the more common white culture. But this seems like it’s also a good argument against any attempt to fight racism or end segregation. And although I am almost sure someone is going to scoff really hard at me for saying this and explain why it’s totally not appropriate, lots of white people seem to like a lot of black culture and even be pretty good at some “traditionally black” forms of expression, and vice versa.
I’d be really interested in hearing from some minority—whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever—who wouldn’t want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
Is “my bodily autonomy is more important than your dreams of social justice” just being contrary?
What would such a coin toss look like for sexuality? If it comes up heads, everyone becomes straight, and if tails everyone becomes gay? That would have significant extinction concerns. Everyone becoming bisexual on tails is more reasonable, but it doesn’t map onto the same sort of concerns, because now it’s asymmetric: straight guys who become bisexual can still be attracted to women, but gay guys who become straight can’t still be attracted to men. So maybe heads is everyone stays the same? But that’s just odd- “we have this option, and either we’ll do it or we won’t.”
I wouldn’t mind moving from gay to bisexual, and I wouldn’t mind gay culture disappearing. I suspect that everyone becoming bisexual would lead to a net social loss, though, even though I might be better off.
That’s a good point, and it made it more obvious to me what the problem is. Equalizing everyone forces them to all play the same status game, and it being zero-sum, minority groups would lose. Before, I only competed with the rest of my small community, afterwards, I compete with everyone. (See also The Melancholy of Subculture Society.)
(Incidentally, my answer is “stop the game”. As an asexual, I’d be very much opposed to being forced to play sexuality, no matter what side I ended up on.)
I also don’t think I would terribly mind becoming asexual, but again, I wouldn’t want everyone to be. (Definitely not before we have artificial uteruses, and still possibly not afterwards.)
Why? What kind of loss?
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments, especially when you consider sexual jealousy. If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with half the population- if everyone were bisexual, I would now have to consider the possibility that my wife/husband were cheating on me with literally everyone s/he knows, and s/he would have the same worry.
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly. I’m not sure what would happen with sexual frustration- there would be more desire but also probably more fulfillment.
Then you get to other measures, like STD transmission or population growth. If you give all men the desire to have sex with other men, given the increased willingness of men to have casual sex compared to women it seems like you’ll get fewer stable couples, fewer child-raising couples, and more promiscuity, leading to dramatic increases in STDs.
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
Options: Non-monogamy. Trusting your partner. Communication with partner, ascertaining whether emotional needs are likely to be met in this relationship. Accepting that sexual jealousy happens because humans are emotional animals and that its mere existence does not constitute a failure mode.
Or you could actually trust each other. What kind of trust is it that depends upon the other player being unable to defect? And are you so entirely sure your wife couldn’t be bisexual?
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
I have no doubt that I unconsciously evaluate every person I interact with; where else would the label “cute” come from?
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant. That is, many people would choose many varieties of non-monogamy, and the existence of jealousy would complicate those choices.
Sure. But remember that policy debates should not appear one-sided. Having to deal with unrequited attractions is a cost, even if people get good at doing so. The question about net loss or net gain is about balancing losses and gains. There are a number of benefits to everyone becoming bisexual, but also a number of costs, and when I eyeball them I reckon the costs as larger than the benefits.
Do you evaluate kittens, small children, and the like as potential partners as well, then? “Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people. I wasn’t advocating monogamy as an additional button-press to fix the problem you see, I was pointing out that the problem you’re talking about already has solutions that don’t disappear if we press this button, and that the problem as you stated it seems to have more bearing on you specifically than on humanity in general.
You’re right, “sexy” would have been a better word to use there.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends. If everyone were bisexual, my dating pool would be massively larger and my male friends might be interested in me, and thus I would probably be better off.
But when I look at straight people around me, and ask myself what their difficulties are, and ask if bisexuality is likely to make them worse off or better off, it seems to me unlikely that the gains would outweigh the losses. The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not, and it’s not clear to me if bisexuality being the norm makes them more likely to be employed successfully.
Small size of the dating pool where you are specifically, or your perceptions of its small size generally? It’s an important distinction...
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
I guess I just don’t see how an uptick in unrequited attractions is a fundamental issue. If most people couldn’t find a suitable partner, then it would be more obviously an issue, but...hell, I get unrequited feelings for people all the time, it sucks and it hurts, sometimes a lot, but does it really impair people in a long-term sense? In a way that existing coping mechanisms couldn’t account for?
It is unpleasant to have desires no amount of planning or effort could deliver, and not be able to convince the source of that desire of that desire’s futility without risking something. It is a sad thing to lose a friend by asking them out, and a sadder thing to be in turmoil over when and how.
Does it need to be long-term for it to be a cost?
Were I to explain my intuition about the long-term and broad consequences, I would talk about things like reduced population growth, increased STD prevalence, and possibly decreased social harmony. Talking about something like social harmony is easier to do if you start off with the short-term and small-scale, though.
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive. People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates, and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
That would be my point in its entirety, yes.
Does not follow at all. People who like, or seek some subset of those qualities might still be considered very desirable in the eyes of a large number of others.
(Hell, I can think of several past and present partners of mine who were positively spoiled for choice, and mostly dated folks who weren’t those things, and still found me interesting as a mate...)
Yeah, no. I think you have a straw model of attraction here.
I think as a good Bayesian you actually DO have to view every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance, and every potential partner around your Significant other as, to some degree, a competitor. I often wonder if first order rationality is actually beneficial in this matter. I may instinctively trust my partner, but at what rate do trusting people get cheated on relative to non-trusting people? That’s all the strength of evidence that my trust can offer me.
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Edit: Also,
Relevant...?
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals? Oftentimes, they don’t. Being interested in a single gender is essentially ‘asexuality lite’ in that you both have the prospect of fulfilling sexual relationships and there are groups in which you can just set sex aside and focus on other things. The convenient thing about being straight is that the sex-free group is people similar to you- one of the awkward things about being gay is that the sex-free group is people dissimilar to you. (The group is also very tiny, ignoring asexuals: once you add a second lesbian, now there’s a chance the two of them will be attracted to each other.)
You might have a point about STDs, but I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures. Mostly I was talking about the assumptions underlying your concern with jealousy / trust / cheating, unrequited connections, stable couples / childraising couples, and promiscuity.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
Yes, but the point was more like: it goes both ways. If you have it, the advantages seem to outweigh the flaws; if you don’t, it seems the other way around.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing. Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
Which is all I need to show something in the loss column, neh?
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.” Obviously, modern society is not the EEA, but it’s a better place to start from than idealism.
Gaining with respect to our utility functions is not what evolution selects for. If evolution has a choice in the short term between more miserable people who have more successful offspring and happier people with fewer successful offspring then evolution will have more miserable people. Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
I’m not. Societies don’t have utility functions; they propagate forward in time through a blind process similar enough to evolution. As mentioned in an ancestral comment, I suspect I personally would be better off in a society where everyone were bisexual, but suspect that the overall society would be worse off.
Intuitively, I would have thought of this as a good thing, but
is a good point.
??? Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
My original claim was “net social loss.” Such a term is purposefully vague, but I suspect it should be uncontroversial that something that leads to collapse or replacement counts as a net social loss.
Enforced uniformity is always a loss.
I wouldn’t want transgendered people to all make a switch to identifying with the binary gender assigned to them at birth.
Sure, nobody would be picking on us for being trans, because we wouldn’t be trans anymore. We wouldn’t have to deal with any of the awful crap that society presses on us. We wouldn’t have to deal with feelings of discomfort and alienation from our bodies (those of us that have such—it’s not a completely universal trait). We wouldn’t have to worry about things like costly surgical procedures, the availability of psychologically-stabilizing hormone treatments, whether we’ll be able to find clothing that fits and looks good, whether or not we want to aim for passing and how well we can do at that, and so on.
Those are things that make my life difficult, and they’re often pretty horrific.
But the thing is? I also wouldn’t be me. It is conceptually nontrivial to propose “a version of Jandila who isn’t trans”—that is a hypothetical individual who is a fundamentally different person, who experiences the world differently, who doesn’t have my memories and my experiences of the world. Whole different person. Sure, you can speculate what’d have happened in some counterfactual timeline where the person born to my parents never wound up displaying this trait, but then so much of their life would have been so different from mine.
This is a problem for me because if the goal is to do well by people who are still alive, we have to actually listen to them to some extent about their preferences and needs. I wouldn’t suffer so much or have as many challenges if I pushed a magic button that made me cis, but a lot of my problems don’t have to be this way.
I wouldn’t need to worry about surgery the way I do if it were something health insurance covered—my condition is considered medical by all my providers and doctors and insurers, yet surgery to remediate it is handled not by meaningful standards of best practices and studied in medical schools or offered at a typical hospital. Instead it’s a bit like buying a collector’s item—a lot of money, up front in cash, buyer’s remorse is entirely your risk, it’s considered a vanity rather than a necessity no matter what said medical profession’s consensus is otherwise, and exceptions are thin on the ground.
Trans people wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble getting hormone replacement therapy if our own medical needs were taught alongside other parts of endocrinology, and if medical research into our health was mostly directed at longitudinal studies of outcomes, treatment modalities and the like, and not predominantly focused on “what makes trans people trans?” (unhelpful to most actual people who are, but a great way to monopolize what little funding is available for research relevant to trans people)
I wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about never getting a job, or being assaulted or harassed, if trans people and acceptance thereof were more normalized in popular culture, if it weren’t limited to the “deceptive/pathetic transsexual” dichotomy most of the tiny number of portrayals of us fall into—because more people would be familiar with the idea, and (I can hope) might think of something other than those stereotypes.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that various entities already extant in the world could do that would make it a lot easier for trans people to exist, without just offering us a magic “turn cis in a flash” pill. Yes, if we were like you we’d not be persecuted for being us, but we’d also not have to be persecuted that way if, y’know, people didn’t persecute us. If people could recognize that we’re targeted as a perceived group, lumped together whether or not we prefer to identify and live that way, and that even those of us who have no strongly-felt affiliation with any trans-specific cultural entity still suffer the effects of being perceived as part of that group.
Counterfactuals about making [minority who suffers/is persecuted/has disproportionately bad outcomes] go away by ensuring no more of them come into existence look a lot squickier when you’re a member of that minority who can think of a few much less drastic things the majority could do to accomplish similar ends.
I think that tribalism expands to cover any differences. Some experience among various Orthodox Jewish groups is one piece of information in my background. Ideological divisions are unimportant within a group half the size of a congregation and important within a group the size of a congregation, regardless of the ideological diversity in the congregation.
Mothers can tell identical twins apart. Anything less than an extreme reduction in differences won’t do much to reduce Schelling point in-group/out-group division.
Speech patterns are part of culture, and you mentioned them as one of the things which would be changed.
That objection could probably be covered by adding speech patterns rather than eliminating them.
How about religion? Would the atheists here be comfortable with a coin toss approach to being religious or not?
I’m ethnically Jewish (personally agnostic). I’m uncomfortable with Christianity in a way which I think is different from the way people who were raised Christian and who’ve had bad experiences are. I haven’t had personal bad experiences with Christianity, but I’m not only edgy about it, but it’s like Gandhi and the murder pill—I’m not comfortable with the idea of fading out my discomfort, even though I can’t see that it’s doing me any good.
Being Jewish carries a lot of memories with it. I only go to a service if it’s an important event for someone else, but if I do, I’m reasonably familiar with the ritual. I still like the Jewish folk songs I learned in Hebrew school. I suppose I could keep all that (from this paragraph) if the coin toss came up Unitarian, but not otherwise. It’s not as though the folk songs are a secret, but no one else especially bothers to learn them.
The general point is that these differences aren’t just pasted-on labels for the most part. (The exception I’m thinking of is a news story I read about an anti-Semite in Eastern Europe who found out he had Jewish ancestry, gave up anti-Semitism, and became observant. People are very strange.)
I’m not sure how useful arguments from completely imaginary tech are.
Other free association: I’ve read about an exercise where people were asked to list the labels they identified with, and the list tended to mostly include things they’d been hurt about.
Religion seems different insofar as some people think it has a truth value. If I believe Jesus is the Son of God, that’s a very strong argument for not using a machine that turns me into an atheist—once I’m an atheist, I would be wrong on the Jesus question.
I also am ethnically Jewish, but I don’t consider that to be an interesting test case of the principle. Part of why I find the black case interesting is that black people could continue to perpetuate black culture even if they had white skin. Since Jews don’t look very different from the majority population, it’s unclear what a machine to make me “not Jewish” would mean other than that I lose Jewish culture and ritual and so on, which makes it a totally different case.
Being made not Jewish would presumably also mean that you wouldn’t identify as Jewish.
I apparently look Jewish. I’ve been handed $20 by someone in a Western state because of a Bible verse that nations which are friendly to Jews will flourish. I told her I wasn’t observant, but she didn’t care.
A street musician spontaneously played Hatikvah (the Israeli national anthem) for me.
In order to be thoroughly not Jewish, I’d have to look different.
How much is one’s identity in oneself, and how much is in other people’s minds?
One piece of black culture is about hair—having different hair would change the culture.
A large majority of German Jews before WWII were fully assimilated and considered themselves Germans, until they were rather sternly reminded of the difference. The situation was very nearly repeated in the Soviet Union around 1953, though Stalin’s death interfered with the planned forced displacement and possibly worse. Still, the resulting anti-Jewish sentiment there never went away completely.
So, other people’s minds often matter more than your own.
I’m white and I wouldn’t be favourable towards the coin toss idea, but I’ll answer anyway since some of the reasoning might be the same.
Firstly, changing surface appearances wouldn’t necessarily end racial discrimination (i.e. physical similarity doesn’t guarantee the absence of tribal identification; discrimination may be based on alleged biological differences that are not limited to surface characteristics). Furthermore I don’t see how pair bonding and attraction, and personal identity could be adequately preserved (for people in general) through substantial changes in physical appearance. For the sake of the thought experiment I suppose we can ignore this, though.
I would nonetheless object to the idea on the basis that it is needlessly illiberal. Why not just allow anyone to use the machine if they want to do so? If someone feels he is being discriminated against, then he is free to use the machine. If he is unwilling to use the machine, presumably the problem isn’t bad enough to merit trampling over the personal liberty and aesthetic values of others.
I presume that “conditioning” refers to social conditioning, i.e. being told or being subjected to media and insinuation that one ethnic group is more attractive than another.
Other (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
Said aesthetic judgements are not purely due to “conditioning”, but are (at least in part) formed by the same mental processes as other aesthetic judgements in general.
There are certain modules of the mind that render humans likely to form tribal attachments to their ethnic groups (non-EEA condition—just how the adaptations are expressed today). The in-group/out-group dichotomy influences sincere aesthetic judgements.
Humans are on average naturally attracted to somewhat similar-looking mates. This influences aesthetic judgements of other ethnic groups in general. Unpacking “natural”, genetic causes might interact with early environment e.g. the ethnicity of the humans to which someone is exposed as an infant. #2 and #3 might be closely related causes.
I don’t see why aesthetics shouldn’t be considered a good reason for objecting to the change, whatever the case may be. I suppose humans might be expected to have second-order preferences in favour of allocating relatively little priority to aesthetic preferences that are merely socially conditioned—perhaps—but I don’t see any reason to assume that this is true of the aesthetic preference in question.
Furthermore, homogenising humanity might be considered an aesthetic disutility independent of any comparison between the aesthetic qualities of different ethnic groups – much in the same way that it is a shame when attractive and unique animal species become extinct. Human ethnic groups differ less than different animal species but as humans, the value that many of us attach to diversity and distinctiveness within the human species is magnified.
My haaaaaaaaair!
(Lest I be accused of not taking this seriously, note that “My haaaaaaaaair!” is also the first objection I generate to the prospect of coming down with cancer, even though I know that is stupid.)
I don’t think the anecdote (parable?) requires or implies that no black person would want to become white, just that a black person could feel that way, and wish to keep other blacks from making such a conversion, without being obviously malicious.
At least, I find that view (for black or deaf people) much more understandable than the view that drives the humans in the good ending of Three Worlds Collide [1], which is widely agreed with here.
[1] that view being, basically, that the loss of a planet of humans is an acceptable price to pay to preserve human “growing pains” (romantic strife, embarrassment, etc).
The obviousness seems to hinge on your definition of ‘malicious.’
The best objection I can come up with is really more of a generalized diversity argument: that heterogenous genetic populations tend to be more robust against environmental stresses, and that the same is probably true for their memetic analogues. But there’s nothing coding that objection to any particular phenotype, minority or otherwise, and I can certainly imagine scenarios where it might be outweighed by circumstances.
I don’t think I’d personally care too much in the scenario presented—it’s conceptually squicky, but I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack—but then again I’m a white dude, so any of Yvain’s caveats could just as well apply to me. My first impulse when I imagine painlessly homogenizing various points of contention where I do fall into the minority is to appeal to something similar to the above, though.
Hm.
So, I think that if actually offered such a coin toss for sexuality, with some kind of proviso that kept me from suddenly no longer being sexually attracted to my husband or vice versa (and that avoided similar problems for everyone else), I would ultimately conclude that the benefits of accepting such a coin toss outweighed the costs, and thus would want my community to accept it. (Note that this is a different question from whether I would impose the results of such a coin toss on my community.)
I’d be really torn, though, and the truth is I don’t know how well I can predict my actual behavior in the event.
The same thing is true for being Hispanic, but I’m more confident that I’d endorse the cointoss there. Unsurprisingly, I identify less as Hispanic than I do as queer.
The same cointoss for Judaism is somewhere in between, and my anxiety considering it is high enough that my confidence that I can actually predict it is again pretty low.
As for where the anxiety/resistance comes from… I don’t think it’s anything surprising. Cultural identities feel very important and they are associated with whatever attributes they are associated with. Mess with those attributes, you mess with the associated identities, which feels threatening.
And, of course, in real-world situations (which don’t have the magic properties you’ve posited for your thought experiment) such feelings of threat have historically often been justified. That is, historically, eliminating the distinctions between majority M1 and minority M2 frequently turns out to mean eliminating M2 altogether, or trying to. And, hey, if M1 is going to act against M2′s collective interests, then M2 had damned well better be prepared to act collectively in their mutual interests, or they’re going down… so it’s not too surprising that our instincts trend that way. (of course, one can come up with evo-psych justifications for anything, so that’s not worth much.)
In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I’m not saying they have more moral worth, I’m saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can’t. The latest iPhone (to pick a piece of technology with a recognizable progression in quality) is better than the iPhone 3G. It has a faster processor and various other doohickies that improve its function. It’s not morally superior, but it IS objectively better, as, as far as I can tell, the ability to hear is objectively better to deafness.
Deaf people can also do things that hearing people can’t. They are completely immune to noise and auditory distractions. I can imagine a future in which people pay for getting an implant that grants them voluntary deafness powers. I’d buy it.
Apart from that bit of pedantry, I agree with your comment.
Behold The Future!
Earplugs: imperfect, uncomfortable, annoying to “turn on and off” and gross. And, I suppose, that in many social contexts using them could end up causing you to be labeled a passive-agressive weirdo. Headphones are better in some ways and worse in others. I think they provide weaker isolation and require you to actually listen to music if you want to really stop hearing outside stuff but I never had high-end headphones so I don’t actually know.
I’d pay for earlids, especially if they came with a shut-in-case-of-loud-noise reflex.
These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.
No, it doesn’t. It would only sound that way if the claim were that deafness is better on net (as is claimed of mortality), rather than pointing out one particular benefit of being deaf.
(Minor nitpick: people labeled “deaf” can still pick up very low-frequency vibrations, and if they’re next to a really wild party, can still get annoyed by the bass. Similarly, people with “no light perception” still get fried by lasers.)
Every net good policy has some bad consequences. Every net bad policy has some good consequences.
I don’t think that is absolutely true. Consider the following policy followed by Omega: “Whenever life is discovered on a planet, all the life is extinguished and the planet is destroyed.” Where are the good consequences of such a policy? This reminds me of “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” an aphorism meant to make people feel better but not actually based on fact. Ask a polio victim if they’re feeling stronger.
Less pain on that planet. Depending on the extermination method, possibly awesome fireworks.
The badly dehydrated do love getting water, but no one (?) seeks to be badly dehydrated. Those who were dehydrated and say it was wonderful but do not lock themselves away from water frequently are probably expressing sour grapes towards those who never went without water for days. The pleasure of getting the water is still real.
Actually—the senses we use to shape our map of the world in a very strong sense alter the ways in which we understand the world. It has long been demonstrated that in patients who lack a specific sense, the neural mass normally dedicated to that sense begins to “bleed over” into the remaining senses, giving them more ‘processing power’ than would otherwise normally be the case. What this, in turn, means is that the perceptual world of a deaf or blind person is very strongly different from the one that we who have all five senses would otherwise understand or know.
What does all of this imply? The deaf truly perceive the world in ways that we who have all of our senses cannot today comprehend, in any true sense—though we can extrapolate from considering cases such as color-blindness; I can imagine that to a deaf person I am effectively color-blind to a whole range of visual depth that I can no more know than could a profoundly color-blind person ‘know’ the reality of red and green being profoundly separate colors.
In restoring hearing to such a person, if we are to truly argue that such a thing would be solely augmentative in nature, we should endeavor to ensure that such depth of perceptual capability was not lost in the process.
As a diagnosed autist, I very often wonder what it would be like to be what many of those of my condition refer to as “neurotypical”. But I definitely would never want to live my life as ‘one of you’; I am quite proud of the insights and demonstrably variant modes of thinking my condition has granted me.
As a transhumanist, I very often find that the notion of neurodiversity; of having the freedom to define for one’s own self what one’s cognitive processes should be shaped after, at any given time, is a more realizable near-term goal (morally, if not technically). It bypasses many of these problems.
Deafness is not death. If you die, you can’t do anything at all, because there isn’t a you left to speak of.
If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don’t have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don’t go away, and social acceptance is not total.
Not the same thing as rationalizing death.
As an autistic person with serious auditory sensitivities, I can see the draw of being able to shut down my sense of hearing voluntarily. If I lost it (I may as I age; there’s some family history) I think I’d just prefer to bank against that possibility by learning ASL now, which—bonus! -- gives me some linguistic access to interacting with people I’d find difficult to talk to before, rather than get a cochlear implant or a hearing aid.
They also tend to have better vision than hearing people, I believe.
Neurally, this is true; they possess the same amount of gray matter dedicated to processing sensory input but it has fewer signals to work with. We who possess all five senses can do something similar by using sensory-deprivation tools to note the “sharpening” of a particular sense we pay attention to.
In terms of apparatus, however, simply being deaf doesn’t suddenly eliminate near-sightedness.
But is the ability to distinguish a discrete and limited number of tones that you have to learn to interpret properly to have any benefit from at all (even more so if the person in question was born deaf) worth an invasive medical procedure?
All things being equal, you are of course correct. If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn’t be an issue at all. The issue is precisely the fact that all things are not equal.
If the true objection was the invasiveness of the procedure, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
And I bet you it would be an issue. There are people out there who force female genital mutilation to their children—that’s an invasive procedure right there that is meant to deprive their children of an ability. And yet millions of people do it to their children.
It’s not about the invasiveness of the procedure—it’s about cultures that choose to do evil in pursuit of their self-perpetuation.
You’d be surprised. Mostly from what I’ve gathered, they discuss the cost of the acquisition of hearing—at all—as compared to their current condition. There are significant differences in how the brain processes sensory input from a profoundly deaf/blind/etc person as compared to a hearing/seeing/etc. Having even 50% hearing restored would ‘cost’ a deaf person the depth and richness of their other perceptions. It really can be boiled down to a question of net expected utility.
But then there are also those folks that stubbornly identify around the culture dedicated to the absence of a given sense and as such can be seen as something of a ‘permanent victim’ mentality—at least, that is my perception.
You’re conflating being better at something with being better. “In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination.” How is that a useful observation?
Deaf people’s disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf. Black people’s disadvantage comes about because a lot of people, at least implicitly, believe (possibly correctly) that being black correlates with other traits that are undesirable in and of themselves.
I disagree that there can be innate disadvantages, except for to the extent the utility function addresses those properties directly. See:
Can you explain why you believe that makes a moral difference?
No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability—a confusion arising because English has the inconvenient fact that it uses the word “good” to mean moral worth (he’s a good person), and great ability (a good musician).
Well, here we tend to be a group of people that prefer the world to be improved, because we currently believe it’s highly subpoptimal. Does that make it clear to you why we don’t want people to be forced to stay blind or deaf or mute?
I don’t think I’m doing that. In the instrumental sense that “ceteris paribus, hearing people can do more than deaf people,” it’s also true that “ceteris paribus, white people can do more than black people (due to discrimination curtailing opportunities).” Both are purely instrumental claims, and both are fairly trivial in themselves. In the deaf case and in the racial case, all else is not equal. Otherwise, we’d want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, just pointing out that the reasons given are incomplete.
Arguments about how things would be ceteris paribus don’t translate well into policy suggestions.
They can still be relevant when we’re not talking about any particular person, though. They’re especially relevant when we’re discussing future people, who we can’t come to a good understanding of but must decide whether or not to affect anyway.
Which isn’t to say that we can’t take other factors into account too.
Do you know of a way where something like this could be practically done and be successful? If so, then we might discuss the pros and cons of such a scheme.
If you don’t know any such way, then this is a mere distraction and diversion at best—or worse yet, an attempt to use the taboo topics of racial politics in an attempt to mind-kill.
This is a moral question. It might be the case that we don’t have any practical ways of convincing people that death is bad, but that doesn’t mean that death isn’t bad.
Silas Barta introduced an anology between the deaf case and the hearing case. Atorm responded with a potential disanalogy, and I responded to him by saying that the disanalogy he provided didn’t straightforwardly work. Do you seriously think I’m trying to “mind-kill” anything? I feel you’re being unfair.
I don’t see a question mark anywhere in your comment. What is this moral question? “Why don’t we encourage black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?” “How is this different from encouraging black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?”
Make exact what this moral question is for me—but let me warn you that your analogy is currently much more likely to convince me that we should discourage black people of conceiving, than that deaf people have the moral right to force their children to remain deaf even if there’s a cheap safe method to restore said hearing.
So it’s bad for deaf people to impair their children’s hearing abilities, because all else being equal, hearing people can do more. By the same token, is it also bad for us to create black rather than white children, since “all else being equal,” discrimination allows white people to do more?
More generally, how do we figure out what to hold fixed—that is, what precisely the “else” is to hold “equal”—when comparing the worthiness of two lives?
“Us”? I’ve not created any black children, and most black people don’t have the capacity to create white children. And child-creation hasn’t been collectivized yet, it’s still an individual process.
If someone deliberately created a child with the explicit desire of having it be socially disadvantaged enough that they’d need to partake in the culture its parents belong to, instead of having more options available, that’d be evil.
What does worthiness have to do with anything? This is about allowing children to hear, not about who is “worth” what. About quality of life, not about justice.
I think you’re missing the point. Please substitute the word “you” with whoever would be faced with such a situation (a black couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a black baby, a deaf couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a deaf baby, etc.).
I am using “worthiness” to refer to an informal measure of how much we should actualize certain lives relative to others, which includes considerations like quality of life. Maybe “choiceworthiness” would’ve been a better word.
You mean a black couple that were given the choice to conceive a black baby or a white baby, and choosing “black” instead of “white”?
I guess that depends on their motivations for this choice, and whether it’s for the perceived benefit of the child or the perceived disadvantage of the child. If they perceived blackness as an inherent disability on the level of deafness, that’d be wrong, yes.
edit to explain: I slightly edited the post shortly after I posted it, which explains the small discrepancy before the current text of the comment, and the quoted text in the response to it.
They believe that a black child will face certain social difficulties that a white child wouldn’t, but that he’d nevertheless lead a happy, flourishing life and love his culture and skin color, and moreover that the added diversity would be a net good for humanity.
Are we still discussing this as an analogy with deaf people? Because I don’t think that most deaf people love their deafness, and though I like diversity of skin colors (and genders, and hair colors, and eye colors) I don’t believe that the existence of deafness or of blindness or of leprosy or of AIDS is a net good for humanity.
I honestly can’t cite any statistics, but there are many, many, many congenitally deaf people who view their condition as a fundamental part of who they are and don’t want it to change. Maybe that attitude is pathological or something, but there it is.
I think the existence of deaf people who want to be deaf is arguably a net good for humanity. Deaf culture is as real as black culture. Few people with AIDS or leprosy are glad they have it, however.
Doesn’t it tell you something if it’s only people who are congenitally deaf and thus have never experienced hearing who are the only ones that don’t want to experience it?
How?
You keep using the word “culture” as if it’s supposed to drive away all my objections. Fine it’s real—how does that show it to be good that it exists?
There are lots of cultures that I wish had never existed—and when they exist I wish they were eradicated. Female-genital-mutilation cultures, because I wish there was no female genital mutilation. Aztec human-sacrificing culture, because I want there not to be any human sacrificing. Deaf culture, because I don’t want there to be any deafness.
I understand this perspective, but the analogy seems rather inapt. I can imagine societal changes that ameliorate the relative stigmatism of dark skin. I have difficulty imagining changes that would allow deaf people to enjoy music, for example. I can imagine technological changes that would allow deaf people the benefit of communicating with a much broader portion of the population without restoring their hearing, but am uncertain how resistant the deaf would be to that for cultural reasons
I think a better analogy for the deaf parents here is to people in the developed world who argue for leaving uncontacted tribes isolated. They think the tribespeople would be losing something by being exposed to the modern world around them, just as the deaf parents think something of their culture would be lost by easy access to the hearing world. I’m not particularly sympathetic in either case.