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This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman. Take abortion - according to opponent

This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman. Take abortion - according to opponents a fetus is a living human being, and actively and purposefully killing a living human being is murder in the Charles Manson style. The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human, it's that fetuses aren't independent human beings, they're an extension of the mothers body. It's really not a relevant metric for wether murder is murder if there are grieving friends and family, or if people live in fear - it seems every other crime show deals with the murder of a miserable, lonely homeless guy or a prostitute. According to this argument, that's not murder at all. The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me. "Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda.

derleth 14y ago
> "Those who don't learn history is doomed to repeat it" Even when they have learned from history? We understand more now about exactly why the Nazi eugenics was wrong than we've ever known. Comparing the quest for a mythical Aryan Superman (Super-Duper-Superman!) to the hunt for a method to eliminate Tay-Sachs is useful how?
- mseebach 14y ago
  Well, for starters, because to properly eliminate genetical diseases, you will eventually need to forbid carriers of undesirable genes to procreate. That gets nasty. So you have a voluntary regime, and the rich and well-educated (generally) make sure their children are free of genetical disorders, while the lower classes (generally) don't. Two generations later, you have "clean" people and "dirty" people. Why should the "clean" people, who did as they were encouraged to by the Department of Health, pay high insurance premiums/health tax to subsidize the totally preventable diseases of the "dirty" people?
  - iuguy 14y ago
    > Well, for starters, because to properly eliminate genetical diseases, you will eventually need to forbid carriers of undesirable genes to procreate. That gets nasty. I'm not sure I agree here. We can use fertilisation treatments to ensure that the fertilised eggs lack the mutation causing Tay-Sachs. Give couples the choice as to whether they want to have children the old fashioned way or go a genetically screened IVF route to avoid it and it'll be weaned out in a few generations. > So you have a voluntary regime, and the rich and well-educated (generally) make sure their children are free of genetical disorders, while the lower classes (generally) don't. Not here in the UK you wouldn't. Nor in most of Europe. People in the lower classes would be told about the genetic markers and given the option to have the screening, depending on the cost of treatment and impact of the disease. > Why should the "clean" people, who did as they were encouraged to by the Department of Health, pay high insurance premiums/health tax to subsidize the totally preventable diseases of the "dirty" people? Why should the "dirty" people suffer, or even exist in the first place? It seems like the combination of a medical system predicated on insurance and a selfish view (by which I mean orientation towards the self) is the heart of the creation of a two-tier system, not the combination of a well-run public healthcare system and a moral obligation for all people to support each other. I realise this doesn't answer your question, but I wanted to highlight that your use case doesn't apply in quite a few parts of the world, although sadly it does in many.
    - mseebach 14y ago
      > Not here in the UK you wouldn't. Nor in most of Europe. People in the lower classes would be told about the genetic markers and given the option to have the screening, depending on the cost of treatment and impact of the disease. People in the lower classes are told about, and (in the UK) offered for free, birth control. Yet unplanned pregnancies are common, and much more common in the lower classes. You're not going to get fertilisation treatments if you're not planning to get pregnant. > Why should the "dirty" people suffer Why should anyone suffer? Yet some do, and we have finite resources and have to prioritise them - it's not an artefact of private health insurance, public health care has to be paid for as well. A very common argument in fighting smoking is that smokers are a drain on the public health system - that's selfish, yet reasonable, on part of the non-smokers. Every once in a while, a variation on the theme of "we should put alcoholics/narcotics/morbidly obese/obese/overweight at the end of the queue for 'lifestyle diseases'" surfaces in Denmark. It hasn't gone anywhere, but all health services (private and public) are under pressure from increasing costs from more advanced treatments, and prioritisation is a constant issue. > or even exist in the first place? Why they exist? Well, that's very existential, but they do, and short of sterialisation, they will continue to for a number of generations. The problems with eugenics isn't what happens when you're done, it's how you get there.
csense 14y ago
> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion, that's the argument that I would make. No human within the first year or so after conception has any of the distinguishing features which give intelligent beings a higher moral status: Tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory. Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse, or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it is okay to kill them humanely if there simply isn't a place for them. The moral status of the very young human rises from that of a proto-human animal to that of a full human at time t_I, the time when they become intelligent. The problem is that t_I is extremely difficult to measure. It depends on your definition of intelligence and can be very different for different individuals. (For severely brain-damaged individuals, it may even be the case that t_I = infinity.) To deal with the difficulty of measuring t_I, our culture and laws have instead picked a deadline t_D, such that t_D is much smaller than t_I in all cases (regardless of differing definitions or individual cases). We have declared that we should assume humans younger than t_D have proto-human legal status roughly equivalent to animal status, and humans older than t_D have full-human legal status. Killing before the deadline is legal if done in a humane way with the consent of the mother; killing after the deadline is treated the same as killing an adult would be (only allowable in very limited circumstances such as self-defense). Therefore our society can avoid some of the drains placed on it by humans who, it is known, will be born into far-from-ideal circumstances, while hopefully staying far away enough from t_I to avoid sanctioning the killing of anyone who has the moral status of a full human. (Obviously, t_D is the time of birth plus delta, where delta is less than one day (I'm not sure exactly what delta is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than one day). Delta is necessary to account for partial-birth abortions.) The problem with many pro-abortion arguments is that they are of the form "It is our belief that all humans have souls, and therefore full-human moral status, from the time of conception." It's not a problem that those are their religious beliefs; the problem is enshrining those beliefs into law in prohibitions on abortion. Logic and facts, not religious beliefs, must be the basis of our laws; to do otherwise would open up the very can of worms that we try to avoid by separating church and state. We can't observe souls, but we can observe intelligent behavior, and the latter seems not to preclude existing abortion laws in any way. (Existing abortion laws also don't interfere with the religious beliefs of abortion opponents; if you believe abortion is morally wrong, you don't have to have one. The law only steps in to the extent that anti-abortionists wish to impose their beliefs on others.) Hypothetically, if the laws were expanded to legalize infanticide as "extremely late abortion" at any time up to, say, age three, then a moral argument would hold weight; many two-year-olds do use language and can exhibit surprisingly intelligent behaviors. Likewise, if the laws were expanded to require abortions in certain circumstances (for example, to enforce a one-child-per-family policy like China has), that would also be wrong and almost surely unconstitutional; for it would interfere with the religious beliefs of most abortion opponents. (I say "most" since I suppose it is possible there is some faction whose religious beliefs, if any, don't forbid abortion, but bases an opposition to abortion on non-religious grounds. If they even exist, they're surely very small and not very vocal.) Of course, everyone (myself included) regards such expansions as extremely morally repugnant; I know of no one who would even consider supporting them. I'm just offering them against a hypothetical opponent who would say, "If you would sanction the killing of innocent babies, you clearly have no moral compass!" This worldview does have limitations on what is allowed; it just draws the line between "unallowable atrocity under any circumstances" and "the lesser of two evils" in a slightly different place than pro-lifers. As much of a tendency as it is among liberals to put all conservatives in the same boat, both on HN and everywhere else the left gathers, abortion is possibly the best place to draw the line between libertarians and social conservatives: The latter favor prohibitions, while the former should oppose them as unwanted government intrusion (although many do not, I suspect, due to simple realpolitik -- a sacrifice of a non-core position by a weaker leg of the stool to support a core position of a stronger leg to maintain the conservative coalition, presumably a compromise to be "renegotiated" -- possibly unilaterally -- when/if their relative strength ever changes.)
DannoHung 14y ago
> The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me. Erm, well, what we saw was that using social programs to engage in eugenics was a problem. Allowing individuals to change their genetic destiny, or allowing parents to try and use genetics to reduce the risk of disease is significantly different. Of course, the stronger argument against eugenics is that narrowing the human genepool is dangerous. Genetic diversity is strength across successive generations. Then again, I'm not someone with a genetic disease, or the parent of a child with one, so I don't feel that I have any authority to say what should or should not be done. I'll limit myself to trying to make people aware of the issue. > "Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda. Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. The arc of society is to eclipse our biology. Attempting to enforce it because of misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, of a novel field of science concerned primarily with our past is something I find personally disgusting.
- rmc 14y ago
  however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. Here here. There are loads of people who "know the truth, and are jufdt trying to find the evidence" to support their beliefs about gender. This isn't real science, but cargo cult, pseduoscience for political goals. Don't try to mask your politics in sciencey sounding arguments.
- 127 14y ago
  >Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. I personally believe that sexism is not immediately a negative thing, but neutral. Sex based discrimination is useful and can hold a lot of value in determining our next course of action. Using sexism as a moral axiom is illogical. What's worse, it's censoring free thought through intimidation of social irrelevance. Logic should be followed through without unnecessary moral burden. Observations should be made without the need to justify oneself purely for making them. Just despairing with how the word sexism is conflated with so many other things in the internet rhetoric. Maybe this is more of an American thing.
sophacles 14y ago
This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman. You're being funny right? I mean it has to be intentional that you are opening this contrary reply with a statement in the form of what TFA calls "The worst argument int he world" . In case you aren't, or other posters don't see it: The term argument has a technical and colloquial meaning. Technical means it is a well thought out, logically built position in a debate. Colloquially it means roughly "a statement in opposition". Rhetoric as used above largely means "statements meant to sway a person to one position, based on a mixture of fact and emotional response". Of course this is regularly a big part of rhetoric, but it also is the act of clear communication via careful composition of words. My rhetoric classes in college never taught me to pander to emotion, but rather lay out my statements in a clear way to make my point - techniques that are required for both clear logical argument (technical sense) and populist panderings (the common connotation of statements like "mere rhetoric"). So how does the parent's statement follow the form of WAITW? Well it says that the "arguments" (second form) are mere rhetoric, therefore discussing how to deal with them with logic must also be mere rhetoric. It completely misses the part where these types of 'argument' are common to daily political discourse in the US and many other places as well, so learning to not make the argument and to counter it is productive in helping people understand the actual issues.
roguecoder 14y ago
Evolutionary psychology isn't valid science: it is not falsifiable. Evolution is a series of accidents that happened to produce the observable outcome. Trying to retroactively assign causality between those outcomes and other simultaneously-evolving outcomes is ridiculous because there is no control condition.

derleth 14y ago

> "Those who don't learn history is doomed to repeat it" Even when they have learned from history? We understand more now about exactly why the Nazi eugenics was wrong than we've ever known. Comparing the quest for a mythical Aryan Superman (Super-Duper-Superman!) to the hunt for a method to eliminate Tay-Sachs is useful how?

mseebach 14y ago
Well, for starters, because to properly eliminate genetical diseases, you will eventually need to forbid carriers of undesirable genes to procreate. That gets nasty. So you have a voluntary regime, and the rich and well-educated (generally) make sure their children are free of genetical disorders, while the lower classes (generally) don't. Two generations later, you have "clean" people and "dirty" people. Why should the "clean" people, who did as they were encouraged to by the Department of Health, pay high insurance premiums/health tax to subsidize the totally preventable diseases of the "dirty" people?
- iuguy 14y ago
  > Well, for starters, because to properly eliminate genetical diseases, you will eventually need to forbid carriers of undesirable genes to procreate. That gets nasty. I'm not sure I agree here. We can use fertilisation treatments to ensure that the fertilised eggs lack the mutation causing Tay-Sachs. Give couples the choice as to whether they want to have children the old fashioned way or go a genetically screened IVF route to avoid it and it'll be weaned out in a few generations. > So you have a voluntary regime, and the rich and well-educated (generally) make sure their children are free of genetical disorders, while the lower classes (generally) don't. Not here in the UK you wouldn't. Nor in most of Europe. People in the lower classes would be told about the genetic markers and given the option to have the screening, depending on the cost of treatment and impact of the disease. > Why should the "clean" people, who did as they were encouraged to by the Department of Health, pay high insurance premiums/health tax to subsidize the totally preventable diseases of the "dirty" people? Why should the "dirty" people suffer, or even exist in the first place? It seems like the combination of a medical system predicated on insurance and a selfish view (by which I mean orientation towards the self) is the heart of the creation of a two-tier system, not the combination of a well-run public healthcare system and a moral obligation for all people to support each other. I realise this doesn't answer your question, but I wanted to highlight that your use case doesn't apply in quite a few parts of the world, although sadly it does in many.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    > Not here in the UK you wouldn't. Nor in most of Europe. People in the lower classes would be told about the genetic markers and given the option to have the screening, depending on the cost of treatment and impact of the disease. People in the lower classes are told about, and (in the UK) offered for free, birth control. Yet unplanned pregnancies are common, and much more common in the lower classes. You're not going to get fertilisation treatments if you're not planning to get pregnant. > Why should the "dirty" people suffer Why should anyone suffer? Yet some do, and we have finite resources and have to prioritise them - it's not an artefact of private health insurance, public health care has to be paid for as well. A very common argument in fighting smoking is that smokers are a drain on the public health system - that's selfish, yet reasonable, on part of the non-smokers. Every once in a while, a variation on the theme of "we should put alcoholics/narcotics/morbidly obese/obese/overweight at the end of the queue for 'lifestyle diseases'" surfaces in Denmark. It hasn't gone anywhere, but all health services (private and public) are under pressure from increasing costs from more advanced treatments, and prioritisation is a constant issue. > or even exist in the first place? Why they exist? Well, that's very existential, but they do, and short of sterialisation, they will continue to for a number of generations. The problems with eugenics isn't what happens when you're done, it's how you get there.

csense 14y ago

> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion, that's the argument that I would make. No human within the first year or so after conception has any of the distinguishing features which give intelligent beings a higher moral status: Tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory. Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse, or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it is okay to kill them humanely if there simply isn't a place for them. The moral status of the very young human rises from that of a proto-human animal to that of a full human at time t_I, the time when they become intelligent. The problem is that t_I is extremely difficult to measure. It depends on your definition of intelligence and can be very different for different individuals. (For severely brain-damaged individuals, it may even be the case that t_I = infinity.) To deal with the difficulty of measuring t_I, our culture and laws have instead picked a deadline t_D, such that t_D is much smaller than t_I in all cases (regardless of differing definitions or individual cases). We have declared that we should assume humans younger than t_D have proto-human legal status roughly equivalent to animal status, and humans older than t_D have full-human legal status. Killing before the deadline is legal if done in a humane way with the consent of the mother; killing after the deadline is treated the same as killing an adult would be (only allowable in very limited circumstances such as self-defense). Therefore our society can avoid some of the drains placed on it by humans who, it is known, will be born into far-from-ideal circumstances, while hopefully staying far away enough from t_I to avoid sanctioning the killing of anyone who has the moral status of a full human. (Obviously, t_D is the time of birth plus delta, where delta is less than one day (I'm not sure exactly what delta is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than one day). Delta is necessary to account for partial-birth abortions.) The problem with many pro-abortion arguments is that they are of the form "It is our belief that all humans have souls, and therefore full-human moral status, from the time of conception." It's not a problem that those are their religious beliefs; the problem is enshrining those beliefs into law in prohibitions on abortion. Logic and facts, not religious beliefs, must be the basis of our laws; to do otherwise would open up the very can of worms that we try to avoid by separating church and state. We can't observe souls, but we can observe intelligent behavior, and the latter seems not to preclude existing abortion laws in any way. (Existing abortion laws also don't interfere with the religious beliefs of abortion opponents; if you believe abortion is morally wrong, you don't have to have one. The law only steps in to the extent that anti-abortionists wish to impose their beliefs on others.) Hypothetically, if the laws were expanded to legalize infanticide as "extremely late abortion" at any time up to, say, age three, then a moral argument would hold weight; many two-year-olds do use language and can exhibit surprisingly intelligent behaviors. Likewise, if the laws were expanded to require abortions in certain circumstances (for example, to enforce a one-child-per-family policy like China has), that would also be wrong and almost surely unconstitutional; for it would interfere with the religious beliefs of most abortion opponents. (I say "most" since I suppose it is possible there is some faction whose religious beliefs, if any, don't forbid abortion, but bases an opposition to abortion on non-religious grounds. If they even exist, they're surely very small and not very vocal.) Of course, everyone (myself included) regards such expansions as extremely morally repugnant; I know of no one who would even consider supporting them. I'm just offering them against a hypothetical opponent who would say, "If you would sanction the killing of innocent babies, you clearly have no moral compass!" This worldview does have limitations on what is allowed; it just draws the line between "unallowable atrocity under any circumstances" and "the lesser of two evils" in a slightly different place than pro-lifers. As much of a tendency as it is among liberals to put all conservatives in the same boat, both on HN and everywhere else the left gathers, abortion is possibly the best place to draw the line between libertarians and social conservatives: The latter favor prohibitions, while the former should oppose them as unwanted government intrusion (although many do not, I suspect, due to simple realpolitik -- a sacrifice of a non-core position by a weaker leg of the stool to support a core position of a stronger leg to maintain the conservative coalition, presumably a compromise to be "renegotiated" -- possibly unilaterally -- when/if their relative strength ever changes.)

DannoHung 14y ago

> The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me. Erm, well, what we saw was that using social programs to engage in eugenics was a problem. Allowing individuals to change their genetic destiny, or allowing parents to try and use genetics to reduce the risk of disease is significantly different. Of course, the stronger argument against eugenics is that narrowing the human genepool is dangerous. Genetic diversity is strength across successive generations. Then again, I'm not someone with a genetic disease, or the parent of a child with one, so I don't feel that I have any authority to say what should or should not be done. I'll limit myself to trying to make people aware of the issue. > "Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda. Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. The arc of society is to eclipse our biology. Attempting to enforce it because of misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, of a novel field of science concerned primarily with our past is something I find personally disgusting.

rmc 14y ago
however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. Here here. There are loads of people who "know the truth, and are jufdt trying to find the evidence" to support their beliefs about gender. This isn't real science, but cargo cult, pseduoscience for political goals. Don't try to mask your politics in sciencey sounding arguments.
127 14y ago
>Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. I personally believe that sexism is not immediately a negative thing, but neutral. Sex based discrimination is useful and can hold a lot of value in determining our next course of action. Using sexism as a moral axiom is illogical. What's worse, it's censoring free thought through intimidation of social irrelevance. Logic should be followed through without unnecessary moral burden. Observations should be made without the need to justify oneself purely for making them. Just despairing with how the word sexism is conflated with so many other things in the internet rhetoric. Maybe this is more of an American thing.

sophacles 14y ago

This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman. You're being funny right? I mean it has to be intentional that you are opening this contrary reply with a statement in the form of what TFA calls "The worst argument int he world" . In case you aren't, or other posters don't see it: The term argument has a technical and colloquial meaning. Technical means it is a well thought out, logically built position in a debate. Colloquially it means roughly "a statement in opposition". Rhetoric as used above largely means "statements meant to sway a person to one position, based on a mixture of fact and emotional response". Of course this is regularly a big part of rhetoric, but it also is the act of clear communication via careful composition of words. My rhetoric classes in college never taught me to pander to emotion, but rather lay out my statements in a clear way to make my point - techniques that are required for both clear logical argument (technical sense) and populist panderings (the common connotation of statements like "mere rhetoric"). So how does the parent's statement follow the form of WAITW? Well it says that the "arguments" (second form) are mere rhetoric, therefore discussing how to deal with them with logic must also be mere rhetoric. It completely misses the part where these types of 'argument' are common to daily political discourse in the US and many other places as well, so learning to not make the argument and to counter it is productive in helping people understand the actual issues.

roguecoder 14y ago

Evolutionary psychology isn't valid science: it is not falsifiable. Evolution is a series of accidents that happened to produce the observable outcome. Trying to retroactively assign causality between those outcomes and other simultaneously-evolving outcomes is ridiculous because there is no control condition.