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Jack comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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There clearly is, at least on my contractarian view. You would not consent to a social contract that left you vulnerable to murder, if it could be avoided.
I'm not sure this works (Why would a strict social conservative consent to a contract that allowed me to have sex with multiple partners at the same time?). But no matter: If the distinction is only non-arbitrary given your normative ethics then you need to give non-arbitrary reasons why we should all be contractarians. Otherwise you've just pushed the conversation back a step.
The contract view appeals to me because it takes as a starting point the fact of our living in large groups; that much is non-arbitrary. In this context, some sort of basis for adjudicating our claims against each other is a requirement, just as food or shelter are a requirement. On this view, the features of social contracts that would make for more general agreement - such as protection from murder - can be treated differently from features of these contracts that would make for narrower (temporally and geographically local) agreement. One way to formalize this intuition is Rawls' veil of ignorance.
I suppose this is a nifty feature for a normative theory to have but there doesn't seem to be a reason why my values must proceed from this fact. I have a theory where an old book tells me what I should value. What argument is there to dissuade me? Moreover, contractarianism is hardly the only normative theory which uses this fact as a starting point. Indeed, the other theory I have in mind, communitarianism, is often sympathetic to certain kinds of social conservative positions!
True, you can treat them differently. But the social conservative wants to treat them the same.
Rawls is formalizing our intuitions about justice in a liberal society. But it is exactly that-- a popular intuition. I share this intuition. But there is nothing in rationality (as we mean the term, here) that compels that intuition if you don't already hold it. If you believe in liberal justice it is indeed irrational to oppose polyamory. The point is, lots of people aren't Rawlsian liberals!
Looping back to the starting point of this discussion, from which we are in danger of drifting too far, what I wanted to say is that people who take an intolerant position on the subject of (say) homosexuality do not seem to do so after having held up their own ethical intuitions to anything like the kind of scrutiny you and others here are clearly capable of.
Rather, they seem to rationalize an immediate "eww" reaction and look for any ammunition they can find supporting their intution that "people shouldn't do that". That strikes me as irrational. This comment seemed to be saying much the same thing.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as "Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory." That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
The best general argument for conservativism I've encountered is that we should pay attention to established social customs and innate moral intuitions because the world is a complex place and practices that persist over time probably exist for a good reason. The fact that we don't fully understand the reason for a practice is not enough to discard it, we should exercise caution when messing with established customs because we don't fully understand what customs are key to society achieving whatever level of success it has so far achieved.
I don't fully buy this argument but I think it has some merit. Thus it is not necessarily irrational to see an intuitive "eww" reaction as a reason to think that we should exercise caution when liberalizing attitudes towards the provoking practice. I think the generous interpretation of the social conservative attitude to homosexuality is that the "eww" reaction probably exists for some 'good' reason and should not be totally ignored. Generating hypotheses to explain why the "eww" is beneficial is not necessarily an irrational first step to understanding what's really going on.
Relatively few social conservatives can articulate this argument but some can and I don't think it is fair to dismiss them as irrational. Indeed the more thoughtful conservatives tend to think that most people are not capable of thinking rationally about the costs and benefits of certain behaviours and so social customs must do the work of preserving the 'good' society.
-- John Brunners
mattnewport's comment was much more broad and insightful than "This is old therefore it is good".
His point (paraphrasing the general conservative thesis) is that social customs arise as solutions to difficult problems and have highly immodular interplay. Therefore, before relaxing them, you should at least identify what problem it was (believed to be) solving, and how it interplays with the other customs and factors (including the ick factor in others).
In the case of homosexuality, the taboo against it is extremely common across cultures, which suggests some kind of mechanism like, "Cultures that didn't have a taboo against it were outbred or otherwise dominated by a more populous culture."
Of course, no one actually argues for such a taboo against it today on that basis, though it has the trappings of a good argument: "If we don't have pro-reproduction customs, we'll be unable to withstand the memetic overload from cultures that do, and will be unable to perpetuate our values across generations." (Several European countries provide good examples of cultures slowly losing their ability to protect Western values by being outbred by those who don't share those values.)
But even so, if this is the concern, there are much better, Pareto-surperior ways to go about it: e.g., require everyone to either have children, help with the raising of other's children, or pay a tax after a certain age that goes toward relieving the burden of others' childbearing.
Unfortunately, the debate on the issue is nowhere near this point.
I'm sorry if you felt I was advocating a position when instead I understood and was in agreement with his points. I was merely supplying an interesting quote about half of them.
I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning.
Tell me what reasoning I was supposed to find your comment, as it related to the parent's point, and if we can agree there's something non-foolish about it, I'll revise my comment. Sound good?
That is a severe undercounting of types of fools.
-- Unknown
Lame quote because everyone I have ever met who starts indexes at 0 says "2 types": it is just that they call them Type 0 and Type 1 instead of Type 1 and Type 2.
ADDED. I am not saying that writers should start indexes at 0, just that the fact alluded to in the quote (that, e.g., the "1" in "Type 1", is different from "2") is not a good reason for avoiding the practice. A good reason to avoid the practice is that diverging from a long-standing stylistic convention distracts without contributing anything substantial to your point.
Or as G. K. Chesterton may have put it:
(It's a good summary of the linked passage, but I can't find evidence that he ever expressed it in this form, which is variously attributed.)
That is perhaps a good argument in favor of conservatism in general, but it falls short of my request to point at someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, at the very least as practiced in private.
I'm not saying that anyone who opposes, say, gay marriage or gay adoption is irrational by virtue of having that position. But it seems clear that people who allow their "eww" reaction to become an excuse to "pick on the queer", as is seen for instance in cases of workplace harassment, are simply not using their heads, to put it mildly.
If you believed that
then you might oppose homosexuality, including as practiced in private.
Disclaimer: I do not hold the above view, for fairly standard Libertarian reasons, and also do not believe all the premises are true.
There's one more belief needed for that complex to make sense-- that the costs (both to homosexuals and to heterosexuals) of suppressing homosexuality are low enough to counterbalance the benefits.
I was considering adding it in, but I think the costs of the missed 'lives worth living' would likely exceed it greatly, assuming the first premise is true.
Edit: I just editted it in, and then re-removed it. Firstly, it makes the whole thing trivial, and secondly, I was only presenting a sketch of a case- really, we'd need a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, this is outlining one of the benefits.
Mostly agree, but what exactly is "the" libetarian reason for rejecting that chain of reasoning? A libertarian (and I consider myself one) would tend to reject the premises, but not the deductions you made based on the premises.
Also, as a libertarian, do you believe something like, "If rampant homosexuality/ childless/ etc. leads to a libertarian society being undermined and outbred, so be it -- that means the whole program was flawed to begin with"? What's your general position on libertarian-permitted acts that, at the large scale, would undermine the ablity of a society to remain libertarian?
(Btw, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a "hardcore" libertarian drew a lot of criticism for his position that practioners of non-family-centered lifestyles would have to be "physicallly removed" from a libertarian society for it to function.)
Usual disclaimer: the chain of reasoning you gave still wouldn't justify opposition to homosexuality, but rather, a kind of compromise like I proposed before, where you can either have/adopt children of your own, or pay a tax after a certain age.
Things like the utility homosexuals get from freely expressing themselves, and the various Public Choice problems with implementing the system. But I also think the first premise is false, and third is at least a simplification.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t adopt the nearest stable system, which could be Libertarianism without sexual freedom.
I would bite the HHH bullet and say that we'd have to do something about it. Things like SeaSteading provide non-coercive alternatives, in basically the same way that making property rights totally secure would prevent being outnumbered being a problem.
However, Minarchists are quite happy to accept taxes to defend liberty, and I know the President of the Oxford Libertarians would accept conscription, and I don't think there's that much difference. It may well be that we should adopt a consequentialist deontology: we act in such a way as to maximise rule-following. The danger here is that in breaking rules to try to enforce them, we might undermine them further.
In general, I don't think Libertarianism has much chance without a culture of individual responsibility, quite possibly family-based.
I would imagine the general form of an argument to that effect would be that taboos against homosexuality must exist for a reason and despite not fully understanding that reason we should preserve the taboos for fear of causing unintended damage to society. If you are the kind of person who believes that society should formalize its taboos as legal prohibitions then you might support laws against the private practice of homosexuality.
To be clear, I'm a staunch libertarian and so firmly oppose laws against any kind of sexual activity between consenting adults but the libertarian position on prohibitions on the activities of individuals is neutral on the question of whether any activity is in the best long term interests of the participants or on the pros or cons of indirect consequences on society as a whole. I also support the right of an employer to refuse to employ homosexuals or the proprietor of a business to refuse to serve them for example.
It is fairly common on both the left and the right to oppose practices that are considered harmful both through social taboos and through legal prohibition on private activity. The only real difference is in the types of activities that are considered harmful. I see little difference between a social conservative arguing that homosexuality should be illegal because we don't know the potential consequences for society and a left liberal arguing that GM foods should be illegal because we don't know the potential consequences for society. In both cases it arguably should be an empirical question but in practice it is driven largely by the "eww" response in the majority of people.
I suggest looking up the views of communitarians on these topics. Some names: David Popenoe, Amitai Etzioni. See this book, and especially this part from Popenoe. tl;dr: The won't go as far as the most bigoted but they're also not cool with just affirming homosexuality and out of wedlock promiscuity. Communitarianism isn't my bag of tea but it has pretty firm theoretical foundations and the research that suggests marriage's importance isn't obviously bunk.
As for those who are just rationalizing an "eww" reaction, their mistake isn't basing their terminal values on disgust, their mistake is trying to justify those values in terms liberals, who don't share their intuition, can understand. "Polyamory should be prohibited because polyamory is immoral" is a consistent position. See Jonathan Haidt's page on the foundations of morality. Most people who object to polyamory and homosexuality are coming from the purity/sanctity foundation (i.e. "ewww!"). But there is nothing rationalist or not rationalist about these intuitions. They're just intuitions like all moral reasons. You and I might have more complicated intuitions that can be formalized in interesting ways and employ philosophers-- But I'm with Hume here, you can't reason your way to morality.
An interesting related recent post from Haidt regards the similarity between the social conservative attitude to sexual purity/sanctity and the left liberal attitude to food and the environment:
That's a direct quote from Popenoe, so our very different intuitions are converging to at least some common ground. That's suggestive of something.
Well, there seem to be strong regularities in the moral intutions developed by healthy humans, strong regularities in our terminal values, strong and predictable regularities in our instrumental values (or more precisely what Gary Drescher calls our "delegated values", what Rawls calls "primary social goods", what it is rational to desire whatever else we desire).
Reason is a tool whereby we can expoit these regularities and so compress our discourse about people's claims against each other; I don't see why we should refrain from using that tool merely because the subject of discourse is a particular subset of human intuitions. We do not shy from using it in our analysis of other types of intuitions, and there is nothing which designates "moral thinking" as less subject to analysis than other types of thinking.
Further, there is some evidence that our moral intutions are changing over time; and they are changing in consequence of our thinking about them. In the same way that we have found it useful for our thinking about the material world to incorporate some insights that we now label "rationality", so I expect to find that our thinking about our own moral intutions (which are part of the material world) will also benefit from these insights.
I don't think Rawls's work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can't justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn't any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don't adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn't any other evidence to tilt the scale.
I believe my comment here addresses your concern.
Actually I come closer to being convinced by this one here, at least for the general case in favor of transcribing taboos into prohibitions.
I do note that both the Popenoe passage linked earlier and the observation that "the taboo against [homosexuality] is extremely common across cultures" run counter to some of the evidence. And that there is plenty of evidence that this and similar taboos, when enforced, are enforced hypocritically.
That links to this comment. Which argument did you mean?
The relevant period to look at would be the modern era (post 1500), when new advances would screen off the apparent connection between old taboos as their function. And in that period, it is significant that populations making up most of the world, depsite separation and diversity in other areas, had such a taboo. Yes, places have relaxed taboos since then, but they were all taboos that had a long origin.
What do you mean "hypocritically"? Homosexuals enforcing the taboo? I'll assume you meant "inconsistently", in which case I still think you're not addressing the conservative argument. Of course their enforcement will look inconsistent, because it has long been detached from its original change-in-taboo/consequence feedback loop (like the woman who follows the family tradition of cutting off the ends of a turkey without realizing that the tradition only began in order to be able to fit it into the first generation's small oven).
Nevertheless (the conservative argument goes), you still need to be able to identify the need the taboo filled and its interplay with the other social mechanisms before justifably concluding it's time to end the taboo.
So, I ask you: Do you accept that a culture has to be pro-reproduction to avoid memetic overload from cultures with different values? If so, what would be the limit of the taboos/prohibitions you would want for achieving that end, given the resistance people will put up to different kinds of laws? (e.g. why not make use of people's existing ick-reactions?)
Just to clarify, I'm not defending laws against homosexuality, just pointing out reasonable concerns that underlie the (unjustifiable) prohibitions, since you asked.
A google search for:
vatican prostitution ring, or
anti-gay congressman
should be amusing.
Edited grandparent to point to correct comment.
People imposing the taboo on others are violating it privately.
I'd have to think about that.
I concur with Morendil that Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a rather elegant way of showing morality to be conditionally objective.
I think you may be overestimating the consistency of the social conservative viewpoint. If you were to tell them about how, when, where & why they could have sex, they would be outraged - even if you couched it in, say, biblical terms. I don't think many social conservatives really believe that sex is a community matter. They're just applying a good old fashioned double standard. Call them on their own sexual behaviour and they'll rush back to consensual ethics ("none of your business!") so fast you'll see Lorentz contraction.
I don't know what work "conditionally" is doing here. But I'm pretty sure Rawls himself doesn't take his theory to justice to show that morality is objective. In fact, in A Restatement he explicitly disclaims that he has demonstrated morality is objective. What he is doing is trying to formalize Western/liberal intuitions about justice.
(EDIT: Just checked. The correct interpretation of the initial publication of A Theory of Justice is that Rawls is trying to demonstrate the objective truth of liberalism, but in later publications he changes his mind in response to criticisms and agrees that he is really just formalizing this intuition of justice as fairness)
I'm certain there are non-hypocritical social conservatives somewhere. I don't think prohibiting polyamory while also allowing measures of sexual privacy are necessarily inconsistent. Holding that some aspect of sexual behavior should be community matters does not require holding that all aspects of sexual behavior must be community matters.
Lorentz contraction. (Oddly enough, I made the opposite correction a week ago for the Lorenz attractor.)
Yikes, thanks!