DaFranker comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong

6 [deleted] 06 November 2012 10:38PM

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Comment author: DaFranker 12 November 2012 06:48:38PM * 4 points [-]

I agree with your statements as written. However:

However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don't have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.

This is not nonsense, as far as I can tell.

Given "Accidental Pregnancy", the woman's decision tree (A) goes:

A1 - Keep the baby, support it, including whatever costs and benefits.
A2 - Get an abortion, costs and benefits are avoided.

The man's decision tree (B), according to the quoted statement, goes:

A1 - The woman kept the baby; (Bx|A1) - Support the woman and baby. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
A2 - The woman got an abortion; (Bx|A2) - No baby, no costs, no benefits. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.

Once you've boiled down the calculations, given unforeseen pregnancy, the men have zero decision power according to such a system in theory, and must pay a cost independently of whatever they could possibly do in exactly half of the possible outcomes.

In other words, whether you pay a cost or not is entirely not up to you, for no specific reason whatsoever other than "aren't the ones using their bodies as life support". Does this sound like a fair setting, and more importantly, does it sound like an optimal system to play in?

Comment author: TimS comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: sam0345 12 November 2012 11:42:24PM * 1 point [-]

But it is totally rejected by society's decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.

Exactly so: Moral and social decay. People behaving badly, bad behavior being encouraged, and frequently enforced. Hurtful consequences, decadence, and all that. "Society" is making wrongful decisions to advance the interests of one group at the expense of another, a characteristic flaw and failing of democracy.

A previous society decided that women and their children were not entitled to support except by a contract voluntarily entered into by both parties, whose terms differed strikingly from current terms. The question then is, which society was right?

The question at issue is moral progress. That society has decided X is not, in the context of this debate, evidence that X is right, since a previous society decided Y.

Comment author: sam0345 13 November 2012 12:50:04AM 0 points [-]

There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what?

The question is, which society was right? I argue that this society's decisions constitute evil, decadence, moral decay, and are an indictment of democracy.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2012 10:04:37AM * 0 points [-]

We're assuming false dichotomies here. We could have a society where women get to decide whether or not to abort, but if they don't they are encouraged to give the child up for adoption if they can't afford to raise it, and if they choose not to, rhat's their business and they aren't entitled to demand that anyone else help them out financially. EDIT: that way, a woman is not forced to undergo a medical procedure if she doesn't want the child.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 November 2012 10:16:32AM -1 points [-]

I haven't seen anyone assuming that you can't have abortion and no childcare, or childcare and no abortion. The main point of contention is that the grandparent is arguing that those are the only coherent options - that abortion and childcare is self-contradictory/discriminatory.

Comment author: DaFranker 12 November 2012 09:13:57PM 0 points [-]

I mostly agree on all of this, at the very least denotationally agree on everything.

I'm quite on a different end of the spectrum when it comes to whether this is morally optimized, but of course this is because I work from different assumptions and when I picture it, I also imagine a completely different social framework than most people who think this is the "right" way to do it would imagine around it.

Errh. Not sure how I could rephrase the above to make it less confusing, but hopefully your model already knows the gist of what I'm saying.

Comment author: TimS 13 November 2012 03:03:24AM -1 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your position - more specifically, I'm not sure what connotations you disagree with. I was trying in this instance to make statements without relevant connotation at all, but it seems that my attempts fell short.

Comment author: DaFranker 13 November 2012 02:53:55PM 1 point [-]

Well, for one example:

Abortion is a medical procedure.

This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as "medical procedures", while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.

If I want to push the meta-analysis a bit further...

So what?

This seems dismissive of the issues. At this point in the paragraph, it holds some connotation of "Your arguments are worthless, society is right because that's what society decided", which is clearly not intended (or so I would presume) but still sneaks into the reader's stream-of-consciousness.

In general the tone of the comment feels a bit like you're saying that society has decided something, nothing can be done about it by one individual, the Enemy's arguments are invalid, and thus society is right. This (probably unintended) connotation is very much one I strongly disagree with.

Comment author: TimS 13 November 2012 08:06:50PM * -2 points [-]

Abortion is a medical procedure.

This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as "medical procedures", while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.

Doesn't this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn't be available to vindicate the man's choice over the woman's choice. And you correctly note that it isn't only a medical procedure

This seems dismissive of the issues.

Sam says there's only one correct moral choice. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was dismissive of that position.

Comment author: DaFranker 13 November 2012 09:53:23PM -1 points [-]

Doesn't this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn't be available to vindicate the man's choice over the woman's choice. And you correctly note that it isn't only a medical procedure

Fully true. It's the pattern-matching connotation of "Here, I argue using known fallacies" that was off-putting, more than the facts stated and the actually-implied reasoning.

I cringe at the phrase "vindicate the man's choice over the woman's choice", because it's clear to me that this isn't a mutually exclusive two-choices-only scenario (there are more than two possible solutions to this "problem", if one wants to think of it in these terms), but that reaction is a matter of gender-equality humanism (which most people, due to historical circumstance, refer to as "feminism") more than the actual issue at hand.

DaFranker comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong

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