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Peterdjones comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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Yes, he's said that it is incoherent. He hasn't said why. Sayign he doesn't like FGM doens't demosntrate incoherence.
Perhaps I should have made more explicit references back. The incoherence that I see is what I was talking about when I originally said this:
It's that basic contradiction:
that this thread has been about: how do you support "the rich tapestry of human life and the desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit" without prohibiting yourself from criticising abhorrent cultural customs like FGM? It's that contradiction that gives rise to the contortions around the subject of FGM that I earlier quoted from the Wikipedia page.
One common approach is called "liberalism". It ascribes certain notional boundaries — called "rights" — to each individual; and asserts that each individual may do as they choose to express their identity, so long as they do not transgress the notional boundaries of another person. This places certain limits on the ways each person can "express their own identity in the manner they see fit" in order to define a space in which all others can do so too.
The conflict between individuality and cultural consistency is practically as old as civilization itself. Most ideologies throughout history included ad hoc, unprincipled, case-by-case solutions to those problems.
Why do you think that multi-culturalism is more inconsistent and unprincipled than any other historical solution to the individuality / group identity problem?
The problem is not that it is inconsistent and unprincipled, but that it is inconsistent and principled.
But it isn't inconsistent.
Thank you for clarifying. That really was unclear.
Prizing equal rights obviously isn't in tension with prizing diverse human exercise of those rights. You haven't cited a contradiction. However, we could use your argument to spin off a real tension:
Similarity (e.g., our common humanity, our common interests and heritage and concerns) is valuable. But dissimilarity (e.g., cultural and individual diversity) is also valuable. So 'value' seems to be trivial.
Response: What we really value is not 'being the same' or 'being different' in a vacuum. What we value is (a) being similar or different in particular respects, and (b) having a certain ratio of similarity to difference. The English language just isn't sophisticated enough to allow for easy slogans of either of those forms. We can't easily signal that we value diversity, but in specific areas and not in all areas; likewise for valuing some similarities, but not all. And we can't easily signal that we value a certain mixture of sameness and differentness, because too much of one or the other would make life less worth living. They seem like platitudes, but they aren't false, and they're worth taking seriously if only because they stand in for so many specific attributes that we need to take very seriously. It's just important to see past the surface structure of some virtues.
"Equality" never means identicality in the political context. It instead means equal value or equal worth.
That's what we're talking about. Requiring a religious day of rest every Friday, or every Saturday, or every Sunday, are indeed practices of equal worth. FGM is not of equal worth with those.
It means people are of equal worth. In liberal democracies you don't have to show that any kind of behaviour is of worth before you do it, you have to show that is does no harm and has consent.
That works until you start getting into details of exactly what constitutes "harm" and "consent".
In the overwhelming majority of the cases the distinction is clear-cut; it's just that the ones where it isn't tend to be much more salient.
And those are precisely the type of cases that gradually cause attitudes to change.
I don't know who would think that would demonstrate incoherence. And I don't notice RichardKennaway pointing out that he doesn't like FGM, so that seems totally irrelevant.
Ah, different thread, thanks. Yes, there doesn't seem to be anything in that comment where RichardKennaway connects FGM with incoherence. You seem to be jumping to conclusions.