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bentarm comments on Blues, Greens and abortion - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (150)
One of the reasons this post is interesting is because I don't expect it to raise any sort of debate at all - I expect pretty much everyone who posts on LW to be pro-choice. Is this because LW people are part of the "Correct Contrarian Cluster" (although it isn't so contrarian in this context). Or does this mean that LW is massively biased towards a certain political point of view? If the latter, should we be actively aiming to encourage more pro-Lifers to give us useful counterpoints in our debates?
This is nearly the opposite of 'contrarianism' (as you partially acknowledge). The 'pro-choice' stance in most cases will be more to do with conforming than coming to a Correct choice. In fact Correct barely fits either, except to the extent that it is part of my (or our) extrapolated volition.
I am most definitely not pro-choice. Most particularly with the 'am' part (it is not part of my identity) and in secondarily with the 'pro-choice' part - abhorring involvement in that sort of weasely definition is part of my identity. (If you prefer you could say that I am pro choice and pro life and balance the competing desideratum with a complicated system of intuitions and reasoning.) But for practical purposes I'm still going to check the same box when faced with the question "Would you prefer safe and legal abortions to be available to pregnant women (and Californian governors) at their own discretion?"
"Pro-choice" and "pro-life" are both rather weasely terms, but they seem to have been selected by implicit mutual agreement between (mainstream elements of) the two sides in order to avoid reducing the debate to name-calling ("murderer" vs "opressor" etc).
The degree to which those slogans are mainstream depends where you live and to what extent mainstream culture in your locality makes that particular ethical question the subject of huge amounts of identity-defining debate.
Indeed. I consider myself pro-convenient-fetal-death
If we agree due to correctness, then the causal chain from reality to belief should follow similar lines in each person's reasoning, and we should give similar (or at least compatible) justifications for our mutual conclusion.
If we agree due to bias, then we would likely discover wildly divergent rationalizations for our common premise, and we should find multiple mutually contradictory justifications.
Mostly, I suspect that the traditional U.S. "pro-choice" vs. "pro-life" lines are not helpful ones for making progress on this subject.
Why do you suspect this?
Because like any organizational labeling, they encourage treating distinct ideas as a package deal.
This is perhaps clearer if I use a different example.
In general, my position on criminalizing activity is that it's something I encourage when I strongly prefer the state of the world when that activity is illegal, and not otherwise.
That bar hasn't been met on most drug use, including alcohol and nicotine, so I don't support criminalizing it. That said: I don't endorse the activity and I think in most cases the world is better if people avoid it.
So you can describe me as "pro-choice" when it comes to drug use... but you can also describe me as "anti-drug."
All of which is fine and dandy, except that if political groups start spending millions of dollars to promote the idea that being "anti-drug" includes support for criminalizing all drug use, and being "pro-choice" means encouraging my friends in their drug use, then both of those labels become problematic, since I do neither of those things.
And if those political groups become powerful enough, then even refusing those labels becomes problematic. If I say "I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-drug" in that counterfactual context, most people understand me to mean that I reject everything those two groups endorse. (They are incorrect to do so, of course, but it's foolish of me to ignore what people in fact do with language.)
At that point, if I'm going to engage in a productive conversation about what choices I endorse around drug use and drug legislation, the best thing for me to do is discard the terms altogether and talk about the underlying issues.
And if the conversation has already begun in a way that's centered around those terms, the best thing for me to do is not discuss those issues until the language environment is less distorted.
Good fleshing out of an important point..
To bring it back to the context of the abortion debate, it at first surprised me that the pro-life is also often packaged with anti-contraception. I imagine many pro-life people would not identify as being anti-contraception, but my impression is that the pro-life groups that are most vocal and most likely to affect cultural norms and policies are also anti-contraception.
For example, this 100% pro-life person claims that contraception is 100% bad:
http://stobie.home.sprynet.com/religion/100prolife.htm#contra
* (then edited to be less judgmental).
People who believe that souls attach to bodies at the moment of conception puzzle me. I'm not sure how, if at all, they deal with the existence of identical twins (who were conceived just the once and then split up later) or chimeras (who were once fraternal twins and then fused together). I doubt they'd say that identical twins have half a soul each or need to share, or that chimeras have two souls.
When it comes to issues of personhood, consciousness, personal identity, etc., there is no view (let alone value system) that wouldn't be vulnerable to such problematic questions. In fact, I'd say that by the usual standards of philosophical cross-examinations, these questions are relatively easy to address from the standpoint of the ensoulment-at-conception theory.
Most people don't care about internal consistency between their opinions. In fact, in my experience, very few people actually take seriously the explicit meanings of their claims about morality, ethics, values, laws, etc.
They care about winning debates, signalling affiliation, that kind of thing. There's no point in taking their claims seriously and formally disproving them, because they don't take their claims seriously themselves - certainly not to the standards expected by this community.
Because they're the two mainstream positions on a highly politically-charged issue?