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PhilGoetz comments on The outline of Maletopia - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (86)
He didn't literally call for the murder of anybody. He's claiming that there's a logical inconsistency in giving people 3000 years ago credit for the rationality of their views on lepers and pork, but condemning them for having irrational views on homosexuality. I think. Or he's arguing that tolerating gay adults does or may make it more likely for children to become gay, and so while we might criticize their values, we shouldn't engage in the routine practice of calling people "ignorant" because they disagree with our values.
It's not inconsistent to acknowledge the occasional rightness of a stopped clock.
It's inconsistent to call ideas about the transmission of homosexuality "superstition" because they turned out to be wrong (if they did; I don't know the research), yet not call ideas about the transmission of leprosy "superstition", just because they turned out to be right. The people at that time had roughly equal reason to believe either proposition. Detection of the transmission of leprosy is extremely hard to detect, so much so that for much of the 20th century, doctors said it was not transmissible.
I think his claim is that people are illicitly labeling people who disagree with their values as irrational.
Ok, so to be logically consistent, if your values are that homosexuality is as bad as leprosy (!) and you believe its contagious, then you isolate the homosexuals, you don't kill them.
So... he's claiming that the only logically consistent position is that people are right about everything or wrong about everything?
He could have said something about homosexuality being a sin, or wrong, or against his values. He didn't. He said:
Maybe strictly speaking this isn't an explicit call for murder, but it does seem implicit.
Incidentally, I would also be opposed to the murder of lepers, despite the fact that leprosy does objectively exist.
To make it absolutely clear, I am not bothered by the hypothesis that homosexuality is caused by pathogens, not that I think its particularly plausible. I just think that trying to fight the spread of a hypothetical non-lethal disease by murdering millions of people is ... words fail me.