I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling like I have some control right now, and I think doing some writing will help.
SO, I figure I'll jump in on the topic I wanted to post about right around the time I left- pedophilia, and sexuality in general.
To anyone who's followed this blog, you know I browse reddit. A lot of times the middle class white male college educated, liberally-leaning perspective is just nice to be around.
Other times, it sucks. Big time.
The topic of pedophilia comes up every once in a while on reddit. Someone will do an AMA (interview where anyone can ask questions) about how their spouse sexually abused their child, or occasionally, you'll see someone who actually has pedophilic desires do an AMA. The pure amount of animosity and general ignorance on the topic is just upsetting.
Let's start with the obvious statements:
1. I understand that touching children is wrong. Agency to commit and consent to complicated actions like that is not something children have. They can't be held accountable to contracts, they're tried different from adults in court, they're not capable of giving consent (except under specific circumstances), and they aren't allowed to be released from parental custody unless, again, specific circumstances are met. Point is- it's wrong to try to force that responsibility of agency onto them when they're not ready, and it's equally wrong to take the agency they have away from them.
No one is arguing otherwise. That's the first step to approaching this discussion.
2. No one is excusing their behavior. When you act on your impulses, you deserve the consequences, regardless of what they are. What this discussion aims to do is explain behavior and, more particularly, desires.
So starting this discussion, you may be uncomfortable with the idea of someone sexually wanting a child. It's not a comfortable thought- but here's a little exercise:
If you're reading this, chances are, you're a friend of mine and you're probably willing to agree that homosexuality is acceptable and more importantly, natural. The desire for another person of the same sex is natural in its own right. Now, are you interested in skinny guys or Muscles McGoo? Do you like dark hair or lighter hair? Do you want him to be protective or do you want him to respect your sense of individual ability? How about the sex? Do you have a preferred position? Is there something a woman can do that just turns you on? Is there just a thought that turns you on? Do you have any fetishes? Do you like light bondage? How about toys? Do you have any roleplay fantasies?
Now let me ask you this-- Could you change those preferences or desires? Would you change them?
Your answers to these questions are subjective across each person. But the essence of it is that your preferences and desires are not something you choose. It's more likely that you stumbled into them through personal exploration, sexual or otherwise, and you started going back to them when you liked what you found.
That is the heart of a fetish or a philia. In the case of pedophilia, we're dealing with a fetish that is socially, legally, and personally unacceptable. No one will talk to you about it, you're labeled as a monster even if you've never done anything, and the worst of it is that you can't change it no matter how much you want to.
To those of you who've had sex or some sort of sexual interaction that was meaningful- how would it feel to know that you could never have the kind of sexual interaction that you wanted. Ever? Imagine up the best sexual situation you can think of. The most romantic, the most passionate, the hottest- whatever you want. Now really get into that. Own it. Want it.
Now imagine it was literally impossible to do without hurting your partner.
Imagine you could never have a consenting partner. You could never do this with someone you loved.
You can never be proud of it. You can never own it. You could go to jail for it (for some older readers, they may have faced something like this in their lifetime).
Take that feeling you have. That sinking, depressing, awful feeling and put that onto every single person with pedophilic urges.
It's a situation to be pitied, not hated. They can never experience what many of us can daily or weekly or monthly. And they don't even have the social support structure to deal with those feelings.
If you're feeling sexually frustrated, you have friends who can and will listen and empathize. Imagine not being able to say anything to anyone ever. Even if you knew someone who wouldn't judge you, imagine the social stigma about the topic- the shame you feel just thinking about it. Why would you want to bring it up? You wouldn't feel comfortable with it even IF you trusted that person not to flip out and call the police on you.
This was one more roll of the genetic dice that you happened to get lucky on.
Not something you willfully did to "be a better person."
Another thing- Have you ever been uncomfortable with something about yourself? (Preferably something you can't change, but it's somewhat relevant even if it was something you could change)
Doesn't that suck? To look at yourself in the mirror and to be unhappy? To hate yourself? To be so ashamed of who or what you are that you want to die? I'm sure a lot of us have been there.
Has someone ever tried to pressure you into changing? Has someone ever made you feel as though it was imperative to make that change? Have relationships or friendships hinged on that change? Even if you couldn't actually do it?
We have to learn to accept and cope with what we have. If we can change the things we dislike, that's part of coping- but if we can't, then we have to cope another way. You can't will away the gay. You can't pray away your "unclean" lusts. You can't trick yourself into not being who you are or attracted to what you are. You just have to cope with it.
And that coping process is a helluva lot easier if you don't have idiots sticking their nose in your face and telling you how you ought to be all day.
Just try to empathize with what someone with pedophilic urges is going through. Maybe if society was better about helping people cope, we wouldn't have so many goddamn actual pedophiles sitting around in prison after no one was around to help them through their shitty situation.
Take this post and replace the current issue with any other issue of gender or sexuality or identity, and you're pretty much set.
-
Wads
DISCLAIMER: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN I CONDONE OR ACCEPT THE AWFUL ACTIONS TAKEN BY PEOPLE IN THIS SITUATION. I DO NOT.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Temporary Hiatus
No doubt my two readers have noticed that my consistency has been slipping with new posts, and I do apologize for that.
I'm going to be taking a little time off and hopefully re-energizing my desire to write.
In the meantime, if I have anything I really want to write about, I'll do it a la carte as it comes up and I'll continue to post those to Facebook.
-
Wads
I'm going to be taking a little time off and hopefully re-energizing my desire to write.
In the meantime, if I have anything I really want to write about, I'll do it a la carte as it comes up and I'll continue to post those to Facebook.
-
Wads
Monday, January 28, 2013
Taking Responsibility
I'm gonna' wing this one since I have a very... small amount of material for this on the top of my mind.
Benghazi.
This has been a bit of an issue recently thanks to the hearing featuring Hillary Clinton. Several senators had plenty of questions for her. Questions revolving around how much of a failure she was- incidentally, she was virtually uninvolved with any meaningful process related to Benghazi.
This is something that's bugged me about people expecting a fall-guy with a recognizable face whenever something bad happens.
A system has some unforeseeable problems thanks to the tangled web of bureaucracy. As a result of an emergency, that tangled web allows for some lowly peon to make a mistake or an error in judgment or assessment. Resulting from this, a few bad things happen.
It's a public debacle.
So what happens? Well, you'd expect the guy who made the mistake to get fired and everyone move on.
But that's not good enough for people. They can't direct their anger towards the peon they've never seen before. They need a scapegoat with a public face, even if that scapegoat is, for all intents and purposes, not related to the incident at all.
In this case, Hillary Clinton.
By virtue of the nature of terrorist attacks, the initial information obtained is typically the first and most basic assessment made by whichever peon sees it first and reports it. All information from thereon is going to be predicated upon that first assessment.
And can we really blame the first guy that much? He made a really typical error- one that most people would make, since no one has normal experience with terrorist attacks. Why would they? That kind of experience is a rarity. Simulating it to be prepared for it isn't easy.
But more than that, why would we blame anyone except the person who made the initial mistake?
(Unless of course, there's someone who made a very negligent mistake that allowed the situation to happen in the first place. In the case of a terrorist attack, that's a little harder to predict or blame though)
The alternate factor here is Libya requesting additional security and whether or not anyone ignored those cables (messages).
Simply put, yes, they requested more security. Months before the attack. Numerous times. Totaling 12 requested security officers
SOURCE
However, the House Oversight Committee (in charge of such appropriations) told them "no." Hillary Clinton should never see these cables because it's not her job.
Despite this, she's taken personal responsibility for the system being slow and awkward and she's vowed to begin fixing it in response to the problem. Instead of, say, blaming it on other people around her and avoiding the problem altogether like many politicians are wont to do.
What I'm getting at here is that personal responsibility is something we should take for our actions and thoughts, but not those that are legitimately out of our control. It's nice of you to apologize for your friend's shitty luck, but ultimately, it's not something you caused or contributed to.
It sucks that your love is unrequited, but you can't blame someone for simply not being romantically interested in you- it's out of their control.
Our thoughts and our actions are what we have control over.
The problems that we cause directly or indirectly are our responsibility- but only that.
I don't really know where I'm going with this.
Take responsibility for what you do.
Don't take responsibility if it's legitimately out of your control or influence.
-
Wad
Benghazi.
This has been a bit of an issue recently thanks to the hearing featuring Hillary Clinton. Several senators had plenty of questions for her. Questions revolving around how much of a failure she was- incidentally, she was virtually uninvolved with any meaningful process related to Benghazi.
This is something that's bugged me about people expecting a fall-guy with a recognizable face whenever something bad happens.
A system has some unforeseeable problems thanks to the tangled web of bureaucracy. As a result of an emergency, that tangled web allows for some lowly peon to make a mistake or an error in judgment or assessment. Resulting from this, a few bad things happen.
It's a public debacle.
So what happens? Well, you'd expect the guy who made the mistake to get fired and everyone move on.
But that's not good enough for people. They can't direct their anger towards the peon they've never seen before. They need a scapegoat with a public face, even if that scapegoat is, for all intents and purposes, not related to the incident at all.
In this case, Hillary Clinton.
By virtue of the nature of terrorist attacks, the initial information obtained is typically the first and most basic assessment made by whichever peon sees it first and reports it. All information from thereon is going to be predicated upon that first assessment.
And can we really blame the first guy that much? He made a really typical error- one that most people would make, since no one has normal experience with terrorist attacks. Why would they? That kind of experience is a rarity. Simulating it to be prepared for it isn't easy.
But more than that, why would we blame anyone except the person who made the initial mistake?
(Unless of course, there's someone who made a very negligent mistake that allowed the situation to happen in the first place. In the case of a terrorist attack, that's a little harder to predict or blame though)
The alternate factor here is Libya requesting additional security and whether or not anyone ignored those cables (messages).
Simply put, yes, they requested more security. Months before the attack. Numerous times. Totaling 12 requested security officers
SOURCE
However, the House Oversight Committee (in charge of such appropriations) told them "no." Hillary Clinton should never see these cables because it's not her job.
Despite this, she's taken personal responsibility for the system being slow and awkward and she's vowed to begin fixing it in response to the problem. Instead of, say, blaming it on other people around her and avoiding the problem altogether like many politicians are wont to do.
What I'm getting at here is that personal responsibility is something we should take for our actions and thoughts, but not those that are legitimately out of our control. It's nice of you to apologize for your friend's shitty luck, but ultimately, it's not something you caused or contributed to.
It sucks that your love is unrequited, but you can't blame someone for simply not being romantically interested in you- it's out of their control.
Our thoughts and our actions are what we have control over.
The problems that we cause directly or indirectly are our responsibility- but only that.
I don't really know where I'm going with this.
Take responsibility for what you do.
Don't take responsibility if it's legitimately out of your control or influence.
-
Wad
Friday, January 25, 2013
Emotions and Arguments
Hokay-
Yesterday I had the pleasure of a lovely "debate" with someone on the merits of the "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy.
For those interested and unaware, standard argumentation has two main kinds of fallacies- formal and informal.
Formal fallacies are those that make an argument structurally nonsensical. For example:
Socrates was smart. Socrates was a human. Therefore, all humans are smart.
Informal fallacies, on the other hand, don't completely destroy an argument the instant they're made, but rather, they diminish the trust one may have in the arguer.
An appeal to authority- "The world is flat. My daddy told me so."
Ad hominem (a personal attack)- "The world is flat because you're an idiot."
Ad populum- "97% of people believe the world is flat, so it is!"
Appeal to emotion- "The world is flat because I'm sad/you're upsetting me."
And so on- Informal fallacies don't technically make you wrong or anything, but they usually make you less trustworthy if you're willing to overuse them.
We use appeals to authority constantly in reference to the authority of our textbooks or our professors or scientists- but that doesn't make us wrong. Informal fallacies are reserved for arguments that you make that have no actual bearing on evidence, whether they're right or wrong.
My textbook might say that the world is flat or round. By trusting in it without using other sources, I'm at least not making the best logical choices.
Now then- with that at least glossed over, the argument in question presented to me was that appeals to emotion are not wrong or bad because humans are emotional creatures and so long as we approach any argument, there will be some emotion behind it.
The premise is a valid point. Humans are always emotional. However, the conclusion was a gross misunderstanding of what an appeal to emotion is. The idea behind informal fallacies being bad is that your sole "evidence" for your argument is that an authority said so, or because you feel it, or because other people agree.
This seems to cause some common misconceptions with argumentation in general.
People often want to divorce themselves from all emotion when arguing. Or, the other extreme- they want to rely on their emotions.
Emotions aren't inherently evil or anything. If you're upset with someone and it's the *reason* you're arguing, that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong at all with having emotions. The problem is when your emotion becomes the reason you're right or the other person is wrong.
"I'm upset. You're not listening to me- you've failed to demonstrate that you understand the position I'm coming from." That's fine.
"You don't understand where I'm coming from because I'm still upset." That's not fine.
A healthy balance where we endeavor to understand how and why we feel the way we do allows us the opportunity to better empathize with someone who may be upsetting us to no fault of their own. Everyone's emotions and emotional responses are unique to them and all too often, we get sucked into how lousy we're feeling without recognizing that it may not be anyone else's fault that we're feeling that way.
This is why human communication is so important. Because we can't understand each others' emotions by default, and most people aren't in touch enough with humanity to be able to accurately judge emotions through conversation unless it's an explicitly discussed topic.
Talk to each other. Don't try to avoid how you feel, but just remember that how you feel has no factual bearing on things that did or did not happen. Your emotions are simply how your mind is knee-jerk responding to events that it perceives have occurred, even if they haven't.
So sit down, shut up, and talk to each other! (Did I say shut up? I meant the opposite of that...)
-
Waddles
Yesterday I had the pleasure of a lovely "debate" with someone on the merits of the "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy.
For those interested and unaware, standard argumentation has two main kinds of fallacies- formal and informal.
Formal fallacies are those that make an argument structurally nonsensical. For example:
Socrates was smart. Socrates was a human. Therefore, all humans are smart.
Informal fallacies, on the other hand, don't completely destroy an argument the instant they're made, but rather, they diminish the trust one may have in the arguer.
An appeal to authority- "The world is flat. My daddy told me so."
Ad hominem (a personal attack)- "The world is flat because you're an idiot."
Ad populum- "97% of people believe the world is flat, so it is!"
Appeal to emotion- "The world is flat because I'm sad/you're upsetting me."
And so on- Informal fallacies don't technically make you wrong or anything, but they usually make you less trustworthy if you're willing to overuse them.
We use appeals to authority constantly in reference to the authority of our textbooks or our professors or scientists- but that doesn't make us wrong. Informal fallacies are reserved for arguments that you make that have no actual bearing on evidence, whether they're right or wrong.
My textbook might say that the world is flat or round. By trusting in it without using other sources, I'm at least not making the best logical choices.
Now then- with that at least glossed over, the argument in question presented to me was that appeals to emotion are not wrong or bad because humans are emotional creatures and so long as we approach any argument, there will be some emotion behind it.
The premise is a valid point. Humans are always emotional. However, the conclusion was a gross misunderstanding of what an appeal to emotion is. The idea behind informal fallacies being bad is that your sole "evidence" for your argument is that an authority said so, or because you feel it, or because other people agree.
This seems to cause some common misconceptions with argumentation in general.
People often want to divorce themselves from all emotion when arguing. Or, the other extreme- they want to rely on their emotions.
Emotions aren't inherently evil or anything. If you're upset with someone and it's the *reason* you're arguing, that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong at all with having emotions. The problem is when your emotion becomes the reason you're right or the other person is wrong.
"I'm upset. You're not listening to me- you've failed to demonstrate that you understand the position I'm coming from." That's fine.
"You don't understand where I'm coming from because I'm still upset." That's not fine.
A healthy balance where we endeavor to understand how and why we feel the way we do allows us the opportunity to better empathize with someone who may be upsetting us to no fault of their own. Everyone's emotions and emotional responses are unique to them and all too often, we get sucked into how lousy we're feeling without recognizing that it may not be anyone else's fault that we're feeling that way.
This is why human communication is so important. Because we can't understand each others' emotions by default, and most people aren't in touch enough with humanity to be able to accurately judge emotions through conversation unless it's an explicitly discussed topic.
Talk to each other. Don't try to avoid how you feel, but just remember that how you feel has no factual bearing on things that did or did not happen. Your emotions are simply how your mind is knee-jerk responding to events that it perceives have occurred, even if they haven't.
So sit down, shut up, and talk to each other! (Did I say shut up? I meant the opposite of that...)
-
Waddles
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Further thoughts on the worth of life
So, guess who forgot that Monday was yesterday.
This guy.
As a result, I present you with Tuesday's blog post.
With Roe V. Wade sitting directly forty years behind us, abortion has been a hot button topic.
Reddit even had the pleasure of hosting workers at an abortion clinic for an AMA (ask me anything- it's a community interview) seen here
I've read many not-so-compelling arguments against abortion and lots of attempts to boil down the argument to its single-value-essence, like "ultimately, the question is when you define life as starting."
I'd like to clarify that there isn't just one of these value-essences- there are several. Off the top of my head:
1. When do you define the beginning of life?
2. Is the freedom of one person more, less, or equally valuable as the rights of a dependent person?
3. Is human life priceless, or can you put a value on it in certain circumstances?
4. Can the price of human life (if it exists) be translated into a currency other than "lives"?
All four of these questions can result in a fundamental position-shift on the topic of abortion depending on how you answer them. The follow-up "why" question after each one also exposes cognitive dissonance and poorly-crafted philosophies.
The first question is an almost entirely arbitrary and subjective question that you can't do anything with. It's impossible to determine a consensus for life's origins because it's such a continuous and nebulous process. In other words, not an argument worth having.
The second question is far more interesting since any answer has serious implications on many other opinions. Dependents come in many forms- children, fetuses, the elderly, the physically/mentally challenged, intended, unintended, forced, etc.
It brings to mind the thought experiment of the Violinist. The meat of the experiment is if you wake up connected to a famous violinist and you're told he'll die if you disconnect yourself from him, do you have any obligation to stay connected to him? He'll be cured in nine months, but you cannot move and you're the only one that can save him. You were not consulted prior to becoming connected and instead, you were kidnapped.
The idea is that if someone is truly dependent upon us for survival, do we actually have any moral obligation towards them? What if we had no say in that dependency (rape)? What if we did everything in our power to prevent that dependency (birth control/condom)? When and why does that line get crossed where we're no longer responsible?
There's always a shortage of blood, so donating blood will always save lives. Does that mean we have an obligation to donate? Someone's life is dependent on it, right? But... wouldn't that mean we're always obligated to be donating blood constantly?
Obviously, it's a bit of a slippery slope towards catastrophe if we're always obligated to help someone who's currently dependent upon our actions.
This brings us to the third question, the one I consider the most important. The third question aims at determining how consistent a view is towards life. Is it truly priceless?
The only way that abortion could never be an acceptable route is if all life is equally priceless and there's no way of determining if life has a specific value to it.
You would never kill a life to save a life.
At its heart, this is a position of utilitarianism vs. deontology (as I'm sure I've pushed before). Morality as a mathematical calculation or as a universal constant?
However, consider this position:
You're the last guard in an over-crowded prison and you just got a call. You're desperately needed for someone that will likely take all night. No one will be at the prison for many hours. There are no spare cells and no rooms available to house prisoners.
Suddenly, on your way out, the cell of a violent criminal starts melting (or bursts into flames, or has a gas leak- pick your poison). There's nothing you can do to stop it. Your two choices are to either let the prisoner die inside the cell or free the prisoner.
If you let the prisoner go, he said he will murder others.
In the end, your choice is to cause a death or indirectly allow other deaths by his hand.
This particular experiment is the nightmare of deontology- forcing someone into a position in which they cannot follow their ideal moral path. It forces a person to admit that life is not inherently priceless. Life can be worth more than other life. It sucks and it's super duper uncomfortable to admit, but the vast majority of people would let the criminal die rather than allow him to make good on his promise. So, the life of an innocent is worth more than the life of a guilty party.
But that's just one philosophical step, which leads us to our next question.
Can we translate the price of life into any currency other than "lives"? Right now, the criminal couldn't be spared because his life would have come at the cost of other life(s). But what if that wasn't quite the case?
What if this criminal was a serial rapist who did not murder his victims?
He's promised that if you let him out, he'll rape again.
Suddenly the stakes are not a life for a life. It's a life for pain, misery, and trauma.
Would you let him out now?
What if he is assured to commit a hundred rapes if you let him out?
Is a single life worth a hundred instances of that tragedy?
Is there a line for you? How much pain and suffering is worth a life?
At some point, one of two things happens-
1. You admit that life has a price and it's not measured in other lives necessarily.
2. You cling to the pricelessness of life, even if it were to cause the suffering of every single human being on the planet.
If you choose option 2, you're philosophically consistent, but I'd be forced to label you as an idealistic dreamer.
If you choose option 1, then we're getting somewhere. From here on out, you're in a stance of utilitarianism- we're creating a mathematical formula to determine the worth of life.
Lives are capable of being priced in pain, anguish, and suffering. From here, it's a simple matter of asking where and why you draw a line at how much suffering is required before a life can be ended to prevent that suffering.
Once you've drawn that line, it's easy to remind you that your single arbitrary position is what created that line. Other people have different lines that they've arbitrarily created, and you have to accept that for some of those people, terminating a pregnancy to avoid suffering is well within their rights.
The crux here is that a valid counterargument would suggest that if we use this logic, then we should be able to kill our annoying neighbor or our boss depending on how much suffering they inflict.
On its face, the argument appears to hold water, but remember, we're dealing with a mathematical formula- your suffering isn't the only important factor.
Let's give some numbers to this exercise.
Let's say your boss causes you 1,500 "suffering" points. So, you think you'd be justified in killing him. Well, hold on. He causes his wife -1,000 suffering. And his child -1,800 suffering. And between his friends and family and other employees, he causes -4,200. So, in total, he causes -7,000 suffering to offset your 1,500. The net total is still -5,500 suffering caused by this human. Therefore, he does more good than bad and killing him would cause more suffering than it would alleviate, making it an action that is immoral by utilitarian standards.
With that in mind, let's revisit the idea of abortion. A fetus that is not currently emotionally connected to other humans is a lot easier to parse out with math.
The fetus is worth 400 points of suffering to the mother. This amount is almost guaranteed to rise as the physical, emotional, and financial demands of pregnancy persist. The father is caused a net 100 suffering because he is pained by the mother's agony and difficult choice, but he's otherwise indifferent to having or not having the child. No one else knows of its existence and there is therefore, no one else who is caused suffering points (whether positive or negative). As such, the fetus causes a net 500 suffering. The abortion is arguably justified at that point.
This isn't a particularly convincing argument when you get down to it though, I must admit. If you have an eight-year-old who has no friends and only immediate family who hate him, he might cause a net positive amount of suffering, but it would problematic to kill this child, wouldn't it?
In the end, even utilitarians want to cling to some universal ethical principles, but not others. We're not above our own inconsistencies.
So, why then would abortion be morally acceptable, but not the killing of your own child if both yielded positive total suffering?
The best I can honestly come up with is a lack of alternatives.
If women had a cheap, safe, and easy way to expel a fetus in such a way that it could still be kept alive, then I think most people on both sides would be satisfied. However, such a method does not exist. The closest is to bear the burden of pregnancy to full term and then to give the baby up for adoption. However, the problem with this method is that it takes serious physical, emotional, psychological, and financial tolls on the woman that could otherwise be avoided. Similarly, adoption poses certain problems for many children (often non-white children). They're thrown into a system that is underfunded and often poorly run. The children may not be adequately cared for or ever adopted.
So, in lieu of a perfect alternative that alleviates everyone's problems, someone has to make the sacrifice, and I'm inclined to people do with their body what they want more than I'm inclined to suggest that fetuses have the same rights as children.
It's not a satisfying conclusion, but if you've followed and understand the previous arguments, then surely you feel the same sense of dissatisfaction, yes?
Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm missing some vital pieces of information or perspective that might make the decision easier.
What are your thoughts?
-
Waddles
This guy.
As a result, I present you with Tuesday's blog post.
With Roe V. Wade sitting directly forty years behind us, abortion has been a hot button topic.
Reddit even had the pleasure of hosting workers at an abortion clinic for an AMA (ask me anything- it's a community interview) seen here
I've read many not-so-compelling arguments against abortion and lots of attempts to boil down the argument to its single-value-essence, like "ultimately, the question is when you define life as starting."
I'd like to clarify that there isn't just one of these value-essences- there are several. Off the top of my head:
1. When do you define the beginning of life?
2. Is the freedom of one person more, less, or equally valuable as the rights of a dependent person?
3. Is human life priceless, or can you put a value on it in certain circumstances?
4. Can the price of human life (if it exists) be translated into a currency other than "lives"?
All four of these questions can result in a fundamental position-shift on the topic of abortion depending on how you answer them. The follow-up "why" question after each one also exposes cognitive dissonance and poorly-crafted philosophies.
The first question is an almost entirely arbitrary and subjective question that you can't do anything with. It's impossible to determine a consensus for life's origins because it's such a continuous and nebulous process. In other words, not an argument worth having.
The second question is far more interesting since any answer has serious implications on many other opinions. Dependents come in many forms- children, fetuses, the elderly, the physically/mentally challenged, intended, unintended, forced, etc.
It brings to mind the thought experiment of the Violinist. The meat of the experiment is if you wake up connected to a famous violinist and you're told he'll die if you disconnect yourself from him, do you have any obligation to stay connected to him? He'll be cured in nine months, but you cannot move and you're the only one that can save him. You were not consulted prior to becoming connected and instead, you were kidnapped.
The idea is that if someone is truly dependent upon us for survival, do we actually have any moral obligation towards them? What if we had no say in that dependency (rape)? What if we did everything in our power to prevent that dependency (birth control/condom)? When and why does that line get crossed where we're no longer responsible?
There's always a shortage of blood, so donating blood will always save lives. Does that mean we have an obligation to donate? Someone's life is dependent on it, right? But... wouldn't that mean we're always obligated to be donating blood constantly?
Obviously, it's a bit of a slippery slope towards catastrophe if we're always obligated to help someone who's currently dependent upon our actions.
This brings us to the third question, the one I consider the most important. The third question aims at determining how consistent a view is towards life. Is it truly priceless?
The only way that abortion could never be an acceptable route is if all life is equally priceless and there's no way of determining if life has a specific value to it.
You would never kill a life to save a life.
At its heart, this is a position of utilitarianism vs. deontology (as I'm sure I've pushed before). Morality as a mathematical calculation or as a universal constant?
However, consider this position:
You're the last guard in an over-crowded prison and you just got a call. You're desperately needed for someone that will likely take all night. No one will be at the prison for many hours. There are no spare cells and no rooms available to house prisoners.
Suddenly, on your way out, the cell of a violent criminal starts melting (or bursts into flames, or has a gas leak- pick your poison). There's nothing you can do to stop it. Your two choices are to either let the prisoner die inside the cell or free the prisoner.
If you let the prisoner go, he said he will murder others.
In the end, your choice is to cause a death or indirectly allow other deaths by his hand.
This particular experiment is the nightmare of deontology- forcing someone into a position in which they cannot follow their ideal moral path. It forces a person to admit that life is not inherently priceless. Life can be worth more than other life. It sucks and it's super duper uncomfortable to admit, but the vast majority of people would let the criminal die rather than allow him to make good on his promise. So, the life of an innocent is worth more than the life of a guilty party.
But that's just one philosophical step, which leads us to our next question.
Can we translate the price of life into any currency other than "lives"? Right now, the criminal couldn't be spared because his life would have come at the cost of other life(s). But what if that wasn't quite the case?
What if this criminal was a serial rapist who did not murder his victims?
He's promised that if you let him out, he'll rape again.
Suddenly the stakes are not a life for a life. It's a life for pain, misery, and trauma.
Would you let him out now?
What if he is assured to commit a hundred rapes if you let him out?
Is a single life worth a hundred instances of that tragedy?
Is there a line for you? How much pain and suffering is worth a life?
At some point, one of two things happens-
1. You admit that life has a price and it's not measured in other lives necessarily.
2. You cling to the pricelessness of life, even if it were to cause the suffering of every single human being on the planet.
If you choose option 2, you're philosophically consistent, but I'd be forced to label you as an idealistic dreamer.
If you choose option 1, then we're getting somewhere. From here on out, you're in a stance of utilitarianism- we're creating a mathematical formula to determine the worth of life.
Lives are capable of being priced in pain, anguish, and suffering. From here, it's a simple matter of asking where and why you draw a line at how much suffering is required before a life can be ended to prevent that suffering.
Once you've drawn that line, it's easy to remind you that your single arbitrary position is what created that line. Other people have different lines that they've arbitrarily created, and you have to accept that for some of those people, terminating a pregnancy to avoid suffering is well within their rights.
The crux here is that a valid counterargument would suggest that if we use this logic, then we should be able to kill our annoying neighbor or our boss depending on how much suffering they inflict.
On its face, the argument appears to hold water, but remember, we're dealing with a mathematical formula- your suffering isn't the only important factor.
Let's give some numbers to this exercise.
Let's say your boss causes you 1,500 "suffering" points. So, you think you'd be justified in killing him. Well, hold on. He causes his wife -1,000 suffering. And his child -1,800 suffering. And between his friends and family and other employees, he causes -4,200. So, in total, he causes -7,000 suffering to offset your 1,500. The net total is still -5,500 suffering caused by this human. Therefore, he does more good than bad and killing him would cause more suffering than it would alleviate, making it an action that is immoral by utilitarian standards.
With that in mind, let's revisit the idea of abortion. A fetus that is not currently emotionally connected to other humans is a lot easier to parse out with math.
The fetus is worth 400 points of suffering to the mother. This amount is almost guaranteed to rise as the physical, emotional, and financial demands of pregnancy persist. The father is caused a net 100 suffering because he is pained by the mother's agony and difficult choice, but he's otherwise indifferent to having or not having the child. No one else knows of its existence and there is therefore, no one else who is caused suffering points (whether positive or negative). As such, the fetus causes a net 500 suffering. The abortion is arguably justified at that point.
This isn't a particularly convincing argument when you get down to it though, I must admit. If you have an eight-year-old who has no friends and only immediate family who hate him, he might cause a net positive amount of suffering, but it would problematic to kill this child, wouldn't it?
In the end, even utilitarians want to cling to some universal ethical principles, but not others. We're not above our own inconsistencies.
So, why then would abortion be morally acceptable, but not the killing of your own child if both yielded positive total suffering?
The best I can honestly come up with is a lack of alternatives.
If women had a cheap, safe, and easy way to expel a fetus in such a way that it could still be kept alive, then I think most people on both sides would be satisfied. However, such a method does not exist. The closest is to bear the burden of pregnancy to full term and then to give the baby up for adoption. However, the problem with this method is that it takes serious physical, emotional, psychological, and financial tolls on the woman that could otherwise be avoided. Similarly, adoption poses certain problems for many children (often non-white children). They're thrown into a system that is underfunded and often poorly run. The children may not be adequately cared for or ever adopted.
So, in lieu of a perfect alternative that alleviates everyone's problems, someone has to make the sacrifice, and I'm inclined to people do with their body what they want more than I'm inclined to suggest that fetuses have the same rights as children.
It's not a satisfying conclusion, but if you've followed and understand the previous arguments, then surely you feel the same sense of dissatisfaction, yes?
Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm missing some vital pieces of information or perspective that might make the decision easier.
What are your thoughts?
-
Waddles
Friday, January 18, 2013
Compromise and Creating Sides
A discussion on gun control by a great friend of mine kickstarted the gears in my head yesterday. In particular, the topic of compromise between two "sides" came up and I started to think about that.
In an earlier post, I discussed Aristotle's idea of the Golden Mean at some point- the concept that a virtue lies between two opposing extremes.
For example, in the realm of eating, one extreme is self-starvation, while the opposing extreme is over-indulgence, leaving the golden mean to be found in the middle- something akin to "eating as necessary and when appropriate."
Obviously, the Golden Mean leaves for some wiggle room as the mid-point for two extremes is typically kind of subjective.
However, so long as you can agree on the perspective from which to approach an issue, the Golden Mean is a fabulous method of determining a virtue.
So, what's the problem? The beef I have with it isn't actually one of abstract principle, but rather one of practicality.
The Golden Mean is too narrow, being focused on one particular action while failing to account for any complex scenarios that include a multitude of actions or motivations. As such, there is no Golden Mean between being Conservative and being Liberal because those two aren't actions, but are instead, ideologies. Because of this conundrum, we've come to a point in our political discourse where people, from basic learning to higher education and beyond, have mistaken compromise for merely the mid-point between two current opposing views.
It sounds like the Golden Mean and it sounds like it should work... Until you examine it further. Since we're not dealing with a single action or trait, determining actual extremes is incredibly difficult and entirely based on cultural perspective.
To simply this argument (since I know I'm being nebulous right now), let's go back to the action of eating and combine it with the liberal and conservative ideologies.
Look at this line as the continuum for eating as an action where the left-hand extreme is total self-starvation, where the right-hand extreme is eating literally all the time:
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
It's a large continuum to be sure. Now, say in this analogy that "liberals" have made up a group that almost half of the country can get behind- these people want to eat three meals a day with snacks in between for enjoyment. And let's say that "conservatives" have made up a group with almost half the country supporting it as well. They want to keep it down to two meals a day without snacks in between. Now, our continuum looks a little something like this.
|------------------------------!---------------------------------------------?-----------------------------------|
The question mark representing "liberals" and the exclamation mark representing "conservatives. Right now, they're equally spread apart and roughly equidistant from each endpoint. Equally extreme ideologies. However, let's say that over the next ten years, "liberals" remain the same, while "conservatives" seek to cut the number of meals in a day down to one. Our continuum is adjusted accordingly.
|----------!------------------------------------------------------------------?----------------------------------|
Now that one group is skewed further towards the one extreme than the other group towards their extreme, we have a bit of a different issue.
If we try to find a midpoint between both sides- a compromise, if you will, it looks a bit like this:
|----------!------------------------------+------------------------------------?----------------------------------|
Where the plus is the compromise, we see a mid-point between the two groups. However, it's not a midpoint between the two poles. As such, the "compromise" is still not the Golden Mean. This is because either side is capable of artificially pushing or pulling the boundaries of what we consider the two "extremes," and it's what happens when we view groups as extremes rather than traits or actions.
Push this into the political sphere and suddenly, it makes a little more sense.
If conservatives have a massive push for creationism in school and liberals have a push to leave religion and school separate, wouldn't the midpoint between the two- the compromise- be to have some religious-based education in schools?
Obviously, we can see where that argument breaks down.
If we're allowed to artificially push back the goal posts for what is "extreme," then one side is entirely capable of pushing their side further back, not out of actual conviction for their ideology, but solely to make the "midpoint" between the two "extremes" further to their own side.
To bring this back to the food analogy, let's say that "liberals" don't want to eat any more than they previously said. They want three meals and snacks. However, if they're forced to compromise, why not push back their position to "eating all the time constantly"? Then the continuum would look like this.
|----------!-----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------?|
The compromise is not slightly to the right of the middle. So, even though "liberals" in this case do not want the position they're advocating for, it benefits them to hold that position regardless since we're working within the confines of this compromise-based political sphere.
As a system, it's clearly unsound. To bring it into reality, I would say that it's become apparent that the Republicans have artificially pushed their position further to the extreme recently. Whether this has been too force the midpoint further in their direction, or if it's actually due to conviction cannot technically be proven, but the end is still the same. In order to compromise with a new radical element, new concessions must be made by Democrats despite their overall positions changing a relatively small amount over the same period of time.
If it feels a little like we're being cheated, that's because we are thanks to this system of compromise.
But what do we do then?
Well, I don't have a good answer, because the only solution I can think of relies on individuals to make an ethical decision to seek the Golden Mean in their lives.
The GM between avarice and total humility lies somewhere near "making what you earn and living at/below your means."
The GM for punishing wrongdoing may be in the middle of "letting them go," and "killing them and their whole family." (or whatever the harshest punishment you can inflict is)
Perhaps- "Community service, rehabilitation, and reparations towards the person(s) you harmed."
The GM for having protection between "no one has any weaponry," and "everyone has every weaponry" might be to have a well-regulated body whose specific duty is overseeing the protection of innocents- and only this body would have weaponry.
However, as I mentioned earlier, the more broad we get, the harder it is to find a Golden Mean, since we're talking about more than just a single action or trait. As such, all three of the examples I just gave are all somewhat subjective and tentative. All three could have extenuating circumstances and the perspective from which you approach each individual issue has an impact on where you see the extremes.
It's complicated.
-
Wad
In an earlier post, I discussed Aristotle's idea of the Golden Mean at some point- the concept that a virtue lies between two opposing extremes.
For example, in the realm of eating, one extreme is self-starvation, while the opposing extreme is over-indulgence, leaving the golden mean to be found in the middle- something akin to "eating as necessary and when appropriate."
Obviously, the Golden Mean leaves for some wiggle room as the mid-point for two extremes is typically kind of subjective.
However, so long as you can agree on the perspective from which to approach an issue, the Golden Mean is a fabulous method of determining a virtue.
So, what's the problem? The beef I have with it isn't actually one of abstract principle, but rather one of practicality.
The Golden Mean is too narrow, being focused on one particular action while failing to account for any complex scenarios that include a multitude of actions or motivations. As such, there is no Golden Mean between being Conservative and being Liberal because those two aren't actions, but are instead, ideologies. Because of this conundrum, we've come to a point in our political discourse where people, from basic learning to higher education and beyond, have mistaken compromise for merely the mid-point between two current opposing views.
It sounds like the Golden Mean and it sounds like it should work... Until you examine it further. Since we're not dealing with a single action or trait, determining actual extremes is incredibly difficult and entirely based on cultural perspective.
To simply this argument (since I know I'm being nebulous right now), let's go back to the action of eating and combine it with the liberal and conservative ideologies.
Look at this line as the continuum for eating as an action where the left-hand extreme is total self-starvation, where the right-hand extreme is eating literally all the time:
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
It's a large continuum to be sure. Now, say in this analogy that "liberals" have made up a group that almost half of the country can get behind- these people want to eat three meals a day with snacks in between for enjoyment. And let's say that "conservatives" have made up a group with almost half the country supporting it as well. They want to keep it down to two meals a day without snacks in between. Now, our continuum looks a little something like this.
|------------------------------!---------------------------------------------?-----------------------------------|
The question mark representing "liberals" and the exclamation mark representing "conservatives. Right now, they're equally spread apart and roughly equidistant from each endpoint. Equally extreme ideologies. However, let's say that over the next ten years, "liberals" remain the same, while "conservatives" seek to cut the number of meals in a day down to one. Our continuum is adjusted accordingly.
|----------!------------------------------------------------------------------?----------------------------------|
Now that one group is skewed further towards the one extreme than the other group towards their extreme, we have a bit of a different issue.
If we try to find a midpoint between both sides- a compromise, if you will, it looks a bit like this:
|----------!------------------------------+------------------------------------?----------------------------------|
Where the plus is the compromise, we see a mid-point between the two groups. However, it's not a midpoint between the two poles. As such, the "compromise" is still not the Golden Mean. This is because either side is capable of artificially pushing or pulling the boundaries of what we consider the two "extremes," and it's what happens when we view groups as extremes rather than traits or actions.
Push this into the political sphere and suddenly, it makes a little more sense.
If conservatives have a massive push for creationism in school and liberals have a push to leave religion and school separate, wouldn't the midpoint between the two- the compromise- be to have some religious-based education in schools?
Obviously, we can see where that argument breaks down.
If we're allowed to artificially push back the goal posts for what is "extreme," then one side is entirely capable of pushing their side further back, not out of actual conviction for their ideology, but solely to make the "midpoint" between the two "extremes" further to their own side.
To bring this back to the food analogy, let's say that "liberals" don't want to eat any more than they previously said. They want three meals and snacks. However, if they're forced to compromise, why not push back their position to "eating all the time constantly"? Then the continuum would look like this.
|----------!-----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------?|
The compromise is not slightly to the right of the middle. So, even though "liberals" in this case do not want the position they're advocating for, it benefits them to hold that position regardless since we're working within the confines of this compromise-based political sphere.
As a system, it's clearly unsound. To bring it into reality, I would say that it's become apparent that the Republicans have artificially pushed their position further to the extreme recently. Whether this has been too force the midpoint further in their direction, or if it's actually due to conviction cannot technically be proven, but the end is still the same. In order to compromise with a new radical element, new concessions must be made by Democrats despite their overall positions changing a relatively small amount over the same period of time.
If it feels a little like we're being cheated, that's because we are thanks to this system of compromise.
But what do we do then?
Well, I don't have a good answer, because the only solution I can think of relies on individuals to make an ethical decision to seek the Golden Mean in their lives.
The GM between avarice and total humility lies somewhere near "making what you earn and living at/below your means."
The GM for punishing wrongdoing may be in the middle of "letting them go," and "killing them and their whole family." (or whatever the harshest punishment you can inflict is)
Perhaps- "Community service, rehabilitation, and reparations towards the person(s) you harmed."
The GM for having protection between "no one has any weaponry," and "everyone has every weaponry" might be to have a well-regulated body whose specific duty is overseeing the protection of innocents- and only this body would have weaponry.
However, as I mentioned earlier, the more broad we get, the harder it is to find a Golden Mean, since we're talking about more than just a single action or trait. As such, all three of the examples I just gave are all somewhat subjective and tentative. All three could have extenuating circumstances and the perspective from which you approach each individual issue has an impact on where you see the extremes.
It's complicated.
-
Wad
Monday, January 14, 2013
Shaming some Shamers
Short post tonight because feel like poop (that's how you craft a coherent sentence, yes?).
I feel I need to call out some behavior that I've seen recently from friends and acquaintances of mine who I thought were more in touch with gender issues.
Alcohol.
I know plenty of people, myself included, who are completely willing to call out sexism as it happens in most situations.
So why is it, then, that a healthy percentage of these same people will adhere to and even invoke sexism in the realm of alcohol?
Chuggin' Milwaukee's best makes you a man now? You're tough because you do shots instead of of mixed drinks? He's a girl because he likes Smirnoff Ice? You're somehow better than someone in a weird primordial strength scale because your body holds alcohol better than someone else?
What the fuck is this shit?
Come on, people. I know some of you who flip out when someone says something misogynistic, but you're willing to perpetuate these shitty gendered ideas that what you choose to drink to get hammered with has any impact on how studly you are? It's a matter of taste, opinion, and sensory desire. It's subjective- 100% different based on the person, regardless of how tough or cool they are.
You know what you sound like when you brag about how you can do shots?
You sound like this. More specifically, you sound like the entire scene (no good full scene on youtube) including Spongebob bragging that he stubbed his toe while watering his spice garden- and he only cried for 20 minutes.
It's subjective. You're perpetuating something stupid and it makes you look like an idiot while you're doing it.
[Short and angry. I'll get better one of these days]
-
Wad
I feel I need to call out some behavior that I've seen recently from friends and acquaintances of mine who I thought were more in touch with gender issues.
Alcohol.
I know plenty of people, myself included, who are completely willing to call out sexism as it happens in most situations.
So why is it, then, that a healthy percentage of these same people will adhere to and even invoke sexism in the realm of alcohol?
Chuggin' Milwaukee's best makes you a man now? You're tough because you do shots instead of of mixed drinks? He's a girl because he likes Smirnoff Ice? You're somehow better than someone in a weird primordial strength scale because your body holds alcohol better than someone else?
What the fuck is this shit?
Come on, people. I know some of you who flip out when someone says something misogynistic, but you're willing to perpetuate these shitty gendered ideas that what you choose to drink to get hammered with has any impact on how studly you are? It's a matter of taste, opinion, and sensory desire. It's subjective- 100% different based on the person, regardless of how tough or cool they are.
You know what you sound like when you brag about how you can do shots?
You sound like this. More specifically, you sound like the entire scene (no good full scene on youtube) including Spongebob bragging that he stubbed his toe while watering his spice garden- and he only cried for 20 minutes.
It's subjective. You're perpetuating something stupid and it makes you look like an idiot while you're doing it.
[Short and angry. I'll get better one of these days]
-
Wad
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