I’m not sure what people mean by “respect” here. If anyone asks me my views on religion, I’ll happily tell them I see no need of that hypothesis, that it explains nothing and mystifies everything, and so on, and I’ll do that whatever I know their own beliefs to be. They ask, they get, and I’m not going to tiptoe around the matter for fear that they can’t handle hearing it. OTOH, I’m not going to express myself to anyone by gleeful mocking of the tooth fairy, ritual cannibalism in the Catholic Mass, or camel-herders with underage wives, not even in company for which those would be applause lights. Neither am I going to proselytise atheism to everyone I see wearing a religious symbol.
Neither treating someone like a fragile bloom that will wither at a touch, nor ranting and mockery, constitute what I would describe as “respect”. People get respect; beliefs aren’t the sort of thing that respect applies to.
I’ve had some Catholics getting seriously upset and calling me a bigot for posting a link to a news story about long-running Vatican coverups of paedophile priests to my Facebook. There’s a pseudo-logical chain of argument attached to this assertion, which as far as I can make out is that the Catholics in question—this was multiple Catholics who didn’t know each other—are helpless in the face of their immortal souls’ access to Heaven basically being controlled by these people; so I am therefore causing them gratuitous pain when they are pained enough already.
I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story—the factuality of which is entirely accepted by the offended parties—constitutes unacceptable bigotry.
Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.
(I suppose it didn’t help when I pointed out that their continued donations of money, and even their continued attendance, grants these people power, and that I do consider that choosing to continue to do so makes them avoidably morally culpable. OTOH, by that stage I didn’t care.)
I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story—the factuality of which is entirely accepted—constitutes unacceptable bigotry.
Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.
I haven’t seen the concrete details of the debate you describe and I’m not claiming that what I’m about to write applies to this case, but generally speaking, conclusions like those of your Facebook correspondents are not always unjustified. (I mean the feeling of hostility they perceived, not the rationalization you ascribe to them.) When someone points out the faults of some particular party and expresses outrage, even if all the stated facts are true, there are still two additional important issues.
First, placing a strong focus on someone’s faults is likely to be interpreted as an expression of deeper hostility, and statistically speaking, this interpretation is often correct. To take an extreme example, imagine if someone wrote a book titled The Crimes of the Elbonians, in which he documented every bad deed committed by any Elbonian individual or institution throughout known history. Even if every claim in the book is factually true, an Elbonian would reasonably infer hostility, possibly threatening hostility, on part of the writer (as well as his target readership). Of course, such reactions are often biased in that they overestimate the level of intended hostility, or even detect it where there really is none. (On the other hand, I don’t think any individual is entirely free of such biases when it comes to all aspects of one’s identity.)
Second, and more important, when discussing the faults of some institution, it is practically impossible to do it without making additional assumptions and implications about the difficult questions of the assignment of blame, both individual and institutional. Again, I don’t think anyone is entirely free of biases in this regard, in the sense that everyone will apply somewhat inconsistent standards to the faults of his favored and disfavored institutions. (One will also likely bias one’s judgments by using a distorted model of how a given institution actually works.)
With this in mind, even if the reactions of these people were severely biased, I think one should be very careful before one places them into the “offensively stupid” category. Of course, what I wrote also has more general implications for the main topic of the original post.
Your post is short of suggested alternate courses of action.
You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.
To get back to specifics:
You see one of the many recent news stories about decades-long coverups of paedophile priests on the part of the Vatican. You are outraged. Do you (a) post a link to it (b) post it with an opinion (c) don’t post it? Why?
You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.
I did say that my points don’t necessarily apply in your case, since I’m not familiar with all the details of it, and that I’ve taken it as motivation to make a more general point relevant to the topic at hand.
Now, regarding the specifics, one should always be suspicious of outrage, both of other people and one’s own. It signals with very high probability that some sort of bias has been triggered. (I’m now talking about outrage about matters of public discourse, not things where one is personally involved.)
If anything, there’s a whole lot going on in the world that you could reasonably be outraged over, but you can show active concern only about a very small subset of these events. In the overwhelming majority of cases—and, given the lack of information, I am not judging now whether that was the case in your specific example—people’s choice of what they get outraged over is determined by their preexisting hostility towards particular individuals, groups, and institutions. Therefore, in regular human interaction, interpreting outrage towards one’s favored institution as a signal of hostility—and conversely, interpreting shared outrage as a signal of ideological agreement and common cause—is a statistically accurate heuristic.
Even if someone gets actively outraged over what could be reasonably considered the very worst phenomenon currently being reported and discussed in the media, that still means that one might be relaying the biases of the media to which one is exposed. (This isn’t relevant if you believe that your favored media outlets are unbiased in what stories of outrage they choose to report with the highest prominence, and that they never bias their coverage towards greater or lesser outrage depending on the topic. But this seems to me clearly false; even the facts are usually reported selectively, let alone the commentary and the more subtly expressed attitudes.)
Finally, you say that in your discussion you made judgments regarding the assignment of blame, including the way the blame for the misdeeds of individual members of an institution should be assigned to the institution itself, as well as the blame that should be assigned indirectly to other members by affiliation. Now again, I can’t judge your concrete argument because I haven’t seen it, but this is another common case where strong biases are present in the overwhelming majority of instances. Just like with selective outrage, people tend to make the widest possible assignments of blame when it comes to the institutions they dislike in the first place, but at the same time they use entirely inconsistent criteria that minimize and individualize the extent of blame towards their favored institutions (if they even register that there might be something wrong going on in them).
You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.
I’m not so sure about that. Let’s compare the rate of sexual abuse by priests with that by social workers and/or school teachers. Religious blogger Vox Day after writes:
Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.
(Note if you found Vox’s post offensive, explain why you have any more right to be offended then the Catholics you describe in your article.)
Vox Day’s post appears to be an example of the moral equivalence fallacy—saying “but we’re not as bad as X!” as a form of counterattack in debate.
“The “not as bad as” argument is a form of the moral equivalence fallacy. It’s popular with people who know perfectly well they’re doing something wrong. Being fully aware of this problem, they feel compelled to attempt to justify it, and they do so by pointing to other, usually worse, actions.”
Edit: Peter Lambert-Cole points out that Vox Day is not Catholic—I misremembered that he was. (Indeed, Mr Beale’s views on Catholics are more than a little idiosyncratic.) Sorry about that.
The “not as bad as argument” is a fallacy, but it’s one of those fallacies that seems to have a grain of truth: That being, if you’re going to point out a group flaw, you should definitely be pointing out that flaw if it’s more prominent in another group as well. In this case, if you’re pointing out pedophilia from priests, you should be pointing out social worker abuses as well.
Pointing out social worker abuses would be a direct comparison to the situation in the Catholic Church if the relevant federal government department, all the way up to the relevant cabinet-level position, was running a coverup of said abuses, including shuffling offenders to different districts rather than turning them into the authorities, and had been doing so over the course of decades. I am not aware that this is in fact the case, but if it is then references would be most welcomed.
Of course, Vox is not a Catholic so there is no “we” in his argument.
Moreover, this post is one in a series responding to New Atheists and others who explicitly argue that religious institutions, people and motivations are worse than the secular alternatives. He doesn’t introduce the comparison between religious and secular as a counterattack. He is responding to people who have already made that moral comparison and is showing that the calculus doesn’t work out as they claimed.
Vox Day’s post appears to be an example of the moral equivalence fallacy
While not vouching for the validity of the the specific points he is making, I see him attempting to make a moral argument with a valid form. Briefly: absence of correlation is evidence for absence of causation, and absence of causation is evidence for absence of moral blame.
What you see as a “we’re not as bad as X” argument, can be seen as an observation of lack of positive correlation. Suppose that a woman observes that while women commit a certain fraction of assaults, men, about equally numerous, commit a larger fraction of assaults (this is hypothetical—for all I know women do commit a larger fraction of assaults). You could interpret that as the woman making a “we’re not as bad as men” argument. But another interpretation is that there is a negative correlation between being a woman and committing assault. This is evidence for the claim that being a woman does not cause a person to commit assault.
(In contrast, being angry probably does correlate positively with committing assault, which would be evidence for the claim that being angry can cause a person to commit assault.)
So that covers the point that absence of correlation is evidence for absence of causation. As for the point that absence of causation is evidence for absence of moral blame, I trust that I don’t need to explain it.
Very good points. The very selectivity has implications, as I think everyone recognises in cases where a group they identify with (or even are neutral to) is the one whose flaws are being highlighted.
For my part, the attitude you describe (supposing nothing very different from the examples you give is being smuggled in through the “and so on”) is perfectly consistent with what I mean by “respect.”
I’m not sure what people mean by “respect” here. If anyone asks me my views on religion, I’ll happily tell them I see no need of that hypothesis, that it explains nothing and mystifies everything, and so on, and I’ll do that whatever I know their own beliefs to be. They ask, they get, and I’m not going to tiptoe around the matter for fear that they can’t handle hearing it. OTOH, I’m not going to express myself to anyone by gleeful mocking of the tooth fairy, ritual cannibalism in the Catholic Mass, or camel-herders with underage wives, not even in company for which those would be applause lights. Neither am I going to proselytise atheism to everyone I see wearing a religious symbol.
Neither treating someone like a fragile bloom that will wither at a touch, nor ranting and mockery, constitute what I would describe as “respect”. People get respect; beliefs aren’t the sort of thing that respect applies to.
I’ve had some Catholics getting seriously upset and calling me a bigot for posting a link to a news story about long-running Vatican coverups of paedophile priests to my Facebook. There’s a pseudo-logical chain of argument attached to this assertion, which as far as I can make out is that the Catholics in question—this was multiple Catholics who didn’t know each other—are helpless in the face of their immortal souls’ access to Heaven basically being controlled by these people; so I am therefore causing them gratuitous pain when they are pained enough already.
I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story—the factuality of which is entirely accepted by the offended parties—constitutes unacceptable bigotry.
Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.
(I suppose it didn’t help when I pointed out that their continued donations of money, and even their continued attendance, grants these people power, and that I do consider that choosing to continue to do so makes them avoidably morally culpable. OTOH, by that stage I didn’t care.)
David_Gerard:
I haven’t seen the concrete details of the debate you describe and I’m not claiming that what I’m about to write applies to this case, but generally speaking, conclusions like those of your Facebook correspondents are not always unjustified. (I mean the feeling of hostility they perceived, not the rationalization you ascribe to them.) When someone points out the faults of some particular party and expresses outrage, even if all the stated facts are true, there are still two additional important issues.
First, placing a strong focus on someone’s faults is likely to be interpreted as an expression of deeper hostility, and statistically speaking, this interpretation is often correct. To take an extreme example, imagine if someone wrote a book titled The Crimes of the Elbonians, in which he documented every bad deed committed by any Elbonian individual or institution throughout known history. Even if every claim in the book is factually true, an Elbonian would reasonably infer hostility, possibly threatening hostility, on part of the writer (as well as his target readership). Of course, such reactions are often biased in that they overestimate the level of intended hostility, or even detect it where there really is none. (On the other hand, I don’t think any individual is entirely free of such biases when it comes to all aspects of one’s identity.)
Second, and more important, when discussing the faults of some institution, it is practically impossible to do it without making additional assumptions and implications about the difficult questions of the assignment of blame, both individual and institutional. Again, I don’t think anyone is entirely free of biases in this regard, in the sense that everyone will apply somewhat inconsistent standards to the faults of his favored and disfavored institutions. (One will also likely bias one’s judgments by using a distorted model of how a given institution actually works.)
With this in mind, even if the reactions of these people were severely biased, I think one should be very careful before one places them into the “offensively stupid” category. Of course, what I wrote also has more general implications for the main topic of the original post.
Your post is short of suggested alternate courses of action.
You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.
To get back to specifics:
You see one of the many recent news stories about decades-long coverups of paedophile priests on the part of the Vatican. You are outraged. Do you (a) post a link to it (b) post it with an opinion (c) don’t post it? Why?
David_Gerard:
I did say that my points don’t necessarily apply in your case, since I’m not familiar with all the details of it, and that I’ve taken it as motivation to make a more general point relevant to the topic at hand.
Now, regarding the specifics, one should always be suspicious of outrage, both of other people and one’s own. It signals with very high probability that some sort of bias has been triggered. (I’m now talking about outrage about matters of public discourse, not things where one is personally involved.)
If anything, there’s a whole lot going on in the world that you could reasonably be outraged over, but you can show active concern only about a very small subset of these events. In the overwhelming majority of cases—and, given the lack of information, I am not judging now whether that was the case in your specific example—people’s choice of what they get outraged over is determined by their preexisting hostility towards particular individuals, groups, and institutions. Therefore, in regular human interaction, interpreting outrage towards one’s favored institution as a signal of hostility—and conversely, interpreting shared outrage as a signal of ideological agreement and common cause—is a statistically accurate heuristic.
Even if someone gets actively outraged over what could be reasonably considered the very worst phenomenon currently being reported and discussed in the media, that still means that one might be relaying the biases of the media to which one is exposed. (This isn’t relevant if you believe that your favored media outlets are unbiased in what stories of outrage they choose to report with the highest prominence, and that they never bias their coverage towards greater or lesser outrage depending on the topic. But this seems to me clearly false; even the facts are usually reported selectively, let alone the commentary and the more subtly expressed attitudes.)
Finally, you say that in your discussion you made judgments regarding the assignment of blame, including the way the blame for the misdeeds of individual members of an institution should be assigned to the institution itself, as well as the blame that should be assigned indirectly to other members by affiliation. Now again, I can’t judge your concrete argument because I haven’t seen it, but this is another common case where strong biases are present in the overwhelming majority of instances. Just like with selective outrage, people tend to make the widest possible assignments of blame when it comes to the institutions they dislike in the first place, but at the same time they use entirely inconsistent criteria that minimize and individualize the extent of blame towards their favored institutions (if they even register that there might be something wrong going on in them).
I’m not so sure about that. Let’s compare the rate of sexual abuse by priests with that by social workers and/or school teachers. Religious blogger Vox Day after writes:
(Note if you found Vox’s post offensive, explain why you have any more right to be offended then the Catholics you describe in your article.)
Vox Day’s post appears to be an example of the moral equivalence fallacy—saying “but we’re not as bad as X!” as a form of counterattack in debate.
“The “not as bad as” argument is a form of the moral equivalence fallacy. It’s popular with people who know perfectly well they’re doing something wrong. Being fully aware of this problem, they feel compelled to attempt to justify it, and they do so by pointing to other, usually worse, actions.”
Edit: Peter Lambert-Cole points out that Vox Day is not Catholic—I misremembered that he was. (Indeed, Mr Beale’s views on Catholics are more than a little idiosyncratic.) Sorry about that.
The “not as bad as argument” is a fallacy, but it’s one of those fallacies that seems to have a grain of truth: That being, if you’re going to point out a group flaw, you should definitely be pointing out that flaw if it’s more prominent in another group as well. In this case, if you’re pointing out pedophilia from priests, you should be pointing out social worker abuses as well.
No, although the institution is eminently deserving.
This is not the opposite of the first one.
You are correct; that was my mistake. I’m uncertain how to word what I meant with that last line, so I will remove it.
Pointing out social worker abuses would be a direct comparison to the situation in the Catholic Church if the relevant federal government department, all the way up to the relevant cabinet-level position, was running a coverup of said abuses, including shuffling offenders to different districts rather than turning them into the authorities, and had been doing so over the course of decades. I am not aware that this is in fact the case, but if it is then references would be most welcomed.
Of course, Vox is not a Catholic so there is no “we” in his argument.
Moreover, this post is one in a series responding to New Atheists and others who explicitly argue that religious institutions, people and motivations are worse than the secular alternatives. He doesn’t introduce the comparison between religious and secular as a counterattack. He is responding to people who have already made that moral comparison and is showing that the calculus doesn’t work out as they claimed.
Comment corrected, thank you!
While not vouching for the validity of the the specific points he is making, I see him attempting to make a moral argument with a valid form. Briefly: absence of correlation is evidence for absence of causation, and absence of causation is evidence for absence of moral blame.
What you see as a “we’re not as bad as X” argument, can be seen as an observation of lack of positive correlation. Suppose that a woman observes that while women commit a certain fraction of assaults, men, about equally numerous, commit a larger fraction of assaults (this is hypothetical—for all I know women do commit a larger fraction of assaults). You could interpret that as the woman making a “we’re not as bad as men” argument. But another interpretation is that there is a negative correlation between being a woman and committing assault. This is evidence for the claim that being a woman does not cause a person to commit assault.
(In contrast, being angry probably does correlate positively with committing assault, which would be evidence for the claim that being angry can cause a person to commit assault.)
So that covers the point that absence of correlation is evidence for absence of causation. As for the point that absence of causation is evidence for absence of moral blame, I trust that I don’t need to explain it.
Very good points. The very selectivity has implications, as I think everyone recognises in cases where a group they identify with (or even are neutral to) is the one whose flaws are being highlighted.
That’s my attitude. It’s a convenient one to have.
For my part, the attitude you describe (supposing nothing very different from the examples you give is being smuggled in through the “and so on”) is perfectly consistent with what I mean by “respect.”