I think it’s totally in scope to be correctly confident about an issue like abortion even if ~half of people agree with you.
But, I also think your point basically stands: there’s an asymmetry in costs to being wrong. (Don’t take that too far though, a lot of harm is caused by forcing people to have children that they don’t want, and aren’t prepared to handle.)
The issue is I think the asymmetry is so great that you have to essentially be like 99% confident in your position to be justified, especially when the compromise position I laid out should prevent a good portion of unwanted pregnancy, especially if you subsidize elective procedures such as vasectomy and provide more childcare support. I think the best arguments for the pro-choice side are consequentialist in nature, but the consequentialist calculations are very complex in this case, so I think it is better to rely on a deontological framework, which is what most people do anyways.
I think we should be careful about reasoning from “if X is true, the consequences are so much worse than not-X, so we should act as if X is true”, since there are many ideas that are in fact exponentially unlikely (eg Pascal’s wager, and analogous situations). The first line of attack should always be just trying to figure out what’s true on the object level.
But yeah, I think this line of argument is basically valid.
This is indeed how I think people should think about the question of animal consciousness. I feel less strongly about the abortion question for various reasons, but I am much less sold on “pro choice is obviously correct” than most liberal Americans.
I mean, I think the real issue with the originial Pascal’s Wager is it’s actually impossible to actually calculate probabilities or assign utilities to different outcomes, as there is a literally infinite amount of conceivable deities (including deities with opposite pay-off matrices) and also infinite utilities kinda break decision theory.
For most realistic scenarios though, I think Pascalian logic is more or less necessary to some extent, and without it you get pretty bizarre conclusions. Like imagine a genie offers you a button which has a 99.9% chance of saving a life but a .1% chance of killing everyone, I think it’s pretty clear that pressing the button is a mistake.
The pro-choice and pro-life debate is a lot more complicated than the button example, but no one seems to want to do the actual work of justifying their viewpoints despite significant opposition being present, a status I would like to call epistemic arrogance.
I think it’s totally in scope to be correctly confident about an issue like abortion even if ~half of people agree with you.
But, I also think your point basically stands: there’s an asymmetry in costs to being wrong. (Don’t take that too far though, a lot of harm is caused by forcing people to have children that they don’t want, and aren’t prepared to handle.)
The issue is I think the asymmetry is so great that you have to essentially be like 99% confident in your position to be justified, especially when the compromise position I laid out should prevent a good portion of unwanted pregnancy, especially if you subsidize elective procedures such as vasectomy and provide more childcare support. I think the best arguments for the pro-choice side are consequentialist in nature, but the consequentialist calculations are very complex in this case, so I think it is better to rely on a deontological framework, which is what most people do anyways.
I think we should be careful about reasoning from “if X is true, the consequences are so much worse than not-X, so we should act as if X is true”, since there are many ideas that are in fact exponentially unlikely (eg Pascal’s wager, and analogous situations). The first line of attack should always be just trying to figure out what’s true on the object level.
But yeah, I think this line of argument is basically valid.
This is indeed how I think people should think about the question of animal consciousness. I feel less strongly about the abortion question for various reasons, but I am much less sold on “pro choice is obviously correct” than most liberal Americans.
I mean, I think the real issue with the originial Pascal’s Wager is it’s actually impossible to actually calculate probabilities or assign utilities to different outcomes, as there is a literally infinite amount of conceivable deities (including deities with opposite pay-off matrices) and also infinite utilities kinda break decision theory.
For most realistic scenarios though, I think Pascalian logic is more or less necessary to some extent, and without it you get pretty bizarre conclusions. Like imagine a genie offers you a button which has a 99.9% chance of saving a life but a .1% chance of killing everyone, I think it’s pretty clear that pressing the button is a mistake.
The pro-choice and pro-life debate is a lot more complicated than the button example, but no one seems to want to do the actual work of justifying their viewpoints despite significant opposition being present, a status I would like to call epistemic arrogance.