A couple of things recently have got me thinking about socialisation and empathy.
The first is the recent set of posts on Yvain’s Blog about gender relations. Many of the posts and comments express a level of frustration with the complications of male/female social interactions which I used to share, but don’t any more. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me any more, but I can very clearly remember a time when it did.
The second is a semi-formal debate I recently attended, where I was one of the speakers for a motion supporting the unconditional right of pregnant women to terminate at any time up until birth. My actual beliefs on this subject are informed by elaborate arguments on personhood, the conflictive nature of moral intuitions and a smattering of politically-oriented game theory (which LWers would probably be in a better position than most to appreciate), while my fellow speaker for the motion came at it from a more nihilistic angle.
We both realised our own personal arguments for the motion would be highly unpopular with the audience, and so we had to construct a more generally appealing set of arguments. There was a time in the past where this would not have occurred to me, and I would have spent ten minutes holding forth on arcane subject matter, trying to deliver a resistant audience to a repugnant but incontrovertible conclusion.
In both cases, a previous version of myself did not understand the social ramifications of certain types of behaviour. I’m trying to decide whether this is more the result of slowly accreting many different pieces of information over time, or of a general increase in my ability to empathise with/simulate the reactions of other people.
If it’s mostly the latter, I don’t really need to do anything special to improve this capacity. If it’s mostly the former, I’m not sure how to go about directing a search for more of them.
It wasn’t really a case of changing my mind. There was a time when I found it really difficult to make sense of, and now I find it significantly less difficult.
Being in a long-term cohabiting monogamous relationship was a powerful learning experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that you have someone around all of the time who you need to negotiate with, account for, and keep happy.
There are a few less obvious reasons why it’s such a learning experience. If you spend a few years removed from the dating game, you have the opportunity to view it from a much more dispassionate perspective with the pressure off. Also if you’re publicly unavailable you can practise flirting without consequence, which is useful for calibrating your sense of what you can and can’t get away with.
You also have access to a relationship dynamic which is generally unavailable to the single: people with whom you have mutually-acknowledged mutual attraction that isn’t going to get acted upon. “Here’s a crapload of tension we can’t do anything about. Let’s talk about it.” It’s like Christmas Day football in no-man’s-land.
We both realised our own personal arguments for the motion would be highly unpopular with the audience, and so we had to construct a more generally appealing set of arguments.
It’s worth reiterating that the debate wasn’t for/against abortion, but for/against allowing women to decide to terminate at any stage of the pregnancy.
In a very tight nutshell, the argument I avoided was “infants aren’t people by any rigorous criteria we (adults) would use to classify ourselves or each other as people. Our protective impulses towards them have a different basis, and aren’t consistent throughout human history.” We decided “infanticide is A-Okay” would not be a popular platform.
The argument I gave was “if you accept abortion is permissible in early pregnancy but not late pregnancy, you have to draw a line somewhere, and proposed bases for drawing that line (foetus viability, ‘consciousness’, etc.) are not up to the task. If you can’t draw the line somewhere, you can’t draw the line anywhere, so pick which bullet you want to bite.”
It looks like the first argument is just the second one taken to it’s logical conclusion. That’s good, because you’re not leading your audience down a faulty path of reasoning.
A couple of things recently have got me thinking about socialisation and empathy.
The first is the recent set of posts on Yvain’s Blog about gender relations. Many of the posts and comments express a level of frustration with the complications of male/female social interactions which I used to share, but don’t any more. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me any more, but I can very clearly remember a time when it did.
The second is a semi-formal debate I recently attended, where I was one of the speakers for a motion supporting the unconditional right of pregnant women to terminate at any time up until birth. My actual beliefs on this subject are informed by elaborate arguments on personhood, the conflictive nature of moral intuitions and a smattering of politically-oriented game theory (which LWers would probably be in a better position than most to appreciate), while my fellow speaker for the motion came at it from a more nihilistic angle.
We both realised our own personal arguments for the motion would be highly unpopular with the audience, and so we had to construct a more generally appealing set of arguments. There was a time in the past where this would not have occurred to me, and I would have spent ten minutes holding forth on arcane subject matter, trying to deliver a resistant audience to a repugnant but incontrovertible conclusion.
In both cases, a previous version of myself did not understand the social ramifications of certain types of behaviour. I’m trying to decide whether this is more the result of slowly accreting many different pieces of information over time, or of a general increase in my ability to empathise with/simulate the reactions of other people.
If it’s mostly the latter, I don’t really need to do anything special to improve this capacity. If it’s mostly the former, I’m not sure how to go about directing a search for more of them.
Why did you change your mind?
It wasn’t really a case of changing my mind. There was a time when I found it really difficult to make sense of, and now I find it significantly less difficult.
I mean, has there been anything in particular that has helped you understand something you couldn’t understand before?
Being in a long-term cohabiting monogamous relationship was a powerful learning experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that you have someone around all of the time who you need to negotiate with, account for, and keep happy.
There are a few less obvious reasons why it’s such a learning experience. If you spend a few years removed from the dating game, you have the opportunity to view it from a much more dispassionate perspective with the pressure off. Also if you’re publicly unavailable you can practise flirting without consequence, which is useful for calibrating your sense of what you can and can’t get away with.
You also have access to a relationship dynamic which is generally unavailable to the single: people with whom you have mutually-acknowledged mutual attraction that isn’t going to get acted upon. “Here’s a crapload of tension we can’t do anything about. Let’s talk about it.” It’s like Christmas Day football in no-man’s-land.
Did you dumb down your repugnant-but-sound arguments to make them more accessible? Or did you use the popular-but-inane arguments that stop people from seriously evaluating the issue?
It’s worth reiterating that the debate wasn’t for/against abortion, but for/against allowing women to decide to terminate at any stage of the pregnancy.
In a very tight nutshell, the argument I avoided was “infants aren’t people by any rigorous criteria we (adults) would use to classify ourselves or each other as people. Our protective impulses towards them have a different basis, and aren’t consistent throughout human history.” We decided “infanticide is A-Okay” would not be a popular platform.
The argument I gave was “if you accept abortion is permissible in early pregnancy but not late pregnancy, you have to draw a line somewhere, and proposed bases for drawing that line (foetus viability, ‘consciousness’, etc.) are not up to the task. If you can’t draw the line somewhere, you can’t draw the line anywhere, so pick which bullet you want to bite.”
It looks like the first argument is just the second one taken to it’s logical conclusion. That’s good, because you’re not leading your audience down a faulty path of reasoning.