Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it’s a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it’s a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don’t produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that “genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics” and “evolutionary psychology is sexist” are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as “Left-wing viewpoints” or “Right-wing viewpoints” is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: “Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!”—this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit “unfair” or “bad” circumstances are wrong; the world must be “good” and “fair”. Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error—I don’t think it is, “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives” is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn’t, and is therefore false, not a word error—but if so, it’s a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false—most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they’re rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who’ve gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they’re false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you’re actually being significantly logically rude to them—putting in less effort than they’re investing—it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something ‘meaningless’.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be “softer” than regular psychology, which itself is “softer” than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I’d be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
Summary: Checking Google Books shows lots of references to pink for girls/blue for boys, and no references to the opposite, going back to the 19th century.
Note: Wikipedia links to this article, but summarizes it in a way which makes it sound much weaker than it really is.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn’t you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren’t really any connotations being smuggled in.
Not if (a) you’re in a situation where everyone already agrees on that
And assuming you also don’t want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you > may have noticed, that’s not true here.
Having common language and beliefs does not preclude questioning those beliefs.
(b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.
Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It’s not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn’t. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.
Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it’s sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it’s fair? Because there are believed to be cognitive biases in play that prevent people from (for instance) selecting an equally qualified woman for a job (one day, I would like to write up a post on the evidence for this). The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased. If this theory is correct, then in cases where we believe that there is such discrimination, maintaining the status quo would be sexism. Naturally, not all cases of affirmative action qualify for this.
As the discussion on The Bedrock Of Fairness shows, fairness can have many meanings. They frequently correspond almost exactly to meta-ethical stances (consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics). I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness (since I view it as merely a part of the whole system of ethics). And affirmative action is only justifiable under a consequentialist (or perhaps virtue ethics) framework of fairness—and then only sometimes. I guess that is, as you say, one particular interpretation of fairness, but it’s one that I would imagine is relatively common here, since consequentialist ethics are relatively popular on Less Wrong.
The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will die before it gets implemented).
The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that an immoral act was performed in these cases; often people just make mistakes. And trying to stop an ongoing harm is entirely compatible with consequentialism.
I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will dies before it gets implemented).
First, unfair situations make people unhappy in and of themselves. That is, in some sense, absolutely absurd, but no more so than boredom is absurd. Nonetheless, it is the way humans seem to be (research on apes also shows this effect as well). Gwern’s post on the psychology of power discusses some of the less obvious effects of this on e.g. cortisol.
Second, when talking about money, utilities are non-linear in dollars. If A has $1 million, and B has $100, and utility is the square root of money, then, ceteris parabus, redistributing money from A to B would be the utilitarian thing to do. Of course, this ignores the incentive and precedent effects of this (why should B bother to work if they can just get A’s money?), as well as A’s unhappiness at losing the money, so of course in the real world the computation is considerably more complex.
Third, if everyone benefits from having the better person doing any given job, then correcting for biases that prevent this will make society better off.
[Edit] Fourth, when a group of people is treated as abnormal or subordinate, their desires are not given full weight (and thus, they are less likely to be happy). An example of this in the US is that only one non-Christian group has ever won a Free Exercise Clause case.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims “ev-psych is sexist” too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won’t even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they’re so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I’m encountered are though—I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There’s definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg “the left/right” is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” and “evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex” are very nearly the same statement, while “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists” is a radically different statement.
when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn’t have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual’s sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that ‘Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex’ justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don’t take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Largely because I’m curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I’ve seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”. Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you’d probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem—is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That’s surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don’t have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it’s relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
When I use attractive as a one-place word, I mean ‘attractive to most members of the same species of their preferred sex’.
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:
And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, ‘What insects are those?’
At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison...
When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)
Because Kenge had no experience of seeing distant objects he saw them simply as small.
This isn’t a science, and perhaps not even terribly important, but I think Aristotle is subject to this effect. Almost every Aristotelian I’ve encountered on the internet is a Thomist, leading to the impression (in my estimation) that Aristotle is some kind of a proto-apologist. And of course, there’s a list of Aristotle-fails, like the women’s-teeth thing or the thing about air rushing in behind a thrown ball to maintain its motion that are either false or misleading.
On the other hand, there aren’t good reasons for most people to study actual Aristotle. Nevertheless he does show up as a foil in odd places.
Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there’s Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said “scientific racism” was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a “this leads to genocide and other horrible things” kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
When it appears that an intellectual edifice has been constructed to portray as necessary a particular status-quo — in the case of scientific racism, that of slavery and subjugation by race — we may reasonably suspect that the overturning of those social conditions is all the disproof that is needed to overthrow the entire edifice of rationalization, too.
Imagine that there exists a complicated, deeply explained theory to explain why no green-eyed, black-haired person has ever been, or ever will be, elected president. And then one is. The theory is not merely socially discredited; it is empirically disproven.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
I think the Time Cube example is almost certainly an exaggeration, although I admit you probably know more on the subject than me. Do you have a more … typical … example?
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn’t a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
Also, that’s a really good “2170th perspective”. I can’t argue with that. Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Which, while of some minor historical significance, is not considered mainstream science AFAIK.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
Fair enough.
Wait, spherical earths I assume refers to the notion that Columbus was a visionary who somehow deduced the Earth was round before even sailors did, and while I couldn’t name names statistically a few presidents must have been in the closet at least. But I have to admit I’m not sure what you mean by “the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists”.
Actually the spherical earth was described by the 2nd century (AD or CE) Greek, Ptolemy (who unfortunately is best remembered for describing the phenomena of the sky in terms of concentric spheres around the earth, which led to planetary orbits having the infamous epicycles). Ptolemy not only stated but fairly well demonstrated the earth’s circularity and gave a reasonable (for the time) estimate of its size. The educated classes in Columbus’ time hence from my readings, were well aware that the earth was sperical.
What Columbus did, was to read Marco Polo, and from Polo’s estimates of the various legs of his journey, and whatever else he had to go on, miscalculated that Japan was around 3000 miles west of Europe, and so, proposed the daring idea of sailing farther than one could hope to return from (if it turned out you were still in the middle of the ocean) because he believed he’d reach Japan and and be able to repair the ships and take on new food, water, and supplies, for the return journey. I guess he hoped for a reasonably friendly reception.
While Japan wasn’t about 3000 miles west of Europe, lucky for Columbus, something was there—of the 2 oceans one would have to cross to reach Japan (plus one continent), he only had to cross the more narrow one, and such human society as he found were not a threat to a well armed group of 15c Europeans (to say the least).
Most obviously, ascribing it to Ptolemy seems like a pretty serious error given Eratosthenes’s famed and remarkably accurate calculation of the diameter of the earth centuries before.
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
Given how many Founding Father types were deists, I suspect that they didn’t have ‘roughly’ the same status. Were there contemporary presidents saying of deists that “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be” (to quote Bush)?
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I think someone running for president today who listed their religious affiliation as “deist” or said things like “I think Jesus’s morality is a good one, but he wasn’t divine and miracles don’t happen” would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority). That public intellectuals then were mostly areligious shouldn’t be that odd when comparing with now.
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I wasn’t really around for Bush, but I haven’t noticed any improvement. What makes you think that?
would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
Romney did fine, despite believe pretty darn weird things by Christian standards.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority).
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
Stuff like this, though I’m having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I think the early American presidents were very different from the ones we have now, and so it’s not clear which comparisons carve reality at the joints.
(It’s not clear to me what point you would concede if an atheist president was identified.)
Alchemy in general, yes. But Newton was less than generous with his science at the best of times; with the already secretive alchemy, he wasn’t exactly publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
No it bloody doesn’t except on the Internet. Read “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you’ll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you’ll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as “scientific racism” tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that “Sexual Strategies Theory” is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized—but it’s a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
Perhaps it is merely that reputable evolutionary psychology is not about gender issues, while disreputable evo-psych is almost entirely focused on them.
I’ve had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it’s also somewhat present out there, but it’s not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches—it’s the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I’ve seen personally is mostly cases where “Evolutionary Psychology” could be substituted for “Magical Scientific Explanation” and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling “facts” at people could have been the arguer’s only source of information—i.e. the “fact” they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that “light is waves” is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natural pattern-matching inclinations to treat it as such.
After reading that article, I seriously can’t tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he’s (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
My guess is that the article is a propaganda piece, designed above all things to elevate Romney’s status and make him look better. I don’t think the author, if pressed on the point, would either commit to a prediction that Romney will receive an overwhelming amount of the female vote, nor to a normative claim that women, ethically, should vote for him(1). In other words, I guess he was just bullshiting. But bullshit can still be sexist.
(1) He probably does think that women (and men) ought ethically to vote for Romney, but on grounds unrelated to the topic of the article.
I suspect that it was intended to be ironic on some level. Whether it’s the irony of those crazy liberal’s theory “proving” they should vote conservative, the irony that conservatives, who are often attacked as anti-womans-rights, should “logically” be getting the votes of women, or something else, I couldn’t tell you. It could even be an attempt to show women information that “should” persuade them to vote for his preferred candidate, but somehow I doubt it. The tone just seems too jokey. Regardless, of course, it’s definitely offensive, so it was a stupid thing to write; I may be overestimating the author.
which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women [will] fall in trance and vote for him.
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it’s sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one’s candidate appeals to voters’ biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it’s unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women’s voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men’s voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author’s opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
It’s not clear to me that it’s supposed to be a descriptive statement. Downvoted for misquotation (even if explicitly shown by square brackets) hiding that.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven’t yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn’t object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I’m using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Sexist actions, by definition, has no valid justification. If there was a valid justification, they would be rational actions.
Going from “Females, in general, make poor executives” (even if this were to be true) to “A particular female will make a poor executive” Isn’t a valid justification. I’m going to make the dangerous claim that the proof is obvious and trivial.
What about going from “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C” to “In the absence of further information, a particular member of subcategory X is more likely to possess characteristic C than a non-X member of category Y”.
You are saying you can’t go from probabilistic information to certainty. This is a strawman.
That only applies if there is an absence of further information. Do you make judgments about what the weather is right now by looking only at historical information, or do you look out the window?
Also, if you’re going to get into category theory:
members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C
Category A is a subset of category X
Category B is mutually exclusive with category X, but a subset of Y
Category B is smaller than category A
Given only “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C”, can you draw a conclusion about whether a random member of category A or category B is more likely to possess characteristic C?
Let characteristic C be “will perform above the 75th percentile of CEOs”, category X be ‘males’, category A be ‘males who being seriously considered for a CEO position’, and category B be ‘females and intersex people being considered for a CEO position’.
It’s only a strawman if it isn’t the exact argument being used in the boardroom.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you’re concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I’m entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
“This field of study encourages sexist actions” and “This field of study is sexist” are equivalent statements, so far as ‘sexist’ can apply to something which does not make decisions.
Previously you defined sexism as something which must be inherently unjustified, or else it doesn’t fit your defintion.
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”. (in regards to gender matters, i guess).
Since EVERY field of study will effectively directly or indirectly encourage some unjustified actions for some people, you’ve effectively declared every field of study unjustified.
I suggest you try and do some serious work towards trying to unconfuse in your mind your labels of various social phenomena and your moral judgments—and also your ideas about what is with your ideas about what should be.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”
More accurately “This field of study encourages wrongful thinking.” and “This field of study has a negative aspect.” More semantically pure “This field of study is sexist” is equivalent to “This field of study is used to create invalid justifications”, because a field of study cannot take actions like encouraging behavior; nor can an object be justified or unjustified; only agents can take actions, and only decisions can be justified or unjustified.
If every field of study is used to create invalid justifications, then every field of study has at least one negative aspect.
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
When someone’s talking about justified actions, I expect they mean morally justified. If they’re talking about justified beliefs, I expect they mean epistemically justified.
You spoke about decisions, so I assumed you meant moral justification of actions.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
For a consequentialist like myself actions are morally justified by their consequences, not “inherently”.
But here, I’ll provide one of each—action and belief which may not be inherently justified but they’re also not inherently unjustified.
I think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Discussing even theoretically whether male brain structure might allow greater proficiency on average with e.g. mathematics or science would be treated as sexism by most people. But there’s no inherent reason to know for certain that there do not exist such differences between average male and average female brains.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors. I’ll also point out that any action (like supporting a given field of study) that has negative consequences which exceed the positive consequences is immoral from a consequentialist perspective. I’ll refrain from making any claims about whether supporting any specific field is a net negative.
No, I think that actions are ‘justified’ when the expected consequences are in accordance with the values of the actor. Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors. A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
Unjustified actions are not always immoral, but do indicate suboptimal decision making and poor mental hygiene. Being able to recognize those decisions in oneself and others is important.
I rage against the sexism that results when the possible fact “There is a difference between male and female brain chemistry with this result” becomes “This is proof that one sex is [universally|locally] inferior”. Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors.
Is that a mere simplification of your deontology? Because if it’s the totality thereof, I find it very easy to construct counterexamples where it’d be really eccentric to proclaim them immoral… e.g. you see a two-year old child lean dangerously over an open window and you pull him back, lest it falls—even though it doesn’t consent and might even cry in protest.
Or you are a doctor and perform an operation to save the life of an unconscious patient that was in a car accident. You don’t have their consent because they’re unconscious and can’t provide it—does it mean the action of saving their life isn’t moral?
In the first counter-examples you make the assumption that people who are young are persons, in the sense that they are worth moral consideration. Some would maintain that children are not people, and thus any action regarding them cannot be considered moral/immoral. In other words, their consent does not matter as they are not ‘actors’. In that way Decius’ claim that all actors must consent would still be true, as you are the only actor in that scenario. I’d be curious to read about any justification you would cite for the treatment of children as moral actors.
However, that said, I find your second example to be more convincing, but I’d be interested to know how the nature of the unconsciousness might affect your view. Would someone in a vegetative state also be considered as a moral actor in your view (and thus should be saved)?
I think IAWYC, but I’d steel-man Decius and assume that young children unconscious people, etc. wouldn’t count as “actors” and thus such actions wouldn’t be more immoral than, say, replace a broken string in a guitar without its consensus.
Well, if that was the position, then it wouldn’t be any more immoral not to help an unconscious person than to not help a broken swing. That seems fairly problematic, so I doubt that’s a successful solution.
Why is it problematic to say that the existence of unconscious people does not obligate me to provide medical care any more than the existence of a broken string obligates me to provide repair services?
A doctor (profession) is under contract to be available and to provide emergency medical services; failing to perform that (social) contract without the consent of the other parties (all of society, in some cases), is impermissible. A doctor who has agreed to provide care in a given situation is obligated to, just as a repairman who has agreed to perform repairs in a given situation is obligated to do so.
Most people feel no obligation to help someone who is in need of help. For example, there is a shortage of living kidney donors everywhere.
The only thing that creates an obligation in me is my decision to accept an obligation; the only way I can obligate others is for them to accept the obligation.
It’s not the totality thereof- contract theory is also included with the concept “It is possible to consent to actions in the future in a manner which may not be unilaterally revoked.”
I can’t explain why the social contract or geographical government has jurisdiction over a new actor who does not choose to accept it.
Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
What kinds of experiences would you expect in a world where (some?) people are metaphysically equal that you wouldn’t expect in a world where people are not metaphysically equal?
If my premise that people are metaphysically equal is wrong, then something which is not part of this universe has privileged access over something else which is not part of this universe.
I would, for example, expect the same entity to make decisions for two physical bodies, or for psychic phenomena to exist and not have a physical basis, or for consciousness to persist after death differentially depending on the conscious entity; in general, things would have to be able happen without a physical basis and differentially based on the metaphysical person.
Since I posit that the metaphysical person exists only as a moral abstraction (and can thus be defined to be equal), such evidence that ‘personhood’ is an actual concrete thing, and that some ‘personhoods’ were inherently superior in an objectively measurable way would falsify my moral beliefs. I also suspect that it would be problematic for all moral systems.
Are you saying people are metaphysically equal by definition? If not, I’m not sure what you mean, since I find your comment somewhat difficult to follow.
A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
This confuses me: I self-identify as a consequentialist myself, but I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else “immoral” (but I’d call it stupid).
I’m not at all sure what it means for an act to be immoral, under a consequentialist moral frame, if not that it leads to the loss of value. Can you expand on this?
But deliberately harming oneself does lead to a loss of value (at least as much as if you did that). So, why do I think that harming you is not-evil if you do it yourself but not if I do it? I’m confused...
You said that if I perform an action that harms me, that’s not immoral. We agree that if I perform an action that harms me, that leads to a loss of value. So it follows that whatever it means for an act to be immoral, by your reasoning, it is not simply that it leads to a loss of value. Also, you’ve identified your moral reasoning as consequentialist.
So I’m asking: under your consequentialist moral frame, what does it mean for an act to be immoral, since you don’t think it’s that it leads to a loss of value?
It’s been suggested elsewhere that the key here is foreknowledge… that an immoral act is one that has negative expected value for the actor. I would agree that this is consistent with a (rule-)consequentialist moral frame, and that you might mean “I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else ‘immoral’ (assuming you don’t expect it to cause harm).” I would agree with that statement (though I would find it odd) but I doubt that’s actually what you meant.
Many consequentialist systems consider the morality or immorality of an action to be a function of the consequences expected by the agent at the time when it makes the decision. For any act, there is a possible universe where that act results in harmful consequences relative to the alternatives. What matters is how harmful it typically is, when executed by an agent in the same epistemic state.
I would guess that among humans we consider self-harming behaviour a sign of mental incompetence, since people don’t usually desire their own suffering. Hence someone who takes “stupid” actions is probably believing that the actions lead to excellent consequences, in which case you can prevent such behaviour through psychological treatment rather than punishment.
Well, OK, but if “better addressed through psychological treatment than punishment” is equivalent to “not immoral”, then it seems that by that reasoning my harming others isn’t immoral either, as long as I’m incompetent enough to expect an increase in value from my actions.
I guess so. But harming anyone at all can still be considered bad. “Immoral” simply has a connotation (or maybe even an additional denotation?) of “blameful” that means it can basically only be applied to competent agents.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors.
Isn’t consequentialism intrinsically objectifying? It doesn’t treat people as right holders but as means to the end of achieving desirable world states.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
I invite you to consider the possibility that what people are, and how people should be treated as, may possibly be two different things. If they’re not “metaphysically equal”, perhaps it’s still best that they be treated as such.
If things are different in a significant way, it is appropriate that they are treated as different.
It is a premise of mine that people are metaphysically equal; to delve further into that we need to discuss what ‘people’ means. I doubt that you will find such a discussion rewarding.
Equal, in every sense that cannot be falsified by the observation of privilege or inequality which exists only in the embodied world.
Basically, it’s a way of creating a metaphysical entity “person”, which is defined to be that which exercises control over the physical embodiment of that person. By making the moral agent an abstract rather than a concrete, the inequalities which exist in the concrete world do not falsify the claim to general equality.
For example, people do not lose or gain rights as their fortunes change.
What is the metaphysical entity “rock”, and how do the actions of physical geology reflect them? When a person consents to a transaction in the world, their body is what makes the decision and indicates to other people’s bodies that consent is present.
If a rock consents to an action which involves a geologic object, how would it indicate that to other physical objects?
think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Why do you think that pornography is sexist? There are male porn stars too.
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
I’m not sure what you mean by “reinforce”, but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought “Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.”, when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other
That’s not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?
Off the top of my head:
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it’s a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it’s a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don’t produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that “genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics” and “evolutionary psychology is sexist” are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as “Left-wing viewpoints” or “Right-wing viewpoints” is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: “Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!”—this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit “unfair” or “bad” circumstances are wrong; the world must be “good” and “fair”. Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error—I don’t think it is, “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives” is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn’t, and is therefore false, not a word error—but if so, it’s a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false—most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they’re rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who’ve gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they’re false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you’re actually being significantly logically rude to them—putting in less effort than they’re investing—it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something ‘meaningless’.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be “softer” than regular psychology, which itself is “softer” than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I’d be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
As in about the likelihood of certain kinds of explanations?
Can’t think anything without a concrete example.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you’re done?
Off the top of my head:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220701559X
So far as I know, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a western custom which only goes back a century or so.
Response to old post:
Appears to be an urban legend.
Summary: Checking Google Books shows lots of references to pink for girls/blue for boys, and no references to the opposite, going back to the 19th century.
Note: Wikipedia links to this article, but summarizes it in a way which makes it sound much weaker than it really is.
Thanks. I hope that someone gets around to actually looking at the clothes and/or paintings.
Precisely.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn’t you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
See the OP.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren’t really any connotations being smuggled in.
I may or may not agree depending on which definition of “sexism” you are using.
Well, in any debate you’d still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.
Not if (a) you’re in a situation where everyone already agrees on that or (b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
And assuming you also don’t want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you may have noticed, that’s not true here.
More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.
Having common language and beliefs does not preclude questioning those beliefs.
Can you unpack that?
Ok, I suppose I should ask you what your definition of sexism is.
Also, is e.g., affirmative action sexist, how about not using affirmative action? Same question about desperate impact?
Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It’s not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn’t. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.
Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it’s sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it’s fair? Because there are believed to be cognitive biases in play that prevent people from (for instance) selecting an equally qualified woman for a job (one day, I would like to write up a post on the evidence for this). The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased. If this theory is correct, then in cases where we believe that there is such discrimination, maintaining the status quo would be sexism. Naturally, not all cases of affirmative action qualify for this.
As the discussion on The Bedrock Of Fairness shows, fairness can have many meanings. They frequently correspond almost exactly to meta-ethical stances (consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics). I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness (since I view it as merely a part of the whole system of ethics). And affirmative action is only justifiable under a consequentialist (or perhaps virtue ethics) framework of fairness—and then only sometimes. I guess that is, as you say, one particular interpretation of fairness, but it’s one that I would imagine is relatively common here, since consequentialist ethics are relatively popular on Less Wrong.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will die before it gets implemented).
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that an immoral act was performed in these cases; often people just make mistakes. And trying to stop an ongoing harm is entirely compatible with consequentialism.
First, unfair situations make people unhappy in and of themselves. That is, in some sense, absolutely absurd, but no more so than boredom is absurd. Nonetheless, it is the way humans seem to be (research on apes also shows this effect as well). Gwern’s post on the psychology of power discusses some of the less obvious effects of this on e.g. cortisol.
Second, when talking about money, utilities are non-linear in dollars. If A has $1 million, and B has $100, and utility is the square root of money, then, ceteris parabus, redistributing money from A to B would be the utilitarian thing to do. Of course, this ignores the incentive and precedent effects of this (why should B bother to work if they can just get A’s money?), as well as A’s unhappiness at losing the money, so of course in the real world the computation is considerably more complex.
Third, if everyone benefits from having the better person doing any given job, then correcting for biases that prevent this will make society better off.
[Edit] Fourth, when a group of people is treated as abnormal or subordinate, their desires are not given full weight (and thus, they are less likely to be happy). An example of this in the US is that only one non-Christian group has ever won a Free Exercise Clause case.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims “ev-psych is sexist” too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won’t even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they’re so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I’m encountered are though—I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There’s definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg “the left/right” is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” and “evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex” are very nearly the same statement, while “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists” is a radically different statement.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn’t have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual’s sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that ‘Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex’ justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don’t take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Largely because I’m curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I’ve seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
Suddenly I am enlightened!
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”. Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you’d probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem—is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That’s surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don’t have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it’s relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
When I use attractive as a one-place word, I mean ‘attractive to most members of the same species of their preferred sex’.
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
They also fail to check on whether a behavior is as universal as they think it is.
Male and female are not important explanatory categories
Yeah, you definitely have to beware of WEIRD psychological samples, too.
For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
Which culture?
According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.
Another “interesting” bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.
Original source
Taboo “learned/innate skill”. Is everything except what feral children do a learned skill? If not what do you mean?
Here is one possibility:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/656735
This isn’t a science, and perhaps not even terribly important, but I think Aristotle is subject to this effect. Almost every Aristotelian I’ve encountered on the internet is a Thomist, leading to the impression (in my estimation) that Aristotle is some kind of a proto-apologist. And of course, there’s a list of Aristotle-fails, like the women’s-teeth thing or the thing about air rushing in behind a thrown ball to maintain its motion that are either false or misleading.
On the other hand, there aren’t good reasons for most people to study actual Aristotle. Nevertheless he does show up as a foil in odd places.
Evolutionary biology in general.
Well, Will Newsome would say theology.
While you mention it, do you know of something like “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” but for macroeconomics instead?
This is an economics textbook I liked:
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/0030259517
It took you this long to understand why people have issues with evolutionary psychology? −1 respect points, Eliezer.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
I strongly recommend not punishing people for saying that it’s taken them time to learn something.
That’s… probably a good idea.
xkcd
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there’s Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said “scientific racism” was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a “this leads to genocide and other horrible things” kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
When it appears that an intellectual edifice has been constructed to portray as necessary a particular status-quo — in the case of scientific racism, that of slavery and subjugation by race — we may reasonably suspect that the overturning of those social conditions is all the disproof that is needed to overthrow the entire edifice of rationalization, too.
Imagine that there exists a complicated, deeply explained theory to explain why no green-eyed, black-haired person has ever been, or ever will be, elected president. And then one is. The theory is not merely socially discredited; it is empirically disproven.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master. These curiosities are better explained by modern evolutionary psychology, with its notion of the psychological unity of mankind, than by the convoluted rationalizations created to justify past systems of social relations.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
I think the Time Cube example is almost certainly an exaggeration, although I admit you probably know more on the subject than me. Do you have a more … typical … example?
I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration.
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn’t a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
Also, that’s a really good “2170th perspective”. I can’t argue with that. Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
Which, while of some minor historical significance, is not considered mainstream science AFAIK.
Fair enough.
Wait, spherical earths I assume refers to the notion that Columbus was a visionary who somehow deduced the Earth was round before even sailors did, and while I couldn’t name names statistically a few presidents must have been in the closet at least. But I have to admit I’m not sure what you mean by “the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists”.
Actually the spherical earth was described by the 2nd century (AD or CE) Greek, Ptolemy (who unfortunately is best remembered for describing the phenomena of the sky in terms of concentric spheres around the earth, which led to planetary orbits having the infamous epicycles). Ptolemy not only stated but fairly well demonstrated the earth’s circularity and gave a reasonable (for the time) estimate of its size. The educated classes in Columbus’ time hence from my readings, were well aware that the earth was sperical.
What Columbus did, was to read Marco Polo, and from Polo’s estimates of the various legs of his journey, and whatever else he had to go on, miscalculated that Japan was around 3000 miles west of Europe, and so, proposed the daring idea of sailing farther than one could hope to return from (if it turned out you were still in the middle of the ocean) because he believed he’d reach Japan and and be able to repair the ships and take on new food, water, and supplies, for the return journey. I guess he hoped for a reasonably friendly reception.
While Japan wasn’t about 3000 miles west of Europe, lucky for Columbus, something was there—of the 2 oceans one would have to cross to reach Japan (plus one continent), he only had to cross the more narrow one, and such human society as he found were not a threat to a well armed group of 15c Europeans (to say the least).
Why is this down voted? I don’t see any obvious inaccuracy. It elaborates nicely on Mugasofer’s point.
Edit: and now it isn’t down voted. I’m still confused why it ever was.
Most obviously, ascribing it to Ptolemy seems like a pretty serious error given Eratosthenes’s famed and remarkably accurate calculation of the diameter of the earth centuries before.
Fair enough. But that’s the type of thing a solitary silent down vote will essentially never communicate.
Indeed. The remark about Ptolemy is even accurate, as far as it goes.
Alchemy was far more mainstream than, say, ‘chemistry’.
The gay president would be Buchanan, and as for conspiracy theorists, well, that’s the shortest summary. See http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
Buchanan won a three-way election as a compromise candidate, so don’t draw any sweeping conclusions from his single term!
Name an atheist president who won any election at all, and I’ll concede the point.
Jefferson, kind of?
Pfft. He’d be the first to say he was a deist.
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
Given how many Founding Father types were deists, I suspect that they didn’t have ‘roughly’ the same status. Were there contemporary presidents saying of deists that “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be” (to quote Bush)?
Three points:
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I think someone running for president today who listed their religious affiliation as “deist” or said things like “I think Jesus’s morality is a good one, but he wasn’t divine and miracles don’t happen” would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority). That public intellectuals then were mostly areligious shouldn’t be that odd when comparing with now.
I wasn’t really around for Bush, but I haven’t noticed any improvement. What makes you think that?
Romney did fine, despite believe pretty darn weird things by Christian standards.
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
Stuff like this, though I’m having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I think the early American presidents were very different from the ones we have now, and so it’s not clear which comparisons carve reality at the joints.
(It’s not clear to me what point you would concede if an atheist president was identified.)
Alchemy in general, yes. But Newton was less than generous with his science at the best of times; with the already secretive alchemy, he wasn’t exactly publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Thanks for the history trivia :)
Well come on, it’s not like Newton’s alchemy was noticeably more nonsensical than regular alchemy!
No it bloody doesn’t except on the Internet. Read “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you’ll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you’ll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as “scientific racism” tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that “Sexual Strategies Theory” is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized—but it’s a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
Evolutionary psychology is not primarily about gender issues. This may be much of why so many folks have such a problem with it ….
Perhaps it is merely that reputable evolutionary psychology is not about gender issues, while disreputable evo-psych is almost entirely focused on them.
Oh boy, this is going to be one of those “reference class tennis” arguments, isn’t it?
I’ve had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it’s also somewhat present out there, but it’s not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches—it’s the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I’ve seen personally is mostly cases where “Evolutionary Psychology” could be substituted for “Magical Scientific Explanation” and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling “facts” at people could have been the arguer’s only source of information—i.e. the “fact” they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that “light is waves” is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
In fairness, that’s about culture. Not gender.
The paper could’ve been called “The Biological Foundations of Culture” and it would’ve been more accurate. Read it before saying that.
I’ve been rumbled :(
We’re talking about this, right? If I really have misunderstood it, I guess this is a good time to get around to reading it.
Nope. You’re looking for the paper by Tooby and Cosmides.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natural pattern-matching inclinations to treat it as such.
The technical term is “karma”. But I must admit, I am surprised he didn’t already know.
After reading that article, I seriously can’t tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he’s (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
My guess is that the article is a propaganda piece, designed above all things to elevate Romney’s status and make him look better. I don’t think the author, if pressed on the point, would either commit to a prediction that Romney will receive an overwhelming amount of the female vote, nor to a normative claim that women, ethically, should vote for him(1). In other words, I guess he was just bullshiting. But bullshit can still be sexist.
(1) He probably does think that women (and men) ought ethically to vote for Romney, but on grounds unrelated to the topic of the article.
This article isn’t a joke?
That is an excellent question.
It could almost pass as an article on the Onion.
I suspect that it was intended to be ironic on some level. Whether it’s the irony of those crazy liberal’s theory “proving” they should vote conservative, the irony that conservatives, who are often attacked as anti-womans-rights, should “logically” be getting the votes of women, or something else, I couldn’t tell you. It could even be an attempt to show women information that “should” persuade them to vote for his preferred candidate, but somehow I doubt it. The tone just seems too jokey. Regardless, of course, it’s definitely offensive, so it was a stupid thing to write; I may be overestimating the author.
They must have been terribly disappointed that his alpha pheromones only worked on married women.
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it’s sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one’s candidate appeals to voters’ biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it’s unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women’s voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men’s voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author’s opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
It’s not clear to me that it’s supposed to be a descriptive statement. Downvoted for misquotation (even if explicitly shown by square brackets) hiding that.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven’t yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn’t object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I’m using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Since I specified unjustified sexism, you’ll have to provide an argument for why said justification is incorrect.
Sexist actions, by definition, has no valid justification. If there was a valid justification, they would be rational actions.
Going from “Females, in general, make poor executives” (even if this were to be true) to “A particular female will make a poor executive” Isn’t a valid justification. I’m going to make the dangerous claim that the proof is obvious and trivial.
What about going from “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C” to “In the absence of further information, a particular member of subcategory X is more likely to possess characteristic C than a non-X member of category Y”.
You are saying you can’t go from probabilistic information to certainty. This is a strawman.
That only applies if there is an absence of further information. Do you make judgments about what the weather is right now by looking only at historical information, or do you look out the window?
Also, if you’re going to get into category theory:
members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C
Category A is a subset of category X Category B is mutually exclusive with category X, but a subset of Y Category B is smaller than category A Given only “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C”, can you draw a conclusion about whether a random member of category A or category B is more likely to possess characteristic C?
Let characteristic C be “will perform above the 75th percentile of CEOs”, category X be ‘males’, category A be ‘males who being seriously considered for a CEO position’, and category B be ‘females and intersex people being considered for a CEO position’.
It’s only a strawman if it isn’t the exact argument being used in the boardroom.
Sounds good to me if you’re going to get all connotative about it.
Was that sour grapes with an ad-hom, genuine agreement with a condition, sarcasm, or something else? I honestly can’t tell.
Genuine agreement with whimsical annoyance about having to consider actual situations and connotations.
Thank you for the clarification.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you’re concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I’m entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
True.
And the existence of a field of study that can be used to justify such a belief is in yet a third category.
“This field of study encourages sexist actions” and “This field of study is sexist” are equivalent statements, so far as ‘sexist’ can apply to something which does not make decisions.
Previously you defined sexism as something which must be inherently unjustified, or else it doesn’t fit your defintion.
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”. (in regards to gender matters, i guess).
Since EVERY field of study will effectively directly or indirectly encourage some unjustified actions for some people, you’ve effectively declared every field of study unjustified.
I suggest you try and do some serious work towards trying to unconfuse in your mind your labels of various social phenomena and your moral judgments—and also your ideas about what is with your ideas about what should be.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
More accurately “This field of study encourages wrongful thinking.” and “This field of study has a negative aspect.” More semantically pure “This field of study is sexist” is equivalent to “This field of study is used to create invalid justifications”, because a field of study cannot take actions like encouraging behavior; nor can an object be justified or unjustified; only agents can take actions, and only decisions can be justified or unjustified.
If every field of study is used to create invalid justifications, then every field of study has at least one negative aspect.
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
When someone’s talking about justified actions, I expect they mean morally justified. If they’re talking about justified beliefs, I expect they mean epistemically justified.
You spoke about decisions, so I assumed you meant moral justification of actions.
For a consequentialist like myself actions are morally justified by their consequences, not “inherently”.
But here, I’ll provide one of each—action and belief which may not be inherently justified but they’re also not inherently unjustified.
I think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Discussing even theoretically whether male brain structure might allow greater proficiency on average with e.g. mathematics or science would be treated as sexism by most people. But there’s no inherent reason to know for certain that there do not exist such differences between average male and average female brains.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors. I’ll also point out that any action (like supporting a given field of study) that has negative consequences which exceed the positive consequences is immoral from a consequentialist perspective. I’ll refrain from making any claims about whether supporting any specific field is a net negative.
No, I think that actions are ‘justified’ when the expected consequences are in accordance with the values of the actor. Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors. A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
Unjustified actions are not always immoral, but do indicate suboptimal decision making and poor mental hygiene. Being able to recognize those decisions in oneself and others is important.
I rage against the sexism that results when the possible fact “There is a difference between male and female brain chemistry with this result” becomes “This is proof that one sex is [universally|locally] inferior”. Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
Is that a mere simplification of your deontology? Because if it’s the totality thereof, I find it very easy to construct counterexamples where it’d be really eccentric to proclaim them immoral… e.g. you see a two-year old child lean dangerously over an open window and you pull him back, lest it falls—even though it doesn’t consent and might even cry in protest.
Or you are a doctor and perform an operation to save the life of an unconscious patient that was in a car accident. You don’t have their consent because they’re unconscious and can’t provide it—does it mean the action of saving their life isn’t moral?
In the first counter-examples you make the assumption that people who are young are persons, in the sense that they are worth moral consideration. Some would maintain that children are not people, and thus any action regarding them cannot be considered moral/immoral. In other words, their consent does not matter as they are not ‘actors’. In that way Decius’ claim that all actors must consent would still be true, as you are the only actor in that scenario. I’d be curious to read about any justification you would cite for the treatment of children as moral actors.
However, that said, I find your second example to be more convincing, but I’d be interested to know how the nature of the unconsciousness might affect your view. Would someone in a vegetative state also be considered as a moral actor in your view (and thus should be saved)?
I think IAWYC, but I’d steel-man Decius and assume that young children unconscious people, etc. wouldn’t count as “actors” and thus such actions wouldn’t be more immoral than, say, replace a broken string in a guitar without its consensus.
Well, if that was the position, then it wouldn’t be any more immoral not to help an unconscious person than to not help a broken swing. That seems fairly problematic, so I doubt that’s a successful solution.
Why is it problematic to say that the existence of unconscious people does not obligate me to provide medical care any more than the existence of a broken string obligates me to provide repair services?
A doctor (profession) is under contract to be available and to provide emergency medical services; failing to perform that (social) contract without the consent of the other parties (all of society, in some cases), is impermissible. A doctor who has agreed to provide care in a given situation is obligated to, just as a repairman who has agreed to perform repairs in a given situation is obligated to do so.
It is not logically problematic, but it I still something with which (I think) most people would (say they) disagree.
Most people feel no obligation to help someone who is in need of help. For example, there is a shortage of living kidney donors everywhere.
The only thing that creates an obligation in me is my decision to accept an obligation; the only way I can obligate others is for them to accept the obligation.
It’s not the totality thereof- contract theory is also included with the concept “It is possible to consent to actions in the future in a manner which may not be unilaterally revoked.”
I can’t explain why the social contract or geographical government has jurisdiction over a new actor who does not choose to accept it.
What kinds of experiences would you expect in a world where (some?) people are metaphysically equal that you wouldn’t expect in a world where people are not metaphysically equal?
If my premise that people are metaphysically equal is wrong, then something which is not part of this universe has privileged access over something else which is not part of this universe.
I would, for example, expect the same entity to make decisions for two physical bodies, or for psychic phenomena to exist and not have a physical basis, or for consciousness to persist after death differentially depending on the conscious entity; in general, things would have to be able happen without a physical basis and differentially based on the metaphysical person.
Since I posit that the metaphysical person exists only as a moral abstraction (and can thus be defined to be equal), such evidence that ‘personhood’ is an actual concrete thing, and that some ‘personhoods’ were inherently superior in an objectively measurable way would falsify my moral beliefs. I also suspect that it would be problematic for all moral systems.
Are you saying people are metaphysically equal by definition? If not, I’m not sure what you mean, since I find your comment somewhat difficult to follow.
This confuses me: I self-identify as a consequentialist myself, but I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else “immoral” (but I’d call it stupid).
I’m not at all sure what it means for an act to be immoral, under a consequentialist moral frame, if not that it leads to the loss of value. Can you expand on this?
But deliberately harming oneself does lead to a loss of value (at least as much as if you did that). So, why do I think that harming you is not-evil if you do it yourself but not if I do it? I’m confused...
I’m not sure what’s confusing.
You said that if I perform an action that harms me, that’s not immoral.
We agree that if I perform an action that harms me, that leads to a loss of value.
So it follows that whatever it means for an act to be immoral, by your reasoning, it is not simply that it leads to a loss of value.
Also, you’ve identified your moral reasoning as consequentialist.
So I’m asking: under your consequentialist moral frame, what does it mean for an act to be immoral, since you don’t think it’s that it leads to a loss of value?
It’s been suggested elsewhere that the key here is foreknowledge… that an immoral act is one that has negative expected value for the actor. I would agree that this is consistent with a (rule-)consequentialist moral frame, and that you might mean “I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else ‘immoral’ (assuming you don’t expect it to cause harm).” I would agree with that statement (though I would find it odd) but I doubt that’s actually what you meant.
Many consequentialist systems consider the morality or immorality of an action to be a function of the consequences expected by the agent at the time when it makes the decision. For any act, there is a possible universe where that act results in harmful consequences relative to the alternatives. What matters is how harmful it typically is, when executed by an agent in the same epistemic state.
I would guess that among humans we consider self-harming behaviour a sign of mental incompetence, since people don’t usually desire their own suffering. Hence someone who takes “stupid” actions is probably believing that the actions lead to excellent consequences, in which case you can prevent such behaviour through psychological treatment rather than punishment.
Or something like that.
Well, OK, but if “better addressed through psychological treatment than punishment” is equivalent to “not immoral”, then it seems that by that reasoning my harming others isn’t immoral either, as long as I’m incompetent enough to expect an increase in value from my actions.
I guess so. But harming anyone at all can still be considered bad. “Immoral” simply has a connotation (or maybe even an additional denotation?) of “blameful” that means it can basically only be applied to competent agents.
Isn’t consequentialism intrinsically objectifying? It doesn’t treat people as right holders but as means to the end of achieving desirable world states.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.
Taboo ‘objectification’.
I invite you to consider the possibility that what people are, and how people should be treated as, may possibly be two different things. If they’re not “metaphysically equal”, perhaps it’s still best that they be treated as such.
If things are different in a significant way, it is appropriate that they are treated as different.
It is a premise of mine that people are metaphysically equal; to delve further into that we need to discuss what ‘people’ means. I doubt that you will find such a discussion rewarding.
I’d like to know what you mean by ‘metaphysically equal’?
Equal, in every sense that cannot be falsified by the observation of privilege or inequality which exists only in the embodied world.
Basically, it’s a way of creating a metaphysical entity “person”, which is defined to be that which exercises control over the physical embodiment of that person. By making the moral agent an abstract rather than a concrete, the inequalities which exist in the concrete world do not falsify the claim to general equality.
For example, people do not lose or gain rights as their fortunes change.
By that definition aren’t people ‘metaphysically equal’ to rocks?
What is the metaphysical entity “rock”, and how do the actions of physical geology reflect them? When a person consents to a transaction in the world, their body is what makes the decision and indicates to other people’s bodies that consent is present.
If a rock consents to an action which involves a geologic object, how would it indicate that to other physical objects?
Why do you think that pornography is sexist? There are male porn stars too.
Um… OK. I’m tapping out here.
I’m not sure what you mean by “reinforce”, but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought “Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.”, when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
That’s not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?
You never need to compare the average, because you only ever need to compare a small number of individuals.
Performance in the production environment correlates with the measured expectation equally well for males and females.