Brad DeLong cites some critics of Douthat on social policy, including on abortion, and (via Matt Y.) there is more here, from his college writings. This post, on eugenics, is one of Ross's most controversial (btw overall I like it). I am myself more libertarian than conservative but at the same time I am on Douthat's side in questioning the common presuppositions behind modern opinion. There is a presumption that liberal, tolerant people should have certain views on abortion, stem cell research, and other matters and I am happy to see Douthat breaking the mold. On these issues, the derivation of current liberal policy views from underlying liberal principles is in fact extremely tenuous, even if one views those conclusions as ultimately correct. I view the current alignment of stances on social policy as more of a sociological regularity ("look at how rotten are the people on the other side") then an intellectual necessity.
Take abortion. Let's say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of when life begins is correct with p = 0.92. That's a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a "p" provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions? That's far from obvious. In this debate you'll find lots of fury and very little willingness to apply stochastic reasoning to ethics. There are far too many smart people who offer lip service to the toughness of these questions and then simply go ahead and take sides.
“understanding of when life begins is correct…”: how can an understanding be correct when the question is, I suspect, ill-posed?
I agree with dearieme, I think. I’ve suggested before that “life begins” is a stupid construction, and I think I said “life began” a billion years ago. There is an unbroken chain of life. What matters is when individuality begins, or perhaps human individuality …
Let’s play the word-substitution game.
1) “Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of when the human species began is correct with p = 0.92. That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a ‘p’ provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?”
2) “Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of whether God exists is correct with p = 0.92. That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a ‘p’ provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?”
3) “Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of how the World Trade Centers collapsed is correct with p = 0.92. That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a ‘p’ provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?”
4) “Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of the establishment clause is correct with p = 0.92. That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a ‘p’ provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?”
5) “Let’s say that the mainstream classic liberal understanding of the appropriate level of government intervention in the economy is correct with p = 0.92. That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently. Does such a ‘p’ provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?”
One cannot judge matters, even tentatively or by proxy, by whether intelligent people disagree vehemently. This is not to say we should not apply stochastic reasoning to the process, but rather to say that doubting conclusions by how many intelligent people are on one side or the other is a thinly-disguised appeal to popularity fallacy.
Well, Neal has made the same argument I was preparing to, so I won’t repeat his points.
But ISTM that the “stochastic” approach is not one that applies readily to moral and ethical issues: after all, we don’t condemn murderers to death based on probabilities, whether they be 92 percent or not: I’ve always taken “beyond reasonable doubt” to mean something a lot closer to unity, so much so as to be indistinguishable from it in a practical sense…and even so, plenty of manifestly guilty people walk. So how could one apply that argument to unborn human lives (yes, I am now unmasking myself as a reactionary)?
I always thought Reagan’s “baby in a bag” argument worked pretty well: if you saw a bag on the street, and you thought there was even the slightest chance of there being a baby in it, would you kick the bag? To ask the question is, IMHO, to answer it.
I also am puzzled at the many liberals who insist on applying prudential principles to other issues (like the environment) but not to the humanity of the unborn: this always seems to me like an argument that privileges unborn and indeed unconceived future generations over actually conceived but unborn people.
The simple fact is that we live in an increasingly disordered society, in which “tolerance” for abortion on demand and without apology, and–more recently–the return of eugenics to respectability have led (and will continue to lead) to a society in which human life is increasingly commodified and instrumentalized.
My fear is that this will lead–with the best of intentions, of course!–to the same sort of policies that disfigured Germany and Russia (genocide) and indeed most of the Western countries (forced sterilization) in the last century. Perhaps we’ve learned something from those (bad) examples: but my sense is that the sinful human heart is as capable of high levels of cognitive dissonance now as it was then.
The derivation of all views on the ground floor is extremely tenuous. People mostly hold beliefs because they identify with other people who hold similar beliefs not because they’ve given much thought to constructing beliefs. Believing that lowering taxation rates will increase government revenues has nothing to do with the idea that preemptive military intervention being justified or the idea that homosexuals shouldn’t be able to get married. But there is a huge amount of overlap in the people that have these world views because people mostly buy world views all at once rather than building them piece mail and then trying to reconcile incompatibilities.
It’s probably entirely practical to do things this way. An individual’s beliefs have a great deal of impact on social interactions go and affiliations and a very small impact on anything of external consequence.
This is why I like to think of libertarianism as the great compromise more importantly than the economic growth and such. The compromise is that we will minimize what we do together. Liberals can support abortion but not make antiabortion people pay for it thought their taxes. Liberals can teach and learn evolution and religious people can teach and learn creation. Drug use and sex should not be outlawed but we need not pay together to pick up the pieces if it leads to some difficult lives. So the banks crash, we should not together bail them out neither should we together bailout those who did not follow the common admonishment to hold enough savings to live at least 6 months without a job. People should be allowed to live in commune that evenly distributes the commune members money but people should be allowed to opt out. We should be free to help people in distress but perhaps we should not be forced.
Michael Foody: Yes! Yes ! Yes! This is the most overlooked “big fact” about politics. There is a remarkable – remarkable – correlation between a person’s views on abortion, foreign policy, tax rates, etc. but little to no philosophical coherence to this correlation. We are all (all) tribal.
also…
Floccina says:
“This is why I like to think of libertarianism as the great compromise… Liberals can support abortion but not make antiabortion people pay for it thought their taxes.”
But the whole point of the pro-life argument is that the fetus is a person and therefore has rights as well. You can’t get around this question with a sophmoric “let everyone do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt other people” argument because the whole issue turns on the question of how many people are included in the “other people” part of that statement.
Either the fetus is a person in which case allowing abortion is a breakdown of the single most fundamental role of the state – the restriction of violence against citizens, or the fetus is not a person in which case restricting abortion is an intolerable imposition on the rights of women. There is not nor can there be neutrality on this. The law will – will – decide whether a fetus is a person, and in so doing make a value judgment. The only question is – what is the decision.
I’ve suggested before that “life begins” is a stupid construction, and I think I said “life began” a billion years ago. There is an unbroken chain of life. What matters is when individuality begins, or perhaps human individuality
Can we put a moratorium on this silly, trite, and completely irrelevant argument? When abortion opponents talk about when “life begins,” they simply ARE talking about human individuality, not about whatever happened 3 billion years ago. That’s why they’ll go on and on about why eggs and sperm alone, while “alive” in some sense, aren’t a human individual, but when eggs get fertilized, there’s a new human being that could, if left unharmed, grow up.
Huh, what? The ultimate test for any public policy is whether its social benefits outweigh its social costs. The social costs of outlawing abortion come in the form of an underground economy in abortions with empirically a very high cost of human life through lousy quality control, something most countries who are not under the spell of a monopoly supplier of religious sentiments have realized is too high to bear.
Robin Hanson on “countries who are not under the spell of a monopoly supplier of religious sentiments” here.
I ascribe no rights to either animals or the unborm (I’d even legalize infanticide). So nyah, nayh, I’m more coherent!
Isn’t being a liberal & tolerant person defined in part by holding certain views? Can you really separate the policy views from the underlying principles that cleanly? (For example, consider the public reason argument (see references and a quickie summary here) for supporting abortion rights, which rests on no claims about when life begins and all claims on what it means to be appropriately democratically inclusive.)
@Tyler
“I view the current alignment of stances on social policy as more of a sociological regularity (“look at how rotten are the people on the other side”) then an intellectual necessity.”
When was it ever else? Isn’t this Hansonism 101?
My issue with Douthat is that he claims to believe in liberty etc etc etc etc. but somehow when I get pregnant he suddenly thinks the state has a right to in practical effect seize my body and regulate my deepest existence. Do you all here not see that without choice women are simply chattel of the state?
He simply doesn’t at bottom believe women are truly human beings and full moral agents. How can I respect him?
I believe that there are a few missed points to this debate. One is that Law is most certainly about ethics, the behavior of the individual in society. A code of laws, be they civil or common, reflect the ethics of a society, regardless of how arbitrary they may seem. There is the constant tension between Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s reality.
The problem of trying to advance the argument of limiting abortions is that it tends to rest on what are perceived as either moral grounds or technical definitions. The argument for unlimited abortion on demand centers on some sense of personal right of the individual that can not be abridged. The former rests on the social group needs, the latter on the individual needs. The real debate is not about religious or moral high ground or the ultimate individual rights, but at what point will the group and the individual be served? Since we do not live in total isolation of one another nor are we so dependent on the totality of the group to survive, we are faced with a number of choices every day. How much of our own individuality do we cede to the group in return for its benefits, its acceptance?
Reconciling an animal rights view and a (moderate) pro-choice view isn’t difficult at all. Most animal rights-ers base their argument on sentience–on the ability of animals to feel pain (and pleasure). By the same reasoning, a pre-sentient embryo or fetus wouldn’t necessarily have moral standing, while a more developed one would. This view has the added advantage of partly explaining why many people find very late abortions more troubling than very early ones.
Anderson,
Can you please tell me at what point life is a matter of established fact
instead of a mere opinion.
Please provide a proof.
The argument for unlimited abortion on demand centers on some sense of personal right of the
individual that can not be abridged.
Mr. Bean I would rephrase this slighly:
The argument for unlimited abortion on demand centers on some sense of personal right of the
VISIBLE individual that can not be abridged.
@All
AAAARRRGH!
Family Planning Politics Isn’t About Family Planning Policy.
JD, I am not actually interested in the abortion debate. I only comment when I’m bored and spot logical contradictions.
Should it be illegal to discard fertilized eggs which result from in vitro fertilisation?
I’m not political on this, and do not have my own definition for when “X” starts, but I certainly observe that the political game is to choose a convenient X and then push it as the important start. “Life starts” is convenient slang for this, but also for some it is an “X” drawn in the sand.
The mention of p and stochastic in reference to moral issues reminds me of a debate I tried to start many times online in the 80s back when the internet was still Arpanet. At 300 baud I would post this question on BBSs around the country (using “PC Pursuit”): Are there any moral imperatives that are indisputable? Put another way, are there any moral laws that exist like the law of gravity or the speed of light? Well, I should not have been surprised by the answers I got online in 1987 and 88. Imagine what the political leaning was of the majority of people online in the mid to late 80s. I tried to focus the question with hypotheticals: killing another human just for fun, could that be considered categorically immoral? Everyone answered me the same way: morality is only what the majority in a society agrees on. That suggested to me that if the majority in some society found killing humans for sport OK then there was no moral question. That was before we all knew about Islamist suicide bombers.
“The problem is that ‘before a given threshold’ has a pretty high agreement among people that it isn’t ‘birth’ which is the standard NARAL and Democratic senators seem to want Supreme Court Justice nominees to sign up for.”
No. This is wrong. Not even NARAL cares about to-term pregnancies, they do, however care about sneakily worded legislation that on it’s face seems to restrict those, but in practice limits lots of other things.
However, as with all activism, to get 80% of what people taking a certain position want, someone has to push for 200%.
Imposing a p-value on philosophical questions is a pretty dicey game to play at. Why is the p-value that embryos don’t have human rights 0.92? I and many others think it’s 1.00. By conceding that there is some doubt, you’re just taking sides in the debate. By pretending that you’re being even-handed — even generous! — to call the p-value 0.92, you’re being disingenuous.
Here’s an example.
Imagine that you’re an atheist and you’re talking to a fanatical Islamist. He thinks members of societies that are not governed by strict Sharia law will all go to hell. You think they won’t. But of course, if he’s right, then the harm of having a secular society is astronomical — in fact, infinite. So, he says, since we can’t deductively prove whether my beliefs or yours are correct, the p-value can’t be 0.00 or 1.00; it must be somewhere in between. And guess what? For any non-negative probability that I’m right (even 0.00001), the rational decision is to adopt Sharia law, since the harm of not doing so is infinite and a non-zero number times infinity is still infinity.
Tyler, tell me where his logic went wrong.
We’re talking about the NYTimes op-ed page. The chimp that plans rock attacks could do as well as Maureen Dowd.
Skimming through the reponses, I think that this is a point that others have jumped on, but I think that the statement “Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of the establishment clause is correct with p = 0.92″ is devoid of meaning. There really aren’t much in the way of factual uncertainies here – we know just about everything we need to know about prenatal development. The issues are issues of moral philosophy, and while, yes, some people on both sides fail to make and apply those arguments with sufficient rigor, that’s sadly true with regard to many moral issues. But setting aside the issue of, say, second or thrid trimester abortions, where the issues get a little trickier (but where I think the prochoice position remains correct), it’s pretty hard to construct any moral argument for protecting the zygote or the embryo – or even the fetus during the first few weeks if it’s existance – which doesn’t ultimately rely upon relious beliefs about the existence of the “soul.” And would be beyond silly to start talking about whether one believes in a “soul” at a some level of p; either you do or you don’t.
Huh, what? The ultimate test for any public policy is whether its social benefits outweigh its social costs. The social costs of outlawing abortion come in the form of an underground economy in abortions with empirically a very high cost of human life through lousy quality control,…
What an absurd statement.
Surely you’re not claiming that a robust effort by the state to ban abortion and enforce said ban would result in a (from the pro-life standpoint) net loss of human life, are you? Even if under such a scenario, we only achieved a, say, 25% reduction in abortions, that would VASTLY outweigh the number of women who would die as a result of botched, black market procedures. I have no illusions that it is possible for the state to end the practice of abortion, but I think it’s plausible that the power of the state could effectuate a fairly sizable decrease in their number.
My issue with Douthat is that he claims to believe in liberty etc etc etc etc. but somehow when I get pregnant he suddenly thinks the state has a right to in practical effect seize my body and regulate my deepest existence.
A belief in liberty obviously is not inconsistent with the view that the liberty of the human being inside you requires you to suffer a nine month diminution of yours. Rights aren’t absolute, and all that…
He simply doesn’t at bottom believe women are truly human beings and full moral agents.
I think you’re are obviously incorrect about what Douthat “thinks.” Do you have any evidence to the contrary, such as documentation of your ability to read his mind?
No one has a problem with any citizen’s religious faith…it is when the mob seeks to impose socio-religious mores on other citizens in Republic that we have problems.
My issue with Douthat is that he claims to believe in liberty etc
Exactly.
Conservatives are simply illiberal on abortion and samesexmarriage. Ross is a liar when he says he believes in liberty.
Federalism is just locallized mob-rule.
Modern conservatives are the philosophical heirs of Kylon and the democrats, that massacred the Pythagoreans.
Forcing or sneaking IDT into science classes, legislating citizen rights for diploid oocytes, trying to pretend the bellcurve of IQ doesn’t exist….
Instead of the elephant, the GOP should display a pitchfork rampant and a torch gules as its crest.
I don’t see how the abortion debate centers entirely around whether a fetus of x development time is or is not a life. Let’s say we were to unanimously agree that life begins at the instant of conception. In no way is the case closed. Someone seeking to ban abortions would still need to prove that the state has a legal basis for compelling a woman to participate in the gestation of that life to the time of birth, removing from her any ability to opt out.
We are not able to force parents of birthed children to raise them — they may give up the children if they decide to opt out on their participation in the children’s lives. Yet we believe somehow the state will be able to deny that same right to mothers of “pre-birth children” and commandeer their bodies as some kind of temporary baby sanctuary?
I don’t see that as a practical option in a free society committed so deeply to individual property rights. We may resent the fact that the life of a fetus is entrusted in its entirety to the mother on whose body it relies for development… and that as a result that mother is empowered to make choices as an individual that we as a community, as a society, do not agree with… we may wish the community had power over the individual to force them to do what we believe is best… but I don’t see a pragmatic basis for intervening without egregiously undermining those most basic tenets of liberty and autonomy upon which a free society rests.
“but I don’t see a pragmatic basis for intervening without egregiously undermining those most basic tenets of liberty and autonomy upon which a free society rests.”
Perhaps because you have yet to factor in the welfare of the fetus. Yet under your hypothetical, you must. I admit it’s difficult (I myself don’t think fetuses are deserving of any rights), but one way to get past this bias is to ask yourself whether or not you would find infanticide palatable. And you cannot answer in the negative by arguing there are alternatives that don’t involve death, such as adoption, as those options are usually not available for pregnancies.
Raivo Pommer
raimo1@hot.ee
KNAPP 400
Der insolvente Modelleisenbahn-Hersteller Märklin entlässt fast ein Drittel seiner Mitarbeiter. Das Traditionsunternehmen wolle sich von insgesamt 397 seiner rund 1400 Beschäftigten trennen, erklärte Insolvenzverwalter Michael Pluta während einer Betriebsversammlung am Märklin-Stammsitz im baden-württembergischen Göppingen. Der Standort Nürnberg mit 58 Mitarbeitern werde komplett geschlossen. Im Stammwerk Göppingen verlieren 166 der 651 Beschäftigten den Job. Im Märklin-Werk im ungarischen Györ trennt sich der Modelleisenbahn-Hersteller von 180 seiner 700 Mitarbeiter.
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