This is a composite of such things as unequal treatment of women in family law and property rights, early marriage for girls, patrilocal marriage, polygamy, bride price, son preference, violence against women and social attitudes towards it (for example, is rape seen as a property crime against men?).
Since this is as much a book review as anything else, it can perhaps be forgiven for not going into complete detail. The level of detail you're asking for here is more likely to be found in the book itself. I'm not seeing any indication, though, that they're just going off of some sort of opinion survey, as you would seem to be implying in your critique. That list above includes a lot of things that can be fairly objectively measured, either directly or through proxy variables.
why would it be brave? Firing people is ok. Firing people for being of particular gender is bad.
Not sure what anyone getting fired has to do with anything. Son preference refers to sex selection, not employment termination based on gender.
If you really believe your analogy of firing people is a good one, then you have already recognized the aborted fetus as a person.
Your argument could be equally applied to other topics that were once debated hotly but now are mostly considered “solved”, such as “is it good to have slaves”, or “should women be allowed to vote”.
• “Is it good to have slaves”: they're people, so they shouldn't be enslaved. (Almost axiomic, with the same reasoning in consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethical systems.)
• “Should women be allowed to vote?”: they're people who are affected by policy, so yes, they should be able to decide it. (See: the whole justification for democracy in the first place; it just falls out. … Should children be allowed to vote?)
I don't think you can come up with something so simple for abortion, unless it's one of the axioms of your ethical system. That's more a function of our (relative) lack of understanding, rather than the problem being intrinsically complex… probably.
But imagine stepping out from your time machine to 1860 Richmond, VA, I don't think many people would agree with your first point, that now seems so obvious.
It's a sign of the immense cultural progress we made that you can now state your two points as truisms. Let's not forget that there was a whole war fought about whether your point one holds value or not - more than 600,000 people were killed trying to find an answer to this question (almost as many as died due to COVID in this country so far).
Our cultural values will continue to evolve, things that are heavily debated today will seem as plain as the two points you raise are for us today.
Slavery didn't carry on so long because people “weren't sure whether it was okay”. It carried on because the powerful wanted slaves. The history of slavery discourse is the history of people inventing new reasons that it's actually a good thing – but the reasons it's a bad thing stay the same, and were even known and remarked upon in Ancient Greece.
Women had the vote in 1264, when the House of Commons was first formed in England, and they had the vote in 1295 when the then-King officially declared the House of Commons part of parliament. In fact, England had universal suffrage (albeit hampered by the lack of secret ballot) until 1430, when it was restricted to forty-shilling freeholders.
Are you really saying these are hard problems? These are problems that were introduced as a means of enabling the concentration of power. The ethics of abortion is a problem introduced by our biology; why would you even expect it to be so easy?
That’s a steep argument that I will not even engage with. You throw around numbers, but it looks like there’s quite a bit of history and current events for you to read up on.
The ethics of women voting, slavery, and the Holocaust were argued on the same biological basis, that some groups are simply fundamentally, biologically, inferior. It leaves me completely speechless and disgusted that you come forward and deny that.
Nope. In Ancient Greece, basically all non-slaves benefited from slavery, and ultimately they didn't do anything about it. Within their culture, they had the right to do bad things (slavery) to those they defeated in war; their society was structured such that it required slaves, and most not-enslaved people were okay with that… or, at least, few objected enough to try to put a stop to it.
The “oh, but they're actually inferior, and naturally deserve this” arguments came later.
I'm making specific claims, not the general ones you think I am. In Ancient Greece, it was merely the powerful, not the powerful elite, who upheld slavery – even though the word had negative connotations in Plato's time. In England, it was the upper classes that imposed restrictions on voting, and the lower classes who made themselves a massive nuisance until those got progressively relaxed… but it was also a rebellious noble who introduced the House of Commons (for largely self-serving reasons) in the first place. In America, it was mostly slaveholders who argued that slavery was good actually. (I don't know much about US history, though, and you can easily cast doubt on this assertion by showing me a slavery apologist who wasn't a slaver.)
> The ethics of women voting, slavery, and the Holocaust were argued on the same biological basis,
Eventually, yes. But this particular excuse was just one in a long, long line of excuses. It's rare for one group to oppress another on ideological grounds when they aren't getting something else out of it; the “ideological grounds” are a mere farce.
Somewhere around the 1350s (± 20 years; I haven't looked into it recently, and I'm no good with dates), the House of Commons became responsible for deciding taxation, a right the barons claimed for themselves in 1215 with the Magna Carta. The justification for this was three-fold; in order for a tax to be just, it must:
• be demonstrated, by the king (the one who imposed taxes), to be necessary;
• be to the benefit of the community; and
• be approved by the community.
This is, fundamentally, the justification for democracy. This is the logic that says all taxpayers should have the right to vote.
Why, then, was the right to vote restricted to forty-shilling freeholders (landowners with at least 40 shillings' annual rent) in 1430‽ Well, “elections had been crowded by persons of low estate“, of course. (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832-1885, page 11: https://archive.org/details/electoralreformi00seymuoft/page/...)
But I disagree that you can make the clear line to the present day, or even 200 years ago. There were no regular mass protests against slavery "because it's obviously bad" in the U.S. that had to be violently suppressed, there were no regular mass protest in Nazi Germany against how Jews were treated even before the Holocaust "because it's obviously bad", there were no regular mass protests for women suffrage all around the world.
I doubt any Proud Boy will trace his heritage to Plato or their disagreement with them. The connotation you describe may all be historically accurate (I have no knowledge of that), but I argue that it was lost over the last few hundred years, and plays no role in the current discussion of human rights, women's right, etc. whatsoever.
Ask a (neo) nazi / slaveholder if they think that people of color, jews, etc. are inherently, biologically, inferior, and they will tell you yes. I will even make the claim that none of them has ever discussed "the right to vote restricted to forty-shilling freeholders (landowners with at least 40 shillings' annual rent) in 1430‽ Well, “elections had been crowded by persons of low estate“, of course. (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832-1885" before punching someone in the face, cracking the whip, or leading someone into the gas chambers.
PS: If you want to make specific claims and not have them understood as general - don't make general claims.
The “moral complexity” of slavery, suffrage etc. is almost entirely artificial.¹ There is genuine, non-artificial moral uncertainty surrounding abortion (even though we can determine the right thing to do in a subset of cases).
Do you dispute this? If not, there's no argument.
¹: I also made the general claim that, as society shifted so that previous justifications could no longer hold water, the artificial justification in vogue also shifted. Fundamentally, “we deserve to be in charge” doesn't seem to change, and it's incredibly rare for anyone in power to question that – this refers to the “why” reasons used to justify that assertion (which aren't proper reasons, because they're effectively post-hoc rationalisations to support, not evidence, the claim).
By this logic, why should wanting to remove a fetus with a specific genital be considered any more sexist than wanting to undergo a gender change operation? In both cases, you don't like the reproductive organ in your body and want to get rid of it.
Personally I think women who smoke while pregnant are horrible, and I don’t mind saying something to them about it. I don’t think my opinion should have the force of law however.
I am confused as to why you think this requires much bravery though. It doesn’t feel like a particularly hidden belief that I’m letting out
I’m not trying to incite anything here though. I’m quite certain that the author genuinely made a mistake including it in their list.
The discussion thus far is consistent with the possibility that each participant has taken the phrase to mean something different.
There seems to be some sort of unspoken belief among anti abortion proponents that roe v wade and pro choice beliefs are built on the flimsiest of legal arguments and if we even squint at it wrong the whole thing will come tumbling down.
> I’m not trying to incite anything here though.
>… then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left.
I find it hard to rectify those two statements in the same discussion much less the same comment
Edit: added the word “specifically” to the second sentence
I specified that I don’t think this a something bad enough to need legislation. Social condemnation is enough
Women that move to live in the husbands extended family have no existing relationships, no blood relations around them. They are outsiders and so are very vulnerable. Son preference indicates that females are not valued, which as the article points out is correlated with poor treatment of women.
Of course aborting pregnancies of females is bad, it’s utterly stunning that you can think joking about it is ok. As the article points out an imbalance in the population means there won’t be enough girls to go around. This correlates with high rates of violence and crime due to all those frustrated men.
In the first(!) paragraph it was mentioned. It was actually the very first sentence in that paragraph: “A woman who drives a car will be killed,” says Sheikh Hazim Muhammad al-Manshad.
If you want to be pedantic about it, then yes, it's not mathematically defined what "treating women badly" means. But the very first sentence should give you a clue what they're talking about.
Do you not realize that when women are killed for driving a car or for speaking with a man, that they likely will say they are treated well, when they are interviewed next to their husband and family?
That’s the first line of the article. I don’t think it’s really subjective to say that killing women for driving cars counts as treating them badly. (Unless you just want to make some kind of general philosophical point about everything being subjective, but how would that be relevant?)