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Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that what Alexander was doing in that one instance nor what this author is talking about are "steelmanning". If in order to "steelman" your argument I also have to accept every point where you beg-the-question then where can there possibly be any argument?

I don't think I have to accept the argument that every fetus has an immortal soul to steelman a pro-life position. But I do however have to accept that the people making a pro-life argument are engaged in a good faith disagreement about when the state has an interest to protect the life of what is or will be one of its citizens (depending upon your definition).

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> If in order to "steelman" your argument I also have to accept every point where you beg-the-question then where can there possibly be any argument?

Yes — when you’re presenting the “steelman” version of someone else’s argument, you have to use their premises.

You outline two distinct arguments in your question:

1. A secular pro-life argument

2. A religious pro-life argument

Substituting a secular for religious argument is a strawman: you’re responding not to the best form of their argument, but to another argument they didn’t make.

In the case of a religious argument, the “steelman” case would be to articulate the religious argument to the best of your ability — and then dispute it by discussing which of the premises you disagree with and why. In your example, disputing the premise fetuses have souls.

The reason for “steelman” arguments is because that allows you to directly dispute the disagreed upon premise by clearly defining it and showing how it is integral to their argument.

Ok. Feel free to conduct that exercise in a context free mindset. But at a certain point litigants are just going to disagree on some fundamental aspect of reality. I can steelman young Earth creationism but that steelman now rests upon a foundation which assumes radio isotope dating doesn't work. Which I'm not going to accept. And I'm just not going to bother arguing the other aspects with that particular point thrown as a gimme.

So we can sit around looking at our lovely steelman like it's a yard sculpture but it really hasn't done us any good.

Yes — it has:

Having defined the steelman version of their argument, you can show why radio isotope dating is a contrary fact.

Without that, you’re not demonstrating anything by yammering about radio isotopes — it’s a context free fact that can’t influence the debate.

It’s only once you have shown that their argument depends on radio isotope dating not being true that the fact radio isotope dating does work becomes relevant to a refutation. You need both their argument and a contrary fact to demonstrate a contradiction.

That’s the purpose of a steelman: to use the best version of their argument in your own argument — and so avoid the strawman fallacy when refuting their point.

Ok, so the philosophical scalpel approach is useful. I'm probably just cynical from seeing so many writers present two steelman arguments essentially to "both sides" an issue and then shrug themselves into their next article. So steelmaning is great, as long as you actually do the difficult work of making choice of what to believe or in the cases where the facts are inconclusive outline what information would actually make the difference.

What Scott is doing there is a hyper-advanced blogging technique called "making a joke" and he's using hyperbole to do it.

You're right. I misrepresented his work here and edited my comment as appropriate.

You can make the broader point that governments ought to be invested in protecting human life regardless if that human is officially a citizen or not. We are not allowed to kill tourists or other travellers. Presumably governments can take away your citizenship, and it has been done before, but I think this shouldn't be a de facto license to kill.

I suppose secular people would argue that it is forbidden to kill them without appealing to their soul. And a secular pro-life argument would most likely revolve around the usual justification for why we don't kill other humans.

I'm agnostic and currently neutral on the abortion question. Both sides have good points, neither side is completely convincing.

I do want people to have autonomy over their bodies, and the extent to which a fetus can be considered a separate person seems like an unsolvable philosophical question to me.

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