Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction
scholarship.law.cornell.edu
scholarship.law.cornell.edu
Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).
It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.
gay marriage shouldn't be predicated on privacy either. two people want equal protection under the law as any other two people who have enjoined their lives together. that's basically it. certainly the gender/sex of those two people isn't the state's concern, because reproduction is not a state concern, but rather a private matter.
But population growth rate (or decline) is absolutely a concern of the state, and reproduction is a significant contributor to that. In fact, one could argue that if a state has an interest in providing health care (including things like contraception) then it must have an interest in reproduction too.
All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providing a free (or discounted) service for healthy women to abort healthy children at any stage of their pregnancy, so if the government has an interest in preventing children then surely it can have an interest in producing them.
Notwithstanding the facts that marriage isn't necessary for sexual procreation and that LGBT people can and do procreate, if the primary interest of the state in regards to marriage was to define it in terms of procreation, then the greater concern by far should be heterosexual marriages which don't produce children and rates of divorce. Yet no one is attempting to argue that heterosexual married couples should be required by law to produce a child within, say, two years.
Also, there is a difference between government providing access to services which citizens can choose to avail themselves of, and government legislating reproduction directly. The government doesn't have "an interest in preventing children" in the case of providing access to abortion clinics, rather the interest there is providing access to medical care. The government isn't forcing anyone to have abortions. So the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children," aside from not making any sense as described earlier, isn't a valid countercase to the government providing abortion access.
Yes, and between those two extremes is the more modest approach of the government providing incentives for certain outcomes, while neither mandating nor preventing any particular actions by its citizens.
> the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children,"
I don't know if anyone is suggesting that the government should "ban[] gay marriage", but some people think that the government shouldn't grant extra benefits to same-sex couples who declare themselves married in some ceremony.
As you point out, such a distinction made by a government is a very ineffective way to stimulate the production of children (indirectly through encouraging people into opposite-sex relationships), just as rewarding opposite-sex marriage doesn't guarantee the production of children, but a more rational set of policies (perhaps rewarding couples of any gender combination for cohabiting during the raising of children, whether naturally conceived or adopted) is more complicated to define and balance and integrate into the culture.
In any case, my point is still that governments have a legitimate interest to legislate policies that encourage an increase in the birth rate, even if they haven't found (or aren't even looking for) an optimal way to do that.
those ideas are seeping in from social and religious debates, not legal and civic ones.
Supreme Court just made it state one, instead of keeping the decision on doctors and pregnants.
Simple historical example: slaveholder says Frederic Dougles should be slave. Douglas does not want to be whipped nor slave again. They are enemies, full stop. Not partners. Same examples exist with any other country history.
Simple current example: Take the model abortion legislative currently proposed. It literally says that raped 10 years old must give birth regardless of threat to her health.
These people are not partners. They are in fact threats and if they win, actual raped kids will he harmed.
please don't simply "think of the children". think both openly and critically.
Frederick Douglass represented the radical abolitionists of the time, not the mild "lets go listen to slaveholders" kind. Selected quotes from "cross-ideological dialogue" of Frederic Dougles:
> I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land. [...] I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show [...] We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them, which is what he's principally known for--his reasoned positions on (anti-)slavery.
He was not merely writing provocatively. He was not provocative in that quote at all. He was trying to radicalize listeners. His distaste toward slaveholders and slavery is clear in his writings, that was his main thing.
> through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them
What are you talking about here. He had no issue with Harpers raid or John Browns previous actions. Instead he had respect toward the man. The civil war followed right after the raid - there was not much time to change opinion such fundamentally.
Also, he wanted black men to fight in civil war, he believed it will give them justification for civil rights and confidence.
Frederic Doughles knew violence works, that was his lifetime experience. Slavery was existing purely because of violence and was kept by violence. That is something Dougles wrote about, talked about repeatedly.
And he did not convinced or outreasoned slaveholders either. They lost the war, they were not convinced. They had too much money in slavery for any convincing to be possible. Plus it feels good to be dominant.
He did however pushed and negotiated with Lincoln. However, he was not pacifist in any shape and form. He was critical of radical abolitionists pacifists (and those were not "cross ideology dialog" kind of people either)
my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved (some of) his aims by winning over those on the margin, not trying to necessarily win over the extremely prejudiced. this happened over a lifetime (some 80ish years), and who someone is is a totality of those years, not some arbitrary subset of them.
> my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved
This is categorically false. You made that up, because you want it to be true (for mysterious reasons).
I write on mobile, I misspell. But, at least I took some interest in that man. And I did not made up whole life philosophy of man I don't know anything about living in social environment I know even less about.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
True! For example, I inherently have a bias towards wanting LGBTQ people to have the right to participate in society through marriage, anti-discrimination laws, etc because I'm LGBTQ. I suspect a lot of black people have a bias towards wanting anti-discrimination legislation so they don't get discriminated against, too.
Does that strike you as unreasonable?
(i'm not going to pretend that i'm always cool, calm and collected in real life. far from it, i'm as flawed as the next person. but when it comes to thinking about this stuff, and striving to be more consistent with my own principles, this is the way i think myself out of all the partisanship i see around me.)
Mind pointing out where exactly in the current, live form of the constitution where women are not considered equal?
The 14th amendment covers this. It requires all persons to be treated equal under the law.
Mind pointing out where exactly in the current, live form of the constitution where women are not considered equal to men?
and that's the crux of why diversity can be powerful. it's not about diversity of demographics, but diversity of perspective and thinking that strengthens societies (and companies and teams).
How do you come up with first principles? Consequentialism vs deontology has been around for centuries and it's obvious which one is the the correct one.
we spend the first 18 years or so of our lives empirically deriving those first principles together, along with the derivations of our ancestors in the form of documents like the constitution. since none of us are intrinsically perfect, we have a whole running population who nonlinearly superpositions our perspectives to create a common, if dynamic and imperfect, consensus of what's reasonable in a social context, and what's not.
If you really do start from first principles (I think “utilitarianism” might be a better example of something that would be a first principle), and you find out that one side of an issue is good and the other is evil, or even if you find out that one political party is a good bit morally better than the other, you’re now back to picking sides. Because picking the right side of a morally important issue is a moral imperative to most people.
Read old document written in specific political tradition.
^ That’s where you jumped the shark.
Less biased philosophy might be Camus, or Freire. Camus if you’re feeling cheeky, Freire if you’re feeling academic.
Freire describes forced import of culture and solutions to problems by financiers on people far away. It is far more objective look at freedom than the Constitutions goal of agency capture people far away.
Camus snarks about the absurdity in the belief we can ever truly understand one another given lack of direct access to each other’s bodily states and memory.
Both push back against the idea of allowing external influence to guide us in different ways. The Constitution is an aristocratic doctrine of acceptable forms and limits of state coercion which are routinely ignored. It’s scripture to hold up as an appeal to imagined authority Freire and Camus don’t believe exists.
You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’s mind in the face of pushback and new evidence is harder than you cavalierly put it.
negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?
Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do not rule the living. Paraphrasing Hume then; commit the Constitution to the flames.
From my reference frame you need me to import a specific philosophy when understanding of physical laws are all that’s needed to build.
I’m not being qualitative; there is no theory of science, no quantity of evidence the Constitution is responsible for engineering anything. Plenty of evidence people built together before it existed. From my reference frame you’re demanding more work than necessary to solve human problems.
You’re qualifying my behavior as negative because you’re not getting what you want, but the Constitution does not include a provision to provide you that. shrug
but it doesn't work, see? so might as well stand for something, rather than nothing, if that strategy doesn't make you invulnerable anyway.
We put American tradition for profit making before the distribution of insulin; oh well if people can’t afford it <- there, see; nihilism in your system. Indifference to action because your philosophy would not allow it. A convenient scapegoat.
Your unwavering devotion to a specific form of parliamentary procedure hurts people in need.
From the start I suggest alternatives, you deflect exploring them, and repeat what you showed up with; I don’t think I’m the inflexible mind stuck in one modal. Such a patronizing ass; sorry child, none of those alternatives will do, come let me explain the Bill of Rights again.
I’m plenty vulnerable with friends and family. I’m not about to take the pop psych view of an air gapped stranger to heart; reads like you just pulled that out of a glossary of psych terms and do not understand there is an entire diagnostic criteria required to make such a conclusion. Par for the course on social media.
This conversation is over.
getting caught up in a side means you can't pick and choose from the whole menu of ideas out in the world. it means that if you're against abortion, you must be for guns (or vice versa), lest you suffer cognitive dissonance and social anxiety. that's exactly how political parties, pundits, the media, and partisans of all stripes get twisted up into contradictory positions, but can never extricate themselves, because they'd have to acknowledge a modicum of reasonableness coming from "the other side". it's pretty silly to get so tied up in a tribal affiliation that you shut down your own thinking that way.
this is actually the topic of the linked paper (i.e., culturally motivated reasoning), which was hardly discussed at all in these comments.
"I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act."
-- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]
Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
That's scary, but it's potentially really helpful in understanding the connections between language and belief.
I know there's some controversy about the validity of the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but the idea that language and perception affect political culture was well understood by George Orwell, and I'm not surprised if the idea intersects well with the "ultimate attribution error" phenomenon from social psychology.
The more general idea that language and perception affect political culture is not as controversial, although the degree to which the tail wags the dog or vice versa is still debated.
This was pretty much tossed in the trash bin, partly due to an interesting study into how a language's lexical entries for colors influences perceptions on color closeness and categorization.
Instead of the strong version there's a reasonable consensus that language influenced things but does not wholely determine them.
An interesting example is that speakers of tonal languages are more likely to exhibit perfect pitch.
Source: my increasingly hazy recollections from a post-graduate comp ling program.
I think, to use your analogy, any language that lets you write new libraries which can be imported, will tend to become pretty decent at anything which people programming in that language do a lot. Whatever problems there are in the language itself, tend to become ameliorated (though probably not entirely eliminated) by focused work, for example spinning up a neural net or scraping a website gets much easier once a lot of people have done it in your language of choice, and they have released a library that they use to do it.
So, a language may not be good for speaking about a topic which the speakers of that language don't have much experience with, but if they come to have much experience with it, the language will quickly evolve to get better at it.
https://poetry-contingency.uwaterloo.ca/fifty-five-english-w...
Here's a subset of my "daily" bookmark folder that at least attempts to do this for me when combined with honestly too heavy reddit/facebook usage:
* http://news.ycombinator.com/
* https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Are some of them controversial? Of course, but that's the point. The wildly authoritarian left leaning sites that comprise big tech as a whole represent a single filter bubble. Staying in any particular bubble (right wing ones exist too) is a great way to turn yourself into a useful idiot/cultists/NPC.
Because the difficulty of tuning into a site that only leans in one direction isn't that you'll get biased news coverage, but whole entire stories are completely left out if they're bad for that side, and stories that are eventually found to be wildly incorrect, or even completely false issue only the quietest of correction edits while the untrue memes repeat ad infinite, but sites that lean the other way will ruthlessly correct their opponents.
The most important things to be reading are the things that are never talked about in your bias-confirming sources of infotainment.
tl;dr: filter bubbles bad, they'll turn you into a cultist