I fail to understand why identifying something as a “slippery slope” means it’s inherently fallacious (in the sense that we can/should ignore it.)
Slippery slopes DO happen, and they happen just like this. Do I have a magic mirror to tell me that this particular one absolutely will get worse? No. But it may, and I think that’s something we absolutely need to guard against.
A fallacy is an incorrect conclusion arrived at because of an *incorrect *reasoning in argumentation. Something can be a slippery slope without being incorrect. There are lots of slippery slopes that really do worry me because they’re real. The slippery slope starting with banning late term abortions has lead to ridiculous laws about mandatory viewing of ultrasounds before first trimester abortions. The movement against illegal immigration has lead to erosion of privacy and racial profiling in Arizona. The practice of chemically inducing labor in pregnant women has led to a 33% c-section rate in our country. Soda “once in a while” when I was a kid has lead to a generation of children who rarely drink beverages without sugar…
And, of course the most famous non-fallacious slippery slope of all: “THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist…”
Yes. The OP presents us with a slippery slope scenario. That doesn’t mean it’s a fallacy.
I’m not sure which I find more stunning - that any pediatricians are backing a way to mainstream this practice, no matter how good their intentions, or that people on this board are saying it’s okay as long as it doesn’t cause damage… well, it’s okay as long as it doesn’t cause permanent damage… well, it’s okay as long as it doesn’t cause a lot of permanent damage. I’d support doctors lying to parents and saying they’d done the procedure when they hadn’t, but not this practice. Nor do I much care that its “culturally imperialist” to try to stamp out a malicious and terrible tradition.
But I’ll say that this is a recommendation from one group and there’s no way the law is going to be changed to allow doctors to do this. Nor should it be changed.
:dubious: Major overreaction, Marley. I don’t see any posters here advocating at any point the practice of any FGC rituals that cause any significant damage to the genitals at all.
Unless you consider that a slight pinprick or paper cut “damages” your finger, you can’t argue that a slight pinprick or nick “damages” the clitoris. And no matter how strictly you define physical “damage”, you certainly can’t argue that any such procedure causes any amount of permanent damage.
The alleged slide that you claim to be seeing here into acceptance of any FGC procedures that cause any degree of permanent damage to the genitals is simply not present in this thread.
I’ll pass over the glaring illogic and inconsistency of arguing that even physically harmless FGC rituals should be stamped out, while still being perfectly okay with male circumcision. If even a pinprick to the clitoris counts as a “malicious and terrible” practice, then cutting off the foreskin of the penis certainly should.
I’m not arguing that it’s okay, I’m arguing that law isn’t allowed to be capricious. If you’re going to allow A and B is by all measurements equivalent to A, you have to also allow B.
Under strict scrutiny, attempting to prohibit a clitoral dent while allowing circumcision seems to fall afoul of the “compelling governmental interest” standard, after all the affect to the individual is essentially nill. But more importantly the law is definitely not narrowly tailored. In their supposed attempt to stop genital mutilation, they’re still allowing the majority of all cases.
Do you have any scars from pinpricks or paper cuts? I don’t. I have a few small ones from burns and dog bites. None of those are on my dick. If they were I might consider them significant damage even if everything worked fine.
Tell me the which diseases are prevented or decreased by removing the clitoris. Yes, circumcision still has its roots in an illogical religious practice. It does have some health benefits. I see none of those here, and if it was only being done in some cultures and was illegal here, but the AAP was suggesting it be made legal here to prevent something else, what do you think the response would look like?
As a physician I’m in the opposite camp.
I’d support physicians–or anyone qualified–doing a procedure that is no more damaging than leaving a tiny scar, and unless you’ve argued equally vociferously against circumcisions and ear piercings on babies, your position is the same as mine. Labeling a ritual skin nick “female genital manipulation” doesn’t put it in the same category as clitoridectomy any more than labeling an earlobe piercing “ear mutilation” puts that in the same category as removing a pinna. As Kimstu notes, there’s no moral inferiority in holding that this sort of “mutilation” or “permanent damage” is any less supportable than ears and penises. I frankly think it’s a bit of rhetoric to assign those pejoratives to truly trivial procedures.
But “doctors lying to the parents and saying they had done (any procedure) they hadn’t” is by the far the most abhorrent suggestion to me. Even in the name of fooling the cognitively challenged to thwart their own dearly-held rituals from creating harm, that’s too slippery a slope. For the practice of medicine in particular, informed consent and honesty straightforward talk are holy. Lying and pretense belong in religion, not medicine.
I think all of these things are dumb and unsupportable. But if they are relatively harmless and they satisfy the need of the masses to indulge their rituals, I can’t get excited about hollering over them. I do get excited about lying to patients and their proxies.
Given that I’m circumcised, I’d say that I have a fairly significant scar on my dick. I wasn’t even aware that it had been modified until I was in my 20s because it looked like any other dick in porn. That the head doesn’t quite pull into a cave seemed like something that could plausibly have been an issue of personal physiology. Overall, I can’t say that it affects my life. Something which doesn’t affect me isn’t “damaged”, it’s just more aerodynamic.
There’s currently an act before Congress, the “Girls Protection Act of 2010”, sponsored by Joseph Crowley (D-New York) and Mary Bono Mack (R-California), which would make people who transport girls overseas for FGM subject to the same federal laws & penalties as those who have it performed stateside. link. Punishment includes fines and up to five years in prison.
It’s generally expected that it will pass with full support (what politician would leave themselves open by voting against it.) Furthermore, it is similar to several European laws which essentially say the same thing.
Also, I found this passage from the AAPA press release itself (posted by DSeid) to be telling:
So AAPA admits that providing less harmful alternatives prolongs FGM acceptance and also that criminalizing traveling overseas for FGM has lead to its decline. Clearly then, criminalization is the best way to go if one’s goal is to eradicate the practice.
I would support further laws that classify FGM as a form of child abuse which pediatricians would be mandated to report, just as if they thought the child was being burned or beaten. We don’t hesitate to call the police for other forms of abuse. I see no reason why those who would abuse their daughters by cutting get a pass. (Yes, even cutting just a little. Yes, even when it’s cultural. Slavery, cannibalism, foot binding, infant exposure are all cultural practices too. FGM ranks right there among them.)
I’m entirely unmoved by attempts to couple FGM with male circumcision. If people want to argue that male circumcision is also barbaric, then make that argument and it can stand or not on its own. The barbarism of FGM stands on its on. There’s no reason why it should only be considered in relation to the male practice.
See above for my comment on circumcision. And piercing a baby’s ears is moronic. I have no idea why the hell anyone does that. Pierce the kid’s ears when it’s old enough to want them if it’s that important. (Of course if you remove the piercings, they close up. Last I checked, genital scarring doesn’t disappear.)
The “nick” is being offered specifically as the legitimized alternative to more damaging procedure. It’s not rhetoric to discuss them as part of the same continuum. It’s just obvious.
That’s abhorrent? You’re right that lying just presents too many problems. I meant to say that I’d support lying to the parents more than I would support doing the procedure. The best option is to pass the law Mernieth mentions. Other posters have said it works, so it’s a no-brainer.
If male circumcision actually does protect against AIDS by making the mucous membrane of the glans keratinized and thus less susceptible to infection when the foreskin is removed, it seems plausible (although IANAD) that removal of the clitoral hood, which anatomically speaking is the female homologue of the foreskin, could do the same to toughen and protect the mucous membrane of the clitoris, which is the female homologue of the penis.
The question of whether some form of FGM really can provide any significant protection against AIDS or other diseases is certainly far from being conclusively resolved in favor of FGM. And it may well not turn out to be in favor of it, no matter what form of FGM is used. However, the state of the science, AFAICT, is not such that we can definitively pronounce that there aren’t health benefits to any form of FGM.
I bring this up just to make the point that simply assuming decisive medical differences between male circumcision and any form of FGM, so that we’re scientifically justified in accepting the former while refusing to permit any form of the latter, is a broken reed. Insofar as clitoral hood removal is the exact physical counterpart of male circumcision, performed on organs that are the embryological counterparts of the penis and foreskin, it’s not unreasonable that some of the health benefits associated with circumcision might be associated with clitoral hood removal as well. It hasn’t been thoroughly studied but AFAICT we certainly can’t rule it out.
But that’s irrelevant to the real-world situation we’re facing. If we’re against all forms of ritual infant genital mutilation, then fine, let’s ban them all, and not make exceptions even for something as mild as a slight pinprick. But since we’re not banning all forms of ritual infant genital mutilation, then the criteria for determining what forms we permit shouldn’t be dependent solely on the sex of the infant.
To say that cutting off a boy’s foreskin is perfectly legal and okay, while even the tiniest pinprick on a girl’s clitoris is intrinsically intolerably barbaric and unacceptable, is not rational or ethically consistent.
Sure there is. The reason is that if it’s acceptable to perform mild genital mutilation on infant boys, it should be acceptable to perform equivalent or milder forms of genital mutilation on infant girls. You don’t get to say “all types of genital mutilation of infant girls are unacceptably barbaric, even the mildest ones, and our tolerance of equally or more severe genital mutilation of infant boys is a completely unrelated issue”. The sex of a child should not be the determining factor in whether it’s ethically acceptable to mutilate its genitals.
I’d say that is the position which is “irrelevant to the real-world situation we’re facing,” in the United States at least. You seem to believe it doesn’t matter what our society has accepted or not in the past.
Given that a solid standard was already established in this society–no genital mutilation on infant girls–the burden of proof is on those who want to change that standard.
What you are missing here is that the basis for the standard against “mutilation” of females is that a permanent alteration of a baby unable to give informed consent is wrong. I agree with that appeal. But you cannot make such an appeal in the name of ethics or morality without it applying equally to all babies.
That’s the point. Inconsistent traditions alone provide no basis for moral or ethical authority. Perhaps we’ve always kept blacks as slaves, and never whites. I can defend or reject slavery based on an assortment of arguments. But if I make an appeal that slavery is unethical or immoral, I have just done so for all the potentially enslaved. For the same reason, if the basis for my rejection of mutilating babies has to do with an ethical or moral appeal to not violate their helplessness, I must reject such practices for all babies.
If the sum total of an argument against allowing X is that it may eventually result in allowing Y, which is bad, then that’s a shitty argument. I will grant you that it may not be a fallacy in the extremely formal sense of the word (and Wikipedia identifies it as an “informal fallacy,” FWIW), but it is still a shitty argument. When I say “shitty argument” I mean “deserves no counter-argument because it is not a well-formed argument in the first place; i.e., has not set forth a prima facie case to be argued against.”
The OP in this thread has made absolutely no attempt to show how X would lead to Y. He is just condemning X based on the bare assertion that it WOULD lead to Y (not even that it would make Y more likely).
Nope, because as Chief Pedant says, it is discriminatory to maintain such a standard solely on the basis of sex.
In fact, we never did establish any kind of a “solid standard” or official ban against ritual genital mutilation of infant girls in our society before now. We simply ignored it or remained unaware of it, because it wasn’t traditionally practiced in our culture.
So if we want to establish a standard concerning ritual female infant genital mutilation now, we need to have rationally defensible reasons for our choice of what that standard will be.
Saying “we forbid this practice because it’s new to us” naturally wouldn’t be an adequate reason. Saying “we forbid this practice because it causes unacceptable harm” is a very good reason. But then we are being irrational and hypocritical if we simultaneously permit equivalent practices that cause equal or greater harm to MALE infants.
Some people here are trying to nuance up that position somewhat by arguing for a sort of “penumbra” effect: we can get away with banning all forms of female genital mutilation entirely while still tolerating our traditional form of male genital mutilation, because the former is kind of in the “penumbra” of a tradition of far more harmful and brutal mutilation rituals, while the latter is not. While I see the appeal of that argument, I think that its fundamental logical inconsistency is likely to come back and bite us in the ass at some point.
Of course a double standard is discriminatory, illogical, etc. The point is, we have a double standard. I don’t see how the corrective can be to relax the standard and enlarge the victim pool.
To use the Pedantic analogy, enslaving black people on the basis of race is clearly discriminatory. Therefore, we should tolerate a relatively benign form of white slavery?
No; we should recognize that our appeal to not enslaving whites because slavery is immoral applies equally to not enslaving blacks. We can’t make the appeal against enslaving whites without an acknowledgment that we are equally immoral to enslave blacks. If we are unwilling, based on moral grounds, to enslave whites, we must be willing to stop enslaving blacks. If we decide we’ll continue to enslave blacks because it is an established custom, we must be willing to abandon any moral argument against enslaving whites–a practice of enslaving blacks renders the moral argument meaningless.
There is no high moral ground from which to make an appeal if we honor moral persuasions in the breach with established customs.
In any case what is the “standard” we have now for girls?
Is it “no pinpricks” at all? Because if so, then what about ear piercings?
Is it “no pinpricks in the genital area”? If so, is that a “standard” of some kind or is it simply the absence of a custom?
I’ve never heard any standards at all for this arena; as it turns out it’s apparently standard for some folks to piddle around with their girl baby genitals the way some parents piddle around with their boy baby’s genitals.
Sounds like the only “standard” we have is to allow parents to cut on their babies…apparently we’ve never even decided if it’s morally OK or not. We’ve decided it’s relatively harmless, and we do it because it’s our custom to do so.
I’m all for changing that standard. The basis for my appeal is that babies cannot give informed consent, and the alterations being made are elective and permanent.
Man, you guys are cracking me up with this anti-circumcision fanaticism. I love my circumsized dick. I’ve never:
-Had to wipe it after I piss
-Pulled my skivvies down and had a smell waft up at me
-Been made fun of or had a girl end a sexual encounter when she saw it (or been refused oral sex)
-Had an STD
-Had a urinary infection
-Had anything remotely resembling or that could in any way, shape, or form be compared to “cheese” anywhere near my dick
(All things I’ve had to hear about from friends and family who are uncircumsized.)
And I have zero memory of the event, which happened when I was a newborn (and neither does any other newborn), zero “psychological scarring”, zero actual scarring, zero issues whatsoever.
And I’d like to know where you’re getting this idea that it causes babies “real pain.” I had my son circumsized on his doctor’s advice and, while we may be backwards when it comes to social progress here in Arizona, we’re doing just fine in the medical field. We have this crazy new stuff called anasthesia.
It’s nice that you and your penis are getting along so fabulously, but billions of uncirc’d guys are getting along just fine with their intact penises too.