Well, this is Great Debates - isn’t that the point?
In the abstract, utilitarianism or not, shouldn’t we determine which society is best (through utilitarianism or through whatever lens you prefer) and then strive to achieve that society?
I do not think this opinion has a place in a modern society in the sense that it should not guide society’s rules in any way. I think you having that opinion is fine.
This is my experience, too. And I’ll even let you in on a little secret - I personally have a distaste for adultery too. I have no interest in being in an open relationship; I don’t really understand the people who do.
But I’m also introspective enough to realize that this personal opinion of mine is no basis for a system of government. If other people want to live a different life than I do, and it makes them happy, and no one is hurt, then who am I to judge?
See above, let me know if I need to repost or if you have questions (I love this thought experiment, I learned about it in college and it is one of a handful of experiences that shifted my worldview from one a lot more similar to yours to the one I hold now.)
That’s not necessarily true. I don’t want to extensively re-litigate my views on the morality of slavery in hypothetical situations, since that’s a major hijack. But concerning social stratification, if it is given as a premise that some people are more suited for certain positions, and without what you call “sanctity”, then in the abstract I would not only tolerate but even prefer a totalitarian society where each person has a position that matches their competence. If, for example, the pseudo-science of phrenology were true or accepted as true, and lacking the sanctity of the home as a fallback, I would support taking children away from parents whose skulls had a contour indicating they don’t (can’t) love their children, etc. even acknowledging that I might have such characteristics.
This is a line of argument where I am adapting your system of morals, as I understand them. Given a choice between two alternatives, one should choose the path of less harm.
Patient complains of severe emotional distress after learning of her pregnancy and requests an abortion. The pregnancy is not complicated at this time but she said she is willing to take “drastic measures” if she can not get an abortion officially, understood to mean self-induced abortion.
How would I interpret this scenario, assuming the fetus has personhood, and assuming the paramount object of morality is harm avoidance?
If I perform the abortion, one person dies with minimal risk of complication or side effects. Furthermore they don’t suffer from pain. If I do not perform the abortion, there is a high chance of one person dying and a significant chance that a second person suffers permanent physical and emotional damage, potentially death, which would negatively affect other people they know. There will be physical pain and emotional pain. In which case it makes sense to perform the abortion.
(ETA: With the given assumptions, I would endorse a society where abortion is acceptable in the above circumstances even if it turns out I’d be aborted as a fetus.)
Human nature being what it is, do you really think it is possible to create a totalitarian society where everyone’s happiness is maximized by assigning them the best job for their personality? You think you can solve the dual challenges of accurately predicting and weighing what people are suited for AND convincing people that this is what’s best for them such that they accept this happily?
If so (and one could theorize of advanced AI being able to do this, for example) then I’d be open to being convinced that such a society is superior to a freeform one. But until you can reliably demonstrate the sort of predictive ability necessary to make that work, your society fails the Veil of Ignorance test.
No sanctity needed.
That’s a great big IF doing a lot of heavy lifting there. IF taking away children on this basis was so reliable that from outside the Veil of Ignorance I would prefer that society does such a thing taking into consideration that I could be born as someone taken away from their parents or as someone who has their kid taken away, then maybe this would be the path for society to take. But this is a monumentally high bar to clear.
I’d be surprised to learn of a single instance where the privilege was violated. It would make big news, and if it was a Catholic priest, he would be expected as a matter of religious law to die before breaking the seal of confession. There are martyrs who became saints for that express reason.
In one case, the federal 9th Circuit (which covers California, mind you) ruled that it is unconstitutional as a matter of law for the state to monitor sacramental confessions, as this violates both free exercise of religion and privacy rights. Mockaitis v. Harcleroad, 104 F.3d 1522 (9th Cir. 1997), overruled on other grounds by City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997), superseded by statute, Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.
Suppose there are more people with my opinion than there are people with your opinion. And we vote to make adultery a crime, even in cases where individual harm cannot be proved. Should not our law be enforceable? After all, isn’t modern society democratic?
I don’t consider a fetus to be equivalent to a person. But if I had to reason from the lens of fetal personhood, yes, I would still support abortion for the reasons you mention.
ISTM the law protects clergy if a communication was done in a confessional/penitent context. That protection seems inviolable and absolute (and has been since forever).
Outside of that context I do not think protections apply to clergy (e.g. you have your priest over for dinner and he witnesses child abuse…that is not protected just because he is a priest and he may well be obligated to report that abuse).
No, I don’t. But that’s fighting the hypothetical.
This is the response I expected. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong. I admit I would come to the same conclusion under the same axioms. I elicit these responses to distinguish myself and my opinions from yours. You cannot reach the same conclusions as I do with mere harm analysis, at least not in these hypothetical cases, because we are different people with different ideas of right and wrong.
I don’t consider a fetus to be equivalent from a person either. (I’m partial to natural viability.) The hypothetical world where phrenology is true science is far-fetched, but this is less so. Many people in today’s modern society do, for whatever reason (often religious), believe fetuses are people. Most Americans believe abortions should be prohibited after three months. There’s something going into their calculus that isn’t in yours. We just demonstrated it isn’t merely that a fetus is a person after three months. I suggest it is respect for “sanctity” of life.
Which goes towards the point I just made about democracy. You don’t have to suppose. There really are more people that would prohibit abortion in cases that you and even I, if we applied a harm standard, wouldn’t prohibit abortion. Does their opinion have a place in modern society? Where I live, abortions are prohibited after six weeks. I wouldn’t prefer that but it’s not my decision. Having Max_S or Babale dictate law fails the Rawl’s veil of ignorance test. The question to me is more about whether one’s opinion should determine public policy, when the actual public disagrees.
Of course I do not think that the majority should be able to do whatever they want. Not all that long ago the majority of Americans moght have thought that Black people should be property, or that women should serve their husbands and not take on too public a role.
Surely you agree that if we all got together tomorrow and voted to reinstate chattel slavery, this would be wrong, democracy be damned.
Not really. The hypothetical is that you are designing a society from outside that society knowing that once you are done you will live your life as a member of that society without knowing which one.
If you only need to appeal to sanctity to protect against impossible societies that can’t be designed in reality then maybe sanctity isn’t actually doing anything?
Fine, so you disagree, even about this kind of society where the AI deciding where people will work is so smart that people are ecstatic about it? Because of sanctity? What in that scenario is the “sanctity violation” exactly? How do we determine what is “sanctified”?
I would argue that the public can debate and decide on lesser issues, but some rights should be fundamental, because violating them hurts people. That should be part of the purpose of a constitution. So something like a law punishing adultery should be unconstitutional. A law banning abortion should be unconstitutional. Enslaving people should be unconstitutional. No amount of popular support should lead to people doing these things.
If you’re opposed to abortion because you believe life has sanctity, good for you; you should not get to impose that belief on others.
The thread has suddenly blown up with a whole other discussion since this exchange, so I won’t try to drag it back in the previous direction. Instead, I’ll just note that you appear to be an optimist while I am a jaded cynic, and our relative positions and arguments reflect this. It will fall to our great-grandchildren to see which view is more correct in the long term.
I don’t think that what we consider sacrosanct is “hardwired”. That’s obviously cultural, and we can see large differences over time and across different regions. I just think the tendency to pick some items or ideals and consider them inviolable is part of our wiring. I prefer the terminology “purity”, honestly, because i think that’s closer to how it plays out.
That’s complicated. If people wanted to become slaves I wouldn’t have a problem with it. It would never happen, but that’s fighting the hypothetical. I don’t want to be reduced to chattel slavery, but if I did, well you see the tautology. From a God’s eye perspective, I don’t believe a valid purpose of sanctity is to protect people from themselves. What I’m saying is that mere slavery doesn’t violate sanctity. Some forms of slavery do, but not all.
Even in the religious sense, some forms of chattel slavery are endorsed, including slavery for life.
Maybe you agreed with other members about sanctity of human dignity. It could be argued that reducing a person to slavery strips them of human dignity. I never endorsed such a concept; my view is that dignity comes from within, not without.
You may have lost track of the scenario. The specific scenario was that a child is torn from her parent, not because of demonstrated neglect or abuse but because the contour of his or her skull, according to accepted science, demonstrates relative lack of mental capacity to love one’s child.
The sanctity involved here is of the home and family. My belief is that no rational person, myself included, would willingly let the state violate the sanctity of the home and family by taking the child, even if it is predicted to reduce the ultimate harm to the child or society. Demonstrated harm is another thing, but a prediction, no matter how confident, defies my sense of moral understanding. (Free will is another axiom we disagree on.) The scenario fails the veil of ignorance test.
If, however, I adopt what I believe are your moral beliefs, then the outcome is different. It is a given in the hypothetical that removing the child results in less harm to the child and society. That constitutes the entire analysis. Sanctity is not part of the equation. The only rational choice is to remove the child, and so adopting these beliefs, the scenario passes the Rawls veil of ignorance test.
For any right you consider fundamental, I can craft a scenario where violating that right results in less harm. So no, I think you should reconsider that statement. This is the point I’m trying to make about sanctity: it is an independent source of morality from harm. It results in different perspectives, in different choices, both personal and in public policy.
You make a rational argument. But I don’t agree with the fundamental premise - that the paramount object of morality is to prevent harm. You haven’t convinced me; you can’t convince me. I won’t concede that adultery should be unconstitutional. I won’t concede that a law banning abortion should be unconstitutional. (For practical purposes, I do agree that enslaving people should be unconstitutional.) I would argue that a law compelling priests to disclose confessions from penitents is and should be unconstitutional. There are more people who agree with me than there are who agree with you. Modern society does value “sanctity”, notwithstanding your contrary opinions. We have passed laws banning adultery and abortion, and protecting the seal of confession. It’s a fait accompli.
The burden is on you to convince us otherwise, and furthermore the beliefs that you personally hold as expounded in this discussion are insufficient.
In other words, everyone agrees that their is an obviously best ice cream flavor, they just disagree what it is.
I agree that some such thing is hardwired in by evolution, but like most traits some people’s wiring is a bit off.
I don’t resort to vague terms like “human dignity”. It’s quite simple - slavery harms people. I can tell it harms people because from putside the Veil of Ignorance I would never choose a slaver society because I would not want to be a slave.
This was in reponse to your scenario where a totalitarian regime dictates what you do, not the skull shape hypothetical.
For the skull shape hypothetical, then yes, if skull shape was such a reliable predictor of parents who cannot love (and would therefore potentially harm) their children, then it would make sense to take children away from people whose skull shape showed they were going to harm their kid.
We don’t live in a universe where that’s the case, so it doesn’t make sense to do something like that. If we lived in an entirely different universe with different rules, then morality would be different.
So let’s say that we lived in the world you postulated. Skull shape directly relates to behavior. We can predict, with 100% certainty, that if you have a skull that’s got a ratio of X to Y on measurements A and B with a lump 3 inches on the lower left hemisphere, you WILL harm your child.
Are you really telling me that in such a world you would let children get abused or even killed just to preserve sanctity, when science could stop 100% of those cases?
I don’t see how such a system of morality could be anything but evil.
That’s precisely why I don’t want to rethink this perspective. And neither do you.
Life is sacred and must not be ended - except for a long list of times when I’m sure you’d agree that the government is justified in killing someone.
If life is sacred, then life is sacred even if someone got sentenced to death or is an enemy combatant. And yet, you’re fine with suspending sanctity under the right circumstances. Why is it fine for you to make that moral calculus, but so shocking that I would be willing to do it?
I agree, there are situations that could be conceived of where every right, no matter how fundamental, would be suspended. That’s trivially easy to prove. The most fundamental right is the right to life, yet I am sure that every single one of us could think of a situation where killing is morally right.
Then make your case for why sanctity should be included. Where does it come from? How do we determine what is sanctified and what is not?
For example, you earlier expressed opposition to the idea of a totalitarian regime that told people what sort of work they must do:
You seem to argue that such a society violates sanctity in some way.
Yet you, like me, are Jewish, no? Who better to determine what sanctity is than God? And the society that God lays out for Israel is one that’s eerily similar to the apparently-incompatible-with-sanctity totalitarian state you describe:
It is a hereditary monarchy - as close to a totalitarian state as is possible without modern communication methods.
The most important jobs in society are assigned to divinely ordained groups - the Cohanim and the Leviim.
Women, slaves, and foreigners are all prescribed with very specific ways to live.
So a society where a higher intelligence tells everyone how to live their lives seems perfectly sanctified to me. Far more compatible than any society that could pass the “Veil of Ignorance” test.
Without knowing how to determine what is or isn’t sanctified, why on Earth would we assume that including sanctity is going to prevent bad things like totalitarian regimes or babies being taken from their mothers?
That’s fighting your own hypothetical, where it is given that “we all got together tomorrow and voted to reinstate chattel slavery.” It follows that the people who would become slaves do, in fact, vote to reinstate slavery. If you don’t vote for slavery you don’t exist in this hypothetical. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the application of this veil of ignorance test.
It was one hypothetical. Phrenology was an example of a totalitarian regime removing a child because it decides the parent is not competent to raise a child. It makes no difference, so far as I am concerned, if some AI overlord makes the same determination without the use of phrenology.
I would make that trade. For me, it’s not about harm. Harm is an afterthought. For the same reason I would oppose a regime of genetic testing and forced sterilizations. I am reminded of a point I made in a former debate,
Justified is a loaded word. Legal justification is not moral justification and moral justification depends on specific circumstances. I wrote before, and I mean it, that sanctity is not paramount. Authority is. It is my opinion that the a decision of government or the enactment of a law may be utterly immoral, yet when it comes time to enforce it, the moral path may be to obey. You should know that about me, from previous discussions.
Under my beliefs, it may be wrong to enact a law punishing a crime with death, yet once the law is passed, it is right to carry out the punishment. It may be wrong to vote for slavery, yet once slavery is reinstated, right to implement it. Wrong to authorize the government to violate the sanctity of the home, or of life, but it may be right once so authorized to carry out the violation. The key point is that it is always wrong in the first instance. No advances in science or technology or pseudoscience or propaganda can dilute what I consider fundamental rights. But violations may be authorized.
I’ve made a lot of legal arguments here where I defended the state’s right to do something bad. That doesn’t mean I think the state necessarily should bad things, only that they are authorized to.
Would be suspended, easily. Should be suspended, for you, maybe. For me? I may choose to let world burn.
The hypothetical I put forward involved taking children away from parents due to no fault of the parent. It’s not the division of labor or pervasive moral rules that violates sanctity of the home or family, it’s the destruction of family ties. I’m not religious any more, but I am also not aware of anything in Jewish belief that would promote forcibly taking a child away from his or her parents. I can think of two instances where a child is offered as sacrificed to God, but in the first (binding of Isaac) the sacrifice was aborted, and in the second instance the father (Yiftach) was punished with leprosy. Likewise the selling of daughters into domestic service was permitted but not forcible taking.
Sorry, to be clear, I meant “we” as in “the people who would end up being slavers in this situation”; it doesn’t mean that we unanimously agree that slavery is great whether you’re a slave or not, it means some of us declare that slavery is OK and enslave the rest. Democratically, it would take 51% of the population of enslave as much as 49%, no?
If it wasn’t for those who insisted that the process of human reproduction is too sanctified to mess with, then we’d be able to do things like use IVF and genetic screening, combined with genetic editing techniques, to ensure that people with Huntington’s can safely have children without passing on the disease.
Why? I get it - that’s your moral framework - but I make the effort to justify my moral framework; what’s the justification for yours?
OK, so in the hypothetical world you presented, where some force (AI, skull shape, whatever) can genuinely tell us with 100% certainty that a parent will abuse or kill their child, you would not support breaking family ties to save the child?
Are you against taking a child away after abuse occurs? After all, family ties are sacred no matter what.
I see. In that case, no, I wouldn’t support that from the veil of ignorance, or even without it.
I don’t have a single justification for all of my beliefs. The fact that there isn’t a single justification is a major tenet of the system. It’s a patchwork system that I try to keep consistent, practical, and conscionable, with the goal of guiding future action.
I would not.
I am not. I would even support taking a child away before abuse occurs, but not without wrongdoing by the parent. For example if the parent abuses another child. In such circumstances the action of the parent violates the ‘sanctity’ of the family, such violation coming from within, it isn’t a violation at all. Just like if I invite you into my home, you aren’t violating the sanctity of my home; so too, if I destroy my own door, and you can see inside, you aren’t violating my privacy.