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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post
[Content warning: brief, vivid description of footbinding and female circumcision.]
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the social justice movement, it would be to get everyone to stop fucking using group membership as an argument.
“This can’t be sexist, I’m a woman.” “This is transphobic; I know, I’m trans.” “Listen to LGB people about what homophobia is.” “Actual people of color don’t think that’s racist.” This is a terrible argument and all of you should stop.
(“All of you” includes anti-social-justice people, by the way. Don’t like this post and turn around and reblog a “twenty people of color say cultural appropriation is stupid!” picset.)
Debi Pearl is a woman who argues that women should never say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands, leave an abusive husband, work outside the home, or use birth control. Anne Lawrence is a trans woman who is one of the major researchers involved in the division of trans women into homosexual transsexuals (men who are, like, really super gay) and autogynephiliac transsexuals (straight men with a sexual fetish for being women). Courage is a Catholic organization whose members are mostly LGB people, which argues that if LGB people ever have an unrepented orgasm they will be tortured for eternity. Does “listen to trans women about transmisogyny” have an implicit “except for Anne Lawrence”? If we say “I’m a woman; I know what’s sexist and what isn’t”, how can we respond to a woman who says that what’s really sexist is denying women’s essential feminine nature which limits her to marriage and babies?
Members of marginalized groups have the same diversity of opinion that people who aren’t members of marginalized groups do. This is because members of marginalized groups are people, with people’s tendency to have their own opinions, rather than members of the Oppression Borg. In fact, the whole argument is oppressive, I think; it pedestalizes oppressed people by assuming they are always correct, and erases the differences and diversity among marginalized people, presenting them as a stereotyped group that all shares the same opinions.
Now, I don’t mean to say that the argument from opinion poll is never relevant. Some arguments are similar to the argument that you shouldn’t chew with your mouth open because it will disgust people at the dinner table; they are about some small matter, easily avoided, that predictably upsets people. You shouldn’t draw Mohammad, because Muslims will be upset; you shouldn’t say the n word unless you are black, because black people will be upset. Such common courtesies make up the stuff of civilized life. In that case, if it turned out the majority of black people or Muslims were just fine with white use of the n word or drawing Mohammad, the argument would lose its force.
(Caveats: I said ‘small’; while it is easy for me to go through my whole life without drawing Mohammad, it is not easy for a lesbian to go through her whole life without holding hands with her girlfriend in public, and the offense caused to homophobes in the latter case does not outweigh her desire to hold hands with a woman. In addition, there are good reasons to deliberately cause offense, most notably protest.)
But the majority of social justice arguments do not take this form. Women should be able to leave abusive partners because abuse causes people pain, and it is bad for people to suffer unnecessary pain. The division between autogynephile and homosexual transsexuals does not reflect reality, and it is bad to have models that do not reflect reality. LGB people should be able to have orgasms because orgasms are nice. These arguments do not depend on the input of Ms. Pearl, Ms. Lawrence, or the esteemed members of Courage. At best, an opinion poll of marginalized people provides slight evidence about what may or may not be harmful to them– but this evidence can be clearly outweighed.
It is time to take up the thorny issue of internalized -isms– when women, or LGBT people, or poor people or people of color, or disabled people believe -ist things that hurt themselves. A lot of people don’t like talking about internalized -isms. This impulse comes from a kind place. There is a long history of people using “oh, you’ve just internalized sexism” as a way to ignore other people’s arguments. This is called Bulverism and it’s rude. As my friend Keller says, treat people you’re arguing with as though they came to their opinions through a disinterested process of pure reason; psychologize those not involved in the conversation.
The other reason a lot of people dislike the concept of internalized -isms is that it has so often been used to delegitimize people’s preferences. Women who wear lipstick, do sex work, stay at home to raise their children, or enjoy kinky sex have long been accused of only doing those things because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Fat people who want to lose weight, autistic people who want a cure, and trans people who think being trans fucking sucks may frown on the idea that they’d be perfectly happy the way they are if not for the evil forces of society.
But without the concept of internalized -isms many things do not make sense.
For one thing, many people report feeling ashamed of their bodies because they were fat, or like they were worth less if they had promiscuous sex, or like they would be ugly if they did not wear lipstick, or like slowly limping along in pain is better than painless, fast use of a wheelchair– and then finding social justice and realizing that those things aren’t true. It would be very strange indeed if every person that applied to had already found social justice and realized those things aren’t true.
For another, women are fifty percent of the population. Sexism could not last long unless there was considerable buy-in from women. There was a point when the majority of American women didn’t want the vote, because it would tarnish their purity and anyway they had the real power through influencing men. This isn’t something that men imposed on women; it’s something women and men agreed on. It is not that men cruelly denied the vote from women who were thirsting for it; it’s that both men and women agreed that the women shouldn’t have the vote. Was denying women the vote unsexist until it ticked over and 50.1% of women thought they ought to have the right to vote? And, of course, if you buy that logic, how would women ever get the vote at all? How could you convince half of women that it was sexist, if you don’t think it’s sexist until half of women agree?
And if you’re willing to bite the bullet on that– Chinese women, with crippled feet, who could barely walk, and who spoke about how happy they were to be so graceful, so delicate. A woman whose clitoris was burned off and her labia sewn together, glad about how it helped her preserve her chastity. Women who iron their daughters’ breasts the way their own were ironed, who jump into the funeral pyre when their husbands die, who can count on one hand the number of times they’ve seen the sun.
Because make no mistake– those institutions did not survive over the opposition of women. As Andrea Dworkin said in a different context, “Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country.” Patriarchy survived because women believed, women were taught, patriarchy was right, and just, and the way things ought to be.
I confess I don’t know how to deal with internalized sexism; I expect “oh, you don’t know what’s good for you, you poor thing” to be as ineffective and offensive directed at the footbound Chinese woman as it is directed at the modern sexual submissive. Indeed, that thought process seems oppressive in itself; the allegedly benevolent denial of autonomy, the assumption that others know better than the individual what is good for them, is at the core of much sexism (particularly that direct at white women) and ableism. But not knowing how to deal with internalized isms doesn’t mean we should pretend internalized isms don’t exist.
I say: it is possible for women to be sexist against themselves, to believe sexist things, things that cause them tremendous pain; indeed, this is the normal condition for members of oppressed groups, and correctly identifying that it is unfair when people hurt you and they should stop is the exception. Therefore, when we make arguments, we must make them based on facts about the world, and on values, not based on opinion polls or the Marginalized Group Hivemind.
Liskantope said:
It depends on whether the anti-SJer’s point is that not all people of color object to cultural appropriation so stop claiming “All people of color understand this, so why don’t you just listen?”, or that a bunch of people of color think “cultural appropriation” is stupid therefore “cultural appropriation” is stupid. The former is basically another form of the “stop using group membership” argument, while the latter, I agree, is hypocritical.
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MugaSofer said:
>The former is basically another form of the “stop using group membership” argument
Indeed, one used by Ozy in this exact essay, with all the examples of group members agreeing Bad Thing isn’t bad.
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code16 said:
(Was this post meant to be two posts by any chance? It really feels like it is. (To be clear, they’re both really good posts and I like them!))
Also, I think that the identities-as-arguments thing is one of those things that takes a really important idea and goes to the wrong place with it. And, the thing is, it’s not even a *controversial* important idea – it’s literally the idea ‘primary sources are important’. Like, if you wanted to know what chocolate cake tastes like, you would want to get information from people who’d eaten chocolate cake. If you wanted to know what being in trench warfare was like, you’d want to get that information from people who’d been in it. And similarly when you want to know, say, how LGB* people experience living in a heteronormative world, you want to get that information from LGB* people.
And, that doesn’t mean all of them will agree with each other, or will tell you the whole story, or will know everything there is to know about the topic in general, or will have beliefs about the experience that you have to agree with.
But if you’re arguing about actual experience, then people who have that experience should be there.
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thirqual said:
Tentative suggestion: it is very easy to slip from
“X experienced Y and can bring the best information about Y, and how it affected their life”
to
“X experienced Y and thus their model, of how Y affect their life and that of people sharing the following characteristics α, β and γ of X, is the correct one”.
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throwaway said:
This may be a tangent, but I’m curious about this:
Like, autogynephilia is a real thing, right? Various niche porn sites, blogs, and testimonials, and my own experience, all support the existence of “straight men with a sexual fetish for being women”. Many such people find relief and/or gratification in taking hormones or transitioning.
Is the objection just to the idea that all MTF transgender folks fall into one of those two categories? Because I get the impression that this is kind of a misreading of the theory (e.g. http://alicedreger.com/autogyn).
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ozymandias said:
Many trans women have autogynephiliac fantasies, but that doesn’t mean they transition because of their autogynephiliac fantasies; in my case, autoandrophiliac fantasies are obviously a coping mechanism for gender dysphoria, and I believe this is true of the majority of trans women with autogynephiliac fantasies as well. Sexual orientation is not the major distinction between women who have autogynephiliac fantasies and women who don’t. And straight trans women are not really super gay men.
In general, theories about transness that don’t acknowledge the reality of sex and social dysphoria are extremely wrongheaded.
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viviennemarks said:
So this reminds me of my FAVORITE case of this issue coming up, and I thought I’d share it with the class:
So I was once in an argument about an SJ-ish issue (trigger warnings) involving multiple people, when my chief argumentative opponent, who was vehemently against them, piped in with “Well, I have [tragic backstory] and suffer [adverse consequences] from it, so really, I know more about this topic than those assembled, and you all should listen to me.”
And I blinked. I’m sure I looked like that scene from “The Office”. Because [tragic backstory] and [adverse consequences] were EXTREMELY SIMILAR to MY tragic backstory and adverse consequences. And we had diametrically opposed views! I’ve never liked Group Hivemind theory, but that was the single most tangible example I’ve experienced as to WHY.
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Patrick said:
The fact that people experience feeling one way about something, finding social justice, then feeling differently about it, proves literally nothing about internalized ‘isms. That is the common experience of an ideological recruit, regardless of the truth of the ideology.
Of course, ideologies can’t acknowledge that. They can’t acknowledge that the reason people feel differently after joining is that the ideology taught them to feel differently, because that would mean that the ideology’s teachings aren’t as natural, obvious, or self evident as the ideology would like to proclaim. So ideologies have explanations for why the natural, obvious, and self evident truths they proclaim are somehow not accepted by the vast majority of the human race.
Social justice uses internalized ‘isms for this purpose.
This is one of the biggest reasons why you can never, ever, EVER trust a convert’s report of their conversion experience. They will always, always describe their pre-conversion self in terms of the ideology and world view to which they’ve converted. They are the least reliable narrator of their own life experiences.
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Teddy said:
[What follows is probably more radical that what I actually believe, but I want to attempt the argument]
I think “internalized -isms” are hermaneutics, not phenomena. They are subjective choices about how to interpret events. Certainly, there are women who understand their lived experience in terms of internalized oppression. This helps them make sense of that experience and decide how to move forward. But that is not the only hermaneutical choice and as you recognize, many women choose to interpret their lives in a way that logically contradicts internalized oppression. This is OK!
We should embrace a pluralism where each person gets to make their own interpretive choices to understand their own lives: You can interpret your own experience through the lens of internalized oppression (or any lens you choose) but you should refrain from interpreting other peoples’ experiences for them, even if their experiences are very similar to you own.
This demands pluralism and acceptance of irreconcilable differences: you and I can each interpret our lives and come to logically contradictory contradictory conclusions. But we should embrace each other’s autonomy instead of demanding to resolve the logical contradictions between the two.
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Lambert said:
Theories with internalised oppression and those without will often reach different predictions about the world. one will make correct predictions more than the other, making it, on a certain level, a better theory. People should embrace the right of others to their opinions, but it does not make all opinions correct.
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mdaniels4 said:
I liked Viviennemarks’ comment from psychological theory. Two people can have almost eerily similar experiences but how they are used to fit a function into the fictional final goal of the individual expression. Personally, soeaking of rules regarding civility and of human interaction, we have lost the Golden Rule. I don’t treat transfolks any different than other folks. I don’t want to be called out for my weirdness so whether i think it’s weird or not, which i don’t is immaterial. I don’t treat blacks differently because i would not like them treating me differently if i went to their church or neighborhood. I do object to all people’s behaviors but certainly not their beingness.
And that’s what bothers me about extremists of any ilk. That musllim terrorists chop off heads of anyone who offends them is the height of this individualistic and internalized nonsense. Would they appreciate anyone killing their kids or selves because of my individual being offended? The BLM activists do not realize that their tactics will prolong their struggle because of this groupthink. ALL black people do not believe all policemen have a death wish for black people. I think a better method would be to state a position of “we’re people too” or something like gathering white support by asking policemen if they would like their kids and families treated like this. The ones involved in their own demise are certainly not innocents, and whether the situation needed escalation to that point is debatable. But to say all blacks believe all policemento be bad, the groupthink issue here, and then to use that for the justification to ambush a policeman is deplorable.
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AJD said:
What’s the difference you’re intending to draw between “black lives matter” and “we’re people too”?
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mdaniels4 said:
Because black lives are as important as white, yellow and ted lives. We have alot of serious issues, and i will not be be limited by a narrow shallow and narrow point of virw.
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osberend said:
Also, if we’re talking about the tactics of the BLM folks, the libeling of people who say “All Lives Matter” (a good, sensible liberal principle) as crypto-racists who secretly don’t believing that blacks are people is kind of a big elephant in the room.
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Nita said:
Osberend, have you ever seen someone use “X matters” to convey the idea that only X matters, whereas Z and Y don’t?
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Nita said:
In my experience, this phrase is usually employed to say “people often act as if X doesn’t matter, but actually it does”.
Examples:
https://www.qualitymatters.org/
http://www.democracymatters.org/
http://itmatters.com/
http://www.conventionindustry.org/ResearchInfo/FaceTimeInternal.aspx
http://creationwhyitmatters.com/
http://hdoa.hawaii.gov/add/md/buy-local-it-matters/
http://www.im2to.com/
According to these sites, the following things matter:
quality
democracy
education
face time
creation
buying local
individual donations
Is each of them implicitly saying that nothing else matters?
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stillnotking said:
It’s the normal human condition. Men are hardly immune from believing false and hurtful things about ourselves, and the difference in gender prevalence can’t even be very pronounced, or our society would look much different than it does. I think you will have a hard time making the case that 21st-century American women are an “oppressed group”, by any faintly realistic historical standard.
Also, I think you are misinterpreting Dworkin: She’s not asserting that women refrain from killing men out of internalized sexism, but out of a hope that we will one day deserve not to be killed. I’m not sure if that makes the statement more crazy, or less, but it’s fucking crazy either way.
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AJD said:
Ozy said they were quoting Dworkin out of context.
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Sinclair said:
I quite like this article but have a minor nitpick that isn’t related to what you said at all:
>Debi Pearl is a woman who argues that women should never say ‘no’ to sex
I have never heard of Debi Pearl before, but a quick glance through her website leads me to believe that she would expect women to say ‘no’ to premarital sex. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
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ozymandias said:
Thank you, fixed.
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Desertopa said:
I regard internalized-isms as a real phenomenon, and a real force in society, but there’s another reason that a lot of people don’t like attributions of internalized-isms which I don’t feel you’ve addressed here, which I can speak for myself.
My concern is that, as you say, members of marginalized groups are people, with the diversity of opinion that entails, and as such, this leaves open not just the possibility, but the practical certainty, that some members of marginalized groups will consider issues which touch on their identities, give them serious thought, and come to conclusions that are simply wrong. Some of them may draw upon internalized prejudices. Some may interpret evidence selectively, or make faulty assumptions about others’ motives, or extrapolate wrongly based on available date, or any of a host of errors which a personal stake in an issue does not shield a person from. The invocation of internalized-isms is also a standard argument wielded against people arguing *against* arguments from identity. When one person argues that all members of a oppressed group cannot hold privileged access to the truth, others will often counter that yes, members of oppressed groups can hold wrong beliefs about matters relating to their identity, *when they buy into internalized oppression. So distinguishing between which oppressed people’s views should be taken as gospel, and which should be discarded, comes down to determining who’s subject to internalized oppression.
The trouble is that proponents of arguments from identity tend to be much more willing to grant that members of oppressed groups can be subject to internalized oppression than that they can also fall prey to the same sort of errors of reasoning that can affect everyone else.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
This is very similar to the problem communists were running into in 19th century: they were all about presenting themselves as the champions of the working class, but most workers just didn’t agree that communists (who back then were mostly aristocrats, businessmen, and other people way more privileged and educated than workers and peasants) were acting in their best interests. Communists were rather honest about that; they said that sure, workers aren’t educated, they can’t comprehend the complicated structure of the society and economy, and can’t plan for long term – which isn’t their fault, because it’s the exploiters who deprived them from education and time to ponder about complicated stuff – so they have to be educated as to what is best for them, and why kombeds are everything they ever dreamed of.
They didn’t admit out loud that the interests of workers were entirely irrelevant, and communists acted in the interests of communists, but given how little remorse they felt about running repressions against their enemies among the workers and peasants, it’s safe to say they understood it perfectly. Well, OK, I’m probably too harsh on them. The interests of workers were kind of relevant: almost everyone agreed that 14-hour work day is a rather bad deal, and wanted either to work less for the same wage, or get higher wage for the same work. It’s just that communism wasn’t the only way to 8-hour work day, and not all of those ways were bundled with such fun activities as dekulakization. So yes, some of the communist ideas were aligned with the workers’ interests, but only loosely, and most of them were about the communist dreams of the perfect world rather than what the workers actually wanted.
Likewise, I don’t think it would be that much of a stretch to say that social justice community mostly acts in the interests of the social justice community, which only occasionally coincide with the aggregated interests of the groups they’re claiming to champion for. On one hand, this solves our problem: situation in which we have a random political platform, and have to go around persuading people that this is what they should support, is entirely normal. On the other hand, of course, it hugely undermines the ethical strength of the argument: instead of directly representing huge chunks of the society, it gets demoted to yet another political position, on which people can disagree without being terrible.
There’s a catch though. Most preferences are neither innate nor caused by ghosts – they’re directly or indirectly taught by the society, which doesn’t make them any less genuine. Women whose preference is to be housewives say that they’re worse off in the modern society than in the traditional one, but their percentage has probably drastically decreased since 19th century, and there are more women who wish and can pursue fulfilling careers. Thus, while immediately transporting 19th century women to the modern society would probably result in few women who, despite all the social pressure, dreamed of pursuing careers being much happier, but overall be net negative (the Soviets sort of did this experiment: despite the attempts to do so, they didn’t manage to eliminate a huge gender disparity in the amount of housework done, but they did basically grant universal suffrage and universal employment overnight, and with state-mandated wages and huge maternity benefits, gender pay gap boiled down to doing on average different jobs rather than being paid differently for the same work; Soviet women were unhappy about doing both their day jobs and housework, but they mostly wished to do housework only, instead of day jobs only), transferring 21st century women to the traditional society would be a huge net negative, since way more of them now want to pursue careers, and be treated equally with men, instead of restricted and pedestalized at the same time. Therefore, we can argue that even if a certain social reformist project may not reflect the interests of the majority of currently living humans, few generations down the road everyone will prefer the new way. Furthermore, we can argue that overall the new way will generate more utility: for example, although a woman whose preference is being a housewife and who is a housewife can be happy, a woman whose preference to be an astronaut and who is an astronaut is way happier, since no amount of love and familial bonds can compete with the majesty of seeing the Earth from space, but to really appreciate that and not feel unhappy about spending your entire life studying and training instead of having lots of children, one would have to want to be an astronaut and not be a housewife in the first place. Thus, making these changes to the society is not only acceptable, but desirable, since at the end everyone is gonna be happier than they would have been otherwise.
However, in this case we’re running into the tricky ethics of engineering preferences in general, and engineering preferences of yet unborn humans particularly. Like I do believe that (at least until the point when we have mind uploading, and most current carbon-based problems are irrelevant) gender equality and possibly gender abolitionism is the way to go. I also believe that for a gazillion reasons (including but by no means limited to easing the gender abolition problem) the society is which everyone is pansexual is gonna be way happier than the current version with the wide variety of sexual orientations, with heterosexuality being the majority. I’m ambivalent as to whether or not I would support the project of figuring out what we need to add to water supply and cartoons to make ever increasing number of people pansexual (provided that it’s possible: currently there are no known ways to change one’s sexual orientation, and those that are claimed to do it end up being horrible abuse, but based on general biological principles I find it unlikely that it’s in theory impossible to control with non-harmful interventions). I suppose a lot of people would start yelling at me at this point already, for considering such ideas. But worse than that, I could also see a somewhat strong argument (though without even a slightest inclination to actually support it) that a society where everyone is heterosexual is also better than the status quo (although not to the same extent as the pansexual society, but this depends on one’s values). I’ll refrain from naming even more terrible examples that fit into the pattern “against current preferences, but everyone is happier after a while”, but it’s not at all hard to come up with them. So unless we figure a way to solve this dilemma, I’m not 100% how to treat such arguments. Well, unless I resign myself to moral realism, and claim that my values are the best just because.
Actually, does the utility of the former outweigh the utility of the latter by a large enough margin to be sure? Like if we take some incredibly homophobic country like Uganda, where 96% of people think that homosexuality is unacceptable, and assume that the remaining 4% are half gay, and half lesbian, and every lesbian has a partner, for every couple who wants to hold hands there are 96 people who are offended by them doing so. So every one of them has to be only 1/48 as unhappy about seeing lesbians as they’re unhappy about not holding hands. I’m not 100% sure that with a strong enough homophobic propaganda this standard is impossible to meet. Of course if we include bullying, ostracism, and state-mandated violence, then yes, pretty darn impossible. But the choice is just between holding or not holding hands in public, I’m not that certain it’s the case.
Personally, I’m with the lesbians on this one, but this is either on deontological grounds (first, I endorse “any people who want to hold hands should be able to do so without anyone yelling at them” as a universal rule, want it to be applied to me, and apply it to others; second, I endorse “no consensual sexuality is a moral transgression” too – thus I disregard preferences against these rules in ethical calculations) or on the grounds of ingroup/outgroup dynamics (I have many lesbian friends, and I strongly empathize with them, while I find homophobes obnoxious, and don’t want to be friends with them; some people would read me as a lesbian, so I have a vested interest in having acceptance, and whether or not I’m actually a lesbian depends on the tricky question what my gender is). But I don’t think I can make a strong enough utilitarian argument that publicly displaying affection is guaranteed to be net positive in happiness or preference satisfaction. The society in which no one holds preferences against public displays of affection is obviously net positive, but doing that when such preferences exist and are strong and wide-spread – not sure. Though again, I don’t alieve moral relativism on certain questions, and only do these calculations for abstract discussions, while actually just sticking to my own preferences.
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Ghatanathoah said:
>Actually, does the utility of the former outweigh the utility of the latter by a large enough margin to be sure?
There are a couple good utilitarian reasons to endorse offending homophobes. One reason is that when people learn they can get you change your behavior by being offended, their response is usually to get offended by more things. So it’s a good idea to avoid punishing people who unintentionally offend others.
Secondly, exposure to offensive stimuli often has the same effect as exposure to fearful stimuli: desensitization. People will often stop finding something offensive if they are exposed to it enough, and it doesn’t hurt anyone in any other way. So not holding hands may well be a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Lastly, on a more meta-level, I’m not sure how much a person’s “morality” type preferences should count when doing a utilitarian calculation of their wellbeing. If you count people’s “morality” preferences the same as their personal ones you get all sorts of weird results. For instance, two utilitarians together could produce infinite utility, because one if one utilitarian has one preference mildly satsified, that satisfies the other utilitarian’s preference that more people have satisfied preferences, which in turn satisfies the first utilitarians preference that more people have satisfied preferences, and so on. It definitely feels like when I donate money to effective charities that I am harming myself to make others better off, I don’t think I should count myself as being better off because I have a “morality” preference for increasing global utility.
So maybe we just shouldn’t count people’s “morality” preference that gay people shouldn’t hold hands. I’m not sure if we should count the disgust they feel at perceiving the handholding as a “morality” preference or a personal preference to not feel disgust.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
> (1) and (2)
Isn’t this an equally strong argument against the following?
If so, what’s your take on those, and if not, what’s the difference?
> Lastly, on a more meta-level, I’m not sure how much a person’s “morality” type preferences should count when doing a utilitarian calculation of their wellbeing.
That is a very interesting idea, and I need to think more about it. On the first glance, it looks kinda close to the justification for destroying other cultures, but I’m not sure about it. Maybe it’s not.
Plus, yes, different people may disagree as to what counts as morality. I’m not sure that to do about that.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I think there are a couple reasons why it isn’t quite as strong an argument against common courtesy.
1. You need to pick your battles. Expressing affection in public is a much more common need than drawing Mohammad or saying the N word, so it makes sense to focus the desensitization towards that area.
2. It seems obvious that many people could be made much less sensitive than they currently are. But it also seems likely that there is a limit to how much humans can be desensitized to things. The fact that homosexuality has gained a lot of acceptance in the past decades indicated that it is something that people can be desensitized to. I’m not sure if things like racial slurs can be similarly desensitized. Obviously you can change which specific individual words are offensive, but if a word carries the idea that [I do not respect you because of your race] I doubt people will ever not be offended by it.
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Orphan said:
>although a woman whose preference is being a housewife and who is a housewife can be happy, a woman whose preference to be an astronaut and who is an astronaut is way happier, since no amount of love and familial bonds can compete with the majesty of seeing the Earth from space
I have a suspicion that I know which of the two you’d prefer.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
That was said with a bit of irony. You may substitute any activity that any oppressed group used to unable to do, and only a small portion wanted to do it, and now they all can do it, and more of them want to do it. More broadly, in fact, substitute any activity enabled by the technological and social progress. To pick the most neutral example I can think of, consider bike lanes. Bicycles have been around for a while, as well as busy roads. However, not until reasonably recently cyclists started campaigning for building bike lanes, and get upset about their absence. Before everyone was satisfied without bike lanes, and now only with them, generating the same amount of satisfaction under different conditions. However, bike lanes are also objectively safer to use, so if we consider not only preference satisfaction level, but also life and health as values independent from how much they make people happy, changing both the urban planning and preferences of cyclists is net positive.
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mdaniels4 said:
And why, btw, would a female astronaut be inherently more happy doing what she wanted to do, and does, than a housewife that what she wants to do, and does. That makes no sense to me.
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Lambert said:
a consideration for bike lanes is that, with growing congestion, bike lanes are becoming much more important. My grandfather cycled to the south of France just fine. If I tried that on roads, I would probably get killed.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
@mdaniels4
This goes directly against the principles of preference utilitarianism, so it’s highly controversial, and I have a very low confidence in such ideas, but it doesn’t seem that far off in hedonic utilitarianism. If you think of two people with equally high libido, but one deliberately, without any social pressure to do so chooses to repress their sexuality on religious grounds, while the other chooses to have lots of sex and cuddles. The preferences of both are equally satisfied, but, although again, I have very low confidence in this, I think it could be the case that the one who has lots of sex is overall happier. It doesn’t mean that having lots of sex would work better for the chaste one, since that would go directly against their preferences, and given their preferences, not having sex is the happiness-maximizing strategy. But it could I think be the case that the maximum amount of happiness extractible from the preference to have lots of sex could be higher.
@Lambert
True, but there’s also a growing concern for safety. 1960s cars were death traps. If this graph is true, the total number of car accidents by mile driven remained stable since 1975, while the population has grown, which means that the odds of a fatal crash have decreased – presumably due to the increased safety. My intuitive feeling from reading literature from different periods is that throughout 20th century people in developed countries have been getting less and less on board with death, as the overall safety of life increased.
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Vamair said:
I think the problem is not so much with preference utilitarianism as with incomplete knowledge. I don’t see any problem with a person deciding to be chaste in a world where the religion that tells him to do that is a correct one. No more than I have problems with a person deciding to go chaste if it increases their productivity or if they have health problems. So I do believe that for preference utilitarianism to be correct, we may accept that the person’s preferences may be wrong. I think IRL it usually happens because of some wrong factual beliefs, but it can also be a result of some bad preference structure.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I think that “internalized oppression” has an important flipside: the Hostile Media Effect and various similar phenomena. People with partisan ideologies and identities tend to perceive the world as much more hostile to them than it actually is. This is why you can get people seriously arguing things like men or Christians suffer more severe oppression (on average) in the USA than transpeople do.
A person being a member of a group does not mean that they are right or wrong about something being oppressive. I’m not about to believe that saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is oppressing Christians just because they keep telling me it is. I’m not about to believe that “microaggressions” are anything other than paranoid and mean-spirited people projecting onto others, just because POCs tell me they are oppressive.
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stillnotking said:
Exactly. On the list of human cognitive errors, mistakenly believing we’re not oppressed is very near the bottom, and mistakenly believing we are oppressed is very near the top. It’s telling that we feel the need to defend the former’s existence!
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Walter said:
I liked slatestarcodex’s theory of multiple axes of oppression being hard for people to accept to explain this.
Glancing at the world: Its very hard to argue that ladies getting X cents per dollar dude get isn’t oppressive. Similarly, its very hard to argue that dudes get a fair shake in custody disputes.
So ladies and dudes are oppressed? There’s basically no one I could go to and say that. If I told any of my facebook friends those 2 facts they’d deny one of them. My right buds would find fault with the comparative pay studies. My left friends would mutter about how custody is the way it is because of abusers.
But those are the facts on the ground (to this rando anyway), and so they keep being brought up. How to explain that? Obviously the reporters are part of the conspiracy. Evidence against is evidence for!
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ozymandias said:
Ghantanaoth: What is the other option to “microaggressions”? I mean, when I see a form that says “Check one: [] male [] female”, or someone giving gender as an example of a binary variable, it’s not a big deal, it’s not a huge life problem, but it is really annoying. Similarly, I can buy that an Asian woman getting told “me love you long time” is not a big deal, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s… well, really annoying. It seems to me that the word “microaggression” is an excellent way to talk about things that are really fucking annoying without either blowing them into a bigger deal than they are or acting like really annoying things don’t exist.
stillnotking: I don’t think people generally mistakenly believe they are marginalized. The classic example of evangelical Christians doesn’t hold up– evangelical Christians actually are fairly far from the Moral Therapeutic Deist mainstream, they are the subject of jokes and bullying, their rights to religious freedom are being infringed upon socially if not legally, and society is gradually rejecting their most cherished values even in secular form.
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Ghatanathoah said:
@ozymandias
I dislike the term “microagression” primarily because it contains the word “aggression,” it conveys the idea that the person is acting in an intentionally hostile manner and paints a much worse picture of the “microagressor’s” motives than is probably accurate. I think that it in fact does blow things into a bigger deal than they are, because it impugns upon the character of the “microaggressor.”
If instead of “microagression” you said something like “annoying thoughtlessness” or “tactlessness” I’d happily agree with you. I agree that people often have unconscious assumptions that make them say really annoying and thoughtless things. And accusing someone of not thinking something they said all the way through is a much smaller attack on their character than accusing them of aggressing against you.
I have read statements that microaggressions are often unintentional. But I suspect that that is one of those definitions of words people use when they are on the defensive, and that when they are not on the defensive they use definitions of that word that connote hostility.
I completely agree with you that people saying mildly annoying and thoughtless things to members of marginalized groups is a problem we should talk about and try to combat. I just disagree with you that microaggression is a good word to use for that phenomenon.
Furthermore, some of the examples of microaggression I’ve seen floating around the web seem to take offense from rather spurious leaps of logic. For instance, I can see how asking an Asian American where they are from, when you mean what country their ancestors are from, could be annoying to them. But I have then seen them make the following conclusions: “This person thinks that I am not from America originally. Therefore they think that most Asian people are not from America originally. Therefore they think that Asian people are outsiders who do not belong in America. Therefore they are racist, since it is racist to think POC do not belong in your country.”
This is a huge leap in logic! It’s totally possible to believe that Asian-Americans people are usually not originally from America, but also believe that Asian-Americans have just as much a right to be here as anyone else. That is what I meant when I said that microagressions were paranoid and mean-spirited. I’ve seen lots of instances in the social justice community of people jumping straight from “this person is implying this is uncommon” to “this person is implying this is bad” with no justification whatsoever.
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demiandproud said:
I’ve experienced intercultural experience as one of the most powerful antidotes to seeing anything I think, just or not, as natural. It’s improved my ability to reflect on my own beliefs and those of others. I think this is the biggest part of “intercultural skills”
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
But the real question is, does internalized bulverism exist?
I once saw a liberal who thought he only disliked Ann Coulter because she’s an outspoken woman…
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osberend said:
A bit of a tangent, but . . .
You shouldn’t draw Mohammad, because Muslims will be upset;
Muslims follow an evil religion. Muslims who get upset at non-Muslims drawing Mohammad are assholes who believe that because they follow an evil religion, they get to dictate what other people do, even those without that particular moral failing. Defying assholes when they attempt to dictate what you are allowed to do is a terminal good, even more so when some of them attempt to impose that dictate through violence. Draw Mohammad. Draw Mohammad everywhere. (And as pejoratively as possible, naturally.)
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Lambert said:
Muslims follow an evil religion. [citation needed] (and not just ‘here are some Jihadists’. Has very visible failure modes != wholly flawed.)
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osberend said:
Uh . . . the Qur’an? I can quote surah and ayah if you want, but it’s not like there are a dearth of examples.
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osberend said:
Alright, let’s do this. (cw: hell, reprisal, menstrual ridiculousness, marital rape (subject to interpretation), compulsion and punishment for being compelled, sexism)
Proceeding in order from the beginning (copied directly from the Muhammad Asad translation, which seems to widely be viewed as moderate but orthodox, from islamawakened.com (with some apparent typos untouched; only the attribution at the end of each quote and any bracketed elipses are mine); if you believe any typos are significant, or have another translation you believe is better, feel free to state that):
That’s all from a single surah. I can make a similarly methodical list from others, but for now, I’ll leave you with just this one quote from Surah 4:
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