And no, I don't have a Marxist view of history, and just because you believe something different from the consensus, or in this case, from the facts, doesn't make you right.
Heidegger, you must have missed what Robert said at the end of his comment, to which I was replying (though it was so far nested that I had to reply to an older comment to reply to it). You're a strange puppy.
And yes, I've bullied my way through life. Just today I locked a kid in his locker, and put another's head in the toilet and flushed it.
Robert, I grew up in a house a mile from the site of the destruction of the Army of Tennessee under Hood in 1864, in a small town where the schools were all (at the time, all) nicknamed "the Rebels," and where Civil War buff-ism wasn't so much a hobby as a city-wide obsession. I have spent far, far too much of my adult life arguing with other grown men (always men, of course) about whether Gettysburg would have turned out differently had Jackson been alive, or what widespread guerrilla warfare in the mountains after April 12 would have meant. I suspect that I'd forgotten more about that war by the age of 25 than you will ever know, even if my interests in warfare have moved on to other conflicts (mostly the two major Prussian wars in the 1860s and early 70s, World War I, and World War II). I point this out so that you'll understand that I speak from a position of knowledge when I say that Hummel's work is widely regarded (and rightly so) as bull fuckin' shit.
Anyway, my main point was that the tariffs remained high for decades after 1861, and the South wasn't supplying 75% of the revenue. They wouldn't have been in 1860, either. They were protectionist tariffs, designed to promote northern industry, but since the South imported most of its stuff from the north, that just meant that the South would be funding industry, not the government.
Robert, I agree with you that the foot soldier wasn't, generally, fighting for slavery. I disagree with you that this has anything to do with the cause of the war, and I also disagree with you that slavery was merely one amongst a constellation of causes. It was the cause, the one without which there would not have been an American Civil War.
It's clear you really know nothing about the period. The Morrill Tariff did pass, in 1861, and tariffs like it were in place for decades, but the southern states didn't end up paying 75% of the federal budget, or any other number you've made up. It is true that tariffs played a role in Lincoln's election, though not because it hurt him in the southern states, but because it helped him in pro-protectionist northern states. Southerners din't want high tariffs, but they weren't going to war over it, and until they left Congress over the issue of slavery, the Morrill Tariff and other high tarriffs had been unable to pass and southern states had been
able to keep tarriff rates low.
Anyway, the main reason I don't reallyagree with you is that the sort of Confederate apologia in which you're engaging, w hich actively tries to minimize the absolutely crucial and, above all other issues, causal role of slavery in the war, disgusts me.
That's not quite the story (OK, it's not really even close to the story), but it's undeniably true that most of the food soldiers were fighting because they were down here, or because it was the honorable and manly thing to do (and if you didn't, you'd have a hard time facing your neighbors). That's how the Southern elite sold it to them, too. Of course, the Southern elite were fighting to preserve their way of life, which is to say, their source of wealth, which is to say, slavery. I think it's safe to say that if the southern elite, who organized, financed, and for the most part commanded the military were the ones who chose to go to war, so that if they didn't go to war because they were down here, then the cause of the war wasn't them being down here, any more than the cause of the Iraq war is that there are soldiers who want to defend their country.
I see nothing wrong with discussing and even praising the military savvy, and perhaps even genius, of Forrest or Jackson. They were two of the few genuinely innovative American military minds in our relatively short history (how much shorter might the war have been if we'd had a Blumenthal or a Moltke, two pick two names from the same period?), and that's something worth mentioning. That doesn't mean we should name schools after them, or have holidays celebrating them, or anything of that sort. Hell, it doesn't even mean we should go out of our way to talk about them, particularly when there are more noble individuals to celebrate from that period, as this post was, I believe, trying to say.
By the way, I've always thought Company Aytch was a good look inside the mindset of a Confederate foot soldier. If Watkins' post-war version of his motivations are to be believed, it's a little more complicated than "Because they're down here," and southern propaganda certainly played a role, but he wasn't thinking to himself that he was fighting to preserve slavery (though he certainly wasn't opposed to slavery).
I saw a documentary about Smalls about 2 years ago, on PBS maybe. His story is even more impressive. He served in the S.C. state legislature, apparently very successfully, and when he went to the U.S. House of Representatives, he was a fighter, even trying to desegregate the military, though unsuccessfully (obviously). Oh, and when he returned to South Carolina, he bought his former master's house. That's just awesome.
It's a crying shame that there are so many people who still celebrate the men who fought to preserve a way of life that was dependent on the enslavement of almost 40% of its residents, but so few who celebrate men like Smalls.
I believe DAR is speaking of qualia, rather than consciousness more generally, when he says that Dennett denies its existence; and of these he does, quite clearly, deny existence. This is of course why he talks about automata with the same brain states being conscious, because this directly answers not an argument for the existence of consciousness, but an argument for the difficulty of it as a philosophical/scientific problem (though we should use the highly technical and esoteric term of the literature, even if it's a slight anachronism for discussions of Consciousness Explained: zombies).
There's much that's wrong with Dennett's view of consciousness, in part because the science has advanced well beyond where it was back when Dennett was writing extensively about consciousness, but also because, well, given everything we know, first person experience is not only real (and therefore a real problem for materialism, even if we don't dig bats, zombies, or two-dimensional semantics), but given everything we know now and knew then, which includes the best conceptual and empirical evidence available to us, it is logically impenetrable from a third-person perspective. The only way to deny this, which is what denying the existence of qualia amounts to, is to deny that consciousness itself exists (at least, this is the only way to deny the impenetrability of first-person experience from a physicalist perspective -- it's apparently perfectly penetrable by god under some non-physicalist views). At least, I think this is what DAR was getting at, and if so, then he and I agree on this point.
Also, Dennett looks like Santa Claus. Given the season, I think this needs to be pointed out. That is all.
Also, the Spanish Inquisition is a good example, sort of like 1930s Germany, of how nationalism is equally a product of the need for a unified culture in order to maintain authoritarian, and especially autocratic control. You have to have everyone on the same page, and one way to do that is to get the people who are already roughly on your page to be even more on your page by pitting them against a perceived (often created, even) threatening outgroup. This has the dual benefits for the authoritarian ruler hat at the same time you get a bunch of people to be more fervent supporters of your “home-grown” rule, you get rid of the people who are less likely to support it. It also seems to help if you have some Jews around to paint as the threatening outgroup, as the Spain and Germany show.
In Europe, nationalism is sort of invented by the Napoleonic wars.
Depends on where you are in Europe. You’ll find pretty strong nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 16th century, at least (I suspect it goes back further). I know this in particular of Poland, Lithuania, the Don region, and other parts of western Russia and Ukraine.
Nationalism is less a product of the loss of custom, I think, than it is the product of perceived threat, be it internal or external. One sort of internal threat is a loss of custom, so it’s not that your hypothesis is wrong, it’s just only one part of the story. I’m not sure it really explains India and Pakistan (there is a whole hell of a lot going on there), but it probably has something to do with a lot of examples of radical nationalism in the last century or so, including Germany in the late 19th century and the 1930s.
I disagree about the Bonus Army, even if the effects weren't immediate (see: post World War II), but whatever, it doesn't matter. There are dozens of examples in the places and periods I've mentioned, that, even if they weren't global, produced results that affected many more lives.
But before we try to argue that point, why don't you tell me what you think it was that the Scientology protests achieved.
I'm not much older than you, to be honest, but I've read a little bit about, you know, the 20th century, or the 19th, and hell, even the 18th. If you're going to start looking for more effective protests, you could do worse than googling the year 1229 Paris, or staying in Paris, check out the 1780s, or look at Ireland and England in the 19th century (America's major pre-1865 political issue will furnish you with some examples as well), the draft riot in NYC, then the suffrage movement and its protest actions, the various labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the Bonus Army, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the anti-war movement in the 60s, the recent nationwide strikes in Spain and France, and so on (there are literally thousands of examples). If you want extent, you only have to go as far back as 2002-03, to the anti-war protests that were global on, at times, a spectacular scale (though their failure was pretty spectacular as well).
Seriously, it's not hard to find more effective protests, and it's probably not all that hard to find larger ones, though more global would have to be more recent, since this sort of thing didn't go global really until the 1960s. But maybe it's not perspective you lack, but hyperbole you have too much of.
"was responsible for one of the most extensive, global, and effective protest actions in history."
Most extensive, maybe, most global, maybe (though that might be redundant), but one of the most effective protest actions in history? Dude, you must be really young, not to mention a bit short in the perspective department (and historical knowledge department, to boot).
By the way, the argument is never simply, “Two consenting adults should be able to marry because they love each other.” That may be all the arguer ever says, but implicit in this are several other premises, not the least of which is that their marriage, or at least the class of marriage, will not be harmful to others (I can think of plenty of heterosexual marriages that are harmful to others). So, the counterargument has to address these premises, even if they’re left unspoken. One can easily come up with potential arguments (I’m not saying they’re actually valid) against, say, incest, by pointing out that incestuous relationships are harmful to the children they produce, or to society in general (just ask the Egyptians, eh?). The same kinds of arguments could be made against bigamy: there is evidence, for example, that it is harmful to the women involved, and it might (I’m not saying it is) be harmful to the children involved as well.
The point being that, in the case of same sex marriage, the top of the slope and the bottom of the slope are only connected in a relevant way if the two are alike on all of the relevant dimensions, and the slippery slope arguers never seem to get that far, because while it’s trivial to say that gay couples, incestuous couples, and bigamists love each other in similar ways, it’s nontrivial to say that everything else about the couples, and their affects on those around them, is the same.
The reason that slippery slope arguments are fallacious is for precisely this reason: they don’t argue the thing. They argue something else, in lieu of the thing, and the argue that something else is inevitable as a result of the thing. Like I said earlier, slippery slope arguments are tacit admissions of defeat.
Like I said, sometimes one thing follows inherently from another. In that case, it's not so much a slippery slope as an actual causal chain. In most cases, in fact, in every case that I've ever encountered, slippery slope arguments don't argue that there is an inherent causal link between the top of the slope and the bottom (there is, for example, nothing inherent in same sex marriage that will cause the legalization of incestuous marriages), but always involve a mediator, something about the legal system, say, or the behavior of people independent of the top of the slope.
Again, if x is legalized because x is harmless and the only reason to discriminate against it is because certain people are biased against x, then the only reason to legalize other things because x has become legal is because those things are also harmless, and the only reason to discriminate against them is because certain people are biased against them. If bigamy is harmless (and it's not obvious that it is), or if incest is harmless (and again, it's not obvious that it is), then there's no more reason for outlawing them than there is for outlawing same sex marriage. If that's the case, we don't so much have a slippery slope than a just outcome that makes other just outcomes more likely.
I actually have no problem with legalized bigamy, and I’m not worried about incestuous relationships between consenting adults either (the evidence that genetic defects are significantly more likely seems to be pretty slim), but I’m not sure how either of these things follow from gay marriage. It could be argued, I suppose, that by changing who can marry whom, as in the case of gay marriage, one has opened the door to other changes, but a.) bigamy isn’t really a change, since it’s been pretty common through much of history, and the same, to a lesser degree, can be said of incest, at least between cousins, and b.) “different from the way things are now” is a pretty abstract similarity, and seems a rather weak one for legal purposes. If, for example, we were to legalize marijuana, could someone then say that, because it is now legal to give someone marijuana in a brownie, it is also legal to give them (with their consent) arsenic in a brownie (assuming they know you’re doing it)? Legalized marijuana is different from the way things are, and so would be legalized arsenic, so if giving someone one of those is legal, why isn’t giving someone the other legal? I know, I know, analogies and all that, but you get the point: just because one thing changes the status quo does not mean other things that change the status quo are OK. What’s more, if we change the status quo because it turns out that the status quo discriminates against some group (say, LGBTs) for no rational reason (e.g., there is no harm in gay people marrying each other), then for the slippery slope to work, it would also have to be shown that there is no rational reason to discriminate against the other groups. In other words, the status quo is wrong on the case of gay marriage, and if we change the status quo for gay marriage, then in order for others to argue that we should change it for bigamy or incest, they would have to argue that the status quo is also wrong, because there is no rational reason to discriminate against those behaviors (e.g., they don’t cause any harm either).
Point being, while slippery slopes almost never work against a position, because they don’t argue against any flaws in the position itself, they can, on occasion, actually argue for the position, because they show that the wrongness of the counter position is actually much worse than its merely opposing the current position under debate: in fact, it opposes all sorts of other positions that it is wrong to oppose.
My view of the slippery slope is that it is not always, but almost always, a tacit admission of defeat. It says, “I can’t defeat your position directly, therefore I will argue against a position that I can defeat, and associate it via a hypothetical [usually opaque] causal chain with the position I can’t find a way to attack.” In some cases, there really is a direct and unavoidable causal connection between one position and another, much worse one, which makes the worse position a flaw of the original one, and therefore a slippery slope argument is actually required, but in most cases, it’s just giving up on arguing the point and instead arguing another.
In the case of gay marriage, legalized incest is not an obvious consequence of gay marriage’s legalization. Granted, some will use the legalization of gay marriage to argue for the legalization of incest (or bestiality, or bigamy, or whatever their kink might be), but it will take more than simply pointing out that gay marriage is legal to legalize those things, not the least of which is saying what the hell legalized gay marriage has to do with incest or bigamy or whatever. So it’s not an inherent flaw in gay marriage that other things might be legalized down the line using gay marriage as (one of) the arguments in favor of legalization. Therefore, when someone argues against gay marriage with a slippery slope to the legalization of something else, they are essentially giving up.
Wikileaks is a tougher issue, in my mind, than the death penalty. Since there is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, for example, then it’s almost certainly the case that the death penalty has a net loss in innocent lives. What’s more, the death penalty has several other things going against it, not the least of which is the fact that it makes further due process impossible (an important fact in a flawed, and in fact biased system).
Wikileaks, on the other hand, if it functions well (that is, if instead of giant dumps of diplomatic cables, it’s more focused on human rights issues and abuses of power, as it was for a while), could save more lives, on average. It might even do this if it keeps doing the occasional giant dump of diplomatic cables. This is certainly not the only factor in determining whether Wikileaks is good, or whether any particular action Wikileaks takes is good, but it at least shows that it’s not as straightforward, from a simple life calculus, as the death penalty. Furthermore, while there are few possible negative side issues related to doing away with the death penalty, the negatives for silencing Wikileaks could be extreme.
This is all of course assuming that Wikileaks costs lives at all, which we have no evidence of it doing (it hasn’t appeared to affect policy in a way that would save lives yet, either, but we’re speaking hypothetically here, eh?).
I think it’s important, and interesting, to point out that Anonymous, on its boards, is one place were such discussions about the ethics of hacking takes place. Groups, or quasi-groups, like Anonymous don’t worry me. It’s the 15-year old kid in his bedroom with no affiliation, even a loose one, with a group like Anonymous, who has no real concept of the consequences of his or her actions for others, and no real understanding of how things work in the larger world, and who is therefore much more likely to operate without an ethical code, or even if he or she has one, to apply it unskillfully.
Liberals have divided into factions on this issue too (when do they not). Some are pissed, though I'm not sure whether it's because there's a Democrat in the White House, and some have been supportive, even excited, about Wikileaks generally.
It's also important to keep in mind that Wikileaks releases a lot of different kinds of information, and it's possible to think of it as both good and bad.
Heidegger, maybe I'm being unclear. I don't think you're a liar; I think you buy the lies of others very easily when they're consistent with your world view, or at least the one you're trying to project. I don't think you're blaming Wittgenstein for the Holocaust; I think you are unwittingly using a common trope in the history Hitler explanations : blame it on a Jew. Clear as mud?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Wall Street Journal’s Darwin-Free Zone”
Tom, you should read up on chimps.
On “Captain Robert Smalls, Bona Fide Hero”
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My work is cited at the Army War College too!
Look, we can both make stuff up.
And no, I don't have a Marxist view of history, and just because you believe something different from the consensus, or in this case, from the facts, doesn't make you right.
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Heidegger, you must have missed what Robert said at the end of his comment, to which I was replying (though it was so far nested that I had to reply to an older comment to reply to it). You're a strange puppy.
And yes, I've bullied my way through life. Just today I locked a kid in his locker, and put another's head in the toilet and flushed it.
"
Robert, I grew up in a house a mile from the site of the destruction of the Army of Tennessee under Hood in 1864, in a small town where the schools were all (at the time, all) nicknamed "the Rebels," and where Civil War buff-ism wasn't so much a hobby as a city-wide obsession. I have spent far, far too much of my adult life arguing with other grown men (always men, of course) about whether Gettysburg would have turned out differently had Jackson been alive, or what widespread guerrilla warfare in the mountains after April 12 would have meant. I suspect that I'd forgotten more about that war by the age of 25 than you will ever know, even if my interests in warfare have moved on to other conflicts (mostly the two major Prussian wars in the 1860s and early 70s, World War I, and World War II). I point this out so that you'll understand that I speak from a position of knowledge when I say that Hummel's work is widely regarded (and rightly so) as bull fuckin' shit.
Anyway, my main point was that the tariffs remained high for decades after 1861, and the South wasn't supplying 75% of the revenue. They wouldn't have been in 1860, either. They were protectionist tariffs, designed to promote northern industry, but since the South imported most of its stuff from the north, that just meant that the South would be funding industry, not the government.
"
Robert, I agree with you that the foot soldier wasn't, generally, fighting for slavery. I disagree with you that this has anything to do with the cause of the war, and I also disagree with you that slavery was merely one amongst a constellation of causes. It was the cause, the one without which there would not have been an American Civil War.
It's clear you really know nothing about the period. The Morrill Tariff did pass, in 1861, and tariffs like it were in place for decades, but the southern states didn't end up paying 75% of the federal budget, or any other number you've made up. It is true that tariffs played a role in Lincoln's election, though not because it hurt him in the southern states, but because it helped him in pro-protectionist northern states. Southerners din't want high tariffs, but they weren't going to war over it, and until they left Congress over the issue of slavery, the Morrill Tariff and other high tarriffs had been unable to pass and southern states had been
able to keep tarriff rates low.
Anyway, the main reason I don't reallyagree with you is that the sort of Confederate apologia in which you're engaging, w hich actively tries to minimize the absolutely crucial and, above all other issues, causal role of slavery in the war, disgusts me.
"
That's not quite the story (OK, it's not really even close to the story), but it's undeniably true that most of the food soldiers were fighting because they were down here, or because it was the honorable and manly thing to do (and if you didn't, you'd have a hard time facing your neighbors). That's how the Southern elite sold it to them, too. Of course, the Southern elite were fighting to preserve their way of life, which is to say, their source of wealth, which is to say, slavery. I think it's safe to say that if the southern elite, who organized, financed, and for the most part commanded the military were the ones who chose to go to war, so that if they didn't go to war because they were down here, then the cause of the war wasn't them being down here, any more than the cause of the Iraq war is that there are soldiers who want to defend their country.
I see nothing wrong with discussing and even praising the military savvy, and perhaps even genius, of Forrest or Jackson. They were two of the few genuinely innovative American military minds in our relatively short history (how much shorter might the war have been if we'd had a Blumenthal or a Moltke, two pick two names from the same period?), and that's something worth mentioning. That doesn't mean we should name schools after them, or have holidays celebrating them, or anything of that sort. Hell, it doesn't even mean we should go out of our way to talk about them, particularly when there are more noble individuals to celebrate from that period, as this post was, I believe, trying to say.
By the way, I've always thought Company Aytch was a good look inside the mindset of a Confederate foot soldier. If Watkins' post-war version of his motivations are to be believed, it's a little more complicated than "Because they're down here," and southern propaganda certainly played a role, but he wasn't thinking to himself that he was fighting to preserve slavery (though he certainly wasn't opposed to slavery).
"
I saw a documentary about Smalls about 2 years ago, on PBS maybe. His story is even more impressive. He served in the S.C. state legislature, apparently very successfully, and when he went to the U.S. House of Representatives, he was a fighter, even trying to desegregate the military, though unsuccessfully (obviously). Oh, and when he returned to South Carolina, he bought his former master's house. That's just awesome.
It's a crying shame that there are so many people who still celebrate the men who fought to preserve a way of life that was dependent on the enslavement of almost 40% of its residents, but so few who celebrate men like Smalls.
On “What Is Politics?”
I believe DAR is speaking of qualia, rather than consciousness more generally, when he says that Dennett denies its existence; and of these he does, quite clearly, deny existence. This is of course why he talks about automata with the same brain states being conscious, because this directly answers not an argument for the existence of consciousness, but an argument for the difficulty of it as a philosophical/scientific problem (though we should use the highly technical and esoteric term of the literature, even if it's a slight anachronism for discussions of Consciousness Explained: zombies).
There's much that's wrong with Dennett's view of consciousness, in part because the science has advanced well beyond where it was back when Dennett was writing extensively about consciousness, but also because, well, given everything we know, first person experience is not only real (and therefore a real problem for materialism, even if we don't dig bats, zombies, or two-dimensional semantics), but given everything we know now and knew then, which includes the best conceptual and empirical evidence available to us, it is logically impenetrable from a third-person perspective. The only way to deny this, which is what denying the existence of qualia amounts to, is to deny that consciousness itself exists (at least, this is the only way to deny the impenetrability of first-person experience from a physicalist perspective -- it's apparently perfectly penetrable by god under some non-physicalist views). At least, I think this is what DAR was getting at, and if so, then he and I agree on this point.
Also, Dennett looks like Santa Claus. Given the season, I think this needs to be pointed out. That is all.
On “The death of custom and the rise of nationalism in the post-colonial state”
Also, the Spanish Inquisition is a good example, sort of like 1930s Germany, of how nationalism is equally a product of the need for a unified culture in order to maintain authoritarian, and especially autocratic control. You have to have everyone on the same page, and one way to do that is to get the people who are already roughly on your page to be even more on your page by pitting them against a perceived (often created, even) threatening outgroup. This has the dual benefits for the authoritarian ruler hat at the same time you get a bunch of people to be more fervent supporters of your “home-grown” rule, you get rid of the people who are less likely to support it. It also seems to help if you have some Jews around to paint as the threatening outgroup, as the Spain and Germany show.
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Ah yes, I did mean that second part for Erik. Sorry 'bout that.
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In Europe, nationalism is sort of invented by the Napoleonic wars.
Depends on where you are in Europe. You’ll find pretty strong nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 16th century, at least (I suspect it goes back further). I know this in particular of Poland, Lithuania, the Don region, and other parts of western Russia and Ukraine.
Nationalism is less a product of the loss of custom, I think, than it is the product of perceived threat, be it internal or external. One sort of internal threat is a loss of custom, so it’s not that your hypothesis is wrong, it’s just only one part of the story. I’m not sure it really explains India and Pakistan (there is a whole hell of a lot going on there), but it probably has something to do with a lot of examples of radical nationalism in the last century or so, including Germany in the late 19th century and the 1930s.
On “All Apologies”
I think he meant "Abba DAbba Ding Dong," not "lice infested." But you probably figured that as well.
On “Anonymous launches new project, press release”
I disagree about the Bonus Army, even if the effects weren't immediate (see: post World War II), but whatever, it doesn't matter. There are dozens of examples in the places and periods I've mentioned, that, even if they weren't global, produced results that affected many more lives.
But before we try to argue that point, why don't you tell me what you think it was that the Scientology protests achieved.
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I'm not much older than you, to be honest, but I've read a little bit about, you know, the 20th century, or the 19th, and hell, even the 18th. If you're going to start looking for more effective protests, you could do worse than googling the year 1229 Paris, or staying in Paris, check out the 1780s, or look at Ireland and England in the 19th century (America's major pre-1865 political issue will furnish you with some examples as well), the draft riot in NYC, then the suffrage movement and its protest actions, the various labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the Bonus Army, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the anti-war movement in the 60s, the recent nationwide strikes in Spain and France, and so on (there are literally thousands of examples). If you want extent, you only have to go as far back as 2002-03, to the anti-war protests that were global on, at times, a spectacular scale (though their failure was pretty spectacular as well).
Seriously, it's not hard to find more effective protests, and it's probably not all that hard to find larger ones, though more global would have to be more recent, since this sort of thing didn't go global really until the 1960s. But maybe it's not perspective you lack, but hyperbole you have too much of.
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"was responsible for one of the most extensive, global, and effective protest actions in history."
Most extensive, maybe, most global, maybe (though that might be redundant), but one of the most effective protest actions in history? Dude, you must be really young, not to mention a bit short in the perspective department (and historical knowledge department, to boot).
On “Self-Serving Slippery Slopes”
By the way, the argument is never simply, “Two consenting adults should be able to marry because they love each other.” That may be all the arguer ever says, but implicit in this are several other premises, not the least of which is that their marriage, or at least the class of marriage, will not be harmful to others (I can think of plenty of heterosexual marriages that are harmful to others). So, the counterargument has to address these premises, even if they’re left unspoken. One can easily come up with potential arguments (I’m not saying they’re actually valid) against, say, incest, by pointing out that incestuous relationships are harmful to the children they produce, or to society in general (just ask the Egyptians, eh?). The same kinds of arguments could be made against bigamy: there is evidence, for example, that it is harmful to the women involved, and it might (I’m not saying it is) be harmful to the children involved as well.
The point being that, in the case of same sex marriage, the top of the slope and the bottom of the slope are only connected in a relevant way if the two are alike on all of the relevant dimensions, and the slippery slope arguers never seem to get that far, because while it’s trivial to say that gay couples, incestuous couples, and bigamists love each other in similar ways, it’s nontrivial to say that everything else about the couples, and their affects on those around them, is the same.
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The reason that slippery slope arguments are fallacious is for precisely this reason: they don’t argue the thing. They argue something else, in lieu of the thing, and the argue that something else is inevitable as a result of the thing. Like I said earlier, slippery slope arguments are tacit admissions of defeat.
"
Like I said, sometimes one thing follows inherently from another. In that case, it's not so much a slippery slope as an actual causal chain. In most cases, in fact, in every case that I've ever encountered, slippery slope arguments don't argue that there is an inherent causal link between the top of the slope and the bottom (there is, for example, nothing inherent in same sex marriage that will cause the legalization of incestuous marriages), but always involve a mediator, something about the legal system, say, or the behavior of people independent of the top of the slope.
Again, if x is legalized because x is harmless and the only reason to discriminate against it is because certain people are biased against x, then the only reason to legalize other things because x has become legal is because those things are also harmless, and the only reason to discriminate against them is because certain people are biased against them. If bigamy is harmless (and it's not obvious that it is), or if incest is harmless (and again, it's not obvious that it is), then there's no more reason for outlawing them than there is for outlawing same sex marriage. If that's the case, we don't so much have a slippery slope than a just outcome that makes other just outcomes more likely.
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I actually have no problem with legalized bigamy, and I’m not worried about incestuous relationships between consenting adults either (the evidence that genetic defects are significantly more likely seems to be pretty slim), but I’m not sure how either of these things follow from gay marriage. It could be argued, I suppose, that by changing who can marry whom, as in the case of gay marriage, one has opened the door to other changes, but a.) bigamy isn’t really a change, since it’s been pretty common through much of history, and the same, to a lesser degree, can be said of incest, at least between cousins, and b.) “different from the way things are now” is a pretty abstract similarity, and seems a rather weak one for legal purposes. If, for example, we were to legalize marijuana, could someone then say that, because it is now legal to give someone marijuana in a brownie, it is also legal to give them (with their consent) arsenic in a brownie (assuming they know you’re doing it)? Legalized marijuana is different from the way things are, and so would be legalized arsenic, so if giving someone one of those is legal, why isn’t giving someone the other legal? I know, I know, analogies and all that, but you get the point: just because one thing changes the status quo does not mean other things that change the status quo are OK. What’s more, if we change the status quo because it turns out that the status quo discriminates against some group (say, LGBTs) for no rational reason (e.g., there is no harm in gay people marrying each other), then for the slippery slope to work, it would also have to be shown that there is no rational reason to discriminate against the other groups. In other words, the status quo is wrong on the case of gay marriage, and if we change the status quo for gay marriage, then in order for others to argue that we should change it for bigamy or incest, they would have to argue that the status quo is also wrong, because there is no rational reason to discriminate against those behaviors (e.g., they don’t cause any harm either).
Point being, while slippery slopes almost never work against a position, because they don’t argue against any flaws in the position itself, they can, on occasion, actually argue for the position, because they show that the wrongness of the counter position is actually much worse than its merely opposing the current position under debate: in fact, it opposes all sorts of other positions that it is wrong to oppose.
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My view of the slippery slope is that it is not always, but almost always, a tacit admission of defeat. It says, “I can’t defeat your position directly, therefore I will argue against a position that I can defeat, and associate it via a hypothetical [usually opaque] causal chain with the position I can’t find a way to attack.” In some cases, there really is a direct and unavoidable causal connection between one position and another, much worse one, which makes the worse position a flaw of the original one, and therefore a slippery slope argument is actually required, but in most cases, it’s just giving up on arguing the point and instead arguing another.
In the case of gay marriage, legalized incest is not an obvious consequence of gay marriage’s legalization. Granted, some will use the legalization of gay marriage to argue for the legalization of incest (or bestiality, or bigamy, or whatever their kink might be), but it will take more than simply pointing out that gay marriage is legal to legalize those things, not the least of which is saying what the hell legalized gay marriage has to do with incest or bigamy or whatever. So it’s not an inherent flaw in gay marriage that other things might be legalized down the line using gay marriage as (one of) the arguments in favor of legalization. Therefore, when someone argues against gay marriage with a slippery slope to the legalization of something else, they are essentially giving up.
On “Death Penalty”
Wikileaks is a tougher issue, in my mind, than the death penalty. Since there is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, for example, then it’s almost certainly the case that the death penalty has a net loss in innocent lives. What’s more, the death penalty has several other things going against it, not the least of which is the fact that it makes further due process impossible (an important fact in a flawed, and in fact biased system).
Wikileaks, on the other hand, if it functions well (that is, if instead of giant dumps of diplomatic cables, it’s more focused on human rights issues and abuses of power, as it was for a while), could save more lives, on average. It might even do this if it keeps doing the occasional giant dump of diplomatic cables. This is certainly not the only factor in determining whether Wikileaks is good, or whether any particular action Wikileaks takes is good, but it at least shows that it’s not as straightforward, from a simple life calculus, as the death penalty. Furthermore, while there are few possible negative side issues related to doing away with the death penalty, the negatives for silencing Wikileaks could be extreme.
This is all of course assuming that Wikileaks costs lives at all, which we have no evidence of it doing (it hasn’t appeared to affect policy in a way that would save lives yet, either, but we’re speaking hypothetically here, eh?).
On “Contraganda”
I think it’s important, and interesting, to point out that Anonymous, on its boards, is one place were such discussions about the ethics of hacking takes place. Groups, or quasi-groups, like Anonymous don’t worry me. It’s the 15-year old kid in his bedroom with no affiliation, even a loose one, with a group like Anonymous, who has no real concept of the consequences of his or her actions for others, and no real understanding of how things work in the larger world, and who is therefore much more likely to operate without an ethical code, or even if he or she has one, to apply it unskillfully.
On “Wikileaks and the Tea Party”
Liberals have divided into factions on this issue too (when do they not). Some are pissed, though I'm not sure whether it's because there's a Democrat in the White House, and some have been supportive, even excited, about Wikileaks generally.
It's also important to keep in mind that Wikileaks releases a lot of different kinds of information, and it's possible to think of it as both good and bad.
On “Julian Assange: bank account closed, prepares to meet with police, face talking-point wrath of GOP hopefuls”
Heidegger, maybe I'm being unclear. I don't think you're a liar; I think you buy the lies of others very easily when they're consistent with your world view, or at least the one you're trying to project. I don't think you're blaming Wittgenstein for the Holocaust; I think you are unwittingly using a common trope in the history Hitler explanations : blame it on a Jew. Clear as mud?
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