There is a significant danger to not standing your ground on the linguistic stuff, like on the race and gender issues. A huge portion of the public now just wants to be able to say “trans women are women.” That means that the woke conceptual scheme is now calcified. The real answer in that debate has a lot to do with principles about how we use words, but that’s a cognitively demanding issue to hash out. It’s kind of a bind, because while the conceptual debate is too cognitively demanding for most, the alternative is to back a silly position (e.g. of a silly position: that the word “gender” necessarily equals biological sex and that the world will fall apart if the phrase’s usage shifts).
This is one way liberals win debates. They are more educated and therefore set the conceptual scheme for the debate. Then their opponents either have to argue from behind or make arguments that most people can’t follow.
Love your work, but the main point you fail to address is that until very recently, eugenics was both widely used, and common parlance within bioethics and biology. Even Crick and Watson openly advocated (liberal) eugenics well after WW 2. For a representative sample of quotations or ordinary philosophers and scientists advocating eugenics, read this quick piece I published with Diana in 2021: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1.pdf?pdf=button
The problem with abandoning terms whenever your opponents misuse them is that you’ll simply run faster on a euphemism treadmill that your opponents create for you. And no matter how fast you run, they’ll eventually trap you into using their moral framework.
Perpetual rhetorical retreat isn't without cost. Once a word becomes taboo, everyone who used it in the past becomes somewhat tainted. Say you refer to an article or book by a scientist who, say, used the term 'dysgenic' (now also being problematized) 20 years ago, and someone sees the use of the word and thinks, 'oh, this guy is just a racist crank,' and dismisses them out of hand. By ceding words you're not just ceding words, but also people, research, literature that used said words in the past; keeping them within the Overton Window requires enough people to keep using them to keep them normal. It's also costly to have to constantly invent new terms for the same thing, as no one outside of the rarefied few who are constantly up to date on the latest euphemisms will no what you're talking about. Constantly forcing your opponents to find new covert ways to express themselves probably does help hinder their ability to communicate and proselytize.
So the issue isn't as simple as 'just use the most socially acceptable phrasing of whatever you're trying to say.' For any individual, the best strategy is to always use the least offensive version one can come up with, but individuals who are willing to deploy marginal ideas and terminology at the expense of reputational damage may be benefiting everyone else by 'normalizing' their use and thus helping to keep them from slipping out of the Overton Window.
I'm not sure that conceding every inch to the whims of our most uncharitable critics is a strategy that is likely to succeed. The Kolmogorov option or being some sort of galaxy brained Straussian, might work. But I can think of quite a few examples where quite plausibly refusing to budge, would have been the better option.
The pro-choice movement has moved away from the term “clump of cells” for this reason. Ever since ultrasounds showed that fetuses do look like mini-babies, they’ve been reframing the debate around the right to choose rather than argue over whether or not fetuses are babies.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's concept of "The Worst Argument in the World" (TWAIW), which is an argument that conflates a term with negative connotations and a term with a neutral or specific definition. In this case, it’s "eugenics." The term itself is now widely seen as negative due to historical atrocities, but its literal meaning, improving the human species through selective breeding or genetic manipulation, isn't necessarily so. This dichotomy seems to be at the heart of the debate around "eugenics," with parties leveraging TWAIW to silence what might otherwise be productive conversations.
Well, this pretty much sums up a big part of the criticism of the modern right by neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin. The left always wins because the right is adapting their framing of the world. “The democrats are the REAL RACISTS”. I wasn’t alive back then, but when the USSR was a thing I imagine republicans calling people “communists” and “socialists” was their effective version of this. People have short memories, and somewhere along the line in the last 20 years “socialism” became sexy and now those accusations have no bite.
A few months after Floyd riots I became completely disinterested in ever using the term “racism” in any intellectual discussion, unless referring to a person who’s literally covered in Nazi tattoos and goes to klan rallies. Long before that I realized the same with “communism” and “socialism” as they’re commonly used. When a person says “X is racist” or “X is a socialist” like that’s actually supposed to mean something in and of itself I view it as a very clear signal that this person isn’t going to be interesting to talk to.
In Iceland due to widespread genetic testing on the fetus, no children are born with Down's syndrome. Many conservatives make bad faith arguments to claim that is Eugenics, when it is not. Using modern medicine, one could test for heart, lung and mental defects.
My neighbor has a child with Down's syndrome, he would need life time support from his parents and care workers. They spend most of their free time caring for the child, taking him to different therapies etc. I understand Eugenics as term which means to kill such children and adults and no serious person would argue for it. Genetic testing fetus is not eugenics, as testing is precise and given as a society we accept abortion, abortion based on fetal defect is acceptable as well.
A bit of a misleading title. It should be, "Why I Oppose 'Eugenics'" (the word) and not "Why I Oppose Eugenics" (the practice).
Anyway, I'm fine with whatever rhetorical frame one wants to put it in, so long as it's practiced to some degree. It's certainly not about the women as far as I'm concerned. If women started aborting the healthiest fetuses for the sake of social justice, I'd very gladly take away their choice and regard deferring to them foolish. But so long as they're not, then it's okay. It's about the practice first and foremost, in whatever form it is provided (access to abortion when it's resorted to largely by the right demographics, designer babies when parents favor intelligence and stuff, etc.)
"Imagine Politician A, who adopts every left-wing position on race but uses slurs to refer to black people. He’s running against Politician B, who wants to abolish affirmative action, go all out with stop and frisk, etc., but always refers to “my beloved African Americans” and talks about how wonderful they are and how much they contribute to the country. Which one do you think would be perceived as the worse person by society? Who would be seen as more “racist”? I think the answer is quite obvious."
This hypo is particularly funny because most left-wing positions on race are inherently condescending and racist. See opposition to voter ID, defund-the-police, and, for that matter, affirmative action.
There are a number of false equivalencies in this piece. Further, allow parents, particularly mothers, to select their children based on their preferred attributes makes children more and more like commodities that are easily disposed of . This makes it easier to argue that mothers must always be able to abort their children if they feel like it, especially if they're not perfect. The child does not matter unless he or she fits the mother's preferences of gender, looks and intellect, not to mention timing. Sad.
“Words are arbitrary combinations of sounds that refer to ideas or things in the world…
I think what smarter writers sometimes fail to understand is that political debates and cancellation efforts are often really, really stupid. People like Fleischman care about ideas, and it’s hard for her to imagine how many people just care about words. I remember a writer once arguing that, if “racism” means preferring your own kind, then he himself is racist, just like everyone else is. This argument assumes that people are seeking logical consistency, and if you reason them into a corner they’ll eventually wake up and say “wow, racism isn’t so bad!” In reality, people are more committed to standing against the word “racism” than any actual principle, and your job is to convince them that your views don’t fall into that category”
I would have saved a lot of pain if I’d been forced to write this paragraph 100 times on a chalkboard like Bart Simpson a few years ago. Still hard for me to understand this feature of human nature, but it is so completely true. Great piece.
My question for eugenicists is where the line is drawn, if there even is one. If a child is born with undesirable qualities, why can't you simply dispose of it? What about passage through the vaginal canal confers a baby with implied immunity to "genetic selection?"
Icarus had a choice, too. He chose to fly to close to the sun when his wings melted and he fell to his death. The more we pretend to "have many choices about the babies we make" the closer we believe we have come to be God. Aborting babies who are too ugly is the killing of the unborn. They in all their deformed ugly selves have a right to life, too.
There is a significant danger to not standing your ground on the linguistic stuff, like on the race and gender issues. A huge portion of the public now just wants to be able to say “trans women are women.” That means that the woke conceptual scheme is now calcified. The real answer in that debate has a lot to do with principles about how we use words, but that’s a cognitively demanding issue to hash out. It’s kind of a bind, because while the conceptual debate is too cognitively demanding for most, the alternative is to back a silly position (e.g. of a silly position: that the word “gender” necessarily equals biological sex and that the world will fall apart if the phrase’s usage shifts).
This is one way liberals win debates. They are more educated and therefore set the conceptual scheme for the debate. Then their opponents either have to argue from behind or make arguments that most people can’t follow.
Love your work, but the main point you fail to address is that until very recently, eugenics was both widely used, and common parlance within bioethics and biology. Even Crick and Watson openly advocated (liberal) eugenics well after WW 2. For a representative sample of quotations or ordinary philosophers and scientists advocating eugenics, read this quick piece I published with Diana in 2021: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1.pdf?pdf=button
The problem with abandoning terms whenever your opponents misuse them is that you’ll simply run faster on a euphemism treadmill that your opponents create for you. And no matter how fast you run, they’ll eventually trap you into using their moral framework.
Perpetual rhetorical retreat isn't without cost. Once a word becomes taboo, everyone who used it in the past becomes somewhat tainted. Say you refer to an article or book by a scientist who, say, used the term 'dysgenic' (now also being problematized) 20 years ago, and someone sees the use of the word and thinks, 'oh, this guy is just a racist crank,' and dismisses them out of hand. By ceding words you're not just ceding words, but also people, research, literature that used said words in the past; keeping them within the Overton Window requires enough people to keep using them to keep them normal. It's also costly to have to constantly invent new terms for the same thing, as no one outside of the rarefied few who are constantly up to date on the latest euphemisms will no what you're talking about. Constantly forcing your opponents to find new covert ways to express themselves probably does help hinder their ability to communicate and proselytize.
So the issue isn't as simple as 'just use the most socially acceptable phrasing of whatever you're trying to say.' For any individual, the best strategy is to always use the least offensive version one can come up with, but individuals who are willing to deploy marginal ideas and terminology at the expense of reputational damage may be benefiting everyone else by 'normalizing' their use and thus helping to keep them from slipping out of the Overton Window.
I'm not sure that conceding every inch to the whims of our most uncharitable critics is a strategy that is likely to succeed. The Kolmogorov option or being some sort of galaxy brained Straussian, might work. But I can think of quite a few examples where quite plausibly refusing to budge, would have been the better option.
It sounds like you oppose the use of the word “eugenics”, not that you oppose what Fleischman calls eugenics. That’s an important distinction.
The pro-choice movement has moved away from the term “clump of cells” for this reason. Ever since ultrasounds showed that fetuses do look like mini-babies, they’ve been reframing the debate around the right to choose rather than argue over whether or not fetuses are babies.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's concept of "The Worst Argument in the World" (TWAIW), which is an argument that conflates a term with negative connotations and a term with a neutral or specific definition. In this case, it’s "eugenics." The term itself is now widely seen as negative due to historical atrocities, but its literal meaning, improving the human species through selective breeding or genetic manipulation, isn't necessarily so. This dichotomy seems to be at the heart of the debate around "eugenics," with parties leveraging TWAIW to silence what might otherwise be productive conversations.
Well, this pretty much sums up a big part of the criticism of the modern right by neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin. The left always wins because the right is adapting their framing of the world. “The democrats are the REAL RACISTS”. I wasn’t alive back then, but when the USSR was a thing I imagine republicans calling people “communists” and “socialists” was their effective version of this. People have short memories, and somewhere along the line in the last 20 years “socialism” became sexy and now those accusations have no bite.
A few months after Floyd riots I became completely disinterested in ever using the term “racism” in any intellectual discussion, unless referring to a person who’s literally covered in Nazi tattoos and goes to klan rallies. Long before that I realized the same with “communism” and “socialism” as they’re commonly used. When a person says “X is racist” or “X is a socialist” like that’s actually supposed to mean something in and of itself I view it as a very clear signal that this person isn’t going to be interesting to talk to.
In Iceland due to widespread genetic testing on the fetus, no children are born with Down's syndrome. Many conservatives make bad faith arguments to claim that is Eugenics, when it is not. Using modern medicine, one could test for heart, lung and mental defects.
My neighbor has a child with Down's syndrome, he would need life time support from his parents and care workers. They spend most of their free time caring for the child, taking him to different therapies etc. I understand Eugenics as term which means to kill such children and adults and no serious person would argue for it. Genetic testing fetus is not eugenics, as testing is precise and given as a society we accept abortion, abortion based on fetal defect is acceptable as well.
A bit of a misleading title. It should be, "Why I Oppose 'Eugenics'" (the word) and not "Why I Oppose Eugenics" (the practice).
Anyway, I'm fine with whatever rhetorical frame one wants to put it in, so long as it's practiced to some degree. It's certainly not about the women as far as I'm concerned. If women started aborting the healthiest fetuses for the sake of social justice, I'd very gladly take away their choice and regard deferring to them foolish. But so long as they're not, then it's okay. It's about the practice first and foremost, in whatever form it is provided (access to abortion when it's resorted to largely by the right demographics, designer babies when parents favor intelligence and stuff, etc.)
"Imagine Politician A, who adopts every left-wing position on race but uses slurs to refer to black people. He’s running against Politician B, who wants to abolish affirmative action, go all out with stop and frisk, etc., but always refers to “my beloved African Americans” and talks about how wonderful they are and how much they contribute to the country. Which one do you think would be perceived as the worse person by society? Who would be seen as more “racist”? I think the answer is quite obvious."
This hypo is particularly funny because most left-wing positions on race are inherently condescending and racist. See opposition to voter ID, defund-the-police, and, for that matter, affirmative action.
There are a number of false equivalencies in this piece. Further, allow parents, particularly mothers, to select their children based on their preferred attributes makes children more and more like commodities that are easily disposed of . This makes it easier to argue that mothers must always be able to abort their children if they feel like it, especially if they're not perfect. The child does not matter unless he or she fits the mother's preferences of gender, looks and intellect, not to mention timing. Sad.
“Words are arbitrary combinations of sounds that refer to ideas or things in the world…
I think what smarter writers sometimes fail to understand is that political debates and cancellation efforts are often really, really stupid. People like Fleischman care about ideas, and it’s hard for her to imagine how many people just care about words. I remember a writer once arguing that, if “racism” means preferring your own kind, then he himself is racist, just like everyone else is. This argument assumes that people are seeking logical consistency, and if you reason them into a corner they’ll eventually wake up and say “wow, racism isn’t so bad!” In reality, people are more committed to standing against the word “racism” than any actual principle, and your job is to convince them that your views don’t fall into that category”
I would have saved a lot of pain if I’d been forced to write this paragraph 100 times on a chalkboard like Bart Simpson a few years ago. Still hard for me to understand this feature of human nature, but it is so completely true. Great piece.
My question for eugenicists is where the line is drawn, if there even is one. If a child is born with undesirable qualities, why can't you simply dispose of it? What about passage through the vaginal canal confers a baby with implied immunity to "genetic selection?"
Icarus had a choice, too. He chose to fly to close to the sun when his wings melted and he fell to his death. The more we pretend to "have many choices about the babies we make" the closer we believe we have come to be God. Aborting babies who are too ugly is the killing of the unborn. They in all their deformed ugly selves have a right to life, too.
I like your term "medical surveillance" when trying to enforce and monitor illegal abortions.