Posts by BenWilson
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The point of the hypothetical alternate question isn’t for you to posit the likely result. It is to highlight one aspect of the actual question that was problematic.
The fact that it's childishly easy to answer in a way that squares with the likely moral intuitions of the masses suggests it's not that problematic at all.
They would be saying that the idea that a smack could be something that is “good husbandly correction” is absurd.
Yup, that's what makes it so easy to answer. Good husbandly correction does not include smacks, so it's no defense, and thus a simple assault. There could be other good husbandly correction. Like "having a talk about it".
You said in your answer to do it would be a crime.
Most people would want it that way, I think. Whether it was a crime or not. That's what the question's asking. Seriously dude, what's hard about this?
That’s either a pointless statement, or you’re appealing to the criminality of the matter as a support of your position on the criminality of the matter in question.
You're tying yourself in knots and then saying it did it. I just said that people would not only want it to be a crime, but would probably realize that it already is. One is not the supporting premise of the other.
Because surveys don’t make decisions.
But they could. We could have had the MMP referendum off a survey. I'm not fundamentally opposed to this idea. It would need to be a government run survey, though.
Harm is not as amenable to science as you seem to think.
Nor you, apparently:
Me: “The question of whether there is some detrimental effect from being smacked as a child is not a moral question. It is a scientific question…”
Ben: “Right”
Harm is a balance of detrimental effects and positive effects. How does science weigh up the positive value of every lesson from every smack? Sure there might be better ways to that positive effect but that doesn't take away the possible positive effect from a smack. For instance, a smack might have prevented the death of a child because they remembered not to run across the road without looking. Does science have some lovely way of calculating the value of that saved life?
1) you realise your focus on the idea of science as where you get your morals from is a straw man, don‘t you? Neither myself nor James W said that.
You did not, I agree. You said laws should come from science, or be 100% informed by science with no question of morality. I disagree.
(2) To paraphrase you: I'd say there a sense that anal sex is as harmful as the people who engage in it think it is. That doesn’t apply to the smacking issue, as the children aren’t asked if they consent to getting smacked, are they?
I was clarifying the idea of the non-scientific side of harm. To include consent, another moral notion, is only to play further into my hands.
I specifically choose the “bullwhip” example because it refers to a notorious case whereby the jury did consider it was reasonable. Thus, it wasn’t illegal.
At least in that case. Each case is new, with new jurors. Justice can be a bit like that, unfortunately.
Why is it so poor? No analogy is perfect, but they’re useful for making points, esp. in informal arguments. Confer your own use of an analogy when discussing a scientific assessment of harm. (I don’t think that analogy holds up, but note that I bothered to say why.)
It's really poor because if you want to create a statement that elucidates how confusing the referendum question was, you don't do it by making up an example that is even less confusing.
It wouldn’t have to be widely popular, just something that people considered to be a private matter, not something the Law or the Government should be poking its nose into.
To get any kind of majority in a referendum it would need to score at least half of the votes. That currently includes both men and women, so it would be widely unpopular. In times past, when only men could vote, it would have been more popular, I'm sure. Your example would be better set in the 19th century. It scarcely needed a CIR to block women's rights back then - the elected representatives were doing the job just fine.
So by analogy you’re saying in the smacking debate we would start with children. Easy sell. Do they get a say in referenda?
Children don't vote, no. I don't have a strategy by which you could convince the population smacking should always be a crime, because, dude, I don't even agree with the statement. That's your challenge.
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I did, but here it is again:
Aha...I missed that post.
Yeah, probably it would get a different result. But it is also a different question. As in, it does not have the same parse at all. It does not amount to the same question. It's a lot vaguer.
Still think this is a great way to make laws?
I detect the horrendous begging of a question here. The answer to that is "No". I never thought it was a great way to make laws so I don't continue to. But I think it's a pretty important part of democracy. The right of citizenry to target an actual issue and demand that the position of citizens be formally counted is one of those safety valves for when the leadership is simply not doing what a large majority of people think they should be doing. Of course the citizens could be completely wrong about that, and find that popular opinion isn't actually in their favor.
But for a fraction of the cost and kerfuffle of a referendum, some polling company could have found out for us.
The kerfuffle is all part of it.
OK, but harm is clearly not defined only how you feel about something at the time. There's a scientific element to harm which isn't hard to see.
I don't deny it. I just don't think it's the whole story. Where morals are concerned it's actually very little of the story. That's why there isn't a science of morality.
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Kyle, if you define the subjective pleasure out of the harm equation then science alone weighs in, sure. But you also miss a lot.
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Ben, "when did you stop beating your wife?" is a straightforward question. Just not particularly useful.
It's also easy to answer. "Never", is a true answer to that question, in my case. I never started, so I have never stopped. Yes it is a poor question, because a "never" answer is not specific about whether I beat my wife.
But do you take my point that a differently-loaded question asking essentially the same thing would have procured a different result?
Perhaps. Give me the question.
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Well OK, if Russ wants a go I'll do one more round.
Perhaps instead of accusing other people of "Epic fail" you should read up a bit more yourself.
Perhaps you shouldn't quote me out of context. I did not accuse anyone in particular of an epic fail. That might involve reading on your part too.
Actually Ben, even given the many dubious practices that went into the collection of signatures for the anti-homosexual law reform petition, its authors almost certainly got substantially more genuine signatures than the pro-smackers did, particularly on a per-capita basis. Even if half of all the signatures were chucked out, it would still be 100,000 more than Baldock got.
None of which proves that homosexual law reform was unpopular.
There is some evidence that a referendum on homosexual law reform might have gone for law reform, but an equal chance that an emotive campaign could have sent it the other way.
Might have. We'll never know.
Are you suggesting that the more core of the issue would have changed either way depending on the vote?
I don't understand the question. Is there a typo?
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Anyways, I'm tapped out. I only had one point, which was that the question didn't really seem that hard, and I think the result bears that out. I don't think smacking is generally a good idea, nor do I always think it is criminal. I speculate that most of the "no" voters suffered as little trouble as I and everyone else I spoke with outside of PAS did, in interpreting a straightforward question. The rest just want the question to be hard, and again I speculate, it's because they don't like the answer that got 7.3 times as much support as it's rival.
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Umm.
Yeah, Um. Your link serves to show that the anti-reform people struggled to even get the signatures for their petition. It does not show that "the public" was against legalized homosexuality, just that some members of the public were.
Basic human rights like voting, equal protection under law, etc for indigenous people are controversial these days? They were often controversial at the time, not so much now.
Right, those equality laws are widely upheld. But 'special rights' are nowhere near so much. I guess I should have been clearer there.
It's an example of progressive movements winning hard fought battles which then become widely popular with everyone 30 years later.
Yup, but on a whole different scale. You were sort of accusing me of hyperbole by mentioning communist Russia as a good example of where "progressive" legislation got too damned progressive for everyone's liking. I speak of things like banning religion because Marxism was more scientific. These days it's fairly uncontroversial that freedom of religion is a fundamental right.
The problem with speaking of progressive movements of the past and extrapolating them to now, is that it presumes you have some kind of crystal ball about exactly what will be considered progressive in the future. Just because something is a big change that has never been tried before doesn't make it a good idea that must through inexorable laws of human nature eventually become gospel. For every good idea there's a thousand stupid ideas. You have to convince people your ideas are not stupid. Failing to do so, but insisting you should be obeyed is one of those stupid ideas. Epic fail.
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In response to the hypothetical “should a smack as part of good husbandly correction be a criminal offence?” you answered, in part, “to try it would be a criminal offense.” So what? That’s the question: should it be a crime.
You're trying pretty hard to get this begging the question thing, but I didn't give you an "argument". I gave you a likely answer. The answer to “should a smack as part of good husbandly correction be a criminal offence?” would be uncontroversially "Yes". The reason is because people think smacking other adults is a crime. I don't mean they think that is the law. I mean they think it's bad and should be a crime. They won't make an exception for "good husbandly correction".
I'm fully aware of what begging the question is, I just wanted you to explain why you thought I was doing it. I have a degree in Philosophy, and I took Logic to Stage 3, btw.
CIRs are crap democracy, and using them to get general statements of opinion is an especially bad way to address public policy. If you just want to know what people think, use a survey.
but
I’ll add here that I’m not against referenda per se. They’re especially useful for making the final decision about significant proposed changes to the mechanisms of our representative democracy
Why bother...have a survey. Personally I don't think CIRs are crap democracy at all. I think representative democracy is crap. CIRs are far, far more credible than surveys. They follow due processes and involve a lot more people. They ask people what they want, rather than who they would like to abdicate responsibility for the decision to. They're probably not particularly practical for running quite a lot of government, but in this technological age, they could be used a lot more often to lend credibility to claims of mandate.
Maybe that’s more true? You’re connecting the notion of what most people think with what is true, and doing so regarding a matter amenable to science (harm and smacking).
Harm is not as amenable to science as you seem to think. Harm is a highly subjective notion. Is anal sex harmful? Ask science and you'll get an answer that will probably highlight the risks of physical damage. There could be any amount of 'scientific' analysis of the psychological impacts of it. But at the end of the day, I'd say anal sex is as harmful as the person who is engaging in it thinks it is.
Where it will have short term application is if someone beats their child with a bullwhip, for example, that parent will no longer have the old “reasonable force” defence. Surely that is a good thing?
That always was illegal man. Because it would not be considered "reasonable" by either a judge or a jury. OK, they get their day in court, but they also, on the whole, get busted.
Let’s go back to that hypothetical about “husbandly correction”. If the law changes under discussion here were to do with men’s treatment of their wives, would it occur to you to use the argument you have above? “So just try to encourage men to treat women better. But don’t go changing the laws. That’s just hiding and suppressing debate.” Really?
Yes, why don't we go back to that incredibly poor example, which will fail any test of popularity on account of the fact that almost all women will all oppose it, let alone most men. In your hypothetical world, where husbandly correction is widely popular, I would indeed say that the best way to go about changing the situation would be to change attitudes. You'd start with women, it would be a fucking easy sell. Then you'd work on the men, until you had the numbers. That's democracy, how she is.
I actually think changing general attitudes to smacking would be a much more positive step than criminalizing it. "There is another way" as a campaign would probably work. I'm inclined to think Supernanny has done much more to stop smacking in NZ than Labour did. A "help quit smacking" team would also be of great benefit, if people didn't think there was a good chance of ending up getting prosecuted instead of helped.
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They all went through over great popular opposition, and have subsequently been proven to be non-controversial long term. The same end result would have occurred if they'd happened years earlier.
That's highly disputable. They could have led to colossal strife, and retrogression. How do you know? It's also a false claim in at least 2 cases. Homosexual law reform was not unpopular, at least in NZ. And indigenous rights are not non-controversial. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Because pushing through unpopular laws in New Zealand is exactly like communist Russia. I think there might have been a couple of other problems going on there.
Mmmm and criminalizing smacking is exactly like freeing slaves and emancipating women?
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I'm not sure when you went to university, but I think someone misled you there.
If so, it was consistent, because I asked every single year, when it came time to opt to pay the fees, what would I miss out on, and the answer always started with the library.
I should point out that the legendary speedboat money was spent by an Auckland President operating illegally under the AUSA constitution. He's also a passionate right-wing VSMer.
Sure, but it's still grist to the "Why should I have to be in this stupid Union?" mill. That it was piss easy to rort so outrageously was not a big selling point.
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