astercontrol:

people have gotta stop equating “empathy” with “kindness,” and “seeing someone else’s viewpoint” with “considering it valid”

it isn’t.

it can be the exact opposite

“why should i try to look at things from his perspective, why would he deserve empathy, he is so obviously evil and needs to be killed” …how are you gonna kill an enemy if you can’t even anticipate his next move

The ability to imagine an argument from another point of view– espcially one that you disagree strongly with– is so damn important, and so many people just have some kind of mental block against even trying.

It shows in the sorts of arguments they use against their enemies. Ineffective arguments, with obvious flaws.

Especially when they’re trying to catch their enemy in a contradiction. Because the assumption that the enemy is a hypocrite often gives them too much credit. It assumes conflicting good and bad motives… when very often the motives are just… consistently bad.

And looking at it from the enemy’s viewpoint easily confirms this, if you bother to try.

Like

there was a whole long thread on Twitter a few years ago, gloating about how this one transphobic author was a hypocrite, due to using she/her pronouns for a girl character who had temporarily bodyswapped herself into a boy’s body. And supposedly this “proved” that the author “knew,” deep down, that gender is determined by inner identity and not by anatomy.

But if you look at it from the author’s fucked-up perspective for half a second, you realize that what it actually “proved” was that the author thinks gender is determined by the anatomy you’re born with, and doesn’t change even if you deliberately change everything about your appearance.

The author was not self-contradictory on this point. These words and actions were consistent with each other, and were equally awful.

And the argument failed to recognize this, because it failed to look at the author’s perspective.

Same goes for a lot of the pro-choice arguments in the abortion debate. Because they almost always have a skewed idea of just how the fucked-up anti-abortion worldview works.

Again, especially when trying to catch them in contradictions.

For example. That argument about “would you save a live toddler or a cooler full of frozen human embryos from a burning hospital?” …and the assumption that choosing the toddler means you don’t actually consider the embryos people.

But see– to someone who does view embryos as people, this would be just one of the standard trolley problem thought experiments.

Like, imagine if the cooler was full of something that you did value as human life, but that wasn’t as clear and immediate as a toddler right in front of you. For instance– I think I would still try to save the toddler, even if the cooler was full of, like, rare chemotherapy medicines, or organs for transplant– even if I knew beyond doubt that these supplies were intended for patients who were close to death and would absolutely not survive long enough to find a substitute.

I think most of us would make the same choice, in almost all cases, if we’re honest with ourselves. Except, maybe, if the patients needing the supplies included people we personally knew and loved. And even then we’d be horribly conflicted.

And this isn’t because we think those patients aren’t people! It would be because they aren’t there. Human minds are very strongly resistant to prioritizing things that are abstract over things we can see.

And there’s probably good reason for this! You know a toddler is there asking for your help; you have a good idea of how much chance you have to get that toddler to safety. But with a cooler full of supplies (or embryos) you don’t know. For all you know the cooler might already be unsalvageably damaged by the heat of the fire. For all you know the patients might still die before you can get through all of the many steps that will be required in order to get them what they need.

The toddler is a bird in the hand; the patients are birds in the bush. Still living people, and more of them… but without the same level of certainty.

And that matters, to a mind making a decision.

The kidney-transplant argument is similar. Except instead of trying to convince pro-lifers that they don’t actually consider embryos people, it tries to convince them that pro-choice arguments are valid even if embryos are people. It compares the embryo to a person who needs a kidney to survive, and the pregnancy to a kidney donation… which can’t legally and ethically be forced, not even to save a life, because people’s bodily autonomy can’t be violated.

But again– if you think about it from the other perspective for a moment, you realize that the other perspective is just going to ask “wait, why are we imagining the pregnancy as the donor and the embryo as the recipient, instead of the other way around?”

And there’s not a good answer to that. In cases of kidney donation, there are two people whose bodily autonomy is in danger. It’s much more in danger for the one who needs a kidney, because without that donation their body will never be under their own control, and eventually will stop working at all.

Kidney donation isn’t really a question of bodily autonomy. Letting the potential recipient die is at least as much a violation of bodily autonomy as forcing the potential donor to donate.

The difference is that one of those choices is action, and the other one is inaction.

And our minds tend to be much more okay with allowing harm through inaction than causing it through action. This is another point in several of the Trolley Problem thought experiments.

And again, there are reasons for it! If people considered allowing harm to be as bad as causing harm, we’d all be murderers for practically everything we do.

Because every time we do something that isn’t actively life-saving, that’s effort and time and money that doesn’t go toward saving lives. And even when it does go toward saving lives, there’s always the underlying awareness that we’re choosing to save those lives instead of other lives (and that possibly we could even have saved more of them if we’d made a different choice)! We’d be in ethical triage hell, all day long.

So anyway, since abortion is an active choice instead of passive, the kidney donation argument actually fits better with imagining the embryo as the potential donor. Except it’s a donor being forced to give up both kidneys, for a recipient who may or may not even need one– which only makes it worse.

And that’s why the argument doesn’t work, for a worldview that considers the embryo an equally valuable human life that’s being forced to die against its will. The viewpoint it works from is the viewpoint that agrees already: the one that hears “abortion rights analogy” and “a person being forced to do something against their will,” and thinks only of someone being forced to give birth.

And that’s why I don’t use that argument, either. To me, the pro-choice arguments that make sense are the ones that combine bodily autonomy with recognizing that an embryo or fetus is not equivalent to a person.

But… these also aren’t very effective arguments, to those who need to be convinced. Because they involve a complicated, unappealing sort of sliding scale… in which the importance of “embryo not being a person” is stronger at the beginning (when a just-fertilized ovum is not meaningfully different from the same egg and sperm before they join, and therefore doesn’t have human rights whether in utero or in vitro)… and the importance of “bodily autonomy” becomes stronger at the end (when a newborn is not meaningfully different from a late-term fetus, except for the fact that it’s no longer interfering with someone’s body, which is why birth makes a good point to draw the line.)

It isn’t an approach that’s likely to make any sense to an anti-abortion viewpoint.

Meanwhile, the pro-trans-rights arguments that make sense to me are the ones that combine an appeal for personal freedom with the argument that women and men are not significantly different from each other in the ways that matter.

(Plus an appeal to restructure things in society that are just inherently awful, when their awfulness gets blamed on trans rights. Like how the reason people feel unsafe and uncomfortable in public restrooms is not so much because of the genders of who might be in there with them, it’s more because of the inherent awfulness of “having to get part-naked and relieve yourself in a horribly unprivate stall without real walls or doors, inside a larger room that’s just public enough that anyone can come in, but just private enough that they could harass you mostly undisturbed if they wanted to.” It doesn’t have to be that way, for godsakes.)

This sort of argument is maybe a little more likely to convince a transphobe, because at least some of them do start from a point of believing women and men are not significantly different from each other in the ways that matter (this is sometimes what initially prejudices them against the idea that someone could have a female mind in a male body, or vice versa).

The most effective argument may be to stay away from trying to convince them that a particular definition of gender is “correct"… and instead point out that the only reason you’d ever need to agree on a definition is if you wanted to restrict what people can and can’t do based on their gender, which goes against the whole idea of gender equality.

…But again, that still won’t work on transphobes who have gotten deeply into a mindset that rejects gender equality on fundamental levels.

I guess the problem is… the more you look at it from other viewpoints, the less hope you have that you’ll ever be able to convince those other viewpoints.

Which might be why I rarely bother to argue with anyone, these days.