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I'm just talking number of steps here. If i want to help and am not, the only thing you need to convince me of is that my action are harming and convince me of a way to help that actually helps.
If i want to harm then first you have to convince me not to want to harm, then convince me to want to help, then convince me of a way to help that actually helps. You have much more to do.
Assuming the same level of ideological commitment in both then one of those will be easier than the other. Yes how easy individuals will be to convince will of course vary but one is clearly closer on an idea space than the other.
And I guess what I'm saying is that this is a flawed way of looking at it. People don't get convinced in steps, and no one makes this sort of calculus when reacting to someone's views.
This has not been true either in my direct experience, or from observing others.
They don't do calculus, but they clearly do judge differently intuitively in my experience. People are much more likely to forgive someone with motivations they judge to be good. Accidental harm and deliberate harm are treated differently through most of our legal systems as a reflection of that.
Even the legal system, which only criminalizes a minority of 'bad behavior,' commonly treats some cases of accidental harm as equivalent to deliberate harm. In most cases, committing a prohibited harmful behavior 'recklessly' is quite sufficient for a criminal conviction. ('Negligent' behavior isn't generally criminal, but can easily be tortious.)
Translating this intuition where crime is concerned back to the more general political arena, the assertion being made is that once a certain level of evidence is available that a particular policy set is net-harmful, continuing to pursue that policy set may be viewed as 'reckless,' and therefore justifiably equivalent to 'intentional.'
In this particular case, I'm convinced that WPATH's behavior is reckless at a minimum. It may be intentional, in some cases, but I think the distinction is splitting hairs at best; recklessness is enough to make it fully condemnable.
Sure, I am not claiming reckless or negligent behavior can't be bad or even criminal. But negligent homicide or manslaughter and the like are lesser crimes than first degree homicide for a reason.
And that is because it jibes with the general rough understanding that intent matters.
I'm not arguing it can't be bad, I'm arguing that all else being equal negligence or recklessness are seen to be not quite as bad as a planned intention.
That is what the people around me seem to believe, it's what I believe and I don't think its a coincidence that our criminal justice system operates the same way.
If you want to condemn WPATH as being bad, and reckless I think thats reasonable! But we don't consider reckless and intentional to be the same. I think that is apparent in pretty much all of society.
You should have known better may well land you in trouble (and should!) but did know better and still intentionally did it is worse.
It is entirely possible to commit murder recklessly--the classical term is "depraved heart murder." Your intuition does not match criminal law, which does generally put some forms of recklessness in the same category as intentional action. There are cases where a distinction is drawn between them, but those are exceptions (attempt; crimes with the specific element "did X with the intent to do Y;" etc.), and those exceptions are due to the particulars of those crimes, not their severity.
Recklessness is approximately defined as "knew that a significant risk of harm existed, took prohibited action despite the risk." It is distinct from negligence in that the negligent person was not consciously aware of the risk at the time, while the reckless person knew and disregarded.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--if one may be executed for an intentional murder, and also executed for a reckless murder, does it matter that "recklessness [is] not quite as bad"? Just because you've shown a distinction does not mean you've shown a categorical difference.
I don't doubt that's what you and the people around you believe. It is not true that the criminal law agrees with you--again, the default rule in criminal law is that recklessness is an equally culpable mental state to intent.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--
But that's my whole argument! You might well get the same punishment, it might well still be bad, but my entire argument with OP is that we see recklessness or negligence as being just as bad as intentional harm and I argued that did not appear to be true.
If you are conceding that, then that is the totality of my point. I don't have a further argument beyond that.
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I don't think this is true. Religious people don't treat cults and fanatics as "accidental harm". Progressives reframe harm caused by the excesses of their ideology as accidental, and my whole argument is that this is based on flawed reasoning.
Sure they do, in that they sympathize with the victims as being misled. Now of course what they see as a cult and what they see as a religion may vary from their own biases. But many of my Christian neighbors think Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons are a cult and think most of the people are being taken advantage of. See how they react to people trying to deny blood products to their kids that will kill them. We don't arrest them for attempted murder, we generally just override their decision. We clearly do in fact treat people differently where we think they are making bad choices for what they see as good reasons.
That doesn't mean we don't do anything, we have negligent homicide and the like for a reason. But we do not as a society see it as harmful as a direct planned harm.
Yeah, when the cult drives people towards self-destructive behavior. When it drives them to harm others, you see people's sympathy starting to wear thin.
And to the extent you're right you're only proving my point. This is a lot closer to how we treat real, actual, historical Nazis vs Nazism, and how I argue we should treat progressives vs. progressivism.
Yeah, it's almost like we have a taboo against imposing medical procedures without informed consent, and we only override it in extreme circumstances, let alone imprison people for refusing it. If you didn't go with one of the most milquetoast examples of a cult causing harm, it would become obvious how faulty this logic is.
So you agree that with informed consent then trans people should generally be allowed to have surgeries and we should only step in, in the most unusual situations? I'm confused by your position here.
Your own post pointed out the people writing WPATH were concerned about making sure their patients were aware of the risks and potential outcomes. Given that, then by your own logic above why are you worried about this at all? If the patient gives informed consent then no-one is imposing a medical procedure.
Well, the confusion seems to be that you're taking my point about not imposing a medical treatment on someone unwilling, and applying it to turning medicine into a free-for-all where anyone who asks for a particular treatment should get it. The former is how modern medicine is supposed to work in the West, and the latter very much is not. Otherwise we wouldn't have tons upon tons of regulations, licences, and various limits on who is allowed to do what in that field.
While I'm a bit anxious about turning medicine into a free-for-all, I'm not against it on principle. Even in cases like the trans issue, it would be a marked improvement over the status quo, where currently specialists lie to parents about the accuracy of diagnosis, negative effects of lack of treatment, the reversibility of the treatment, and where alternative treatments are sometimes banned as "conversion therapy".
In private. In public they work very hard to minimize the perception of those risks. Compare the videos I linked to, to the article from (WPATH member) Jack Turban, for example.
Other than what I mentioned above, that the concept is supposed to prevent unwanted treatment, rather than open the doors to any wanted treatment, the problem is that there is no informed consent, as admitted by WPATH itself.
Given that you completely dropped the argument about "good intentions" justifying different treatment of ideologies, and are now changing the subject, I take it you concede it?
Not at all, I don't think you were able to provide a good argument against it. Indeed you conceded it when you said those ideologies only got treated better when the outcome was self-destructive. Trans people wanting surgeries is (assuming you think it is destructive at all), self-destructive! Therefore my point was correct!
And it can't be that spreading the ideology counts as harming others because otherwise Jehovahs Witnesses who are famously aggressive about spreading their faith which then causes people to refuse life saving treatment would fall afoul of it.
So far your arguments seem to come from a place of disliking the trans movement then rationalizing why it is uniquely bad, when it simply does not seem much worse than things we do tolerate when it comes to self-determination, then tying your arguments in knots about it.
Your own post doesn't show there is no informed consent, it says specifically for children (only a subset of trans people!) Informed consent is hard because sometimes parents giving consent don't understand and sometimes kids don't understand. I agree thats a tough issue, but its one that happens in medicine all the time. Do you think young kids understand what death is, and it might happen because their parents are against blood transfusions or the like? Do the parents having been raised into a religion that teaches them weird things really have the ability to give informed consent?
And the answer is we basically shrug our shoulders and say yeah, close enough. And its only in the most dire circumstances where courts sometimes decide to override it. And I think thats reasonable for trans issues too. If going ahead is going to lead to death then sure override the parents and kids choices. Perfectly happy with that.
But we accept that people (or parents on behalf of their children) get to make risky decisions all the time. But it seems an isolated demand for rigor to require people to be (as the WPATH person themselves said would be ideal) "tiny endocrinologists" when we do not demand that for people going through even riskier treatments.
Hell the JW'S have a whole network of people whose job it is to convince the hospital and pressure the parents on behalf of the church to not use blood treatments. And we allow that in 99% of cases with no problem at all. When the outcome is a higher risk of death, we allow parents or patients to make stupid calls all the time, yet for trans issues all of a sudden, it's way too risky?
If the parents disagree then absolutely I am on board with restricting trans care. If the parents and kid are on board, well we don't intervene until their actions are about to cause a high risk of death in most cases (and sometimes not even then!) why should this issue be different?
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If the goal is to stop the harm, then for a person who is harming people because they want to cause harm, you only need to convince him to not want to harm the people anymore. With no desire the harm the people any more, naturally he will stop (except, I suppose, out of habit).
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