"Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one’s audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience’s moral beliefs."
At face value, this implies that it is virtually impossible to deliberately engage in moral misdirection, since almost no one sets out to knowingly reduce the accuracy of others moral beliefs- Don for example thinks he is increasing the accuracy of his audiences moral beliefs.
"It’s disheartening to consider how rare this form of intellectual integrity seems to be, even amongst intellectuals (in part because attention to the question of what is truly important is so rare). By drawing explicit attention to it, I hope to make it more common."
The complexity here is that none of us are anyone's sole interlocutor. Don could say, for example "sure, I only tell people about the crimes immigrants commit. That's fine, I'm just like a prosecutor in a trial. Immigrants have plenty of defence lawyers to tell their side of the story." Perhaps slightly more plausibly, consider someone who says "look, obviously wokeness isn't the worst thing in America, but someone has to tell the story of how fucking annoying it is- that's my job. I don't claim to be the font of all wisdom, I'm just pushing a particular angle that I think has merit". I agree that a lot of these broken records on wokeness are very irritating, but capturing exactly what they're doing wrong is hard, given that plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world.
Did you read my discussion of negligence? In general, someone can *predictably* have an effect without *deliberately* doing so. Don may not have given any real thought to the *importance-weighted* effects of his acts, such that when the issue is drawn to his attention he would (if honest) concede that he'd made a mistake. (Few real-life political actors are so intellectually honest or receptive to correction, of course. But motivated reasoning does not excuse, on my account.)
> "plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world"
I'm not much one for "obligation" talk, but I actually think it would be (clearly!) much better for more people to try to be, in this way, fair and balanced guides to what is truly important.
Having said that, I agree it's often fine to have a division of cognitive labor. But it's important to assess one's contributions *in context*. A prosecutor in a trial must trust that the overall system is set up so that, through playing their role, they help juries to reach more rather than less accurate conclusions. If they had sufficient reason to doubt this, then that really would undermine the ethics of their zealous prosecution.
In many particular cases (anti-vaxxers highlighting costs but not benefits of vaccines, for example) I think it's very clear that certain contributions, in context, predictably reduce the importance-weighted accuracy of their audiences. That is objectionable.
Other cases will be less clear, and that's just the way of things. But I think I've identified the right test: assess whether (it is clear that) one's contributions, in context, reduce or enhance importance-weighted accuracy in one's expected audience.
I wonder if it's important to specify a norm against moral misdirection that doesn't leave listeners off the hook for their own epistemic negligence.
I might be in a context where, for example, if I say that Trump's criminal sentencing reform bill was good, it will be taken as a sign that I endorse Trump, that I will vote for Trump, that Trump was a good president, etc., etc. when all of those things are in fact untrue. But it seems to me that there could be cases where I would be under no obligation to correct this misdirection, even if it would be a good thing for me to do. Intuitively, it feels to me that a theory of moral misdirection needs to account for the fact that sometimes it is better to hold listeners liable for their misunderstandings than the speakers who have 'misdirected' them.
I'm not sure that your case meets the "importance" criterion for qualifying as *moral* misdirection, unless your audience views you as their guru and will defer to (what they take to be) your political preferences -- in which case you probably should take care to correct the misimpression! Whether this rises to the level of an 'obligation' might depend on the stakes.
But fair point that there can also be obligations on listeners not to be epistemically negligent. And at least in low stakes contexts, we might think it's fine for the speaker to not bother correcting the misunderstandings of their negligent listeners.
I am reminded of a recent article I wrote about the ethics of polygenic embryo screening. My mind also jumped to vaccines. The main point I wanted to make was that for a selection method, couples need some way to select between the available options and so ethical critiques should be relative, but articles too often side step this. They list MANY reasons why they are concerned and then conclude that polygenic embryo screening should not be offered. But they don't mention the fundamental question of whether it passes a cost benefit analysis. I found this frustrating.
Analogizing to vaccines, I thought: look you can list reasons why it's not 100% proven or there could be potential downsides (rare adverse reactions), but the reality is that there are major downsides to NOT getting the vaccine. We need to do a cost benefit anaysis. I don't think the critics of polygenic embryo selection are doing this on purpose, but it seems like some inadvertent moral misdirection. I think that they don't have a clear idea about what exactly they think is ethical, whereas you do -- utilitarianism.
Yeah, doing one-sided "cost analysis" rather than "cost-benefit analysis" (or at least comparing the costs of doing X to the costs of NOT doing X) seems like a very general recipe for moral misdirection.
Agreed. See also how wellbeing of the outgroup or the immigrants is regularly discounted by nationalists. For example, consider the claim - immigrants commit more crime. The honest cost-benefit analysis would consider the crime rates of sending and receiving countries and then see the incentives and then see how much more or less the immigrants are committing crimes relative to the people in the sending and receiving countries and then see the impact on world crime rate and then decide.
But the moral misdirected way is to - just see immigrant crime rate relative to the natives... and if immigrants commit more crime than natives, then just build a wall and other draconian regulations, restrictions!
In that case I could see it just being an honest disagreement about what's important (see footnote 3). If someone was *known* to be a criminal, it would seem pretty reasonable to not want them in your neighborhood, even if keeping them out would result in their committing impartially worse crimes elsewhere.
Exactly I want to keep them out of my neighborhood. It places like San Francisco LA in New York want them and let them have them because I don’t need to go there. I want to feel safe in my own neighborhood and my own state. These people are not vetted all of these illegal aliens need to be sent back to where they came from and apply and enter the United States legally. There is a legal process and it needs to be followed.
I think that's a very interesting idea. But I think the average person has an extremely high moral value for their fellow citizens which isn't defensible for utilitarianism--but could be defensible from a different moral perspective.
I submit that a political leader or candidate who proposes, or intends to implement, a more liberal immigration policy primarily in order to improve the welfare of potential migrants should make that motive clear rather than pretending that the welfare of his fellow countrymen is his primary concern.
Would a lot of leftist critiques of sweatshops count as moral misdirection?
While concerns about safety and abuse are important, these critiques often leave out the most salient facts - we are talking about people living in extreme poverty who very much want these jobs and who will be benefitted significantly from them.
Excellent analysis, I agree that such misdirection (ethical or epidemiological) is a serious problem and that we'd be all much better off if there was less of it.
That said, I think relatively little of it is knowing and in TRULY bad faith. I'm sure much is intellectually negligent. Some will be attempting to navigate a very complex information landscape indeed, especially in "official" communications -- it's very difficult to assess the potential downstream effects of allowing something with known risks on the behaviour masses of people, of whom some will be under informed and many will have different values/priorities. I think this is an important if exasperating reason "precautionary principle" is so common in Big Issues public health now. Leaving covid aside, during the original MMR-causes-autism panic in the UK, the government refused to offer measles-only vaccine to hesitant parents. It is available privately (I'm not sure if it was then, though) at a substantial fee. There's no child vaccine mandates in the UK so it's a fairly pure case. I think this was a right decision. But it likely DID reduce measles vaccination rates (the only potentially truly serious with significant frequency of the three), while probably keeping MMR rates higher than they'd have been had a single jab was offered as an alternative. So, it IS complicated. If a drop in MMR uptake rates was extremely high, offering single measles vaccine would have been probably optimal. One could still argue that NOT offering single jab to parents who completely refuse MMR is ethically sketchy. But I'm getting distracted away from pure information issues (this is policy as information, tho).
So back to the meritum:
>>*what if they misdirect as a result of sincerely but falsely believing that what they’re drawing our attention to is really more important than what they’re distracting us from?*<<
I think this is, unfortunately, at the very core of most of such behaviour. The IMPORTANCE aspect is where this whole thing crashes. I've seen only yesterday some American saying that while they think Trump is an absolutely awful person, bad news in every sense, they will be voting for him (presumably holding their nose and averting eyes) because they consider "gender-questionig propaganda in schools" an issue of such utmost importance that it overrides everything else. I think a similar thing is often true with anti abortion people: yes, if you REALLY think abortion is murder, then voting for almost anyone who has a chance of reducing it is a no-brainer, however bad he or she is otherwise.
As to scandals, they're not really about their content, but they're signals -- of dishonesty, stupidity, arrogance, etc. I don't care at all whether Johnson & co had parties at No 10 during lockdowns, champagne or not. But it says something about those people, which isn't altogether unimportant.
It’s choosing between the lesser of two evils and many times like currently that’s the only choice we have. Both sides are bad and there is no good to choose so you have to weigh which bad is worse and in my case abortion and all this gender trash is worse, because I don’t believe in murder and I don’t believe in this grooming and spewing of immorality and destroying our youth.
To this day, I don’t understand this whole thing about the measles. It’s a childhood disease. I had every kind of measles there was twice as a child and I am fine. Why are people getting so upset about people not wanting to get a measles shot it’s a simple childhood disease, I mean my God we had chickenpox parties with my kids so that everybody in the neighborhood got him around the same time.
The same can be said about the Covid vaccine. I don’t care if you got it or not but a lot more people have health issues who got it than those people who survived Covid and the people that died from Covid in 90% of the cases had extenuating circumstances and other serious health conditions like diabetes or cancer that were killing them anyway. I know several people or I should say new several people who died as a result of the vaccine itself.
Beyond the scope of the “moral misdirection” topic, but yes, I agree we need to prioritise and choose lesser evils at times. Personally, I don't care all that much about “gender nonsense”, but I care AN AWFUL LOT about a right to abortion, so there would need to be very persuasive reasons for me to vote for any party that wants to curtail it. Luckily, where I live no party would dream of doing it, it's a non-issue, but had I lived in the US that single issue would be enough for me to vote against GOP (and there are many others too).
As to vaccines, I'm not going to even try to engage on this topic as I am fairly certain that you are wrong here but won't be persuaded — it's your right and choice to act based on inaccurate information — again, where I live there are no compulsory vaccinations (but the vast majority of people follow standard recommendations) and I'm happy with that model.
One extremely common example of moral misdirection is talking about benefits and harms of an action purely from an human standpoint, while neglecting the impacts on animals (farmed or in the wild).
However, as animals are very numerous, and it is likely that they can feel pain and suffering, it's really easy to miss the big picture by not talking about them.
Of course, this is understandable, as we live in a human society while most harms caused to animals are mostly hidden. It's also uncomfortable, to hold this conclusion and I personally did not think about things from this angle for a very long time (most people I care about are humans, after all).
But when we talk about the 'good' or 'bad' of any event (an election, a recipe, a wildfire, climate change, technological progress in the last 50 years), it would (at least theoretically) make sense to dedicate a large amount of time on the impact of most moral patients, which are animals.
I could see many people just honestly disagreeing about how important animal welfare is. To distinguish "moral misdirection" from sheer "moral neglect", we may need to add that (to qualify as misdirection) the speaker would not be willing to openly affirm the implicated false claim. (Compare footnote 3.)
Disagreeing on how important this topic is makes sense. I think most people would agree with the claim that "it is important to not make animals suffer needlessly" - and this would as a result deserve, at the very least, more consideration than what happens in public discourse.
So it might not be "moral misdirection", but "moral neglect", that's possible - althought in practice I expect that this would lead to similar results.
I think I thought of a particularly egregious example of moral misdirection. There is a worrying trend of public profiles of individuals or descriptions basically consisting of the WORST things that person has ever said--sometimes with little context. For example, Rational Wiki says I am "a eugenicist who supports embryo selection and has criticized trans rights." and links to some article I wrote a few years ago about ambiguous use of language to bolster moral intuitions (e.g. saying "my existence is threatened" by not recognizing trans identity, describing embryo-selection against deafness as "genocide"). I feel like this is used to make me look like a bad guy, rather than explain who I am as a writer, but few people are going to read the whole thing and say "that's an unfair description of the article" to recalibrate their moral evaluation of me. Such is the price to pay for talking about a hot-button issue like transgenderism--which I will probably never write about again for this reason.
Embryo selection against deafness or any other undesirable genetically-determined trait at the behest of prospective parents is indeed eugenic -- and I see nothing wrong with it.
"Eugenics" should not be a dirty word merely because of the notoriety of the inhumane methods to which Nazis (who preferred the term "racial hygiene") resorted to purge the Nordic gene-pool of traits such as feeble-mindedness and mental illness.
Given that most people strongly associate "eugenics" with *coercive* eugenics (which also happened in the US!), it does seem pretty misleading -- at least to a general audience -- to call someone a "eugenicist" if they *don't* actually support any coercive measures along those lines.
(That said, I don't want this thread to devolve into a verbal dispute over "eugenics", so let's leave it at that -- feel free to post further about it on your own blog if you feel the need.)
"Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one’s audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience’s moral beliefs."
At face value, this implies that it is virtually impossible to deliberately engage in moral misdirection, since almost no one sets out to knowingly reduce the accuracy of others moral beliefs- Don for example thinks he is increasing the accuracy of his audiences moral beliefs.
"It’s disheartening to consider how rare this form of intellectual integrity seems to be, even amongst intellectuals (in part because attention to the question of what is truly important is so rare). By drawing explicit attention to it, I hope to make it more common."
The complexity here is that none of us are anyone's sole interlocutor. Don could say, for example "sure, I only tell people about the crimes immigrants commit. That's fine, I'm just like a prosecutor in a trial. Immigrants have plenty of defence lawyers to tell their side of the story." Perhaps slightly more plausibly, consider someone who says "look, obviously wokeness isn't the worst thing in America, but someone has to tell the story of how fucking annoying it is- that's my job. I don't claim to be the font of all wisdom, I'm just pushing a particular angle that I think has merit". I agree that a lot of these broken records on wokeness are very irritating, but capturing exactly what they're doing wrong is hard, given that plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world.
Did you read my discussion of negligence? In general, someone can *predictably* have an effect without *deliberately* doing so. Don may not have given any real thought to the *importance-weighted* effects of his acts, such that when the issue is drawn to his attention he would (if honest) concede that he'd made a mistake. (Few real-life political actors are so intellectually honest or receptive to correction, of course. But motivated reasoning does not excuse, on my account.)
> "plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world"
I'm not much one for "obligation" talk, but I actually think it would be (clearly!) much better for more people to try to be, in this way, fair and balanced guides to what is truly important.
Having said that, I agree it's often fine to have a division of cognitive labor. But it's important to assess one's contributions *in context*. A prosecutor in a trial must trust that the overall system is set up so that, through playing their role, they help juries to reach more rather than less accurate conclusions. If they had sufficient reason to doubt this, then that really would undermine the ethics of their zealous prosecution.
In many particular cases (anti-vaxxers highlighting costs but not benefits of vaccines, for example) I think it's very clear that certain contributions, in context, predictably reduce the importance-weighted accuracy of their audiences. That is objectionable.
Other cases will be less clear, and that's just the way of things. But I think I've identified the right test: assess whether (it is clear that) one's contributions, in context, reduce or enhance importance-weighted accuracy in one's expected audience.
Thanks for this very resonant piece.
I wonder if it's important to specify a norm against moral misdirection that doesn't leave listeners off the hook for their own epistemic negligence.
I might be in a context where, for example, if I say that Trump's criminal sentencing reform bill was good, it will be taken as a sign that I endorse Trump, that I will vote for Trump, that Trump was a good president, etc., etc. when all of those things are in fact untrue. But it seems to me that there could be cases where I would be under no obligation to correct this misdirection, even if it would be a good thing for me to do. Intuitively, it feels to me that a theory of moral misdirection needs to account for the fact that sometimes it is better to hold listeners liable for their misunderstandings than the speakers who have 'misdirected' them.
I'm not sure that your case meets the "importance" criterion for qualifying as *moral* misdirection, unless your audience views you as their guru and will defer to (what they take to be) your political preferences -- in which case you probably should take care to correct the misimpression! Whether this rises to the level of an 'obligation' might depend on the stakes.
But fair point that there can also be obligations on listeners not to be epistemically negligent. And at least in low stakes contexts, we might think it's fine for the speaker to not bother correcting the misunderstandings of their negligent listeners.
Nice article.
I am reminded of a recent article I wrote about the ethics of polygenic embryo screening. My mind also jumped to vaccines. The main point I wanted to make was that for a selection method, couples need some way to select between the available options and so ethical critiques should be relative, but articles too often side step this. They list MANY reasons why they are concerned and then conclude that polygenic embryo screening should not be offered. But they don't mention the fundamental question of whether it passes a cost benefit analysis. I found this frustrating.
Analogizing to vaccines, I thought: look you can list reasons why it's not 100% proven or there could be potential downsides (rare adverse reactions), but the reality is that there are major downsides to NOT getting the vaccine. We need to do a cost benefit anaysis. I don't think the critics of polygenic embryo selection are doing this on purpose, but it seems like some inadvertent moral misdirection. I think that they don't have a clear idea about what exactly they think is ethical, whereas you do -- utilitarianism.
https://www.parrhesia.co/p/contra-the-acmg-on-polygenic-embryo
Yeah, doing one-sided "cost analysis" rather than "cost-benefit analysis" (or at least comparing the costs of doing X to the costs of NOT doing X) seems like a very general recipe for moral misdirection.
Agreed. See also how wellbeing of the outgroup or the immigrants is regularly discounted by nationalists. For example, consider the claim - immigrants commit more crime. The honest cost-benefit analysis would consider the crime rates of sending and receiving countries and then see the incentives and then see how much more or less the immigrants are committing crimes relative to the people in the sending and receiving countries and then see the impact on world crime rate and then decide.
But the moral misdirected way is to - just see immigrant crime rate relative to the natives... and if immigrants commit more crime than natives, then just build a wall and other draconian regulations, restrictions!
In that case I could see it just being an honest disagreement about what's important (see footnote 3). If someone was *known* to be a criminal, it would seem pretty reasonable to not want them in your neighborhood, even if keeping them out would result in their committing impartially worse crimes elsewhere.
Exactly I want to keep them out of my neighborhood. It places like San Francisco LA in New York want them and let them have them because I don’t need to go there. I want to feel safe in my own neighborhood and my own state. These people are not vetted all of these illegal aliens need to be sent back to where they came from and apply and enter the United States legally. There is a legal process and it needs to be followed.
Thanks. That makes sense.
I think that's a very interesting idea. But I think the average person has an extremely high moral value for their fellow citizens which isn't defensible for utilitarianism--but could be defensible from a different moral perspective.
I submit that a political leader or candidate who proposes, or intends to implement, a more liberal immigration policy primarily in order to improve the welfare of potential migrants should make that motive clear rather than pretending that the welfare of his fellow countrymen is his primary concern.
Well, in my opinion, the woke crowd does not have a defensible reason for allowing this invasion of our country by illegals.
True, true.
Would a lot of leftist critiques of sweatshops count as moral misdirection?
While concerns about safety and abuse are important, these critiques often leave out the most salient facts - we are talking about people living in extreme poverty who very much want these jobs and who will be benefitted significantly from them.
I think they often can be, yeah. (Though I want to stress that responsible critique of any target is possible. Just sadly rare, perhaps.)
Excellent analysis, I agree that such misdirection (ethical or epidemiological) is a serious problem and that we'd be all much better off if there was less of it.
That said, I think relatively little of it is knowing and in TRULY bad faith. I'm sure much is intellectually negligent. Some will be attempting to navigate a very complex information landscape indeed, especially in "official" communications -- it's very difficult to assess the potential downstream effects of allowing something with known risks on the behaviour masses of people, of whom some will be under informed and many will have different values/priorities. I think this is an important if exasperating reason "precautionary principle" is so common in Big Issues public health now. Leaving covid aside, during the original MMR-causes-autism panic in the UK, the government refused to offer measles-only vaccine to hesitant parents. It is available privately (I'm not sure if it was then, though) at a substantial fee. There's no child vaccine mandates in the UK so it's a fairly pure case. I think this was a right decision. But it likely DID reduce measles vaccination rates (the only potentially truly serious with significant frequency of the three), while probably keeping MMR rates higher than they'd have been had a single jab was offered as an alternative. So, it IS complicated. If a drop in MMR uptake rates was extremely high, offering single measles vaccine would have been probably optimal. One could still argue that NOT offering single jab to parents who completely refuse MMR is ethically sketchy. But I'm getting distracted away from pure information issues (this is policy as information, tho).
So back to the meritum:
>>*what if they misdirect as a result of sincerely but falsely believing that what they’re drawing our attention to is really more important than what they’re distracting us from?*<<
I think this is, unfortunately, at the very core of most of such behaviour. The IMPORTANCE aspect is where this whole thing crashes. I've seen only yesterday some American saying that while they think Trump is an absolutely awful person, bad news in every sense, they will be voting for him (presumably holding their nose and averting eyes) because they consider "gender-questionig propaganda in schools" an issue of such utmost importance that it overrides everything else. I think a similar thing is often true with anti abortion people: yes, if you REALLY think abortion is murder, then voting for almost anyone who has a chance of reducing it is a no-brainer, however bad he or she is otherwise.
As to scandals, they're not really about their content, but they're signals -- of dishonesty, stupidity, arrogance, etc. I don't care at all whether Johnson & co had parties at No 10 during lockdowns, champagne or not. But it says something about those people, which isn't altogether unimportant.
It’s choosing between the lesser of two evils and many times like currently that’s the only choice we have. Both sides are bad and there is no good to choose so you have to weigh which bad is worse and in my case abortion and all this gender trash is worse, because I don’t believe in murder and I don’t believe in this grooming and spewing of immorality and destroying our youth.
To this day, I don’t understand this whole thing about the measles. It’s a childhood disease. I had every kind of measles there was twice as a child and I am fine. Why are people getting so upset about people not wanting to get a measles shot it’s a simple childhood disease, I mean my God we had chickenpox parties with my kids so that everybody in the neighborhood got him around the same time.
The same can be said about the Covid vaccine. I don’t care if you got it or not but a lot more people have health issues who got it than those people who survived Covid and the people that died from Covid in 90% of the cases had extenuating circumstances and other serious health conditions like diabetes or cancer that were killing them anyway. I know several people or I should say new several people who died as a result of the vaccine itself.
Beyond the scope of the “moral misdirection” topic, but yes, I agree we need to prioritise and choose lesser evils at times. Personally, I don't care all that much about “gender nonsense”, but I care AN AWFUL LOT about a right to abortion, so there would need to be very persuasive reasons for me to vote for any party that wants to curtail it. Luckily, where I live no party would dream of doing it, it's a non-issue, but had I lived in the US that single issue would be enough for me to vote against GOP (and there are many others too).
As to vaccines, I'm not going to even try to engage on this topic as I am fairly certain that you are wrong here but won't be persuaded — it's your right and choice to act based on inaccurate information — again, where I live there are no compulsory vaccinations (but the vast majority of people follow standard recommendations) and I'm happy with that model.
Interesting discussion. Deceiving others with true statements has been called “paltering”. I just talked about it here: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/i/142688541/deception-with-plausible-deniability-paltering
Good thoughts! Moral misdirection is ubiquitous.
One extremely common example of moral misdirection is talking about benefits and harms of an action purely from an human standpoint, while neglecting the impacts on animals (farmed or in the wild).
However, as animals are very numerous, and it is likely that they can feel pain and suffering, it's really easy to miss the big picture by not talking about them.
Of course, this is understandable, as we live in a human society while most harms caused to animals are mostly hidden. It's also uncomfortable, to hold this conclusion and I personally did not think about things from this angle for a very long time (most people I care about are humans, after all).
But when we talk about the 'good' or 'bad' of any event (an election, a recipe, a wildfire, climate change, technological progress in the last 50 years), it would (at least theoretically) make sense to dedicate a large amount of time on the impact of most moral patients, which are animals.
I could see many people just honestly disagreeing about how important animal welfare is. To distinguish "moral misdirection" from sheer "moral neglect", we may need to add that (to qualify as misdirection) the speaker would not be willing to openly affirm the implicated false claim. (Compare footnote 3.)
Disagreeing on how important this topic is makes sense. I think most people would agree with the claim that "it is important to not make animals suffer needlessly" - and this would as a result deserve, at the very least, more consideration than what happens in public discourse.
So it might not be "moral misdirection", but "moral neglect", that's possible - althought in practice I expect that this would lead to similar results.
I think I thought of a particularly egregious example of moral misdirection. There is a worrying trend of public profiles of individuals or descriptions basically consisting of the WORST things that person has ever said--sometimes with little context. For example, Rational Wiki says I am "a eugenicist who supports embryo selection and has criticized trans rights." and links to some article I wrote a few years ago about ambiguous use of language to bolster moral intuitions (e.g. saying "my existence is threatened" by not recognizing trans identity, describing embryo-selection against deafness as "genocide"). I feel like this is used to make me look like a bad guy, rather than explain who I am as a writer, but few people are going to read the whole thing and say "that's an unfair description of the article" to recalibrate their moral evaluation of me. Such is the price to pay for talking about a hot-button issue like transgenderism--which I will probably never write about again for this reason.
Embryo selection against deafness or any other undesirable genetically-determined trait at the behest of prospective parents is indeed eugenic -- and I see nothing wrong with it.
"Eugenics" should not be a dirty word merely because of the notoriety of the inhumane methods to which Nazis (who preferred the term "racial hygiene") resorted to purge the Nordic gene-pool of traits such as feeble-mindedness and mental illness.
Given that most people strongly associate "eugenics" with *coercive* eugenics (which also happened in the US!), it does seem pretty misleading -- at least to a general audience -- to call someone a "eugenicist" if they *don't* actually support any coercive measures along those lines.
(That said, I don't want this thread to devolve into a verbal dispute over "eugenics", so let's leave it at that -- feel free to post further about it on your own blog if you feel the need.)
What’s the best example of moral misdirection on the left?
Coming up in a future post :-)
Absolutely excellent, excellent!