Mr. Bad: “As for Arwen’s ad hominem against Richard, I’m slightly surprised that you let it slide; I thought personal attacks were out of bounds here.”

This is something of a pet peeve of mine.

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when you (irrelevantly) appeal to facts about the person advocating a view or advancing an argument, as a substitute for addressing the argument. In its circumstantial form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to explain why the person is making an argument, and tries to use them to explain away or dismiss the argument. In its abusive form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to make the advocate bad or untrustworthy, and so to dismiss or undermine the argument without considering it on its own merits.

Argumentum ad hominem is not committed whenever somebody insults another person, or engages in “personal attacks.” (It is only when the attacks are insults are falsely presented as a counter-argument to some point that the fallacy is committed.) Arwen didn’t do this to Richard. In fact, she didn’t engage in any personal attacks at all: she merely used sarcasm to point out that the standards that he was applying to the feminist movement, and to feminist theory as a whole, were unfair.

Hope this helps.

Hugo: Anyone on the pro-choice side want to make a case that what this woman did was morally defensible?

Yes. If you think (as I do) that abortion is part of a woman’s moral right to control her own body, then why would you have any particular indignation about Amy Richards’ decision?

Your reaction makes sense on one common anti-abortion view (the view that abortion is a grave evil, but that women who feel constrained to choose it by dire circumstances deserve compassion rather than condemnation). It doesn’t make very much sense on the most common pro-choice views. It seems to me that the disagreement on this case will have a lot to do with general attitudes towards abortion and very little to do with Amy Richards’ circumstances specifically.

The pro-choice position does not depend on whether you feel sorry for the poor girl or not. It’s based on respect for women’s choices.

candace: And the sad thing is, I would bet that Amy Richards’ little boy would, too.

This is preposterous arrogance. You don’t know Amy Richards and you almost certainly will never know her “little boy.” He didn’t ask you to speak on his behalf and I can’t see where you got any particular knowledge or authority that would make it appropriate for you to do so. If you want to make a case against abortion you should feel free, but using a stranger’s child as a ventriloquist’s prop in trying to make it only undermines your efforts.

joe: In getting off the topic, I was hoping to draw a comparison to those of affluence (education) and those less affluent (little education) and its impact on society. Do the enlightened ideals of abortion and contraception, which are probably used mostly by the well-to-do, a benefit to society?

There’s no need to speculate about who “probably” uses abortion and contraception. Data is publicly available. As it happens, you’re correct about contraception but mistaken about abortion: poor and low-income women are more likely than “well-to-do” women to have abortions (see: Alan Guttmacher Institute: Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001 in the Findings under “Women’s Characteristics”); the rate of abortion per 1,000 women decreases fairly steadily as annual income increases. Anyway, I’m unclear what any of this has to do with whether abortion should or should not be legal. If birth rates decline in proportion to increases in female literacy and education, then that must mean that women, given the resources and options to make a meaningful choice, are choosing not to have as many children as they had previously had. The women making these choices are human beings, not machines for maximizing whatever demographic statistics you happen to find important; each and every one of the women in question has her own life and her own reasons for choosing to have fewer children, and I can’t imagine where policy-makers would get the knowledge or the virtue or the right to tell her that she needs to abandon those reasons in order to make quota.

Well, I think it’s obvious that there is some problem to be considered here, but I’m a bit puzzled that you treat “teaching and evaluating” all of a piece. I took a class in statistical methods that my father taught several years ago; the arrangement that we worked out was to ask the Department Chair, as a favor (since it concerned a single student only, and the course was in his area of specialty, it wasn’t that big of one to ask) to grade the exams that I took. It may not be possible to arrange something of the sort in every situation; but if it’s not possible to arrange a third-party auditor for the kid’s grades, well, that’s as good a reason as any to have the kid enroll in somebody else’s section.

It seems likely to me that there are some parts of the student-teacher relationship that are worth taking a harder line on than others.

Sally: ‘“Queer” is a much broader category than “gay and lesbian”: it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you’re less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.’

Well, no it doesn’t—not really. There are lots of forms of sexuality that are non-normative, in this society or in past societies, but which aren’t part of what “queer” is commonly accepted to mean: e.g. paedophilia, bestiality, incest, polyandry, liasons between black men and white women, etc. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I doubt that Hugo’s class is going to cover all of these topics in any particular depth, and I also doubt that it should. (I know that I, for one, would be quietly puzzled if interracial relationships were being considered under the same heading of “queer” and furious if paedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. were.)

Generally I think it’s pretty well understood that when people say “queer” it means something like “gay” in the broad sense or the ever-expanding alphabet soup (on a recent trip to a college campus I noticed that the “community” had now expanded to “LGBTIQ”) — that is sexualities that differ from the norm mainly in regard to the sex or the gender identity of the people involved. Of course there are problems with each of these ways of trying to say what you mean — sticking to words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “sexual orientation” reifies categories that are actually very specific to our own times; using words like “gay” can do the same thing and also prioritizes the experience of gay men; using the alphabet soup is unwieldy, falls back on the same reified categories, and creates expectations of false universality; but I think “queer” is just as bad in creating the impression of false universality (although the sort of universality it suggests may be different) and also, frankly, hard to give any coherent definition to whatsoever that doesn’t just fall back on one or more of the terms that it’s supposedly trying to replace.

None of this is an argument against using any of these forms of speech, incidentally. I just don’t think that there’s any good one-size-fits-all solution to the linguistic problem and that we are better off keeping things simple while being critical of the terms we use than finding some “right” word to use.

Come on, Hugo. I’m no Catholic, and I probably have a lot more problems with Benedict than you do, but this is a bit much:

As a Christian of Jewish descent (on my father’s side), and as a professional historian, I share the same uncertainties as Jonathan Dresner. (One canard that I’m quite tired of is the notion that “everyone” joined the Hitler Youth and “went along” because they had no choice. That insults the memories of far too many righteous Germans who were part of the Resistance, from Bonhoeffer to Hans and Sophie Scholl.)

Hans Scholl was 21 when the war broke out and Sophie was 18. Ratzinger was 12 years old. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty hard for me to blame 12-14 year olds for not facing imprisonment and death in the struggle against even the most Satanic totalitarianism. It’s pretty hard for me to blame 18-21 year olds, for that matter, but at least in that case we are talking about people who are unambiguously adults. (By the time Ratzinger was 18, the war was nearly over. He was drafted into the military; when he was, he did desert his post at the risk of summary execution.)

And, well, I don’t know how to say this exactly, so let’s just go with the quotes:

From Sophie Scholl’s biography on WikiPedia:

In 1932, Sophie started attending a secondary school for girls. At the age of twelve, she joined the Hitler Youth, like most of her classmates. Her initial enthusiasm gradually gave way to criticism. She was aware of the dissenting political views of her father, of friends, and also of some teachers. The political attitude now became an essential criterion in her choice of friends. The arrest of her brothers and friends in 1937 left a strong impression on her.

From Hans Scholl’s bio at the White Rose memorial site:

Hans enrolled in a secondary school. In late 1933, Hans joined the Hitler Youth. He was attracted by their apparently high ideals. However, disappointed by the reality of National Socialism, he sought contact with the ‘Jugendbewegung’ (Youth Movement).

From Pope Benedict XVI’s biography at WikiPedia:

When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, membership of which was legally required from 1938 until the end of the “Third Reich” in 1945. According to National Catholic Reporter correspondent and biographer John Allen, Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a National Socialist mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. While this normally required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities, according to Ratzinger, his professor arranged that the young seminary student did not need to attend those gatherings to receive a scholarship.

It’s worth pointing out that the Scholls each joined the Hitler Youth before it was made legally mandatory. The point here isn’t to run down the Scholls; it’s to point out that people can join terrible organizations when they are young, not knowing very much about what is going on around them, and later repent, and even bring themselves to acts of astonishing courage and love. The fact that Ratzinger was in no position to do this at the age of 14 raises no more moral questions for me than the fact in 1932 Alexander Solzhenitsyn (age 14) was not personally risking his life in the underground to stop the Great Purge and the Terror-Famine in the Ukraine.

“To answer Alyric’s question, masculinity must be changed because the pursuit of traditional masculine ideals makes most men very unhappy.”

Maybe traditional masculine ideals do make most men very unhappy. I’m not sure this is true, but if it were, is men’s unhappiness the reason that we ought to change masculinity? What about what the social and political prerogatives of masculinity do to, well, y’know, women?

“I do think rigid gender roles harm men.”

In some respects I’m sure they do. I’ve been on the business end of normative masculinity too many times in my life to think otherwise. But don’t we have to ask why those rigid roles exist, why those pains are inflicted, who inflicts them, and what they accomplish?

FP: “Does it not allow women to evade responsibility as well? Or is the pill a natural function now?”

A heart attack is a “natural function”. A defribillator is an artificial intervention that prevents cardiac arrest from taking its normal course, i.e., death. It doesn’t follow from this that you are evading your responsibility to die.

Broadly speaking, “natural” is not a term with any intrinsic normative content whatsoever. Certainly not for human beings, anyway: invention is a part—perhaps the most distinctive part—of our nature.