Licensing to control Irresponsible sexual behaviour

As one of the number of factors in society that will collude in reducing the abortion rate without making abortion illegal, I have suggested, without any detail whatsoever, that some kind of licensing/registering regulatory system is a likely trend, and one that as constituents we can influence its direction in a positive way. I will refer to marriage licenses, driving licenses, "blue" card for working with children, Apprehended violence orders, and student cards. The license I am proposing, I would envisage being just another card to carry like these. It would be called something like a dating license to start with. You wouldn't necessarily have to pass any tests or anything, but just have your details registered and police checked (as with the blue card). I would consider it an important form of ID for adolescents and young adults (as would a student card). It would be required to be shown to, say, go to a movie, restaurant, or disco in certain situations. Where it would shine would be with certain infringements. Convictions on date rape (or any kind) would disqualify you from having a date license. Lesser infringements such as inappropriate behaviour as registered by a complainant or by a third party would be registered as infringements (as speeding, parking infringements are) and wouldn't necessarily disqualify your license until you got a number of them. Complainants that make a number of complaints against different people may also be cautioned for vexatious behaviour. Teenage (or any unwanted) pregnancies caused or had can then be easily factored in the equation, and used as evidence of irresponsible behaviour as far as the dating license is concerned. I see this as primarily reducing the incidence of date rape and other hard to prove indiscretions/crimes, such as statutory rape. The reduced incidence of unwanted pregnancies will just be a side effect.

Schapelle - a statistical analysis

Now I have heard this statement a few times with respect to Indonesia's legal system. "Only facts relevant to the case should be considered" implying that things such as the relative percentages of people carrying drugs from Indonesia to Australia and visa versa, the prevalence of drugs in luggage in domestic Australian flights, unrelated cases of drugs mysteriously appearing in peoples luggage are completely irrelevant. This reminds me of a tragic case of a young male getting a screening for HIV. His initial screening came back positive, and his doctor told him that the test had a 4% false positive rate. Because this young individual only took into account facts relevant to the test, he calculated that he had a 96% chance of having AIDS. He committed suicide, not realising that the actual probability was only 1% that he had HIV. Anyone who knows statistics knows that in situations of imperfect information, a strictly statistical approach including (even highly approximate) data about the population in general will give a much better idea of probability of guilt. By the percentage of drug cases that the judge has found innocent, it seems that he is just rubberstamping the prosecution's cases. The Indonesians don't seem to agree with the adage that it is better for 99 guilty to be set free than for 1 innocent to be found guilty.

So many things to write about

I feel I need to make (or retract) my case for licensing to control irresponsible sexual behaviour. I feel I need to respond to an anonymous comment regarding (S)chapelle Corby(late April/early may entry). I feel that I would probably like some answers to the other questions I posed to Dr. Clam. I would probably like at least a G'Day style comment from anybody who reads this (yes you know who I'm talking about, it's you, and I haven't got a single comment out of you, but I know you read this blog!). I will get to some of that!

Pie in the sky technology vs pie in the sky legislation

Dr. Clam said:
The idea that children raised by parents who suck will do better than ones raised by a benevolent state or NGO is one that has too many historical counter-examples to bother refuting.

Humour me, how, in history have children been raised by the state? And is that from birth?

Then:
I find your 'licensing' system infinitely more terrifying than putting drugs in the water. Beyond the obvious axiom that legislative solutions are bad and fail, while technological solutions are good and succeed, it will have absoluely ruinous compliance costs except in the limit of the Global Village, where it will be superfluous.

Is having to have a driving license terrifying? Would it be better to just take cars away from people who have caused accidents and never let them drive again? Would it be better to think of the desire to drive as a mental illness? Maybe you should clarify your "obvious" axiom - at the moment it sounds like a gross exaggeration. Legislative moves such as making the wearing of seatbelts compulsory is much more cost-effective at saving lives than technological air-bags. Technological solutions such as shipping everyone to Mars to solve our population problems is not a helpful vision, because it isn't realistically feasible. The compliance costs of licensing can be quite low also. The "Blue card" system for suitability to work with children, for instance is not expensive and is a useful tool to police regarding paedophiles.


Also when you say:

I envision technology that would take the children away from unwanted parents at a very early age and raise them in tanks, so they would not be forced to bring them to term and would not be likely to form an emotional bond.

You ignore your own arguments with regards to legislation. Clearly, you need legislation to allow this technology. Even technology needs basic tweaking of legislation to develop properly. There was a policy of taking away children who were deemed to be in doubful circumstances in Australia. The children are invariably called the stolen generation. They weren't brought up by the state, but were moved in to well-adjusted families. I don't think they ended up any better than those that were left with their parents.

Future Caliphate

Dr. Clam said
Just one comment for now- you mentioned my hypothetical caliphate before (probably far from the most unlikely way for prohibiton to occur) and under such a regime unwanted children would be raised by the state to form a quasi-military caste, not left to fester with their unwanted parents.

The advantage I see with a caliphate system over a nation state system with full moral leeway for each state, is that people wouldn't be able to move from a strict nation to a more liberal one to avoid restrictions to their "choice". If a caliphate was broad enough , the rules would be consistent across national boundaries, and if the economy suffered as a "cost" of the moral rules, other countries couldn't take advantage of that (competitively). This was the main failing with communism in which there was the success of non-communist systems to compare with, so that communism was not so much a failing as an evolutionary dead-end. I don't believe that under even the most favourable conditions, children raised by the state could do any better than unwanting parents, even ignoring the fact that most unwanting parents will still want to do their best for "their" child, and would not give them up for adoption willingly, even if they had wished them dead at some stage.

Having read the preamble to Afghanistan's constitution back when we were talking about separation of church and state, it seems that newly democratising Islamic middle eastern countries would make their country's laws secondary to Islamic law - caliphate style. However with no central basis for Islamic churches, it is difficult to see how an Islamic caliphate woud be structured.

This, to me is all a little bit moot, because I believe a global caliphate highly unlikely to ever happen, barring a really huge Earth-changing "Act of God". As you, however, I believe structural change to be inevitable (in first world countries) but it will not involve womb replacing incubators, and demographic change will not be a big factor. I believe the change to be influenced by a convergence of many factors which make the life of the unborn more valuable to society. Better education (sex, child upbringing), better contraception technologies, better 4-dimensional ultrasound technology such that the life of the unborn is more visible, Stable popuation (more resources able to be allocated for the future generation), stricter regulation with the youth with a view to reducing date rape and other problematic situations. The future provision of "date licences" or "unprotected sex licenses", as well as parenting licenses also. The separation of sex and pregnancy seems to be a logical progression, and will reduce abortion rates.

A little bit of cost-benefit analysis

I am going to make a lot of dead reckoning judgements, on my way through this analysis, but I feel that the figures are accurate enough to make some broad observations. I am going to use Dr. Clam's figure of $100k as a reference value for the value of the life of the unborn at the stage they are typically aborted. I'm asserting that this value is well below the "market" value of the life of a born baby in our country, and well above the "market" value of said unborn at said stage. Based on the rough figures from the pre-Rowe vs Wade and post comparisons, it is clear that the actual numbers of illegal abortions was at least an order of magnitude lower with abortions illegal than legal. Because they can no longer be reliably counted when they are illegal, it's like the deaths in Iraq - applied best guess-work. But say that Australia's rate is reduced from 90k a year to 9k a year, we are talking about a "moral" gain of 81k*100k = 8.1 Billion dollars a year equivalent. Thats on the plus side of the ledger as far as I'm concerned. On the minus side of the ledger, the calculations get a lot trickier. There are clear indications that there is a considerable influence in demographics as the studies of the relationship of abortion law with crime in the US post Rowe vs Wade. Is 8.1 Billion dollars extra in todays terms enough to bring future crime down to the level of today? I would contend that it is by no means certain that it is possible to do that with 8.1 Billion a year. Is the level of unavoidable increase in crime a "cost" greater than 8.1 Billion? Is that cost going to include a large increase in illegal abortions? My reckoning would say yes - illegal abortions, starting from a very low base, would increase with the new generation, with criminals getting smarter at the same rate as the institutions put there to stop them - with technology to do so improving in line with the technology to stop them. Policing abortions would gradually become as tricky as policing any murder, once things reach equilibrium. I am contending that a policy of gradualism is better, where the "market" value of the unborn steadily increases year after year, pushed along with monetary incentives, until the value of the unborn reaches an equilibrium with their born peers. Then the push for prohibition will be more universal and satisfyingly less disruptive to demographics and society in general.

Axioms are the mother of all logical arguments

Dr. Clam asked
Gosh! Well, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, instead of what you thought I was saying, is there anything that you disagree with? :)

Well actually no - Axiom 2 pretty much stands. My main issue with good and bad is entirely to do with context. It maddens me when someone generalises by saying say "killing is bad" and comes to the conclusion that whatever the context, killing cannot be the most moral thing to do in any given situation. This is where I thought it must mean that good and bad are relative. I do think that societies with disparate moral laws can be reconciled by logical discourse and a developed moral sense - however in practical terms, this must meet certain cost-benefit criteria, which unfortunately has to be converted to dollar terms to be able to logically argue whether it is worth changing a law. Democracy is also an important process to reconcile disparities in moral sense across a population.

Life Brokers

No, I'm not talking about life insurance salesmen. Life has inherent resistance to being converted to a dollar term. However, my belief is that depending on the context, we do it quite often. Doctors are the main ones I am talking about because every day they have to make decisions about life and death, and how much money to spend on saving one life. However, it isn't the amount of money we spend on saving the life that determines how much we value a life, but how it compares to us saving a non-living but valuable item. For instance, if a fireman knew that there was a child inside a burning house, and also a box of jewellery worth $2.5 million dollars, and he could save only one or the other - which would he choose, or to put it another way, what value of object would we take the same effort to save as we would a human life. Homicide detectives are also life brokers - ie. a crime of what value of money would be given the same priority and resources as a murder investigation. This is extremely relevant to abortion debate, as with any crime, the better it is policed, the higher the black-market value becomes ie. the price to reliably get an abortion performed in a country in which it is illegal will give you a ballpark estimate of the nominal dollar value of the life of a fetus. If society does ever accept that most of our police resources should be split up between suspicious deaths of all descriptions evenly, it would mean that most of taxpayer-funded police money would be going to investigating pre-birth deaths. Not doing this would basically be saying that we should not equivalently value pre-birth life. Dr. Clam seems to think we can have it both ways - ie. illegal but low priority for police.

HuH??? I'm not a moral relativist after all!

After 27 years of thinking that I didn't believe in absolute good or bad, I decided to actually look up moral relativism in google. I read what the philosophers had to say about it all, and I realised that I wasn't a moral relativist at all, as they'd explained it. I seem to be just excessively skeptical, as in the environmental skeptic is skeptic. This would indicate to me that deep down its not that I don't believe there is an absolute right or wrong, I just don't believe anyone who tries to lecture me about it, and I feel I must contradict them somehow. To think I had it backwards all this time jumping to conclusions as to what I thought moral relativism was all about.

Changing Hats

For the remainder of the abortion discussion I'm going to take off my hat of relativism and place my hat of righteousness. As far as that goes I agree with the formula for calculating cost benefit analysis as a goal for humanity, as Dr. Clam replied. However, I came up with a figure of $2.5 Million as a value that in developed countries is used for cost/benefit analysis. Dr. Clam seems to have rejected this value as at least an order of magnitude too high - However, in a number of different ways I can demonstrate this to be the value we use and voters vote in a way which backs up this value. I am not sure if he is contending that we value life too highly in the western world, or whether my value is not the relevant one.

Theory of Relativism

Relativism to me is a philosophy with a number of implications. For instance, there are ways at looking at things that have nothing to do with morals in a relative or absolute way. A relativist, to a food which he did not like the taste of, would say "this doesn't taste nice to me"; an absolutist would often say "this food is bad". An absolutist would see a woman and say "she is beautiful", a relativist would say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Similarly, an absolutist looking to buy a product would ask their peers what they thought of particular "brands" being good or bad, while a relativist tends not to look at the brand at all and concentrate on price/feature signals. A relativist believes the judgement of creative works such as movies/books to be completely subjective, while an absolutist does believe movies/books to be good or bad in an absolute sense. When picking who to vote for, an absolutist would tend to view parties as good or bad, while a relativist would look at the policies and predictable results thereof that would most closely meet the ends they are looking for whether they are selfish ends or selfless. In other words, I would expect Dr. Clam to preference coalition parties because they are most likely to mention abortion. However, to more thoroughly explain my argument, there is a block which will vote labor, a block which will vote coalition, the swingers I divide up into selfishists, which will tend to cancel each other out (because the parties have an equal amount of money they can convincingly promise), and thinkers, which will be looking at policies for the betterment of the country. My argument is that that gives the thinkers a lot more power than in other countries.

Moral value versus market value

I have come to a conclusion as to why I think prohibition of abortion the way Dr. Clam envisions it is doomed to fail (for the moment) and the required pre-conditions for it not to fail in a self-defeating heap (n.b. these pre-conditions are by no means impossible, so it does not mean he shouldn't aim in that direction). The reason I believe that homicide laws work well for between birth and "old" age is that the "moral" value given to life based on Dr. Clam's assumptions match up fairly well to the "market" value of life as judged, voted on and paid for through our tax system, or otherwise translated (eg. insurance). Before birth this match starts to deviate markedly, as people are not prepared to allow the same amounts of money for investigating miscarriages as they would other deaths. If the example of 1960's Italy is anything to go by, abortion laws generate into a farce as people with means could get them at no risk of being prosecuted, while those without were often scapegoated. As the entire point with abortion was mostly that the parents (or society) could not afford to bring them up effectively - this meant the artificial selection of people without means by breeding beyond their means (relatively speaking). This point was not lost on voters who eventually voted in a referendum to scrap the abortion laws as they stood (in Italy). Therefore the pre-condition for anti-abortion laws to work (in my opinion) is for the moral value to be reconciled with the market value as decided by voters. A sign that this could be happening would be a heap of money being poured into miscarriage research. This doesn't seem to be happening - however there definitely does seem to be a case for later term deaths/abortions law reform.

Australians Embrace "Nationality" and their own relative good

This Economist Article entitled God Under Howard, to me demonstrates the results of thinking with starting assumptions of "relative" good, as opposed to "absolute" thinking. This comes from decades of concentrating and studying swinging voters, an obvious subset that are relative thinkers.

Of GoodEvil & EvilGood

Evil Dr Clam asked: Can you give us an example of a particular case that you would consider good and evil simultaneously?

Well, for starters the kind of situation I am thinking of is not like your supporting the war in Iraq, or shooting abortionists. When it is about an authority punishing evil behaviour, this does not conflagrate good and evil. The punishment is a response to rid the world of something evil and/or deter others who would think of copying the example. The concept is clear, and there is no deception involved. With relativism of course these same situations could be classed as EITHER good OR bad depending on whose perspective, but not both at once. The situations I'm talking about involve :

- Privileged Information - the good/evil entity has access to knowledge that is not generally known, and is definitely not known by the victims/benefiting public. This could be knowledge like knowing the details of a terrorist plot, knowing which police are corrupt and not, or knowing whether someone is pregnant or not.

- Public Backlash - When an obviously evil thing happens, there is a predictable backlash against what the assumed perpetrator stands for. For instance when a respected politician (in say Lebanon) gets blown up, there is a considerable (predictable) backlash against an occupying army associated with things blowing up. When abortion was illegal in Italy in the 70's there was considerable public backlash due to the impossibility of fairness the way society was. The public victims were the visible persons whose lives were perceived to be wrecked unnecessarily. I assume there would be backlash the other way if the suffering of the unborn were made more visible and tangible (such as when that 8 month pregnant Chinese lady was deported) in our society.

- Clever and virtually undetectable deception. In certain situations and certain countries, fraud, theft, even murder can be perpetrated by certain people with virtually no risk of being suspected or charged. These people have opportunities of making innocents (of a particular crime) the obvious suspects. These innocents may well be guilty of other crimes but not of the one in question.

- An end with these means which is honourable - such as adding momentum to changing laws which would save lives (eg. banning guns), enabling "Just" wars to be won more effectively, adding momentum to laws which would restrict abortions etc.

There is no specific example which combines these elements which I can demonstrate actually happened - but that is what I'm getting at.

Of Good and Evil

Evildrclam has realised, as a side note, that I don't believe in an absolute good and bad. This is an important philosophical point, and I realised back in 1987 that both he and Sandor believed in an absolute sense of good and bad whereas I didn't. However, I think that I initially had taken this assumption by default, and although it is the basis of virtually any argument of consequence that I make, I have no particular attachment to it. I can see that a lot of our diferences stem from this starting point. If this proves to be our major difference in philosophy, we may well find ourselves delving more deeply into this particular aspect. Already, I see that most of my opinions of what happens behind the scenes is based on my view that some things are morally good and bad simultaneously, depending on the perspective and our view of what calculations are happening in people's minds. Moral clarity has always been less important for me than trying to engineer an end with means that you are given - and that the end you are trying to reach is an "honourable" one. For instance, I see that an end in which the numbers of abortions are reduced considerably is an honourable one. I ask myself what means I have at my disposal, this blog, people who trust me, my family and I think that I can have actions that can move things in that direction. The moral clarity that comes from the statement "Bad things like this should be prohibited" is meaningless to someone like me who thinks that "Bad" is relative to the voting population of which I can't think of a way that I personally could engineer a seachange in said public opinion (well I kind of can, but it is a kind of sinister plot type of scheme which is definitely not honourable)