[This is Henry, returning to a couple of points criminally late due to travel etc – comments are now closed and there is no easy way to reopen them – if anyone wants to make rejoinders email them to me and I will append them manually]

novakant – you can’t have read my comment upstream. I am not claiming and have not claimed that people make choices independent of other social factors which structure those choices – rather that the current ideology justifying abortion etc is one of choice (without pronouncing on the pros and cons of that ideology) and thus radically different from that of eugenics in the 19th and early to mid 20th century. I specifically acknowledge the importance of such structures above.

c.l. ball – you had originally said:

there is no reason to take the latter claim as not being ideologically linked to the former claim. Put differently, aborting children without a viable future is consistent with “improving the gene pool” or ‘improving’ humanity (also part of the eugenics ideology). The macro-ideology of eugenics need not be propagated by a conscious micro-ideology of eugenics.

I had taken you to be saying that the link between the language of eugenics and the language of choice was an ideological one, in which the micro-ideology of choice was unconsciously influenced by the macro-ideology of eugenics. Fair enough if that wasn’t what you meant, but you can surely see where the confusion arose. More generally, I am not sure at all that you’ve succeeded in liberating eugenics from geneticism – it is pretty clear from the article that you cite that left eugenicists too wanted to improve gene pools, even while they (a) wanted to engineer the environment to do this, and (b) disagreed with conservatives over the qualities that the environment should select for. See pp. 646-647 in particular on this. Freeden argues at greater length in a later explicatory article href=”http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-246X%28198312%2926%3A4%3C959%3AEAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O” rel=”nofollow”>http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-246X%28198312%2926%3A4%3C959%3AEAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O that:

The clue to the question I have been asking – why do ostensibly discrete, even opposing, ideologies coalesce, form links and back concrete policy measures – can only be discovered if one accepts that ideologies are not mutually exclusive but share some idea-elements structurally. As Soloway has recently demontrated, birth control can provide an instance of such a link. For eugenists, socialists, feminists and others, birth control was often, though not necessarily, part of the idea-environment of varying core-beliefs. For each of these ideologies, birth control had a different function to perform. For eugenists it was
important to restrict inferior stock; for socialists to improve the conditions of the working class; for feminists to further the independence of women. Within the context of each ideology, birth control combined with other elements to create a distinct pattern; but it nevertheless served as an idea on which various ideologies could form a union of convenience.

This seems remarkably close to my argument against Douthat – that different ideologies share the same position on issue x does not, obviously mean that they can be collapsed into a single ideology.

If I compare the 19th century notion of courtship to the 20th century one of dating, the key difference is that courtship was seen as winning the approval of the potential mate’s family, not just the individual, and was usually done at her (it was men courted women) home. From the viewpoint of finding good potential spouses, I can see the sense of this. A marriage typically links two families, not just two individuals, and people, particularly at the ages of marriage in the 19th century, do not necessarily have good judgment; one can get second opinions. Also, experiencing the relationship in a domestic environment is more like what marriage will eventually be like than most dating situations. Nonetheless, I do not want my family partly making my mating decisions, either casual or long-term. Perhaps that is just my culture talking, and perhaps it is not. I do not claim my position is objectively valid, but I still hold it.

“While exact statistics on the historical prevalence of torture cannot be determined,
the available evidence suggests that torture decreased in Europe during the 18th and
19th centuries, as it came to be legally abolished throughout the continent, and then
increased greatly in the 20th century. Elsewhere in the world, torture either remained
high or increased from the 19th century to the 20th.
”

http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June07STFeature.pdf

First of all, your example is not a “counter-example” precisely because my point applies to it: I cannot access the subjective experience of being a medieval galley slave either.

Secondly, you have taken uncharitable reading of this point into misreading. Let’s review the discussion: You said “Who wants to turn the clock back to the 15th century?” I took this as “Who wants to live in the 15th century?”, which was not uncharitable, but simply the most direct interpretation in my judgment. From what you later said, you actually meant: “Who would judge the 15th century morally superior to the present?” – so there was some misunderstanding there, but not as a result of uncharitability or bad faith.

So I asserted that I cannot recover the subjective experience of someone in the ancient world, so I cannot use this as a basis for comparison. I did not say that there had been no progress. Indeed, I said, more than once, that there had been, though I qualified it as relative to values I accept. I did claim that moral values were not objective, but that’s a separate argument: premodern experience would still be inaccessible to me even if they were. Admittedly, it was a glib comment, in response to one even more glib. I actually think trying to reach the subjective experience of other situations is very important, and that is one of the reasons I value utopian thinking; but it is not an easy problem. You have distorted and stripped all nuance from this view, have heaped sarcasm and schoolboy insults on it, and then complained that I am not reading you charitably.

The point I was making is if we look back on the slavery controversy now, we can all agree that abolition was in fact progress, despite the fact that, as you rightly point out, differing opinions were held at the time. So someone who claimed at the time that abolition was progress was not saying something meaningless. She was saying something meaningful, which we now know to be true. Someone who claimed that it was an arrogant attempt to impose “Enlightenment values” on a different but equally valid way of life would have been wrong. Etc, etc.

I don’t claim that anyone’s judgment on what is and is not progress today is infallible. But progressives do have reasons for their convictions and in some cases I think we can be very confident, eg. I am certain that legalising torture would not be progress, even though some people may use the language of progress to try to justify it.

“3) Even if you could establish 2, showing that we have sufficient knowledge of the future to ascertain its judgements in support of controversies now.”

Calling yourself ‘progressive’ does nothing to show that you are on the side that history will judge was correct.

Martin, are you telling me that because I offended you—by not taking sufficiently seriously your, ahem, radical insight that it is “impossible to know” whether the life of an average modern-day US citizen is better than that of a medieval galley slave—you are now to going to deliberately misread everything I write from now on as a form of punishment? Just so I know what to expect…