What's next ?

I've recently come across two discussions in which the moral point of an argument seemed to be absent. Consequently the whole point of the debate seemed to be missed, with everyone dancing in circles around the target while never getting anywhere near it. Specifically, these boil down to :

1. What do you want to do with this information ? For example, why do you want to know if two demographics have fundamentally different abilities ? 
2. What do you think will happen next if this policy is implemented ? I mean the immediate consequences of, saying, giving more rights to an underprivileged group. Do you think that this is in and of itself inherently bad, or is it only the foreseen slippery slope that causes you problems ?

The first was about whether men and women have similar abilities. It's an interesting question, I suppose, but... why ask it ? What are you going to do with the answer ?

The second was about the rising debate in the UK on legalising assisted dying. Okay, fair enough, those campaigning against it say it will ultimately lead to (in essence) public suicide booths. As the worse-case scenario, that's clearly bad. But what about the best case ? What about the cases where someone was properly informed, repeatedly consented well ahead of time and at the moment of decision, to ending their life to escape unendurable agony – should those people actually be forced to continue against their own wishes ?

Now proclaiming a slippery slope is not itself a fallacy. It can happen that one thing will lead to another, ending in a position that nobody wanted. But it's a fallacy to insist that this will happen without justifying why this would be so. In particular, when other countries have implemented similar legislation and found that actually, yes, people do want to end their own suffering but (amazingly enough) remain steadfastly against suicide booths... then why do you think it would happen in some countries but not others ? Or even if sometimes a slippery slope has happened but not universally, still you must then justify why it would be likely to occur in the particular case under consideration.

It's far safer and simpler to first say what you believe about the thing-in-itself. If you say that mercy killings are fundamentally immoral, then we don't have to worry about all the paraphernalia and secondary concerns. We can skip the complex pragmatic issues and go directly to the basic moral issue at hand. Otherwise, these objections to AD feel similar to me to early objections to gay marriage : that it would eventually end in people marrying their cars and pets and siblings and suchlike. Okay, those scenarios, which failed to happen, would be bad, but what about the issue at hand, the thing-in-itself ? What exactly was supposedly wrong with gay marriage ?

Now if you don't object to the TII, that's okay. At that point we can proceed to the pragmatics and potential for a slippery slope. But we shouldn't skip the phase of discussing the TII, because this is the most important and morally interesting part of the discussion. It also provides vital information about the basis on which the debate should proceed : if we both agree on gay marriage or AD or whatever being fundamentally moral, but only disagree on what's likely to be the practical result, that's different from having a really basic moral disagreement.

And after all, your pragmatic objections might be valid. There's nothing inherently wrong or false about presuming that one good thing will lead to other bad things; sometimes one thing does carry unintended consequences. The problem is that you must demonstrate that this is (a) likely to actually occur (e.g. gay marriage has not led to incest or auto-erotica and there was never the slightest reason to think that it would, because these are not sexual desires that are inherent but repressed in any sizeable fraction of the population), and (b) that any consequences you see happening definitely would be problematic in themselves, that they would have some intrinsic moral problems.

As for why you want to know... it might be that you want to account for genuine differences and allow for people of different abilities, providing facilities to accommodate them. But here you generally only need to know what abilities and ability levels actually exist, and how common they are. Demographics are often irrelevant, except for schemes to deliberately uplift targeted underprivileged groups. You need to know what the abilities are, not who has them, because you can meritocratically test for this on an individual basis.

If you insist on judging people based on demographics... well, that's why the question, "what will you do with this information ?" is an important one. It may well be that you're just curious. Okay but why pursue the issue at all ? Why do you apparently want it to be true ? Why exactly does it matter to you ? If you have some good evidence that the groups are different then you probably don't need a study to confirm it. If you don't, it's probably safe to assume they're the same. Presuming a difference is, in general, a very strange thing to do, and I don't think it's at all unfair to want to know why it should matter.

There is of course a major exception : medical data. Men and women do have physical and physiological differences, and especially if one group is more prevalent in some area than another, it makes sense to be prepared for this eventuality. Presuming similarity here should be no more than a starting assumption, which you can actively test for to determine the proper course of treatment. Here though, the obvious physical differences should make it equally obvious that there might be medical differences as well, whereas in the case of mental skills, the case is (to put it mildly) infinitely weaker. It would seem that there is an obvious need to allow for medical differences existing; there is no such case for mathematical or creative faculties.

But in general, if you can recognise that the question of demographic differences might be unpleasant, and take steps to address this, and show that your response won't be simple unfair discrimination... well then, perhaps you have a case to make. Until you do this, however, you should be able to understand why I might view your curiosity as being uncomfortably close to bigotry.

The unifying factor in these cases, of what happens next and why do you need to know, is that metadata is essential. Knowing the moral preferences of each side changes the entire tone of the debate. So it's incredibly helpful to present this information first, i.e. state what you think is fundamentally wrong with the proposal in and of itself, or tell me what you want to do with the information which you think is very important. Do this first, I repeat, and only then we can move on to discussing the secondary effects. If we both accept that there's nothing wrong the with TII, then we can debate the slippery slope; if neither of us is clearly trying to be a bigoted twat, then we can discuss demographic differences.

Moral issues are anyway often complicated. Perhaps this guidance might help simplify the discussions, if only just a little bit.