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Being Pro-Choice Seems Epistemically Arrogant, Thoughts?
When it comes to the issue of abortion, both sides seem to speak with a sense of certainty I do not believe is justified. However, the moral implications of a government embracing the wrong policy under a pro-life framework are far worse than the moral implications of being wrong under a pro-choice framework, so it seems to me it is far easier to support the former.
Note: I think exceptions in the case of rape and the health of the mother are morally permissible, contraception should be freely accessible to all citizens, and public schools should teach the importance of being careful about sex.
I am vegan, but for non-vegans I think it’s more ignorance and self-interest than epistemic arrogance, as the vast, vast majority of most societies are non-vegan, whereas there is at least an order of magnitude more people who support pro-life positions, and people don’t personally benefit from non-veganism in the same way pro-choice folks benefit from their own position.
However, I would claim most non-vegans who have thought deeply about vegan arguments, and don’t make arguments from the angle of nematode welfare, are epistemically arrogant.
I think it's totally in scope to be correctly confident about an issue like abortion even if ~half of people agree with you.
But, I also think your point basically stands: there's an asymmetry in costs to being wrong. (Don't take that too far though, a lot of harm is caused by forcing people to have children that they don't want, and aren't prepared to handle.)
The issue is I think the asymmetry is so great that you have to essentially be like 99% confident in your position to be justified, especially when the compromise position I laid out should prevent a good portion of unwanted pregnancy, especially if you subsidize elective procedures such as vasectomy and provide more childcare support. I think the best arguments for the pro-choice side are consequentialist in nature, but the consequentialist calculations are very complex in this case, so I think it is better to rely on a deontological framework, which is what most people do anyways.
1I think we should be careful about reasoning from "if X is true, the consequences are so much worse than not-X, so we should act as if X is true", since there are many ideas that are in fact exponentially unlikely (eg Pascal's wager, and analogous situations). The first line of attack should always be just trying to figure out what's true on the object level.
But yeah, I think this line of argument is basically valid.
This is indeed how I think people should think about the question of animal consciousness. I feel less strongly about the abortion question for various reasons, but I am much less sold on "pro choice is obviously correct" than most liberal Americans.
I mean, I think the real issue with the originial Pascal’s Wager is it’s actually impossible to actually calculate probabilities or assign utilities to different outcomes, as there is a literally infinite amount of conceivable deities (including deities with opposite pay-off matrices) and also infinite utilities kinda break decision theory.
For most realistic scenarios though, I think Pascalian logic is more or less necessary to some extent, and without it you get pretty bizarre conclusions. Like imagine a genie offers you a button which has a 99.9% chance of saving a life but a .1% chance of killing everyone, I think it’s pretty clear that pressing the button is a mistake.
The pro-choice and pro-life debate is a lot more complicated than the button example, but no one seems to want to do the actual work of justifying their viewpoints despite significant opposition being present, a status I would like to call epistemic arrogance.
This isn’t that important, but the “term Bay Area” has always annoyed me (as someone from Tampa), as it appropriates a generic geographical feature that many cities contain. Should we start calling Denver the “Mountain Area”? New York City the “Island Area”? Phoenix the “Desert Area”? Oklahoma City the “Plains Area”? The only reason the “Bay Area” sounds normal is because people are used to it.
What are other similar cases?
There are 75 islands in the world bigger than "the Big Island" (Hawai'i); but it's the biggest of its archipelago, and the nickname disambiguates the island from the state.
In petroleum-driven geopolitics, "the Gulf" often means the Persian Gulf; e.g. the 1991 "Gulf War". In this usage, "the Gulf states" are Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. But I'm guessing that in your area, "the Gulf" often means the Gulf of Mexico, and "the Gulf states" are Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
"The Mountain West" means Colorado and its neighbors, not the French Alps, even though the French Alps are in Western Europe and are mountainous.
"Sahara" is just Arabic for "desert".
For your examples, they are either used by locals informally ("The gulf" as a shorthand for gulf of Mexico is rarely used by national publications), by foreigners (who often give illogical or simplified names to things because the original would be too complicated), or apply to very large regions (which in my opinion, is less annoying because it is less self important). The fact that the San Francisco area gets its own special name that is frequently used despite the fact that there is nothing especially impressive about that particular feature of the area is slightly annoying imo. If people in the Bay Area want to colloquially call it that, I wouldn't mind, but the fact that national news refers to it as such is slightly annoying to me.