Yes, Nukes

[mzmadmike]

My point about the "Second Amendment isn't absolute, of course it doesn't apply to nukes" argument is it's a straw man, that's always presented for reductio ad absurdum, and a slippery slope.

"Of course no one would defend the right to own a nuke," but then the next statement, always implied and usually stated is, "So since the right is not

Comments

[septithol]

Hmm, it isn't quite clear to me Mike, whether you actually support being able to own a nuke, or whether you are simply talking about the 'owning nukes is not reasonable' argument being a red herring.

However, I have noticed the following about a lot of 'slippery slope arguments'.

1. The people who use them deliberately disregard that there may be something qualitatively different (rather than just difference in scale) regarding point 1,2, and 3, and the end points on the slope. People against abortion or in favor of circumcision are good examples of this. An anti-abortion argument will often go something along the lines that if you support the right to life of a newborn baby or the mentally retarded, despite their lesser intelligence, then you also need to support the right to life of a 2 month old embryo, or a 1 celled fertilized egg. The problem here is that an infant or someone who is mentally retarded has a difference in scale, they have lesser intelligence. A 2 month old embryo does not have a functioning brain, and a fertilized egg has no brain at all. There is a qualitative difference between no brain, or a brain that is not functioning, and a brain that is there is functioning, but to a lesser degree than other people. Ditto with circumcision, an argument often used in favor of this is that since parents have the right to consent to their children getting vaccinations or surgery to remove cancer, they therefore have the right to consent to circumcision. But there is a qualitative difference between vaccination (which doesn't remove a normal healthy body part), or surgery to save a child's life, and a medically unnecessary amputation of a normal healthy body part.

2. People who engage in them don't like accurate cost-benefit analysis of what they propose. In the case of guns, they talk endlessly about people killed by guns, but don't mention the number of lives saved by guns used in self defense.

3. People who engage in them are either useful idiots, or else have a real agenda which is different than their stated agenda. Those in favor of gun control have a real agenda of wanting to impose tyranny on people. Those against abortion want to control other people's sex lives. Those who demand the 'right' of parents to circumcise non-consenting infants have some sort of nuerotic emotional problem with normal human anatomy.