Why Pluralism (Really) Matters

Not everyone's landscape is the same

I was re-reading some old Facebook posts recently and found a brief screed I wrote in reaction to an interview with Dr. Amy Teuter a while back. I’m reproducing it here in full as an entry point to a broader I’ve been thinking about the link between pluralism and toleration:

“There's a lot to be annoyed with in Russ Roberts' EconTalk interview with obstetrician Amy Teuter on unmedicated birth, but this quote from Teuter made me laugh out loud:

‘And, it's--frankly, I think it's encouraging women to torture themselves, and embracing them for doing it. I mean, if you need a fallback and you are afraid of an epidural--fine; don't have an epidural. But don't tell me that this is empowering women. Why is it that women are the only ones empowered by pain and not men?’

My response: In what possible world are women the "only ones empowered by pain"? Literally thousands of years of literature detail men doing stupid and painful things in the name of empowerment or glory or whatever you want to call it. Even today, marathoners of both sexes, as far as I know, do not find marathons painless and neither do the people who die on Mt. Everest every year. If you're empowered by birth pain or think you might be, go for it! And if you want an epidural for birth but want to run a marathon because you find that kind of pain empowering, do that instead. Or if you just don't like pain that's fine too! I would never make anyone give birth without meds and I would like everyone else to promise me not to make me run a marathon. It turns out that people (which includes women!) have different preferences! So weird.

But whatever you do don't pretend that women's legitimate choices about what they do with their bodies is somehow a trick of the patriarchy. #rantoff”

Whatever you think about unmedicated vs. medicated birth (and I’ve heard it all over the years), the point of my irritation above is the really obnoxious habit all humans have of assuming that everyone who does things differently than them does these things differently because they’re wrong or misunderstand something fundamental.

Patronizing Toleration is Half-Assed Toleration

Toleration in this sense - if we get toleration at all from people like Teuter - is just tolerating people’s divergence from our optimal pathway. “Bless their hearts! They’re wrong,” we might say, “but they can’t help it” or something similarly patronizing.

What people like Teuter and all “men of systems,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase, get wrong about human beings is that there exists real and meaningful and legitimate variation precisely because humans occupy different parts of the moral and political landscape at different times.

The toleration that people like Teuter offer is a kind of grudging half-assed toleration that is actually quite dangerous in real life. It’s dangerous because this kind of toleration doesn’t actually accept other people as autonomous agents who might actually be right about their choices given their location in their own distinct landscape. Instead, this kind of toleration says “well, I’m not allowed to force people to be right so I have to tolerate them being wrong.” And that’s a dangerous form of toleration because it’s really easy to come up with reasons why it might be ok not to tolerate other people being wrong (see for example all the jerks who call the police on parents for letting their kids play outside). This is particularly dangerous in the medical context in which Teuter works, because it allows physicians to assume their patients are idiots whose misguided preferences can be over-ridden without a second thought.

I made this point in my post on Other People’s Junk from a while back, but even that post doesn’t quite get at what I’m talking about because “junk” still has a normative heft to it. Even if we understand why some people have junk in their yards, junk still isn’t seen as a great thing. But part of the point was that sometimes what is junk to one person is *not* in fact junk to other people, and not just because those people might have a mental illness like hoarding. What looks like junk to some people might not be junk at all if it’s spare parts for a project or construction materials to be repurposed or a pile of donations being collected for drop off.

Ultimately, there’s a lot of human variation - even about stuff we might think there shouldn’t be variation on - that is in fact legitimate and deserving of respect. And that’s because the variation goes pretty far down. It’s not just a function of people in the exact same moral and social location making different choices. It’s about people in different parts of the landscape making different choices about how to proceed because they have different paths and different tools and different experiences and different personalities and different goals.

How to Think About Other People’s Choices

Nowhere is this more clear than in women’s choices during birth, as the Teuter quote shows. It’s a question on every pregnancy chat board: “is medicated or unmedicated birth better?” Lots of people weigh in with all kinds of opinions, educated or otherwise, but very few people get the right answer: it’s a completely meaningless question. There are tradeoffs to medicated and unmedicated birth and how a particular woman weighs those tradeoffs depends on her experiences with her particular body, her trust of the medical establishment, her fitness level and/or attitude toward physical pain, her partner, her level of support, her specific hospital and provider and even sometimes her insurance coverage. Trying to decide if unmedicated birth is better than medicated birth is like asking if a canary is better than an eagle. The relevant follow up question is “better at what?!?!” and that’s where you’ll get a bunch of different answers.

But you don’t need to go somewhere controversial to see this in action. Someone could ask “are marathons good?” and the answer would be “it depends.” There’s certainly nothing morally objectionable to running a marathon, unless you drag some unwilling person along with you, but whether it’s good or bad will depend on your goals, your life, your current obligations, your body, your location, and your preferences. Whether marathons are good or bad is simply a meaningless question.

In both of these cases - and many many more - the right answer is “it depends” not “well marathons are clearly the best form of fitness and everyone else who doesn’t do marathons is useless, but we have to accept their errors as part of life.”

Radical Humility Supports Radical Toleration

It’s in recognizing this range of diversity that I think we need to practice more radical humility (and, by extension, radical toleration) about other people’s lives. It’s one thing to think “Crossfit is the best workout system out there, but we should tolerate other people who don’t do Crossfit because we have to tolerate half-wits” and quite a different thing to think Crossfit is the best and also accept that non-Crossfitters might actually also be right about their choice. They might have very good reasons not to do Crossfit.

Of course, they might not have good reasons. They might not do Crossfit because they hate Crossfit bros or they’re scared to lift heavy objects and want to “tone” instead. Those are dumb reasons not to do something, but it’s also dumb to assume that other people’s reasons are the dumb ones instead of the legitimate ones in the first place. This is a mental bias about other people that we would do well to scrub out of our brains as much as possible.

A big part of practicing radical moderation in daily life is the practice of a kind of radical humility about other people’s lives, goals, preferences, and backgrounds. Notice: humility doesn’t mean we give up on trying to understand other people. Humility is the starting point for engagement. But it does mean - quite firmly - that we should question our assumptions about what other people are or are not doing and start with the belief that other people have reasons for what they do.

We might be proved wrong - the world is a pretty complex place! - but it’s a safer position to start from because it assumes that other people matter - another key principle of radical moderation. And when we assume other people matter, that also means that other people have internal lives that matter and that their choices mean something to them as individuals and humans and agented beings. When we see other people that way we’re much less likely to make fundamental errors about their motives and we’re much less likely to turn them into ideological straw-men to be moved around on our own mental chessboard.

So the next time someone makes a decision that’s different from your own, practice thinking “she probably had a reason for that” instead of “bless her heart, she’ll learn…” It’s one small step, but you might be surprised how often it makes the world an easier and more interesting place to navigate.

Let me know what you think! Leave a comment and, as always, please share if you like what you read!