Comment by clejack
5 days ago
Just to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding you, I double checked the meaning of "normative." This is the first result from google:
"establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior."
And other sources have something similar. I'm interpreting your comment as saying "(psychological) harm is subjective, and because it can not be measured empirically, it's not possible to have expertise on this topic."
Fortunately, there are real world consequences that can be measured. If I take an action that makes many people say "ow!" and we acknowledge that expression as an indicator of pain, even though I can't measure the exact level of pain each person is experiencing, I can measure how many people are saying "ow!" I can measure the relationship between the intensity of my action, and the number of people that respond negatively. There's plenty of room for empiricism here, and a whole field of mathematics (statistics) that supports handling "normative" experiences. They even have a distribution for it!
The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms. A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.
They are saying that judgements of what qualifies as harm is something like a judgement of what is good, or what is right or wrong. That’s not the same thing as evaluating whether something causes pain. You can measure whether something caused pain, sure. (Well, the sort of limitations you mentioned in measuring pain exist, but as you said, they are not a major issue.)
“Harm” isn’t the same thing as “pain”.
I would say that when I bite my finger to make a point, I experience pain, but this doesn’t cause me any suffering nor any harm. If something broke my arm, I claim that this is harm to me. While this (“if my arm were broken, that would be harm to me”) might seem like an obvious statement, and I do claim that it is a fact, not just an opinion, I think I agree that it is a normative claim. It is a claim about what counts as good or bad for me.
I don’t think normative claims (such as “It is immoral to murder someone.”) are empirical claims? (Though I do claim that they at least often have truth values.)
I'd go beyond that and even say that one might consider something harmful, but be willing to endure a certain level of harm in pursuit of something of higher value.
For example, I once asked a smoker why she smoked, and the response was "because I love it" -- when I asked if the enjoyment was worth the health risks, she said "yes; I never planned to live forever". She was making a conscious decision to seek short-term pleasure at the cost of potential longer-term damage to her health. At that point, there wasn't really anything remaining to debate about.
I didn’t mean to imply that the harmful effects of something can’t be worth it for the beneficial effects of that thing. Yeah, if someone is trapped, doing something that frees them and also breaks their arm, may well be an appropriate action for them to take.
> The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms.
Exactly. So it sounds like you're agreeing with me that qualification of a particular effect as "harm" is not a matter of "medical expertise", but is rather a question of subjective norms that is in fact on the opposite side of the is-ought gap from the side at which expertise is applicable.
> A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.
Well, not exactly. This presumes that "society" in the abstract (a) actually has a general consensus on the question, and that (b) the rules imposed by the legal system reflect that broad consensus, rather than reflecting the values or intentions of the people administering the legal system, without necessarily aligning with those of the general public.
There are a lot of questions that do have broad consensus across society, but also a lot of subjective questions that different people answer very differently. And I think that the level of consensus that actually exists in terms of considering things causing physical injury or pain as "harm" is far, far greater than the level of consensus on treating anything that causes emotional stress as "harm".
I don't think that the "negative response" criteria that you're articulating is sufficient to reveal an underlying normative consensus: I would not presume that most people would equate harm with any kind of negative reaction. For example, I would personally not consider something harmful merely on account of being annoying, insulting, or even morally questionable (though there's often overlap in the last case).
I have to point out that your original post is technically correct because you specified "medical expertise" as the focus of your argument and psychologists aren't MDs. The field has some questionable aspects (and outcomes) to be sure, but I don't think it's completely without merit, and as a consequence, I feel the spirit of your argument is still wrong. You said:
> At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses
It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement. The consequences can be quantified, even though the subjective experience itself can't.
If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied, and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?
This is really all I'm trying to get at. Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.
> I have to point out that your original post is technically correct because you specified "medical expertise" as the focus of your argument and psychologists aren't MDs.
It's also correct because "harm" is a normative concept, which expertise per se doesn't apply to.
> It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement.
Well, no, not really. First, you have to be aware of their subjective experiences, and not just speculating or projecting your own assumptions on to them, then you have to know what criteria to apply to the evaluation of the consequences of those experiences, which can only come from the particular values that they subscribe to, irrespective of your own. And "empirical judgment" is a dubious concept, since, again, judgment is inherently normative.
> If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied,
Anything can be studied, but the extent to which the conclusions of study can be validated for something like this is quite limited. First, you'd be studying something that is a drastic outlier -- only a tiny proportion of the population even attempts suicide for any reason at all.
Second, you're dealing with something with complex causality, much of which can't be directly observed or measured except by the subject themselves, so there's no way to eliminate confounding factors or construct control groups.
Finally, with so many ideological and pecuniary interests attached to a topic like this, it would be difficult to conduct such a study in an institutional setting without it being potentially skewed by bias, and the aforementioned difficulty in setting up controlled experiments would make it difficult for replication to factor out bias.
So I don't think I'd rely on formal studies for this sort of thing, especially when the motivation is to rationalize normative conclusions rather than understand the world as it is.
> and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?
No, I don't think that would be a sufficient reason. Even if it were happening, not everything is the government's responsibility, and not every social problem has a political solution.
> Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.
I don't think it holds in any of them.