Should circumcision be banned?

[Alcon]

Anyone with five minutes, an Internet connection and an Excel spreadsheet can figure out why this it's stupid as a health policy.

I'm ambivalent about actually illegalizing it -- I don't like the idea of prosecuting benevolent people for bad decisions -- but it's an unjustified preemption of consent and should go away.

[Alcon]

So...everyone who thinks circumcision is the only "non-reversible" parental decision concerning a child, please raise a hand.

I always find it slightly irritating when someone attacks the worst argument in a thread, especially when it's actually the worst argument they presume was made in the thread.

I checked:  The closest anyone's come to "non-reversible is inherently bad" is "unnecessary, non-reversible is bad."  Considering that no one has bothered to ask what these posters meant by "necessary" (probably not just "required to avoid instant death"), it's hard to take this as anything but a strawman or shadowboxing.

I see it as much like someone getting their kid's appendix or tonsils removed before any infection or issue to prevent that from being necessary later. Not something I'd do but I'm not too bothered by it. Nor would I be bothered if it was done to me (I still have appendix and tonsils, but don't care.)

We don't routinely remove the appendix or tonsils prophylactically, even though they serve no real functional purpose; that's because prophylactic removal doesn't make any sense as health policy.  I think you can see how little sense it makes to practice routine circumcision to prevent health problems that will eventually require circumcision:  You take your affected population, who are subjected to surgical risk, from 1-2% (liberally) to 100%.  Does that make any sense?  The fact that a policy may turn out well for some people does not make it rational, if it increases risk to many more people.

Besides their stupidity as health policy, the ideas of routine appendectomy and tonsillectomy are probably non-trivial to much fewer people than circumcision is.  I'm not saying it should be non-trivial to you; I'm glad it's trivial to you.  But I generally err against telling people that my opinion of their body takes precedence over theirs.  Because that's batsh**t.

[Alcon]

Gustaf, you just quoted a bunch of posts that were arguing that irreversibility is a bad thing -- not that it was necessarily the lone criteria involved here. Only Wormguy's earlier post pushes that line (the "painful" one.)  There is the difference between a problem and the problem.  Indeed, the lack of consent may be what triggers it to be a problem, but that does not mean that a lack of consent is intrinsically bad.

I assume, since Dibble, Mikado, Andrew, et al., are not idiots, that they weren't saying that irreversible+unconsenting makes it intrinsically wrong to do something to a child; but rather that, if you're going to make an irreversible change to someone's body by preempting their consent, there is a moral responsibility for it to be justified/"necessary."  (People haven't really gotten into detail on what justification is yet, because the thread hasn't been that detailed.)

I think it's bizarre that you extended that argument so reflexively, when it seems so inconsistent with the intellects of the people posting here; but yet you're not even touching the "I don't care so it's fine" argument, which doesn't require any extension to be insanely problematic.

[Alcon]

Besides, philosophically, people might think irreversible things shouldn't be allowed.

There are dichotomy choices that happen whenever you're interacting with people.  I'm going to assume, again, that no one you quoted believes that.  You could probably have asked any one of them to explicate.

I also think there were certainly other posts early on (including mine) that presented more of an argument than the one you're claiming was the only one presented; mine at least included enough caveats so that it couldn't be extrapolated to what you're claiming has been the only argument presented.

Anyway, my contention is basically that in order to ban something I think you have the burden of evidence. Most things done to kids are in some sense irreversible (which was the point I was making, which I suspect you didn't fully appreciate) and may have negative consequences. Yet we hardly ban anything concerning children (in fact we typically allow things to be done to children that we wouldn't allow for unconsenting adults - mandatory school, grounding, (in some countries) spanking and so on.

Yes, which I think is why most of the people posting earlier were making moral appeals more than legal appeals.  It's a tough and nuanced thing to get the government involved in.  But what exactly is "the burden of evidence" -- is doing something that is, in aggregate, harmful, that's fine, until it is severely harmful?  I'm not sure we've ever nailed this down in U.S. law.  Other countries draw this hazy line elsewhere (apparently circumcision is illegal before 16 in South Africa -- who knew.)

Honestly, I think that debate has more to do with philosophy of our laws than the morality of circumcision, and I assume people aren't going into great detail over that because it would make the topic a lot broader than the original material.

[Alcon]

I'm sorry.  It's not that I don't want to present my whole argument, it's that it's 4:30 AM here and I've had six hours of sleep in the last three days.  Insomnia is kind of ruining my life.    The fact that I can string together sentences at this point surprises me.

I'll get there (same with the Religion Discussions topic.)

[Alcon]

First Amendment does not allow every religious act.  I can't commit a ritualistic bull sacrifice in my hypothetical back yard.

You can, however, commit ritualistic bull sacrifice elsewhere.

You can't commit ritualistic bull sacrifice if it violates animal abuse laws, so...doesn't that kind of defeat your point?  Assuming you had one? 

Gustaf: I still owe you a reply here, which I'll get to once I figure out how to print things on stickers.  So, probably like a week.