Why do I oppose cultural sensitivity?

Marrying a first cousin isn't *that* big a risk if your family isn't doing it every generation. I say this as the aunt/first cousin once removed of beautiful, intelligent, healthy twins who are second cousins to each other.

(Of course, ask 'em which one is the evil twin, and they'll tell you, "We're both evil ...")

Not that inbreeding to the extreme doesn't raise problems -- it's just that, in these parts, it is assumed that all cousin-marryin' leads to harm to the offspring.

I am against "cultural sensitivity" as opposed to treating people as individuals - that is, as people rather than categories. This is the case here. I agree with the quoted doctor who said "medicine knows no borders."

Conversely, I am for "cultural sensitivity" when it means treating people as individuals - that is, as people rather than as categories. For instance, I'm not sympathetic to Europeans who provoke Muslims (or tacitly accept the European military meddling in the Muslim world) and cry "no fair" when Muslims become angry and react, blaming the "crazy and volatile Muslims [between the lines is always implied: brown people]."

Ummm, isn't being against cultural sensitivity just a consequence of your own secular humanist values? How about if I were to follow your edict and, in the course of not being sensitive to your culture, force you to worship my god? Hmmm?

Ummm, isn't being against cultural sensitivity just a consequence of your own secular humanist values? How about if I were to follow your edict and, in the course of not being sensitive to your culture, force you to worship my god?

who said i was a 'humanist'? anyway, you don't know what my values are. i do believe in the right to bear arms, so if someone tried to force to worship their god, well, you'd know my answer. that being said, i wouldn't emigrate to a place where people had to worship a particular god.

So what, precisely, is wrong with the National Society of Genetic Counselors PR aside from fact taht you disagree with it's take on the issue?

This, in the end, is a policy issue. Folks will decide whether or not cousin marriage, from a social perspective, constitutes a big enough problem to take the trouble to deal with it.

Everyone agrees that siblings can't marry, so there is no huge matter of principle involved here, just a question of the law and our avidity in enforcing it. Doesn't really seem to be an issue that really calls for the high Culture Wars bluster.

Policy issues, by the way, almost always run up against cultural concerns of various sorts. How could they not? So what does one oppose cultural sensitivity in favor of? Technocratic dictatorship? The will of the majority? (Which essentially boils down to cultural sensitivity only for the most numerous, since the will of the majority is often irrational)

Not that inbreeding to the extreme doesn't raise problems -- it's just that, in these parts, it is assumed that all cousin-marryin' leads to harm to the offspring.

janet, one can lie and tell the truth with statistics, right? :) seriously, in an idealized libertarian world there would be no problem marrying first cousins. the risk of recessive diseases does increase in relative terms, even if the absolute level isn't significant on the individual level (2-3% vs. 4-7%, etc.). the key is that in our society, even if we don't have socialized medicine, we do have medicaid, and our insurance system is semi-socialized. i don't have a specific problem with this, but with privileges comes responsibility.

so, % of affected children whose parents were first cousins (united states)
color blindness - 15
albinism - 21
xeroderma pigmentosum - 23
ichthyosis Congenita - 35
tay sachs - 40

for american whites the prediction equation is:

K = c(1 + 15q)/(c + 16q - cq)

the proportion of first cousin matings being c within the population, and q being the frequency of the recessive allele in question. in other words, the rarer the recessive allele the higher the frequency of offspring of first cousins who will exhibit the disease in relation to the total pool of those who exhibit the disease.

so, probability of disease conditional upon first cousin parents is low. but, probability of having first cousin parents if you have many recessive diseases is high. of course, selective abortion alters the equation, but adds another moral/ethical axis.

whether there should be laws against first cousin marriages or not depends weighting the various values and costs vs. benefits in your personal utility function. myself, i think first cousin marriage should be legal, but there shouldn't be cultural neutrality, and americans and westerners should not tolerate as normal or acceptable subcultures where first cousin marriage (or uncle-neice marriage, as among south indian hindus) is normative.

This, in the end, is a policy issue. Folks will decide whether or not cousin marriage, from a social perspective, constitutes a big enough problem to take the trouble to deal with it.

the policy issue is contingent upon the facts. rational costs vs. benefit are shaped by how the "numbers" are presented.

for example, "first cousins have a 4-7% chance of having a child with birth defects vs. a basal rate of 2-3%" as opposed to "first cousins have a doubled risk of having a child with birth defects" as opposed to "a society where 5% of the marriages are of first cousins vs. 1% are of first cousins will result in a different of health costs for prenatal units of 100 million dollars per year" you will get sharply different responses (the "100 million" figure might be a trivial aggregate % difference, but "100 million" is a big number, so people will probably be scared).

'cultural sensitivity' has a tendency to short-circuiting an evaluation of the various inferences. for example, if you are sensitive to the importance of mixed-gender education because people should be treated as individuals evidence of a non-trivial but minor improvement in male and female academic performance in single gender classes might not warrant action.

so, to be specific, i oppose the general principle of cultural sensitivity, though i am sensitive and tolerance of a particular culture. that of, roughly speaking, the majority in the united states and europe. btw, i have to say, this:

So what, precisely, is wrong with the National Society of Genetic Counselors PR aside from fact taht you disagree with it's take on the issue?

This, in the end, is a policy issue. Folks will decide whether or not cousin marriage, from a social perspective, constitutes a big enough problem to take the trouble to deal with it.

classic oran kellyism, whisper sweet nothings as if it is some sort of skepticism. you don't have an MBA do you? :)

oh, and oran, i will post on my 'political philosophy' in at least one post soon...so that you need to ask skeptical questions since you are incapable of using google to search the archives of my other weblog :)

No, no MBA.

I, much like some of the American founders (Hamilton, for instance), am pretty strongly concerned with the interests of minorities. Not that they should always trump, but that they ought to have some status in our deliberations and some recourse.

It's a cost/benefit question, as you say. I, personally, support cultural sensitivity. But I also support the French policies on head covering and the like (though I draw the line at their stupid language rules). I think the French have been culturally sensitive, but have decided to do what they've done anyhow, which I think is good.

What I don't support is limbaugh-esque blowhards who wants us essentially to ignore and denigrate the values and customs of minorities simply because we can. That's the attitude of an ignoramus, if you asked me.

i think the rights of cultures are trivial next to the rights of individuals. that is the key: do cultures deserve some special recognition? i am pragmatic enough to understand that religious beliefs and opinions are just going to be elevated to a special level of respect and tolerance, but i do not think it is acceptable to give the same reverence to folkways and traditions of groups if those folkways and traditions violate basic core principles of the majority culture.

as for this:
What I don't support is limbaugh-esque blowhards who wants us essentially to ignore and denigrate the values and customs of minorities simply because we can

no, i denigrate the values and customs of minorities if they conflict with particular values that i hold precious. just because x is normative for a particular group is irrelevant to me. groups have no rights, individuals do.

razib, Sailer said it best, Citizenry should trump race, religion, and ethnicity.
cultural sensitivity only applies when it doesn't interfere with being a good citizen. ;)

Citizenry should trump race, religion, and ethnicity.
cultural sensitivity only applies when it doesn't interfere with being a good citizen

as an atheist it is easy to say that citizenship should trump religion! would american christians be loyal to this nation if it was a non-christian power in conflict with christian powers? perhaps. the example i like to use is the loyalty of bavarian german catholics to the protestant prussian state against austrian german catholics. the key is to make the interests of piety and polity align in a synergistic fashion, and, i think that demands a level of "constrained pluralism."

sheesh, i'm a transhumanist, not an aetheist.
well, maybe they are the same. ;)

i said should, not would.

If you can eliminate arranged marriages, cousin-marriage will fall to an acceptable level.

so, % of affected children whose parents were first cousins (united states)
color blindness - 15
albinism - 21
xeroderma pigmentosum - 23
ichthyosis Congenita - 35
tay sachs - 40

percentage of lung cancer caused by smoking-- a lot
percentage of coronary artery disease caused by unhealthy eating habits-- a lot

and those things cost a lot more (summed over the entire population) than the genetic diseases you cite. maybe we should expand our lack of cultural sensitivity to the smokers and big eaters. Or anyone that does anything risky, for that matter.

Didn't you say in an earlier post that liberty was the thing you liked best about western culture?

maybe we should expand our lack of cultural sensitivity to the smokers and big eaters.

we do. and i do (i wrote several poems about my contempt for fat chix in college, this did get me in trouble). anyway, the analogy isn't appropriate because incest/cousin marriage isn't a powerful cognitive bias we have, it is a cultural tradition whose rewards are mediated through social pressures, not physical (biological) gratification. there is some evidence from MHC smells that we might even be biased against it (i'm skeptical though). but hey, if you want to make a cheap quip i guess you can bait me to state my axioms....

well crap, I didn't think that was a particularly "cheap" quip. but I take back the smartass rhetorical question, which was.

your implied that the reason incestuous relationships should be frowned upon is that they cost you money. you have the same interest in controlling behaviors based in culture as you have in controlling those based in biology (incestuous relationships cost you money, as do smokers).

I stand by my analogy-- there's no strict dichotomy between physical gratification and cultural gratification. the specific way physical urges are satisfied are quite subject to social pressues (some cultures get their kicks from cigarettes, some from qat. some people jockey for status with their fists, some with cheap quips).

When you start down the path of controlling individual behavior in the interest of our collective health costs, you get smoking bans and (soon) regulation of unhealthy foods. Of course, I agree with David Boxenhorn that the major problem with incestuous relationships would disappear with arranged marriage (which you need no biological justification to dislike). So we arrive at the same place, just for different reasons.

When you start down the path of controlling individual behavior in the interest of our collective health costs, you get smoking bans and (soon) regulation of unhealthy foods.

the line is always drawn somewhere along the slippery slope, and considerations of practical implementation are part of the calculus. let me offer an analogy: let us assume that a religion believes in the ingestion of a substance that is neutral in terms of its positive psychological effects and has some minor, but non-trivial, utility costs. it is perhaps some social marker, eg., "i am one of the tribe." compared to the cocaine epidemic it is nothing, but, unlike the cocaine epidemic it would be easy to quash the addiction because there is no physical compulsion that drives people, only social ones.

there are multiple levels here:

1) the practice of cousin marriage is customary and preferred, it is not a necessary condition of a culture (eg., most marriages in muslim countries until recently were not cousin marriages, and most of muhammads wives were not cousins).

2) the practice of cousin marriage does not appeal to powerful cognitive biases or physiological compulsions.

3) so, its abolishment probably wouldn't be difficult, but the perception of sensitivity tends to serve to entrench it.

4) it is a small problem with a simple solution (they need not even directly address the issue of incestuous marriages, denmark's policy of raising the age of marriage for foreigners has basically solved much of the problem since cousin marriage among kurds in that nation served as a way to bring the family over).

5) smoking, alcoholism and fatty foods are big problems with complex possible solutions.

also, let me clear, i do not think a law is necessary against cousin marriage. public ostracism and disapproval would probably do the trick (along with some work-arounds like banning forced marriage or easy overseas brides and husbands). the problem is that just because some cultures prescribe consanguinity a large subset of individuals in the modern west will confer onto that practice a legitimacy and imprimatur of acceptability that it would not otherwise possess (see how "hillbillies" are sneered at for the perception that they engage in incest).

I absolutely agree with that, and will only point out that sometimes slopes really are slippery.

The intersection between medicine and politics is a bitch of an area. Note that New York's plan for the tracking of diabetics uses the same logic as you did in your second comment on this thread.