craschworks

I've always been fascinated by the question: why don't the political beliefs of people of good will and intelligence converge more often than they do? For example, James Hughes is an energetic and prolific leader of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA). He's also a socialist. I remember back in the early '90's, when I was on the extropians list, he would get into lengthy rows with the (mostly) libertarian crowd on the list. Now I'm on one of the mailing lists of the WTA, and he's making the same arguments that he was a decade ago. Why have seemingly none of his views changed over the years?

More alarmingly, I perceive that few of my values or beliefs have changed radically in the past 10 years or so either. Why not?

One of the few examples where I can recall my views changing is the issue of abortion. When I was in high school, I was strongly pro-life. My memory of the reasons why I held that stance are probably distorted but as I recall, it went like this: historically, whenever there has been a clash over what constitutes a human deserving of full human rights (slaves, Nazis), those who favored the less expansive definition were almost always, in retrospect, considered evil monsters. Therefore, it seemed prudent to me to grant fetuses full human rights from the time of conception forward. I'm sure my Mormon upbringing also influenced my beliefs, as well, as Mormons believe that the soul enters the embryo at conception, and therefore aborting the embryo constitutes murder.

Now I think women should be able to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. As best as I can tell, my views changed as a result of a number of things I've read. After reading Bart Kostko's Fuzzy Thinking, I realized that “humanity”, however you defined it, was a continuous characteristic, and that any line you drew between human/non-human would be arbitrary. After reading Rand, I became an atheist, so I no longer believed that embryo's have souls. I also began judging laws in terms of their effects on my long term self-interest. I don't care about embryos, but I do care about people who are dying of diseases that could be treated with embryonic tissue. Moreover, enforcing anti-abortion laws would cost a great deal of money in court/prison costs, as well as the opportunity costs to women who were killed/injured from botched back alley abortions.

Now, I don't want to get into an argument over abortion, at least, not in this post. I present the evolution of my thoughts about abortion above as an illustration of the process, as best as I can recall, of how my beliefs changed.

Have you ever held strong beliefs that changed substantially? For example, did you go from being a democrat to being a libertarian? (or vice versa). An atheist to a believer? If so, how did your beliefs change? What catalyzed the change?