Opposing parties in debates over commonly-raised questions often fail to focus their arguments on the same concept. These “ambiguous questions” are usually those that are fundamentally unresolvable until one disambiguation of the question is agreed upon. Until that disambiguation is reached, the debate often swirls in circles as different parties effectively argue about distinct topics, seemingly discussing the same thing.
Examples of common “ambiguous questions” include debates like:
- Is healthcare a right?
Well, what is a ‘right,’ and is that truly the question here that we mean to be asking?
- Is milk healthy for kids?
Well, what does ‘healthy’ mean, and when we say ‘healthy,’ what alternative are we comparing it to implicitly?
- Is immigration good?
Well, what is ‘good’? Do we mean what advantages and disadvantages are there to immigration?
- Is obesity a disease?
Well, what is a ‘disease,’ and what are we hoping to determine by asking this question?]
- Is abortion murder?
Well, what are we truly trying to get at by asking if it’s ‘murder’?
- Is marriage defined as being between a man and a woman?
What do we mean by ‘defined’ here, and how will determining the ‘definition’ answer any questions for us?
- Is a trans person who identifies as a woman actually a woman?
What does ‘actually’ mean here, and in what ways does that bear on the reasons we’re having this discussion?
- Should performance-enhancing drugs be banned from sports?
What is a ‘performance-enhancing drug,’ and for what reasons do we want to ban them?
- To focus more on one specific example, consider the question:
“Is it healthier to have a diet that has no meat or that includes meat?”
Different disambiguations of these questions could begin to be tackled empirically, but the empirical methods would differ, and the difficulty level could range from relatively easy to answer to nearly impossible, depending on what we mean by the question. For instance, the questions could be disambiguated as:
- “If we take meat eaters in a society and make them go vegetarian (i.e., meatless), would that make them healthier?” Of course, this is still ambiguous because it will depend on what vegetarian food they are made to eat, and what society we started with, and how we define health (e.g., longevity? absence of chronic disease?). Even if we settle these subquestions though, the causal question is quite challenging to answer and very expensive to study, but could, in principle, be answered with randomized controlled trials (i.e., randomize some people to change to one vegetarian diet, some to change to another vegetarian diet, etc.).
- “On average, when a person decides to switch from a meat-eating diet to a vegetarian (i.e., meatless) one, does it make them healthier?” This could, in principle, be answered (once we decide on a metric for health) with a longitudinal study tracking people across time, but we’d still have to rule out effects of other changes besides the dietary ones that tend to coincide with the dietary changes, which could be tricky.
- “If we were constructing the ‘optimally healthy on average’ human diet, would it include any meat or be all vegetarian?” Well, even if we decide on how to define “healthy,” nutrition scientists probably just don’t know enough about humans to answer this question. Plus, there are SO many possible diets; there is no way we could test them all. But in principle, we could start testing many combinations of foods in carefully controlled experiments where we make study participants switch to a prescribed diet to find combinations that seem to work really well for health. This would at least make a small amount of progress. It could, of course, even turn out that the “healthiest” diet is strongly specific to the individual’s body or that the “healthiest” diet will one day involve foods specifically manufactured for each person’s body.
- “If we look at vegetarians within non-vegetarian cultures, are they healthier than the non-vegetarians around them?” Well, this could depend on which cultures we’re talking about but could be answered with individual-level survey data once we pick a culture and a metric for health.
- “If we look at traditionally vegetarian cultures, are they healthier on average than non-vegetarian cultures?” Well, what do we mean by health? If we settle on a definition of health (e.g., longevity or rate of heart attacks), we could then answer this empirically with group-level statistics about different regions (e.g., what’s the average longevity in the mostly vegetarian vs. mostly non-vegetarian regions). This is probably not what most people mean by the question, but it’s relatively easier to answer than most of the other disambiguations.
Our society cannot reach conclusions effectively with out getting a clear view of our issues.
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