Respect Chesterton-Schelling Fences

Yes, and:

Chesterton's Fence is often invoked by the people who tore down a Chesterton's Fence.

A really quite facepalmingly excellent example of this is American middle-class attitudes toward child-rearing; in between 1900 and 1960 we medicalized almost everything about how kids are born and cared for and raised, in the sense that we promoted what random doctors think over the established collected wisdom-of-the-ages.

Which, to be clear, is not a thing I'm fundamentally against; actually checking our assumptions against the data is how progress is made, and how we get things like handwashing and vaccines, and kids do die way way less now than they did in the year 1900!

But a bunch of things unrelated to the actually important medical stuff were also outsourced to doctors talking out of their asses (er, excuse me, "outside of their domains of expertise"), and a bunch of how kids have lived and been socialized for approximately forever was suddenly pooh-poohed and delegitimized and subsequently vanished or began slowly drying up.

Cut to a few decades later, and most people think that the way it's been done for about two or three generations is the way it's always been done (it isn't), and if you try to do something different, they invoke Chesterton's Fence and shout "don't tamper with this, it's the received Wisdom of the Ages!"

When it really, really, really isn't.

This is a single example of a thing that happens A LOT. Cultural memory is short and fickle, and often it is precisely the Dangerous New Experiment that gets defended as being the Timeless Wisdom.

(There were of course other things going on with child rearing besides medicalization, such as e.g. the development of national media causing people to be afraid of a lot of things that were extremely unlikely to happen to them.)

This post is excellent.

Rather than thinking in terms of "safe" and "dangerous", I think it makes more sense to think of it as "more risk" and "less risk" where marginally increasing risk is effectively increasing a tax on the expected value of a change. On individual cases it might depend on individual risk premiums, but for larger groups it's more about the risks from causality cascades.

This strikes me as a fully general argument against making any form of moral progress. Some examples: 

1. An average guy in the 1950s notices that the main argument against permitting homosexuality seems to be "God disapproves of it".  But he doesn't believe in God. Should he note that there is a strong cultural guardrail against "sexual deviancy" according to the local cultural definition, and oppose the gay rights movement anyway?
   1. Does the answer to this question change by the 1990s when the cultural environment is shifting? Or by the 2020s? If so, is it right that the answer to an ethical question should change based on other people's attitudes? (Obviously the answer to the pragmatic question of "how much trouble will I get into for speaking out?" changes, but that's not what we're debating.)
2. A mother from a culture where coercive arranged marriages are normal notices that the culturally-endorsed reason for this practice is that young adults are immature and parents are better at understanding what is good for them, so parents should arrange marriages to secure their offspring's happiness. She notices that many parents actually make marriage decisions based on what is economically best for the parents, and that even those trying to ensure the young person's happiness often get it wrong. Should the mother think "this is a guardrail preventing breakdown of family structure, or filial respect, or something important, I will arrange marriages for my own sons and daughters anyway?"
   1. NB: I'm trying to be clear I'm talking about arranged marriage of adults, not child marriage, although that is also a practice that has been endorsed by many cultures, who would presumably be able to name "guardrails" that banning child marriage would cross.

I get that you said "respect" not "obey" guardrails presumably for reasons like these, but without more discussion about when you "respect" the guardrail but bypass it anyway, this seems roughly equivalent to saying that there is always a very heavy burden of proof to change moral norms, even where the existing norms seem to be hurting people. (In the two examples above, gay people, and everyone who gets married to someone they don't like).

Chesterlling fence? :)

there is one main problem with this argument, and this that people who want to cross Fence aren't safe on their current position. 

for example, high-commitment communities is "safe" social default, one very old that survived from before we were humans. but, as Ozy wrote, "One of the most depressing facts about high-commitment communities is that they almost all cover up child sexual abuse."

this is the safety of the Fence. this "safety" sucks. 


the sister that went no-contact with her rapist father is the black sheep of the family. she is the radical, the revolutionist. all her family think she is bad daughter and she should not deny her father his granddaughter. her sister, who send her little boy unsupervised to his grandfather, even after he start to wetting himself again - she is the conservative, who respect the status quo.

i want to be the black-sheep sister. i can't see the other option as anything but abomination. 

***

different argument: what is the fence? because if you ask me, cheating in unhappy marriage IS the fence, the conservative view. the unconservative view is you can just divorce. very new, was definitely not like that during most of the history. while constant cheating, sometimes with "self-respecting woman have husband and lover" as folk-wisdom idiom, was the norm in some times and places.

so how can you be respectful of the fence, with you don't know what side is the conservative one? 

(it's like what Duncan said, but from different angle)
 

DM me for my discord and I will send you my first comment draft for this post, containing my thoughts on Chesterton-Schelling deontology and on rules generally. I spent a good 9 hours writing it and it's very verbose and dramatically non-metacontrarian; it would get downvoted to hell for pretentiousness and I might wake up tomorrow largely in disagreement with it.