Plasma Pool

There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party. If you want to join in, all you have to do is walk up and say “yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins.

Take an example from ethics. While we all agree that killing is wrong, there are nonetheless cases where it is justifiable if not expected. If a bomber were en route to destroy an orphanage, you would surely have no problem shooting it out of the sky with minimal consideration for the lives of the crew. This is a clear example, but in the grey area between right and wrong is where controversy arises. Capital punishment, abortion and animal cruelty are instances where cut and dry morality breaks down, but where we still attempt to make definitive pronouncements.

0 or 1, there is no alternative

Few cases better illustrate this propensity than attitudes toward sexual orientation. Although we tend to lump people into the convenient categories of ‘gay’ and ’straight,’ the Kinsey Scale and the experiments predicated thereupon show us that this is a misrepresentation of the facts. In reality, sexual orientation involves a gradation from exclusively homosexual to exclusively heterosexual, although for general purposes of discussion, we often shoehorn everyone into two exclusive, and therefore oppressive, categories.

Another example of such gradation can be seen in the biological process of speciation. What line needs to be crossed for a lineage to be considered a separate species? This is a difficult question to answer, because speciation derives from a mounting number independent changes which make interbreeding more and more difficult and/or unlikely. Clearly, horses and donkeys, camels and llamas, and lions and tigers are different species, yet each of these pairs can still interbreed. In these cases, sufficient genetic deviation from a common ancestor has not yet occurred so as to prohibit reproduction, but they are well on their way to being separate species — we are witnessing the transition. Creationists use the absence of a definitive delineation between the concept of species and subspecies to question the idea of evolution. However, there is no line in the sand upon crossing which animals can no longer interbreed, and it’s senseless to demand one for the theory to be valid.

A final example comes from the field of linguistics, in dialectal variation. While we Americans have little trouble understanding British Received Pronunciation, we may have to struggle to parse some accents, such as Scottish, or Cockney. So, at what point does a dialect become a language of its own? Should the criterion be mutual intelligibility? If so, Spanish and Italian should be considered different dialects of the same language, and Sean Paul is not singing in English. Evidently, there is no strict dividing line between dialect and full-on separate language (some have even joked that a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy).

–

It’s obvious why we would develop a compartmentalizing method of classification. Indeed, deliberation and appreciation of exception may not have been an evolutionarily favored means of decision making to our ancestors on the savanna. But utile perception is not necessarily a faithful reflection of reality, and sometimes, it downright betrays it. This is why we should be careful not to give an absolute answer for the ‘in between’ cases, and to reserve invariable judgment.

Anyone who tries to give you a hard-and-fast rule for delineating issues on spectrum is surely a fool, yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. There is no ‘magic line’ to tell when a clump of cells becomes a human, or what constitutes a family — if someone tells you otherwise, I promise you, they are wrong. Instead, we should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.