With that said, are you not in favor of banning the religious paper cut practice?

No, I think child molestation results in significantly egregious harm to justify its banning. Entirely consistent.

No I would not sign a bill today that banned this. Nor would I for all the innumerable and considerably more harmful, in my view, things above this.

Where? Assuming said molestation causes no physical harm and the child doesn't remember it.

Okay, we're done here. You're of the mind that it's effectively okay to torture an infant so long as there are no physical or mental scarring.

You can answer the question with whatever definitions you like. Obviously it is quite a long list of things that can be harmful and most people would accept as harmful. The issue here seems to be that you want to include as part of your definition that circumcision by its nature is harmful. I disagree, or at least that it is very minor harm such as a 1/500000 risk of death and some transient pain. So I have asked you this: can you show why it is harmful not just intrinsically by definition, but in terms of other things that we would all likely agree was harmful.

For instance, you brought up stoning. I think we can all agree that stoning causes death or massive body trauma and that THOSE things are in turn harmful. So stoning is harmful in terms of these other things. But is this the case for circumcision? You have certainly not provided a reason why it is.

You didn't ask whether I thought it was okay to torture and infant. I don't think it is. I wouldn't do it to my child. The question is whether I would pass a bill, in today's climate, that stopped that. The answer to this very different question is no, I don't believe in the encroachment of the state involving itself in the decisions of parenting for a problem that doesn't seem to actually exist.

Sufficiently often I think it WOULD cause physical harm and child would remember it consciously or subconsciously that the pragmatic role of ban stands. Remember, we are asking whether there is enough aggregate damage to justify a ban. In this case, clearly yes. Questions of some bizarre thought experiment don't factor in.

Now you're qualifying your view with "today's climate". If a mass epidemic of religious infant paper cutting swelled out of nowhere, would you then be in favor of banning it?

This is wrong. One of the big benefits of circumcision is the ease of cleaning when a baby ****s all over it, which helps prevent infection

I said the exact same thing the first time, not some new qualification:
If it was some mass epidemic, no I probably wouldn't want to ban it. But don't read to much into this, I am not in favour of a nanny state jumping into parenting decision in almost all cases. I would not be happy about it, certainly.

As I have said, this seems like a new and egregious hypothetical, but mostly this is just because it is both new and just seems viscous. I think that parents do a lot WORSE than paper cutting and we are normalized to this and just accept it. Even if it is going to do lifelong psychological damage, or increase significantly there chances of death and morbidity. This would not be the first time that religions do damage to their kids. You have not indicated any tendency to go along and ban these kinds of things.

Further, it should be noted that this is entirely consistent with my general theme of needing a standard of egregious harm. At some point, even I would support a ban if it was papercutting 100 times a day every day say. Because at that point the harm - physical pain and risk of infections and the like - start to become sufficiently egregious. Someone gives three paper cuts once a year in a ceremony, I don't care. But the general standard is the same.

My middle brother had such an infection, as I said earlier, which is why my mother ended up circumcising him after this (about age 1 i think?)

That's fine and well, we just have different definitions of what qualifies as egregious harm. I consider the unnecessary and permanent lopping off a body part to qualify, you however, do not.

So just to be clear, in my post where you asked me to define harm and I responded, I asked you if you could justify that circumcision was harmful in terms of other things we all agree are harmful, the way I justified that stoning was harmful in terms of other things we all agree are harmful. Due to lack of attention, can I assume that you do NOT believe you can do this? That this body part removal thing of yours is just intrinsically harmful and cannot be described as harmful as a result of any more basic concept?

And also just to be clear, can I have a clear example to my repeatedly posed question: "Is there anybody here who is seriously disagreeing with the contention that if you want to ban X, X ought to be shown to cause harm? If so, why?"

I'm saying that in the case of something like circumcision the autonomy of the child should be valued, and in this case (as with the yearly paper cut ceremony scenario), there is no fundamental difference between the violations of autonomy allowed to children by their parent and to adults.

I don't see how that answers either of my questions so I must repeat the query for an answer to them.

Now you have raised (for the first time) this new issue where you think circumcision is an exception to the usual situation where parents are allowed to impose their wishes on their children and are asserting this is a special case. Why? How do I know when it is okay and when it is not okay? Am I wrong to think that the distinction should be that it is not okay when it causes significant harm? Why is it that all of the many other things we accept which cause really significant harm but we don't ban don't count?

It's entirely relevant, because the crux of your argument is "Why should you ban something that's not harmful", and I think I've shown that there are cases where things should be banned, yet aren't harmful. Now the argument can shift past that premise and towards "Is circumcision something that should be banned, even though it's only slightly harmful."

Would you approve of a parent having a kids ears cut pointy, like an elves? Is it different is society by and large did it?

On a different part of the conversation, you seem to think parental rights trump almost everything, which is ludicrous. I think parents should be forced to vaccinate their children. I think there's a lot of laws that should be on the books to force parents into being responsible instead of just popping out a ton of worthless kids they only put 1/100th the required effort into raising. Either way, just because parents choose to do something to their kid and it doesn't harm them doesn't mean it should be allowed.

I never said it was a 'special case'. If you can't see the distinction between making your child get a vaccination shot and lopping a body part off, then the problem doesn't lie with me. See below.

I think this analogy will hold:
In order to know where the distinction lies, replace 'infant' with 'severely mentally handicapped adult'. The caretakers are obviously going to have to make certain allowances with regard to the mentally handicapped adult's autonomy. This does not mean, however, that they can randomly decide to slice off his foreskin (without a medical reason)...even if the procedure produces no pain and the patient doesn't realize it's even occurred.

The reason for a deontological rule in society like "thou shalt not rape people" is because of the harm of it. Just because someone can create a hypothetical where it doesn't cause harm (although rape usually DOES cause physical harm) does not mean the rule is void.

To the latter question: okay, so if you are not banning circumcision because it is harmful (something even the anti-circumcision people on this forum can't even decide if it is or is not harmful) why are you banning it? What is the other magical standard?

Oh interesting, see I had the vaccine example earlier because I assumed almost everyone would NOT want to force vaccines. I also don't want parents to be forced to feed brocolli to their children, or be forced to teach them atheism, even if both things would probably help them. But then I am not a fan of an overarching nanny state that jumps into a huge range of parenting decisions and forces its opinion on them. Are you a fan of this?

You have the burden of proof backwards. To ban something, you have to argue that it is so harmful it should be banned. What is the harm?

Again, I don't see the answers to my previous set of questions.
Sorry, I am confused on what you are implying here. Do you support or not support the forcing of children to get vaccines against their parents wishes?

Indeed. Our society gives a higher level of privileged to parents over children, than to careworkers over handicapped people. So parents can do all kinds of things to their children that careworkers cannot do to their patients. There are good reasons for this.

If your baby's penis got infected because there is **** on it you're probably a bad parent. Just saying.

guess my mom is a bad parent then. huh she doesn't seem to be. sometimes infections do happen in babies against the best aims of their parents.

The whole reason the circumcision came up in the germany court was that the curcumsized baby had complications afterwards, which are supossedly not that uncommon.

The court also stated that there are health benefits of circumcision, but at least in middle europe they are virtually non-existant.

I guess I would agree that in cases where the hygiene of the baby is not properly taken care of I would agree that a circumcision would beneficial, but I really hope those cases are rare.

Babies **** on themselves several times a day for a very long time. It's basically all they do. You're supposed to clean them. Even when they're circumcised.

Maybe. I would have to decide on a case by case basis. If there was a widespread plague, then yes, infants should be forced to get said vaccine, regardless of the parent's wishes.

Here, the scenario has been changed slightly:

In order to know where the distinction lies, replace 'infant' with 'severely mentally handicapped adult'. The caretakers/parents are obviously going to have to make certain allowances with regard to the mentally handicapped adult's autonomy. This does not mean, however, that the parents can randomly decide to slice off his foreskin (without a medical reason)...even if the procedure produces no pain and the patient doesn't realize it's even occurred.

Replace the foreskin example with the tattoo example if you have to, but it's probably not necessary.