Childhood Obesity as “Child Abuse”

Apparently there is a really fat kid in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is eight years old and weighs 14 stones.

Experts fear the only way to prevent Connor McCreaddie . . . from developing life-threatening diabetes or heart problems, may be to remove him from his family.

The mother says “I love that little boy so much really. I would give my life for him, willingly.” But the “obesity expert” says:

“They love him but they actually love him to death, literally … through the way they are treating him and feeding him, they are slowly killing him. As far as I’m concerned this is a form of child abuse. Not done intentionally, but the result is child abuse.”

I can’t decide whether that’s the most logical, rational thing I’ve ever heard regarding childhood obesity, or whether it is astonishing and outrageous. If letting your children get extremely overweight is “child abuse,” then where do we draw the line? What amount of weight is beyond the parameters within which one may still be a good parent who does not need government intervention? Should we extend the same rationale to children with other problems that parents cause, exacerbate, or fail to prevent? Why not use government intervention when children are being raised as extremist practitioners of some religious sect?

If we start making “child abuse” into a problem of quantitative extremes rather than qualitative differences (e.g., you feed your child too much versus you sexually molest your child at all), then it becomes a lot easier to move those quantitative delimiters around. In other words, sexual abuse is usually easy to identify and never acceptable, but feeding your child enough is a necessity while feeding your child too much might become “abuse.” It is much, much easier to re-define “too much” than to re-define “sexual abuse.” When definitions of “abuse” are based on quantitative measures, then it may not be long before there are government agencies who are charged with the task of creating a statistical model of the “normal” child and enforcing some kind of sanctions against those parents whose children fall outside that range.

On the other hand, why should parents be allowed to let their children get so breathtakingly fat?

At any rate, it will be interesting to see what happens.

Keep Asking Why

The infanticide discussion lit up again the other day. Can’t say I’m surprised. It’s a difficult subject and everybody thinks they have the right answer.

I have been reading Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc D. Hauser, which is very relevant to the infanticide discussion. A few minutes ago, I read a passage that pretty well encapsulates why I started the infanticide discussion in the first place.

On page 34, Hauser presents two commonly posed moral dilemmas, which I will summarize quickly:

(1) If you are an emergency room doctor and you had five dying people and, by killing one healthy person to harvest and redistribute his organs, you could save them, would it be the right thing to do?

(2) If you are the conductor on a train whose tracks are about to fork, and there are five people on one fork but one person on the other, and none of them will see you coming, should you switch to the fork with only one person and kill him in order to save the other five?

Most people say No to the first one and Yes to the second one. A couple pages later, Hauser writes:

Suppose that everyone reading these two cases delivers judgments that are automatic, consistent, and rapid, but based on poorly articulated or even incoherent explanations. If there is a kind of consensus answer for each of these scenarios, then we need a theory to explain the consensus or universal view. Similarly, we must explain why humans have such intuitions but rarely come up with the underlying principles to account for them. We must also explain how we acquired these principles—in development and over the course of evolution—and how we use them in the service of making morally relevant decisions. Sometimes, we will find ourselves in conflict, simultaneously appreciating the force of our intuitions while recognizing that they lead to actions we should not accept.

That, right there, sums up my purpose in sparking the infanticide discussion (and continuing to fan its flames). It frustrates me how quickly people are willing to judge, but how hesitant they are to determine and articulate the reasons why their judgment should be as it is.

Statistical Police Work

What is wrong with Al Sharpton’s brain?

On Friday, the New York Police Department released a pile-o-data regarding stops and frisks in New York. (See coverage in the New York Times and the New York Press.)

Here are some of the facts that are relevant to the question above:

• 55.2 percent of the persons who were stopped by New York police in 2006 were black.
• 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects who were described by their victims or by witnesses as black.

If you’re like me, you look at those numbers and think, “Wow, the New York police are doing a really good job of not just stopping black people because they’re black, because they’re actually stopping black people at a rate thirteen percentage points lower than might actually be merited by reports from victims and witnesses!”

But when Al Sharpton looks at those numbers, he says, “One will have to explain how 55 percent of the people stopped are black when we’re not nearly 50 percent of the population.”

Huh?

So, according to Sharpton’s apparent “reasoning,” the police should be stopping people of different races at the same rates as their races appear in the general population, without regard to statements from witnesses and victims. Right? (If we’re going to adhere to that reasoning scrupulously, then we need to insist that about fifty percent of all police stops be targeted at women, too, even if substantially more than fifty percent of crime victims report male perpetrators. How about it, ladies?)

If we could reasonably assume that crimes are committed at equal rates by members of all races, then we could infer that wherever the percentage of police stops involving a particular race exceeds that race’s incidence in the general population, there may be a problem of racism by the police.

However, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that, if witnesses and victims identify suspects by race, the percentage of races stopped by the police should match the identifications of those witnesses and victims?

Certainly, there remains the problem of whether those witnesses and victims are themselves identifying members of certain races disproportionately, but how are police supposed to know in any given case whether the witness or victim identification is accurate?

(There is an epistemological barrier that cannot be breached, unless the police add another statistical layer: Say a certain percentage of the population is known to be racist. If a witness identifies the suspect as a particular race, then you re-weight your pursuit according to that probability. Better yet, if the incidence of racism is higher within particular races, then you use a different weighting system according to the race of your witness. “Sorry, witness; you are 34% untrustworthy because you are a member of race X, which is known to be 34% racist. Therefore, in accordance with that information, we will increase the number of people of race X that we pursue in the course of investigating this crime, because we will assume that your probable racism affected your perceptions.” This rapidly turns into a dystopian science fiction nightmare, doesn’t it?)

If they followed the Sharpton model, then police would simply disregard the identifications of witnesses and victims and pursue a group of suspects whose races were proportional to their incidence in the general population. E.g., if you have a city of 1,000 people where 600 are white, 200 are black, 100 are hispanic, and 100 are “Asian/Pacific Islander,” and someone reports a murder, then you need to find 6 white suspects, 2 black suspects, 1 hispanic suspect, and 1 “Asian/Pacific Islander” suspect. If there is a witness who insists that the murderer was hispanic, that’s too bad; the police still need to expend their resources searching for the requisite number of suspects from the other races represented in the population.

How much more ridiculous could it get? Does Sharpton think police work should be guided by statistics regarding the entire population, instead of by tips from people who actually observed or were victims of the crimes?

What other characteristics that are unrelated to the actual crimes should guide the conduct of the police? Should they be stopping people according to the percentage of individuals in the population with a particular color eyes? By the percentage of individuals in the population at a particular height? Height-weight ratio? Should they be stopping people by the percentage of individuals with a particular disability? Should they follow the statistical breakdown for every crime?

Then those individuals with statistically unlikely characteristics would know they had a better chance of committing crimes and getting away with it. Naturally, the police would have to respond by altering their statistical approach and re-weighting their investigations to favor statistically unlikely suspects. Oh, what fun.

I can only conclude that Al Sharpton is incapable of thinking critically and rationally, at least on this issue.