What to taboo

1 Taboos

Taboos are powerful and dangerous ways of controlling some societal ill. Taboos are like garden variety social norms but fed on interhuman growth hormones. They have a proven track record in making some things utterly off-limits for most people most of the time. We like them because there is a good case that some things should indeed be as far off limits as possible. Rape and murder and other cases of extreme violence are ills that we can make a strong case for handling as taboo acts; If you did it, you did wrong and your claimed intention doesn’t matter.¹

Things that are nebulous, complicated and opaque are risky to taboo.

We want to be very certain that a blanket ban is a good idea on things we taboo, because if we are successful at making them taboo it will be hard to talk about them to make them un-taboo. Taboos, once set running, have their own momentum and find their own natural level, which may be more or less stringent than we were hoping.

We want them to encode rules that do not require heroic effort to abide by, for the vast majority of the population, or if they do, that that effort is worth it. So making same-sex contact taboo makes us into hypocrites.

1.1 Taboo as finite resource

If we deploy taboos too frivolously, we might weaken all the taboos. Suppose I really want to stop jaywalking, so I attempt to foster an anti-jaywalking taboo. People who jaywalk by accident and suffer no ill-effects might start to wonder if all the taboos are as over-certain as the jaywalking taboos.

2 Incoming

• Weaponized Sacredness
• About / Best-Of • The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought
• Overcoming Bias : We See The Sacred From Afar, To See It Together
• When explaining becomes a sin—by Tom Stafford file under taboos and Tetlock and compassion/comprehension

3 References