Idle Arguments Support Blinkered Policy

I'm developing a tendency to write very long blog posts and this means that I'm less likely to pick up errors. My last post contained a serious error in the second paragraph that probably made the following paragraphs difficult to understand. I have inserted a correction and apologise to anyone who may have found my argument hard to follow as a result.

In future I need to remind myself that if I can't form a conclusion in less than 1000 words, I probably need to do more thinking than writing. Perhaps even 1000 words is too long and I should aim for 500-700? Anyhow, I thank people for their patience and especially those who have taken the trouble to let me know when they have spotted an error.

In a nutshell, I don't disagree with Mr April's conclusion, that opt-out testing is superior to opt-in testing. I just think the argument is idle and should be completely unnecessary in the first place.

People originally advocated for opt-in HIV testing because those found positive risked being stigmatized. They risked being stigmatized because of the mistaken belief that HIV positive people are in some way immoral or bad (although these qualities are usually implied rather than stated). Unfortunately, the risk of being stigmatized is still very real, despite the evidence that HIV infection is not mainly, as the HIV orthodox view claims, a result of unsafe sexual practice.

Arguments like those presented by April presuppose the truth of the behavioral paradigm, this view that HIV is mainly transmitted through unsafe sex. Attempts to test as many people as possible for HIV in high prevalence populations have been thwarted by the resulting stigma and discrimination, which arises from the behavioral paradigm, even though this paradigm is completely unsupported by evidence.

It shouldn’t take a philosopher or medical ethicist to spot policy that has been formulated on the basis of naked prejudice. But as long as the offending paradigm is retained in HIV policy making, people will continue to be stigmatized. The stigma is a consequence of the paradigm.

To the extent that philosophers or ethicists fail to take account of how things actually are on the ground, their arguments will be, as Wittgenstein might say, ‘wheels that are turning but are not themselves turning anything’. Perhaps Mr April even thinks that UNAIDS, the WHO, the Harvard Medical School, the CDC or the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health are able to inform him about how things are on the ground. But he is mistaken. All they can offer is their prejudice, which he seems to have accepted.

It could be argued that, because Mr April’s arguments are not based on anything happening in the real world, they have no consequences. But his arguments are developed in places where HIV policy is also developed. Therefore, people in high HIV prevalence countries suffer the consequences of the stigma and prejudice that arises from current policies. In fact, what is happening in the real world, unlike academic arguments in certain institutions, has little noticeable influence on policy. But policy can have a huge and overwhelmingly destructive influence on the real world.