Undecided

The thing that bugs me about Intelligence Squared—other than its title—is that the number of undecided votes in the audience is always lower after the debate than before.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, IQ Squared is a formal-debate show whereby two teams, each consisting of two or three speakers, take opposing sides on a contentious proposition. For example, if the motion is Ban college football then one team argues in favor of banning college football, and the other team argues against. The catch is that for each debate there's an objective winner and loser; the audience is polled both before and after the show, and the team that changes the most minds in its favor wins the debate.

In theory, it's possible for both teams to lose. That would happen if the for and against sides both lost votes to undecided. But that never happens—even though IQ Squared propositions are worded ambivalently.

Today I listened to the IQ Squared debate titled It's wrong to pay for sex. When I first read that proposition—before I began listening to the arguments—I assumed its meaning was categorical, as in: It's always wrong to pay for sex. That's as opposed to a non-categorical claim such as It's sometimes wrong to pay for sex, or It's usually wrong to pay for sex. As I figured, though prostitution is usually carried out in deplorable circumstances and to regrettable ends, paying for sex is categorically wrong only if it's wrong in all possible circumstances. Even if there's only one case where paying for sex isn't wrong, then there's nothing intrinsically wrong about paying for sex: any of the wrongness we often observe accompanying it must be because of other factors, such as coercion, violence, and sexual inequality. Or so I figured.

The debate played out, as many IQ Squared debates do, as a lesson in ambivalence fallacies. What exactly does the proposition mean? The team arguing for the motion (—that it's wrong to pay for sex—) implied the proposition is not categorical. They argued that prostitution is a big problem worldwide—that buying sex from women makes them worse off, that buying sex from a woman who has no other opportunities to support herself is a form of rape, and that all attempts to regulate prostitution fail to improve these problems.

The other team made an argument similar to the reasoning I outlined two paragraphs previously—that most prostitution is bad, but sometimes it's good, and so saying that it's wrong to pay for sex is to commit a fallacy of composition—to mistake what is common for what is universal.

And so it went—for the entire debate neither team budged from its interpretation of the motion. Neither team agreed to the other's terms.

As a listener, I became more confused and more irritated as the debate went on. My irritation stemmed from the unresolved disagreement in terms. My confusion was because I didn't know how the disagreement should have been resolved.

On the one hand, the interpretation It's usually wrong to pay for sex strikes me as stupid. Of course it's usually wrong! To argue otherwise is to take a naive or callous view of prostitution and its consequences. But if that interpretation is too obvious to debate, then the proposition must instead be asking about the categorical claim—that it's always wrong to pay for sex. Right?

But the categorical interpretation transforms the debate from a real topic into an abstract one: i.e., what is the moral meaning of paid-for sex after untangling the act of paying from the act of sex from the other acts, such as coercion and violence? That's a fascinating topic—for ethicists and philosophers. But we shouldn't expect it to capture the audience's imaginations. Most people aren't philosophers; they think in terms of real-life occurrences, not hypotheticals.

And as if that line of reasoning didn't make me doubt the categorical interpretation enough, towards the end of the debate I began to wonder about extreme, bizarre forms of the categorical interpretation. The topic of prostitution-like behavior in chimpanzees came up among the debate's speakers. Is that relevant to the proposition? The proposition makes no conditional specifier about being human, as in It's wrong for humans to pay for sex. Should we include chimpanzees and other animals in the motion? And what about forms of payment other than money? How do we define pay? Where on the continuum between dinner-and-a-movie and handing over a wad of cash does prostitution begin? For the categorical interpretation, such a definition is critical.

By the end of the debate, I no longer knew what to think because I no longer knew what the proposition was saying—it had become a jumble of meaningless words. On the one hand, I had an interpretation whose likely conclusions seem obvious. Why not instead propose something contentious, such as It should be legal to pay for sex, or It's wrong to pay men for sex? (Think: gay-male prostitution.) On the other hand, I had a different interpretation, one whose likely conclusions are pedantic and abstract. No interpretation is good for mainstream debate.

In the end, I was decided on only one matter: that the debate wasn't and couldn't be about logic.