Am I the only one to whom ‘what’s wrong with raping someone if they don’t get injured, traumatized, pregnant, nor get STDs’ sounds a lot like ‘what’s wrong with driving at 100 km/h while drunk, sleep-deprived and talking on the phone if you don’t have any accidents’?
You obviously missed the point completely. Hanson’s thought experiment wasn’t claiming there would be nothing wrong with committing that type of rape, his point was that it would be traumatic in the same way being cuckolded is traumatic. And yet committing that type of rape is illegal, while cuckolding is not even a misdemeanor. His point wasn’t to denigrate the psychological harm of rape, it was to investigate the roots of the difference in the way these harms are treated.
It’s not the same thing, rape is still a violation of bodily integrity even if there’s no health damage of memories.
If a sterile man without STDs drugs a women to be unconscious and then rapes her, that’s still wrong and still should be punished strongly by law.
The sacred value of a woman’s control over her own body is still violated. The fact that Hanson doesn’t address that sacred value is what makes his post a bit creepy.
It isn’t just a matter of “sacred values”. It’s a matter of the consequences of making the statement.
“What’s wrong with doing if ?” will predictably have the effect, on the margin, of encouraging people to do even when don’t actually hold. We can predict this for reasons closely analogous to why knowing about biases can hurt people: Arming people with more rationalizations for bad things that they already were tempted to do will generally make them worse, not better.
Conducting motivated search for conditions under which something normally very harmful can be justified as barely non-harmful is the sort of thing someone would do, in conversation, if they wanted to negotiate down the badness of a specific act.
“What I did isn’t real reckless driving. In real reckless driving — the maximally bad sort — the driver has to be driving too fast, while drunk, sleep-deprived, and talking on the phone. Me, I was only sleep-deprived. So stop treating me like my drugged-out ass ran over a dozen schoolkids or something.”
(See actual political discussions of “real rape”.)
Sacred values is a term out of modern decision theory. Putting quotes around it is like putting quotes around cognitive bias.
“What’s wrong with doing if ?” will predictably have the effect, on the margin, of encouraging people to do even when don’t actually hold.
I don’t think that’s a strong argument. It’s quite useful to play out scenarios of “is X still a bad idea if we change Y” to understand why we think X is a bad idea. It’s how you do reductionist analysis. You reduce something into separate parts to see which of those parts is the real issue.
If I say: “Stealing is bad but there are cases where a person has to steal to avoid starvation.”, that’s a permissible statement. We don’t ban that kind of analysis just because stealing is generally bad.
(See actual political discussions of “real rape”.)
I think it’s quite foolish to believe that a societal debate about what rape happens to be is bad when your goal is to reduce rape.
Tabooing that discussion prevents people to speak in polite company openly about issues of consent and as a result a lot of people don’t think deeply about those issues and make bad decisions.
It’s silly to try to raise rape awareness while at the same time wanting to prevent the topic from getting discussed.
(See actual political discussions of “real rape”.)
Which is extremely idiotic and mostly seems to consist of feminists attempting to get away with further and further expanding the definition of “rape” while keeping the word’s connotations the same.
The sacred value of a woman’s control over her own body is still violated.
Would you accept the same argument for cuckoldry violating the sacredness value of the marriage? If so then wasn’t Hanson comparing two sacredness violations? If not how do you decide which sacredness values to accept?
Would you accept the same argument for cuckoldry violating the sacredness value of the marriage? If so then wasn’t Hanson comparing two sacredness violations?
No, Hanson didn’t speak about sacred values at all. If one wants to make the argument that marriage is sacred and violations should be punished then the logical conclusion are laws that criminalize adultery. Hanson is not in favor of those.
However, one difference is that in the rape example, some people in the audience are more likely to see themselves in the role of the rapist (“Is he saying that I should be allowed to get away with that, if it really caused no harm?”) whereas others are more likely to see themselves in the role of the rape victim (“Is he saying that someone should be allowed to do that to me, if they can explain away my objections?”).
Am I the only one to whom ‘what’s wrong with raping someone if they don’t get injured, traumatized, pregnant, nor get STDs’ sounds a lot like ‘what’s wrong with driving at 100 km/h while drunk, sleep-deprived and talking on the phone if you don’t have any accidents’?
You obviously missed the point completely. Hanson’s thought experiment wasn’t claiming there would be nothing wrong with committing that type of rape, his point was that it would be traumatic in the same way being cuckolded is traumatic. And yet committing that type of rape is illegal, while cuckolding is not even a misdemeanor. His point wasn’t to denigrate the psychological harm of rape, it was to investigate the roots of the difference in the way these harms are treated.
It’s not the same thing, rape is still a violation of bodily integrity even if there’s no health damage of memories.
If a sterile man without STDs drugs a women to be unconscious and then rapes her, that’s still wrong and still should be punished strongly by law. The sacred value of a woman’s control over her own body is still violated. The fact that Hanson doesn’t address that sacred value is what makes his post a bit creepy.
It isn’t just a matter of “sacred values”. It’s a matter of the consequences of making the statement.
“What’s wrong with doing if ?” will predictably have the effect, on the margin, of encouraging people to do even when don’t actually hold. We can predict this for reasons closely analogous to why knowing about biases can hurt people: Arming people with more rationalizations for bad things that they already were tempted to do will generally make them worse, not better.
Conducting motivated search for conditions under which something normally very harmful can be justified as barely non-harmful is the sort of thing someone would do, in conversation, if they wanted to negotiate down the badness of a specific act.
“What I did isn’t real reckless driving. In real reckless driving — the maximally bad sort — the driver has to be driving too fast, while drunk, sleep-deprived, and talking on the phone. Me, I was only sleep-deprived. So stop treating me like my drugged-out ass ran over a dozen schoolkids or something.”
(See actual political discussions of “real rape”.)
Sacred values is a term out of modern decision theory. Putting quotes around it is like putting quotes around cognitive bias.
I don’t think that’s a strong argument. It’s quite useful to play out scenarios of “is X still a bad idea if we change Y” to understand why we think X is a bad idea. It’s how you do reductionist analysis. You reduce something into separate parts to see which of those parts is the real issue.
If I say: “Stealing is bad but there are cases where a person has to steal to avoid starvation.”, that’s a permissible statement. We don’t ban that kind of analysis just because stealing is generally bad.
I think it’s quite foolish to believe that a societal debate about what rape happens to be is bad when your goal is to reduce rape. Tabooing that discussion prevents people to speak in polite company openly about issues of consent and as a result a lot of people don’t think deeply about those issues and make bad decisions.
It’s silly to try to raise rape awareness while at the same time wanting to prevent the topic from getting discussed.
Which is extremely idiotic and mostly seems to consist of feminists attempting to get away with further and further expanding the definition of “rape” while keeping the word’s connotations the same.
Would you accept the same argument for cuckoldry violating the sacredness value of the marriage? If so then wasn’t Hanson comparing two sacredness violations? If not how do you decide which sacredness values to accept?
No, Hanson didn’t speak about sacred values at all. If one wants to make the argument that marriage is sacred and violations should be punished then the logical conclusion are laws that criminalize adultery. Hanson is not in favor of those.
Yes, a little bit.
However, one difference is that in the rape example, some people in the audience are more likely to see themselves in the role of the rapist (“Is he saying that I should be allowed to get away with that, if it really caused no harm?”) whereas others are more likely to see themselves in the role of the rape victim (“Is he saying that someone should be allowed to do that to me, if they can explain away my objections?”).