How is it difficult to justify on utilitarian grounds? If one were both a deontologist and committed to elegance in one’s theories, admittedly not the most common combination outside of ancaps, one might be in a poor place to say that one form of subjective harm must be resolved in favor of the offended party without saying so for all harms. But if you think that contingent facts matter, then you can just look at the world and see that rape produces these harms and ritual pollution does not. In fact, if you really squint you can just look and see that ritual pollution as such doesn’t exist at all, unlike the brain’s inborn mapping of me-ness onto a body.
As it happens, contingently, there do seem to be—even beyond sex—ways of touching people that very generally do, and do not, make them uncomfortable. The fact that there’s no remotely elegant way to distinguish between the two doesn’t mean not touching people in ways that make them uncomfortable is almost always a bad idea! Bad touching is bad! So this does in fact seem to apply to touching in general, with the caveats that 1) for a lot of kinds of touching a norm like “prior, verbal, enthusiastic consent is required” would be unweildly, and we can take consent as the default instead, and 2) that while there is basically never outside of contrived ethical thought experiments a really great reason to have sex with someone against their consent, there are commonly if unfortunately really great reasons to physically restrain or even kill people without their consent.
As it happens, contingently, there do seem to be—even beyond sex—ways of touching people that very generally do, and do not, make them uncomfortable.
What value of “very generally” are you using? IME there are ways of touching people which would likely make (say) a American freak the hell out but would likely be barely noticed by (say) an Italian.
EDIT: “IME” is nowhere near an unbiased sample of all human experience, so it is probably much more complicated than that. OTOH there’s a female American LWer who described how uncomfortable she was when someone had kissed her on the cheeks, but I have a very hard time imagining that happening with a female Italian. (EDIT 2: To clarify, in informal contexts in Italy, kissing a woman on the cheeks is roughly analogous to shaking a man’s hand—I could imagine a woman not wanting her cheeks kissed or a man not wanting his hand shaken, but it’d most likely be someone they’d already have some reason to dislike.)
Generally enough in any given person’s social context that they should have a decent but not infallible sense of what’s acceptable. Obviously there’s a great degree of cultural variation.
What about for a culture that permitted non-consensual sex?
If there are people who are genuinely not make uncomfortable by suddenly having sex with them, and you know this, then sure. (That such people could exist on a culture-wide level I find tremendously implausible, but LCPW and all that.) Of course what we usually mean when we talk about “cultures that permit non-consensual sex” is ones where a husband can rape his wife all he likes, or just rape culture more generally, which is obviously a different axis of variation than how much personal space people tend to have.
The OP was about people from two different social contexts (atheists vs Christians), so that doesn’t help that much. (And if you think that religion doesn’t count as a social context, there have been places where people from different religious backgrounds have even had different native languages.)
How is it difficult to justify on utilitarian grounds? If one were both a deontologist and committed to elegance in one’s theories, admittedly not the most common combination outside of ancaps, one might be in a poor place to say that one form of subjective harm must be resolved in favor of the offended party without saying so for all harms. But if you think that contingent facts matter, then you can just look at the world and see that rape produces these harms and ritual pollution does not. In fact, if you really squint you can just look and see that ritual pollution as such doesn’t exist at all, unlike the brain’s inborn mapping of me-ness onto a body.
As it happens, contingently, there do seem to be—even beyond sex—ways of touching people that very generally do, and do not, make them uncomfortable. The fact that there’s no remotely elegant way to distinguish between the two doesn’t mean not touching people in ways that make them uncomfortable is almost always a bad idea! Bad touching is bad! So this does in fact seem to apply to touching in general, with the caveats that 1) for a lot of kinds of touching a norm like “prior, verbal, enthusiastic consent is required” would be unweildly, and we can take consent as the default instead, and 2) that while there is basically never outside of contrived ethical thought experiments a really great reason to have sex with someone against their consent, there are commonly if unfortunately really great reasons to physically restrain or even kill people without their consent.
What value of “very generally” are you using? IME there are ways of touching people which would likely make (say) a American freak the hell out but would likely be barely noticed by (say) an Italian.
EDIT: “IME” is nowhere near an unbiased sample of all human experience, so it is probably much more complicated than that. OTOH there’s a female American LWer who described how uncomfortable she was when someone had kissed her on the cheeks, but I have a very hard time imagining that happening with a female Italian. (EDIT 2: To clarify, in informal contexts in Italy, kissing a woman on the cheeks is roughly analogous to shaking a man’s hand—I could imagine a woman not wanting her cheeks kissed or a man not wanting his hand shaken, but it’d most likely be someone they’d already have some reason to dislike.)
Generally enough in any given person’s social context that they should have a decent but not infallible sense of what’s acceptable. Obviously there’s a great degree of cultural variation.
Would you consider that an acceptable justification for the treatment of Dalits? What about for a culture that permitted non-consensual sex?
See Yvain’s parable of the salmon and Vladimir’s reply.
If there are people who are genuinely not make uncomfortable by suddenly having sex with them, and you know this, then sure. (That such people could exist on a culture-wide level I find tremendously implausible, but LCPW and all that.) Of course what we usually mean when we talk about “cultures that permit non-consensual sex” is ones where a husband can rape his wife all he likes, or just rape culture more generally, which is obviously a different axis of variation than how much personal space people tend to have.
The OP was about people from two different social contexts (atheists vs Christians), so that doesn’t help that much. (And if you think that religion doesn’t count as a social context, there have been places where people from different religious backgrounds have even had different native languages.)