Okay, women have a preference along a single axis which they do nothing about and do not express at all. The framework as described is all about what active agenty men could or should do to entirely passive npc women. I’m very far from being a feminist, but come on—this is objectification and “don’t worry your pretty head about it”.
I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.
It is true that some participants in the analogy are “non-player characters”. That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be “playable” in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.
It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians.
If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying “you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects”.
The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn’t have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story.
As for why the women don’t express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.
because I don’t see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the discussion
Your parable is flawed at the core because you made a basic category mistake. Flirting is not an action, not something one person does to another one. It is interaction, something two people do together.
Deciding that one person in that interaction controls the encounter and does things, while the other is just a passive receptacle to the extent that not even her consent is required, never mind active participation, is not a useful framework for looking at how men and women interact.
Okay, women have a preference along a single axis which they do nothing about and do not express at all. The framework as described is all about what active agenty men could or should do to entirely passive npc women. I’m very far from being a feminist, but come on—this is objectification and “don’t worry your pretty head about it”.
I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
I don’t understand your analogy.
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.
It is true that some participants in the analogy are “non-player characters”. That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be “playable” in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.
It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians.
If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying “you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects”.
The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn’t have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story.
As for why the women don’t express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.
Your parable is flawed at the core because you made a basic category mistake. Flirting is not an action, not something one person does to another one. It is interaction, something two people do together.
Deciding that one person in that interaction controls the encounter and does things, while the other is just a passive receptacle to the extent that not even her consent is required, never mind active participation, is not a useful framework for looking at how men and women interact.