I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas”
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
I don’t have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don’t object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn’t involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we’re just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I’m confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it’s much easier to come up with cases that don’t disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest—again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn’t bug me much at all.
==
(1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of ‘nerd religion’ should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a ‘nerd religion’ form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Although assisting suicide seems to be a felony in most states in the US according to wikipedia.
Of course for the majority of people wikipedia page itself is all the assistance they would require.
My discovery of the day: Suicide by locking yourself in the garage with the car on just aint what it used to be. Apparently it was once painless and only minimally unpleasant due to the large amount of carbon monoxide produced. These days, however, we have more efficient engines and catalytic converters. This means you need an awful lot of exhaust fumes to get enough carbon monoxide to kill you—and exhaust fumes still aren’t pleasant.
Evidently it is better to use a barbeque (charcoal burner) than a car if you really want to off yourself with CO.
I don’t much care if suicide is illegal just so long as those that are enabling the suicider aren’t vulnerable to punishment for obvious reasons. Well, unless our legal system is expected to last as is until after recovery from cryopreservation is implemented. That’d be awkward.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
I’d support this more confidently if I believed that the legal mechanisms distinguishing “enabling suicide” from “murder” would align well with my own intuitions about the distinction.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
This seems like a bad idea as long as most people aren’t getting cryonicly preserved. A lot of what we’ve learned about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of brain damage comes from autopsies and we’re still learning. Similarly, in some cases the brain will be severely damaged by the form of death (such as say many cases of blunt trauma) and in some of those cases (such as murder investigations) autopsies may be necessary.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
I would require that explicit consent be granted by the patient in a will or, if the will does not mention the subject, then require the consent from the next of kin as opposed to requiring the next of kin to actively request that no head-destruction be done. Because cops aren’t going to make it easy for next of kin to hinder their investigation by making such a request but they are almost always going to get permission that is required so that they don’t face criminal charges.
(I don’t have any particular objection to donation of one’s body or brain to science for them to do as they please.)
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There’s no external sanctification going on here, and I’m not sure how valuable I’d consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. “Mortification of the flesh” is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it’s not a perfect one.
Giving up the immediate prospect of a conventional life, before and during the process of the disease setting in, to demonstrate faith in future technological developments?
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they ‘really’ want than they do? (Not that I’m saying you don’t.)
Well, not that alone; but also the fact that sacrifice (as I understand it, at least) is irreversible, so someone who doesn’t want to be sacrificed right now can change their mind, but not vice versa.
They’ve got it wrong you see, it’s not about instant sacrifice, it’s about gradually giving yourself over to the Price, giving only as much as you deserve to give at any one time.
There those people working at industrial jobs, seeming to be accident prone day after day and begging to keep their jobs; they don’t claim workman’s compensation after losing a finger or after a metal fragment pierces their eye.They splash their mouth with alcohol to cover for their “incompetence” or beg not to take a drug test because of their “habit”. Notice how hard working they are, taking every over-time hour they can get. Some or religious and all are hard-working, wanting to keep their job. The upper management seem to turn a blind eye, often belonging to the same social clubs or churches with these model workers. This gradual sacrifice of a body one piece at a time, shows a continued dedication to the Prince. Much more than blindly jumping into a soup pot once.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
There’s no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don’t think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
I agree with you that consent is not simple… indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I’m inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that’s ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
I think people often misjudge situations, especially in relation to ending their own life. And consent in case of permanent damage is probably not sufficient to say anything about morals. If their death actually did have higher value than other options then I suppose it is just a tragic situation.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others. Also, it cuts the other way too. For example, when my grandfather suffered a stroke, nobody expected him to recover, and both he and his loved ones preferred him dead rather than continuing to live bedridden, frequently delirious, and in constant pain. The law prevented us from killing him, though. I consider every day of his life after that point far more tragic than his eventual death.
I agree that knowledge about consent is not always sufficient to make a moral judgment.
I think if we switch from talking about expected-value judgements to moral judgements, we will have to back up a very long way before we can keep making progress, since I’m not sure we have a shared understanding about what a moral judgement even is.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives.
I have experienced a Cartesian-demon-like urge to rationalise “I should kill myself”. While similar dispositions exist in e.g. anosognosics, I expect situations that cause them are rare.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant to say that if their death had higher value then I would agree that it would be the better decision. It is tragic that there are no positive solutions, and only negative ones.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
Consider the situations where people consider suicide. They often are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable. Sometimes there is a euphoric response when people decide that everything will be over soon. Obviously, I can’t think of any statistics or anything, so I guess we just have to disagree.
I’m content to disagree, but I’m not sure we even do.
Certainly I agree with you that people often misjudge the decision to end their own lives, often for the reasons you cite.
What I’m saying is that, for example, people who are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable also make decisions about whether to get out of bed, whether to go to work, whether to take their medication, whether to talk to friends about what’s going on in their lives, whether to take psychoactive drugs, whether to get more sleep, whether to exercise regularly, whether to punch their neighbor in the head, whether to buy revolvers, and on and on and on.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
We suck at these decisions, but the consequences tend to be significantly more severe. Good defaults before the unstability starts also help; for example, “go to work” is much more likely to be on the radar at all than “punch someone out of the blue”.
But to address your point: yup, there are specific bugs that are triggered solely by considering suicide. Though how you’d measure their frequency I don’t know.
I agree that the consequences of an incorrect decision about dying are severe compared to most of the other decisions we make.
I agree that there are specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering suicide. There are also specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering all kinds of other things.
I agree that existing predispositions to explicitly consider/not consider certain decisions, and to decide them in particular ways, affect how we make those decisions.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think suicidal people are just as reliable in their decision-making as others.
I recommend that you take a break from this thread, go think about something else for a while, come back to what I said, and see if you still believe I’m making a claim about comparisons between two groups of people.
If you do, then I agree that we should end this discussion here.
I don’t know. I mentioned before there is a euphoric response to having things finally end in peace. This is why so many people can believe in something like the rapture. It’s not a frightening thought. They get caught up in the idea that everything will be all right. Suicide sounds like it would trigger that appeal as well, so I’m still inclined to disagree.
I’m glad you’re now seeing what I said. It makes useful discussion much easier.
I share your belief that such an anticipation of relief might be triggered by contemplating suicide. That has certainly been my experience, at least.
I infer (though not very confidently) that you believe such anticipation is a more powerful motivator than various other feelings such people have that cause them to make unreliable decisions in other contexts. If you do in fact believe that, then yes, we disagree.
Er… what about pets? Not all animals we kill and eat, you know...
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
Comparison? It wasn’t a comparison. It was a clarification. Having sex with pets is also bestiality.
You’re against it? Why? You’re just sounding arbitrary.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent (similar to pedophilia). So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
By “that we have” do you mean “that we do have” or “that we should have?” I think it would difficult to claim that existing bans on bestiality are really based on the idea of consent, which they predate. (Note that e.g. “rape” (of humans) refers to something conceptually quite different than it did back in the bad old days.)
22:22 If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel.
22:23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
22:24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
22:25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.
22:26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:
22:27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.
22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
22:29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Indeed, in the US the last state was North Carolina in 1993, and even still it tends to be a lesser offense (assault, battery, or spousal abuse). wikipedia.
Of course, my wife and I tend to call shenanigans on the concept. Thought experiment:
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim. So someone who didn’t want their life ruined (jail time, permanent sex offender registry, etc.) would do well to make certain sure they can establish that consent was given. Various methods would work to some degree—signed documents, video tapes, witnesses, the presence of a government official...
As ridiculous as it would seem to get all of those things together for the recording of consent for sex, it so happens we actually do have an institution that incorporates all of those things—marriage. We actually have a tradition that involves getting the entirety of both families together, in front of a government official, with signed government documents, usually on videotape, where both parties agree (often speaking directly to their respective deities) that they will do certain things with each other, traditionally understood to prominently include sex. A bit over the top, but sometimes you have to do crazy things to avoid litigation.
Except now, even going through all that is insufficient to establish consent. It’s a world gone mad.
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim.
Compared to other crimes, rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
Quick sanity check: According to RAINN (disclosure: citing an organization I’ve supported), 58% chance of a conviction for rape. A questionable Wikipedia article claims that the conviction rate for crimes in general is “84% in Texas, 82% in California, 72% in New York, 67% in North Carolina, and 59% in Florida.” (as of 2000). Thus, it seems plausible that rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
For clarity, the RAINN stats are rape-specific and the Wikipedia stats are for all crimes, right?
Crime-specific conviction rates seem to be hard to find. A 1997 DoJ press release claims 87% conviction rates for all crimes in federal court (a skewed sample, though) and 86% for violent crime, but doesn’t break it down further. The situation could plausibly have changed in the last fourteen years due to changes in culture or forensic science.
Statistics from the California DoJ (pages 49-50; PDF file) suggest that around 67% of felony arrests (not trials) in the state result in conviction, and that that rate has slowly been increasing since the Seventies (when the number was around 45%).
I tried looking up statistics, but it seems like my Google-Fu has failed. I found numbers for federal court, but most of what it says is that the vast majority of federal indictments are resolved with guilty pleas, and there don’t seem to be very many rape trials in federal court.
Trying to break down the numbers further:
According to the numbers given, In 2005 there were 3065 jury convictions and 430 jury acquittals in federal court, making a total of 3,495 federal jury trials and a conviction rate of 88%. Under the “sexual abuse” category, there were 24 jury trials that ended in a conviction and 8 that ended in an acquittal. The sample size is small, but it gives a conviction rate of 75%.
Which tells me… basically nothing, because the sample size is very small, most rape cases would be prosecuted in state courts rather than federal courts, and cases that actually go to trial are unusual anyway because both the prosecution and the defense have to prefer a trial to the alternatives of not taking the case to court at all or pleading guilty.
Actually, the traditional part of the wedding vows (in America, at least, and I assume other English-speaking countries) referring to sexual obligation—“serve”—faded into disuse well before spousal rape became criminalized, and in any event a key feature of sexual consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
There are of course enforcement problems which may complicate cases where there’s no other physical abuse, but pertaining to my original point, at least, I’d contend that most late moderns would agree that spousal rape is both logically coherent and evil, because it meets the “consent” conception of rape, whereas most earlier peoples would not, operating as they were from a property crime framework.
it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim.
There are certainly those who would dispute claims 1 and 3. (And obviously, in doing so, use a broader definition of “easy” which includes cultural norms and foreseeable consequences.)
To clarify: do you and your wife believe that the presumption of consent that marriage entails is sufficient to overcome any potential evidence of rape, or merely that it is sufficient to raise the bar significantly?
If the latter, I agree; if the former, I disagree. Your comment seems to suggest the former, but you may simply be indulging in entertaining hyperbole.
Thought experiment: suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me? Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me?
Yes, I’d generally consider “X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so” or everything else severally (weakly) sufficient to justify that claim.
Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
My presumption above is that ‘nonconsentual sex’ and ‘marriage’ are inconsistent. If X is your spouse, then X was asserting something inconsistent in X’s shamefaced admission, and you were in your accusation. If you want to withdraw your consent, then get a divorce.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
One’s spouse isn’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex. That is not their purpose.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
All right, slavery is too strong.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
[I]’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
“You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters.
From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction.
From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances
I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
you … misunderstand the issue
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s ridiculous to assume that it must mean the latter when we generally take it to mean the former (although even then, not always). I am not sure it is ridiculous to allow both options, but confusing the two is harmful.
Indeed. I was clarifying, more than correcting. I think the perspective you introduced (or made explicit, if that’s what wedrifid was thinking) is interesting and relevant to the discussion.
What is the intended message of the Deuteronomy quote? It seems to imply that rape implies non-consent. In this case the relevance of the rape is that the betrothed rape victim is excused from punishment for the crime of adultery.
Right, consent is relevant insofar as it determines whether the maiden is complicit in the harm to her fiance. But it’s not a determinant of whether harm was done, or even the severity of it. If you have sex with another man’s wife or fiance, you die. If she’s not betrothed then the pottery barn rule kicks in and you make restitution to her owner. If there’s contested ownership (e.g., if she’s your slave but someone else’s fiancee) you pay a fine (Leviticus 19:20-22.)
In all cases the person whose consentH^H^H^H^H^H injury matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
In all cases the person whose consent matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
That’s certainly not the case in the passage quoted here. In fact in no place in the passage is the fiance, husband or father even able to give consent. These particular rules apply even if for some reason the fiance or husband said “go for your life, she’s yours for the taking”. The only consent that is mentioned at all is the consent of the betrothed damsel, the giving of which will get her killed alongside her lover—it is male consent that does not happen to matter at all.
The issues you have with sexism in these collections of religious text seem to be overshadowing what this passage has to say about rape. (And those issues may be valid and important in their own right as independent subjects!)
That does seem likely to be the reason there were such strict laws against adultery. Robin Hanson explores why adultery (and so cuckoldry) is a more significant issue for males.
even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape
Which seems ridiculous to me. And that isn’t an objection with respect to people should being punished for what is called statuary rape. It is an objection to the crime against language!
I’d say it falls naturally out of the construction of consent, actually. Looks pretty different from a consequential perspective, but from a deontological one the only relevant problems show up around the consent-capable/consent-incapable border, or relate to what to do when both partners are considered incapable—none of which is much of a surprise if you’re using a consent criterion. I’m pretty sure there’s similar strangeness in contract law.
There’s some more or less analogous stuff going on in the earlier property-crime construction, too.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Not True consent. Because we want to call the sex ‘rape’ and rape is forcing someone to have sex with you without consent. So what they did when they said “I want you baby. #$%# me now.” then tore of the clothes of the ‘rapist’ and forced them down on the bed couldn’t have been consent. Consent in this context must mean “whatever it takes for me to not call the act rape”.
Repeated disclaimer: This isn’t a claim about morality or what punishment is appropriate for any given sexual act. It’s about word use!
Why is consent required for sex but not for killing and eating?
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living. But whether or not this is right it’s clearly just a post-hoc rationalization of the fact that I/DoubleReed/most people think it’s super duper gross.
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living.
If that was really the reason, people would express more outrage and disgust over the idea of factory farming than over the idea of bestiality (I suspect zoophiliacs would also argue that they treat their animals very well and that the animals enjoy it—I don’t doubt some enjoy it more than what factory-farmed animals go through).
So yes, I think that that, and consent, are post-hoc rationalizations, and are not remotely related to the true reasons we find bestiality super duper gross.
You know, I agree that at first my ideas were post-hoc, but that could just be where it started.
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues. There are still issues of course (usually in terms of irreversible or serious harm).
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues.
On the contrary rape is exactly the example I bring up to reject that adage as a moral absurdity.
I don’t go and tear a girl’s clothes off and do to her just because I’d like it if she tore off my clothes and did to me!
That would be rape. And rape is bad. Therefore following the adage would make me bad.
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent. Along the lines of of “Three Worlds Collide” morality (as it applies to me and by those in the set I consider to be the pool of potential mates and without any interest in being free to do such things myself to others). That would be seriously awesome. Much more exciting!
Wait… are we talking about the old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or the new adage that doesn’t appear when googling for it, “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you”. I was assuming the former whereas the latter is actually kind of awesome. It’s kind of like pre-emptive tit for tat. If people want to kill you then you are morally obliged to kill them.
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual. That does not defeat what I am saying. It’s not like first part overrides the second part or something.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual.
That is not what he said. He said, “If I did not consent and she did, I would still want her to do it.” Your objection does not apply to this, but others clearly do...
Edited to add: He may be conflating “consent” and “voiced consent”?
More like the idea of precommitting to consent, really. After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent? This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent?
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
Hmm. Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood). And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Reminds me of the idea of designated, legally-sanctioned areas where anyone in the area can use violent force against anyone else in the area without fear of prosecution for such, but which develop a social equilibrium with very little nonconsensual violence because people mostly go there to enjoy the polite-with-undetones-of-danger ambiance.
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
I believe I would call this “still consent”, provided the draw of the situation was the fact of the situation including such acts.
Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood).
The more you elaborate, the more I find myself intrigued by the idea.
And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Is it something I would like them to do to me? Yes or No.
Do all parties involved consent that this is what they want to do? Yes or No.
The first question doesn’t override the second question. Both parts has to say yes. If the you don’t care about consent, that only affects the first question.
OK, I begin to understand how you are including consent into the moral principle. It seems like it puts most of the moral work into the “Don’t do things to people without their consent” part but that is at least safer than actually following the adage itself and does rule out any problem which includes “things are done to people without their consent.” This leaves only those inefficiencies that, well, fall short of the extremes of brutal, unwelcome violations.
Yeah, the currently established rules of consent are really for the purposes of safety—to prevent tragedies borne out of miscommunication, to prevent plausible excuses from either party.
It’s an excellent rule, but it’s not the absolutely fundamental point, the goal unto itself—the real goal is to prevent the physical and emotional suffering associated with undesired violations of one’s person.
In a hypothetical world where true preferences could be determined and established without a hint of potential miscommunication or the possibility of denial-after-the-fact (e.g. by the electronic monitoring and recording of thoughts), the situation could well be different and the issue of consent might drop away to be replaced by the concept of ascertained shared preferences—atleast in persons mature enough, well-informed enough, and in a stable enough mental state to be able to evaluate said desires/preferences in a sane manner.
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Clearly, we don’t care about animals’ consent when we kill and eat them. So I guess we can have sex with them all we want. Kind of an odd train of thought, I admit...
Although the meaning is already unambiguous if you reread the part in your third “[...]” it should be even more clear.
I am against having sex with ALL animals (ie. a number of sex acts upon animals that is as at least as large as the number of animals) because I can multiply. This isn’t a terribly important point so I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it if was going to make DoubleReed so confused. It is only relevant in as much as it was part of an explanation of why the Err… didn’t make any sense in the context.
the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
I get it. I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur. (Though it would be more clear if “I’m against it” were quoted between “also bestiality” and “You’re against it?”)
Also, I wish you would stop using such hurtful terms as “pervert”. I highly doubt I’ll make my way through all the sponges in the next hundred years anyway.
I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur.
They would have to also not understand the part that is plain logic and even then requires “would seem to make perfect sense to them” since sincere misunderstanding doesn’t make things logically follow.
I know, the problem being that it you presented it with an “Er...” as though somehow it made my comment about bestiality incorrect… which it wouldn’t unless bestiality involved having sex with any or all animals… which it doesn’t.
Following along on your tangent for curiosity’s sake I note that I have killed and eaten my pets. They happen to have been sheep, cows, a goat and some roosters (that we raised by hand). They tend to get fairly obnoxious at a certain age. Especially the roosters, given that the mating habit of that species is basically rape.
But you DO have objections to bestiality. Just not all cases of it.
No I don’t. I have no idea why you are saying that.
Having sex with any nonhuman animal is bestiality. That’s literally what it is.
Which is why I am still rejecting the relevance of pets. Since bestiality only requires that a person have sex with one animal even if someone declared or assumed sex with pets was forbidden (which you seemed to) it still wouldn’t be a rejection of bestiality. Because it does not require that you have or desire to have sex with all animals including pets.
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
In other words, he’s against an alternative, nonstandard definition of bestiality, which is not the same thing as the kind of bestiality for which he has no objections.
The allusion to torture vs. dust and his emphasis of standard bestiality “only requir[ing] that a person have sex with one animal” suggests that he is against this sort of serial bestiality because the numbers involved become large.
No, I said I’m against “the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts”. I said that because that would be what required for your mention of pets as a reason to reject or ‘clarify’ my earlier declaration of non-objection to be valid.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent
The issue of consent is probably how I’d choose to justify my objection to bestiality on the basis of rights. The concept of rights is among the highest-status deontological ethics in the world today, so may have the best chance of convincing others.
But I think my true objection may be just that I feel it horribly demeans the humans involved, lowering them to the status of (lesser) animals.
I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas”
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
I’ve no disagreement with your comment Atelos, but—why do those words exist?
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
Telling someone, “I define the word ‘wiggin’ to mean a person with green eyes and black hair”, by Gricean implication, asserts that the word “wiggin” will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages.
If green-eyes and black hair have no greater than default probability to be found together, nor does any other property occur at greater than default probability along with them, then the word “wiggin” is a lie: The word claims that certain people are worth distinguishing as a group, but they’re not.
In this case the word “wiggin” does not help describe reality more compactly—it is not defined by someone sending the shortest message—it has no role in the simplest explanation. Equivalently, the word “wiggin” will be of no help to you in doing any Bayesian inference. Even if you do not call the word a lie, it is surely an error.
And the way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw your boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace.
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations. Also note that 15-25 and 18-21 are typically given as the prime age ranges of female physical attractiveness by Roissy and his commenters (although since these are arbitrary cut-offs, there’s no need to give them a name). The 15-19 age range of “ephebophilia” cuts across this age range seemingly at random.
The same goes for hebephilia, attraction to 11-14 year-olds. There is no discontinuity in the characteristics of a typical human between 14 and 15 years of age, and I don’t see why hebephiles should form a compact cluster in thingspace either.
On the other hand paedophilia does seem a valid word, because attraction to pre-pubescents seems qualititatively different from attraction to fertile human beings (there are evolutionary considerations at play, and there are great physical changes in a short space of time during puberty). Properties shared in common by paedophiles are presumably qualitative differences in “brain wiring” in comparison to humans of typical sexuality.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
There are people with a sexual preference for people from the age of their birth right up to and even past the age of their death. Since there are many such people it is easier to have words that give a ballpark to their sexual preference than to say “someone with a specific sexual preference for humans between the ages of X and Y” every single time.
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
(With the caveat that it is stupid to use the same word for the preference for males and females at this stage. Both groups are more similar to adults of their sex than they are to each other!)
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations.
Or, in this case, the opposite. In most cases injecting the word ephebophile into a context will expunge connotations rather than introducing them. In the case of a sexually active ephobophile using the word ensures that all “people who have sex with those who are under the age at which it is legally permissible to have sex with them” aren’t lumped in together. Because they aren’t @#@%ing pedophiles and because while both practices are illegal they have entirely different moral connotations. For that matter the active practice of the various illegal chronophilias also have different practical implications. Counter-intuitively (unless you think about it) in the case of rape I seem to recall that a rape of a girl that is sexually mature does greater psychological damage on average than than the rape of a younger girl (probably something Robin Hanson cited).
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females) the age range 15-19 is rather close to the widely agreed-upon (by men) 5-year age range of females in their physical prime of roughly 18-22. 15-year olds have been reproductively viable for about 4 years on average. 19-year-old women are about as attractive as they’ll ever be!
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Even if the girl in quesiton is 15, it seems that the extent to which an older man might target her as a mate in today’s society depends more on how up-tight, how scrupulous or how socialised he is – whether he prefers slightly younger (by 3 years) women than the average man would generally be difficult to tell from outside, and being “normal” in this regard doesn’t preclude attraction to a 15-year-old any more than it does attraction to a 25-year-old in any case.
There are words like “creeper” and “pervert” that might be used to describe the type of person who appears to pay undue attention to younger teenage girls. This seems to exhaust the social utility of having a word for someone who prefers slightly younger women than does the average man. Note that this concept is also highly contingent; plenty of human societies would consider overt sexual attraction to young teenage girls, insofar as sexual attraction is acceptable in general, to be unremarkable (as Hanson’s piece points out).
Ephebophilia therefore appears to be useful, if at all, as a scientific term only. And in that case, where is the evidence that ephebophiles form a meaningful category? Why not have special words for adults who are attracted to 22-25 year-olds in particular (equally unusual), and so forth? Why name a specific age range at all, rather than having a general word for “prefers fertile women, but of unusually young age”, if not just to lend the term a bogus scientific air?
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms. I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”. On the other hand achondroplasia dwarfism is a term that cleaves reality at its joints. (NB: no offense intended by this analogy, which implies no similarity beyond the use of words to refer to variations in some characteristic of humans).
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
In most cases that’s probably true, but the more discriminating question might be why this confusion exists so widely. After all it’s quite a severe accusation.
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults. So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
The point is about arbitrary “scientific” gradings pulled out of thin air. Short, very short, diminutive—they are vague context-dependent categorisations that are suitable given the continuous nature and contingent relevance of the variation in question. This is not comparable to rigid, highly specific classifications like my putative “veryshortman”, which is how I would characterise words like ephebophilia. There should be a good reason for the existence of such a term, and that reason is not apparent.
The other problem with the specificity of “ephebophilia” is also that it overlaps with the typical 5-year window in which an average male would find a female most physically attractive. Therefore it can’t even be justified on the grounds that the psychologists are binning males into continuous but arbitrarily demarcated categories of “normal”, “ephebophile” and “hebephile”.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults.
You said: “Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with”. I pointed out that this alleged use to which the word might be put is redundant, since 15-19 year-old women are among the most attractive to men in any case. Generally the large majority of heterosexual men would want to have sex, if the conditions were right, with an attractive girl of this age, particularly a 19-year-old!
I went on to point out that if we look at the other extreme (15-year-olds) scrupulousness and other character traits probably play a bigger role than ephebophilia in assessing the likelihood of a man attempting to mate with a girl of that age, in this society.
So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
That sounds about as reasonable, given the definition of ephebophile, as suggesting that an average man would be more attracted to a plain 18-year-old than to a 27-year-old supermodel. I.e. unreasonable, unless I missed the part where it is defined as exlusive attraction to 15-19 year-olds (in which case I would ask for some evidence that such people even exist).
If you actually did wonder that back through the analogy you would probably look at the third sentence of the wikipedia article and follow the link.
I did so already, and noticed that teleiophilia and gerontophilia are not specified by age range. If ephebophilia and hebephilia were likewise merged into a word that meant “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical” (I agree with you that having the same word for female-male and male-female attraction is also foolish) then I would admit the legitimacy of that word. It is the pretense to specificity, or having idenitified some actual clusters in thingspace that I object to.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
Such a word could be the word meaning “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical”. No need to pretend that there is clustering into the groups “sexually normal men”, “ephebophiles” and “hebephiles” rather than a continuum.
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures.
I don’t see why another word apart from pederasty is needed for that.
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females)
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures. Paedophilia… I would have put that one as an even split with perhaps the most notorious sterotypical applications being with respect to male attraction to young boys (eg. ‘priests’).
I’d say it depends on the man’s age, too. A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me. And, while most men prefer younger women, it’s not like the typical man prefers women between 18 and 22 no matter how old he is—see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see. The writer is advocating the idea that men should target older women, because they’ll face less competition.
A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me.
I’m sure the 70-year-old, given the opportunity to be transported into a younger attractive body with his mind in-tact, would be just as keen on the 16-year-old as the 22-year-old is. You are probably trying to imagine a 70-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old, which would indeed be remarkable but is beside the point.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see.
The median 23-year-old man sets 18 years as the least possible age for a match, whereas the median 48-year-old man sets 32 years for the same. This effect is much smaller if you see who people write messages to, but it’s still there (see the red in the bottom right corner of the relevant graph).
Imagine asking a lot of men of different ages if, all other things being equal, they’d prefer a 16-year-old woman (assuming the men are from somewhere the age of consent is less than that—tweak if necessary) or a 26-year-old one. Do you really believe that many more men from any given age range would choose the former? (Heck, I would choose the latter, and I’m 24.)
I suspect that the difference between messaging behavior and the minimum age setting is related to the fact that those settings are publicly available. That adds a signaling component to the game, and for 48-year-old straight males I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the dominant one: I don’t have any actual data here, but it seems likely that a middle-aged man setting the age of consent as his threshold sends a clear “dirty old man” signal that a 32yo threshold wouldn’t. Not a signal that a hypothetical dirty old man wants to send, I think; meanwhile, you can send messages to whoever you like, and large-scale messaging preferences are opaque to everyone but password holders. Actually, messaging someone below your nominal age limit might send a weak positive signal: “I like you enough to make an exception”.
The smaller of the effects discussed is probably genuine, though.
Fascinating. Following those links I just discovered I’m a teleiophile. Also a gynephile but I probably could have guessed that one myself.
I’m somewhat nonplussed with having the word ephebophilia refer to a preference for either females of approximately 14-16 or for males of an equivalent level of development (so slightly older). Unless for some reason people with one preference have a particularly high chance of also having the other preference. Because by this age it is an entirely different kind of preference so if you are going to go to all the trouble of making up names for various categories you may as well have “likes young men” different to “likes young women”. Having just one word for pedophilia and perhaps hebophilia makes somewhat more sense given the much smaller difference between sexes at the younger ages.
It’s very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma”, and many other people interpret as “raping particularly vulnerable people”.
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to “reclaim the word” by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It—unsurprisingly—still didn’t go well for him).
What person would it be physically impossible to have sex with? Though, that depends on what qualifies as “real sex” vs. what is merely foreplay/Xth base/etc., which is a whole other issue.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object: that is, if A wants to have sex with B and C and D, but A is unfortunately trapped inside a giant transparent hamster ball, with B-Z all on the outside looking in.
You would achieve the same effect if A were attracted to people trapped inside giant transparent hamster balls. Now we just need a single word for this kind of attraction.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object
Yes, I was primed to think in terms of the subject—and the kind of subject that people are inclined to shame. That is, pathetic people. As in, “pathetic people who can’t get laid”.
To translate into the language of physical impossibility would, I suppose, require observing that humans are not black boxes that can freely do anything within the realms of human possibility. Going against instinct and indoctrination really is hard and for the kind of people I was primed to think about (pathetic people) they just couldn’t. Because being proactively vile and evil requires initiative and the ability to overcome inhibitions so most people in that hypothetical category couldn’t have sex with the people they wanted to (due to their pathetic nature).
It seemed entirely plausible to me that there was a jargon term for “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with [because you’re a pathetic loser], and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma” that people also used as an indicator that the subject is more likely to be a rapist. That is exactly the kind of prejudice that humans tend to enjoy engaging in. What surprised me was that I wasn’t familiar with the jargon in question. My confusion is now resolved.
the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. “Reviled” should be replaced with “reviled by ___” in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I’ve rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically “lefty types,” not that “lefty types” typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can’t quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn’t call him a “lefty type” personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn’t much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who’s doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I’m here, I will note that eliminating the comma between “types” and “who” would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”? I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the US mainstream endorsing what amounts to technocracy; I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom. I’m fairly sure that this is both the main thing that Emile meant when he was thinking of what you can’t say, and the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”?
Consider someone who wants judicial fiat to impose some policy they approve of- like, say, gay marriage. Is that anti-democracy? That’s the extent to which I’m including anti-democracy in that position.
The desire for a progressive regulatory state is conditioned on the idea that some people know what should be done better than others, which is an inherently anti-democratic notion; democratic opposition to things in the people’s best interest is an obstacle to be overcome not an objection to be heard out.
That said, I think most of the people I know would at least complain if they had to move to a Singapore-style “democracy” (well-run but lacking rights like free speech). People have inconsistent political preferences all the time.
I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom.
A number of people I know take overpopulation and environmental threats very seriously. Many of them approve of the results of China’s multiple-child tax, though many of them complain about the implementation and the limitation on freedom. I don’t remember any of them acknowledging that the only way to get Chinese levels of results was with Chinese levels of political freedom, but I’m sure at least one made that connection.
the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Ah. The first thing that comes to mind for me, when comparing the Chinese government and the American government, is that the Chinese government is comprised of engineers and the American government is comprised of lawyers, and I suspect that is true for most people who would hold some version of that opinion.
No idea—I revoked my downvote from the grandparent after you changed it.
Edit: On further reflection, I suspect you are getting dinged for positing a technocratic-democratic dichotomy. It is possible to be a technocrat and a small-d democrat. A more accurate opposition would be technocratic-populist, which is not the same thing.
He’s not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but Scott Adams seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is “dance, monkeys, dance”.
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don’t support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I’d probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it’d be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don’t think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I’d not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don’t think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it’s synonymous with treason in Greece.
If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it’d be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
Bestiality.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Human sacrifice
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape).
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I wouldn’t call any of the above “ideas” at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, “support for incest” is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it’s still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don’t see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
If you have statistics about sibling incest being prominent to “rednecks” in a significantly higher degree than other populations, let me know. If not, I don’t approve of unsubstantiated stereotyping.
That’s absolutely hilarious. I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t, because “redneck” isn’t an acknowledged sociological distinction. It’s a stereotype. Anyone who gestures toward vaguely “redneck ideas” should not be surprised when incest comes up. The fact that you did not know this makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
I’ve heard the jokes about cousin incest, and even made an initial reply to your pre-edited post, saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries—when you edited your post to refer specifically to sibling marriage, I deleted that answer which no longer applied.
makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece, no need to assume anything.
I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t,
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
Perhaps I exaggerated a little too far for the sake of the joke, then.
saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries
I actually didn’t know this, interestingly.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece
I did that a lot for a while, but it seemed like hardly anyone put anything there so I eventually stopped bothering. Also, I’m surprised (and a bit disturbed) that someone in Greece knows anything about ‘rednecks’, so nevermind.
Wikipedia tells me that “redneck” is a term that refers to rural southern whites
I guess I must be a redneck then!
But if you want data about these topics, here’s
I knew all this already, and am not disputing it. That’s not the point.
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
Look: there is a difference between “green-eyed black-haired ideas” and “wiggin ideas”.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
They seem not to exist; apparently the best indicators would be some unreported fraction of general child abuse, but no leads on what the fraction might be.
I know the jokes about cousin marriages—but frankly such didn’t even count as incest in most Western societies until relatively recently, and it still doesn’t count as such in some non-Western societies.
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
I don’t have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don’t object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn’t involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we’re just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I’m confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it’s much easier to come up with cases that don’t disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest—again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn’t bug me much at all.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of ‘nerd religion’ should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
Legalize human sacrifice!
Fair point.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a ‘nerd religion’ form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Good idea!
I submit “social reification” in the mild hope that someone will improve on it.
I thought the word was “politics.”
A lot of things are ‘politics’. More specific names are also handy.
I think khafra’s comment was intended more for snark than for a serious submission.
“Bootleggers and baptists” is a related concept.
Hell, just legalize suicide. :P
If you commit suicide it’s not like you’re going to jail.
Besides, the policy against suicide attempts is usually psychological treatment not jailtime or something.
Although assisting suicide seems to be a felony in most states in the US according to wikipedia.
Of course for the majority of people wikipedia page itself is all the assistance they would require.
My discovery of the day: Suicide by locking yourself in the garage with the car on just aint what it used to be. Apparently it was once painless and only minimally unpleasant due to the large amount of carbon monoxide produced. These days, however, we have more efficient engines and catalytic converters. This means you need an awful lot of exhaust fumes to get enough carbon monoxide to kill you—and exhaust fumes still aren’t pleasant.
Evidently it is better to use a barbeque (charcoal burner) than a car if you really want to off yourself with CO.
(nods) My dad once attempted and failed to kill himself by the former method and reported something similar.
I don’t much care if suicide is illegal just so long as those that are enabling the suicider aren’t vulnerable to punishment for obvious reasons. Well, unless our legal system is expected to last as is until after recovery from cryopreservation is implemented. That’d be awkward.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
I’d support this more confidently if I believed that the legal mechanisms distinguishing “enabling suicide” from “murder” would align well with my own intuitions about the distinction.
This seems like a bad idea as long as most people aren’t getting cryonicly preserved. A lot of what we’ve learned about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of brain damage comes from autopsies and we’re still learning. Similarly, in some cases the brain will be severely damaged by the form of death (such as say many cases of blunt trauma) and in some of those cases (such as murder investigations) autopsies may be necessary.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
I would require that explicit consent be granted by the patient in a will or, if the will does not mention the subject, then require the consent from the next of kin as opposed to requiring the next of kin to actively request that no head-destruction be done. Because cops aren’t going to make it easy for next of kin to hinder their investigation by making such a request but they are almost always going to get permission that is required so that they don’t face criminal charges.
(I don’t have any particular objection to donation of one’s body or brain to science for them to do as they please.)
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There’s no external sanctification going on here, and I’m not sure how valuable I’d consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. “Mortification of the flesh” is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it’s not a perfect one.
Giving up the immediate prospect of a conventional life, before and during the process of the disease setting in, to demonstrate faith in future technological developments?
I’d assign a high probability (about 80%) that a random person consenting to being sacrificed would not do so if they knew more, thought faster, and were more the person they wished they were.
But clearly the person they wished they were is someone who has been sacrificed!
A relationships thread on a rationality site has become a discussion of human sacrifice? :-)
We’re anticipating the post where he talks about compromise.
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they ‘really’ want than they do? (Not that I’m saying you don’t.)
Well, not that alone; but also the fact that sacrifice (as I understand it, at least) is irreversible, so someone who doesn’t want to be sacrificed right now can change their mind, but not vice versa.
What about a sacrifice which takes place incrementally over a period of years?
Like what?
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?363769-nMage-the-other-99-999-Leaves&p=11220674#post11220674
Also, human sacrifice is creepy!
I think that’s enormously underconfident. That said, I’m also not sure why it matters.
There’s no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don’t think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
I agree with you that consent is not simple… indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I’m inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that’s ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about.
I think people often misjudge situations, especially in relation to ending their own life. And consent in case of permanent damage is probably not sufficient to say anything about morals. If their death actually did have higher value than other options then I suppose it is just a tragic situation.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others. Also, it cuts the other way too. For example, when my grandfather suffered a stroke, nobody expected him to recover, and both he and his loved ones preferred him dead rather than continuing to live bedridden, frequently delirious, and in constant pain. The law prevented us from killing him, though. I consider every day of his life after that point far more tragic than his eventual death.
I agree that knowledge about consent is not always sufficient to make a moral judgment.
I think if we switch from talking about expected-value judgements to moral judgements, we will have to back up a very long way before we can keep making progress, since I’m not sure we have a shared understanding about what a moral judgement even is.
I have experienced a Cartesian-demon-like urge to rationalise “I should kill myself”. While similar dispositions exist in e.g. anosognosics, I expect situations that cause them are rare.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant to say that if their death had higher value then I would agree that it would be the better decision. It is tragic that there are no positive solutions, and only negative ones.
Consider the situations where people consider suicide. They often are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable. Sometimes there is a euphoric response when people decide that everything will be over soon. Obviously, I can’t think of any statistics or anything, so I guess we just have to disagree.
I’m content to disagree, but I’m not sure we even do.
Certainly I agree with you that people often misjudge the decision to end their own lives, often for the reasons you cite.
What I’m saying is that, for example, people who are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable also make decisions about whether to get out of bed, whether to go to work, whether to take their medication, whether to talk to friends about what’s going on in their lives, whether to take psychoactive drugs, whether to get more sleep, whether to exercise regularly, whether to punch their neighbor in the head, whether to buy revolvers, and on and on and on.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
We suck at these decisions, but the consequences tend to be significantly more severe. Good defaults before the unstability starts also help; for example, “go to work” is much more likely to be on the radar at all than “punch someone out of the blue”.
But to address your point: yup, there are specific bugs that are triggered solely by considering suicide. Though how you’d measure their frequency I don’t know.
I agree that the consequences of an incorrect decision about dying are severe compared to most of the other decisions we make.
I agree that there are specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering suicide. There are also specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering all kinds of other things.
I agree that existing predispositions to explicitly consider/not consider certain decisions, and to decide them in particular ways, affect how we make those decisions.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think suicidal people are just as reliable in their decision-making as others.
I recommend that you take a break from this thread, go think about something else for a while, come back to what I said, and see if you still believe I’m making a claim about comparisons between two groups of people.
If you do, then I agree that we should end this discussion here.
When I was in a similar circumstance I had to try very hard to stop myself from making puns on DoubleReed.
That didn’t even occur to me. (hat-tip)
Oh snap.
Oh I see what you’re saying.
I don’t know. I mentioned before there is a euphoric response to having things finally end in peace. This is why so many people can believe in something like the rapture. It’s not a frightening thought. They get caught up in the idea that everything will be all right. Suicide sounds like it would trigger that appeal as well, so I’m still inclined to disagree.
I’m glad you’re now seeing what I said. It makes useful discussion much easier.
I share your belief that such an anticipation of relief might be triggered by contemplating suicide. That has certainly been my experience, at least.
I infer (though not very confidently) that you believe such anticipation is a more powerful motivator than various other feelings such people have that cause them to make unreliable decisions in other contexts. If you do in fact believe that, then yes, we disagree.
The meaning of this ‘consent’ term seems to be drifting closer and closer to ‘whatever it takes for the action to be considered morally right’.
How so?
Obviously permanent and long-term effects have more issues with consent. I don’t see how that’s particularly wishy-washy.
Edit: If anything I’m declaring a harsh limit on how far consent goes. It is insufficient for certain moral situations.
Er… what about pets? Not all animals we kill and eat, you know...
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
What have I ever done to you?!
Comparison? It wasn’t a comparison. It was a clarification. Having sex with pets is also bestiality.
You’re against it? Why? You’re just sounding arbitrary.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent (similar to pedophilia). So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
By “that we have” do you mean “that we do have” or “that we should have?” I think it would difficult to claim that existing bans on bestiality are really based on the idea of consent, which they predate. (Note that e.g. “rape” (of humans) refers to something conceptually quite different than it did back in the bad old days.)
Can you clarify this? I don’t understand your point on rape. Even in the old days, I’m pretty sure rape implied not-consent...
Is the idea of consent really that modern?
Deuteronomy:
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Indeed, in the US the last state was North Carolina in 1993, and even still it tends to be a lesser offense (assault, battery, or spousal abuse). wikipedia.
Of course, my wife and I tend to call shenanigans on the concept. Thought experiment:
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim. So someone who didn’t want their life ruined (jail time, permanent sex offender registry, etc.) would do well to make certain sure they can establish that consent was given. Various methods would work to some degree—signed documents, video tapes, witnesses, the presence of a government official...
As ridiculous as it would seem to get all of those things together for the recording of consent for sex, it so happens we actually do have an institution that incorporates all of those things—marriage. We actually have a tradition that involves getting the entirety of both families together, in front of a government official, with signed government documents, usually on videotape, where both parties agree (often speaking directly to their respective deities) that they will do certain things with each other, traditionally understood to prominently include sex. A bit over the top, but sometimes you have to do crazy things to avoid litigation.
Except now, even going through all that is insufficient to establish consent. It’s a world gone mad.
Compared to other crimes, rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
Quick sanity check: According to RAINN (disclosure: citing an organization I’ve supported), 58% chance of a conviction for rape. A questionable Wikipedia article claims that the conviction rate for crimes in general is “84% in Texas, 82% in California, 72% in New York, 67% in North Carolina, and 59% in Florida.” (as of 2000). Thus, it seems plausible that rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
For clarity, the RAINN stats are rape-specific and the Wikipedia stats are for all crimes, right?
Crime-specific conviction rates seem to be hard to find. A 1997 DoJ press release claims 87% conviction rates for all crimes in federal court (a skewed sample, though) and 86% for violent crime, but doesn’t break it down further. The situation could plausibly have changed in the last fourteen years due to changes in culture or forensic science.
Statistics from the California DoJ (pages 49-50; PDF file) suggest that around 67% of felony arrests (not trials) in the state result in conviction, and that that rate has slowly been increasing since the Seventies (when the number was around 45%).
Yes. Editing.
I was waiting for someone to cry foul on empirical grounds. I was arguing from popular perception. Do you have a source?
Good question.
I tried looking up statistics, but it seems like my Google-Fu has failed. I found numbers for federal court, but most of what it says is that the vast majority of federal indictments are resolved with guilty pleas, and there don’t seem to be very many rape trials in federal court.
Trying to break down the numbers further:
According to the numbers given, In 2005 there were 3065 jury convictions and 430 jury acquittals in federal court, making a total of 3,495 federal jury trials and a conviction rate of 88%. Under the “sexual abuse” category, there were 24 jury trials that ended in a conviction and 8 that ended in an acquittal. The sample size is small, but it gives a conviction rate of 75%.
Which tells me… basically nothing, because the sample size is very small, most rape cases would be prosecuted in state courts rather than federal courts, and cases that actually go to trial are unusual anyway because both the prosecution and the defense have to prefer a trial to the alternatives of not taking the case to court at all or pleading guilty.
Sigh...
Actually, the traditional part of the wedding vows (in America, at least, and I assume other English-speaking countries) referring to sexual obligation—“serve”—faded into disuse well before spousal rape became criminalized, and in any event a key feature of sexual consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
There are of course enforcement problems which may complicate cases where there’s no other physical abuse, but pertaining to my original point, at least, I’d contend that most late moderns would agree that spousal rape is both logically coherent and evil, because it meets the “consent” conception of rape, whereas most earlier peoples would not, operating as they were from a property crime framework.
There are certainly those who would dispute claims 1 and 3. (And obviously, in doing so, use a broader definition of “easy” which includes cultural norms and foreseeable consequences.)
Edit: that goes double for marital rape.
To clarify: do you and your wife believe that the presumption of consent that marriage entails is sufficient to overcome any potential evidence of rape, or merely that it is sufficient to raise the bar significantly?
If the latter, I agree; if the former, I disagree. Your comment seems to suggest the former, but you may simply be indulging in entertaining hyperbole.
Thought experiment: suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me? Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
Yes, I’d generally consider “X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so” or everything else severally (weakly) sufficient to justify that claim.
My presumption above is that ‘nonconsentual sex’ and ‘marriage’ are inconsistent. If X is your spouse, then X was asserting something inconsistent in X’s shamefaced admission, and you were in your accusation. If you want to withdraw your consent, then get a divorce.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
Is it? Here I thought that was the point.
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
Cold comfort for someone getting repeatedly forced to have sex while they wait for the divorce to be finalized.
It was my understanding that most divorce proceedings encourage separation early on in the process.
In some states, it is mandatory to have a period of separation prior to divorce, and having sex with your spouse will reset the timer.
All right, slavery is too strong.
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Possibly. Looking up the word, “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel” pretty much matches my meaning.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
Yes, that’s probably right. It seems it has to come down to either:
You don’t think not having sex constitutes misery/suffering, or
You don’t think withholding something that would alleviate misery/suffering from a loved one is cruel / lacking compassion
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters. From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction. From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
Or maybe 3. He thinks that having sex when one doesn’t want to constitutes misery/suffering that outweighs the misery/suffering of not having sex.
For the record: I think this is often true, but largely irrelevant to my current exchange with thomblake.
That implies 2, or else is irrelevant to the claim that it is inhumane.
ETA: For reference, I also think 3 is often true, for some reasonable methods of “weighing”.
It certainly isn’t #2.
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
I think more typically tension arises from points on the spectrum between these extremes.
Absolutely agreed.
Fair enough.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Having an overwhelmingly low prior for your husband saying something like this for reasons that are cruel certainly helps!
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
These aren’t similar statements, in that while monogamy demands fidelity 24⁄7, refusing sex should generally be a temporary.
However, in a situation where the latter is permanent, then I agree that we have a problem.
I see no reason it should be so black and white.
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
Because it is rape?
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
Is it “they” or “you”?
Missed one. They.
That’s precisely begging the question.
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
Brilliant! I am totally using this for private contracts in the future. Is that done already?
I think I’ll prefer ECDSA for my documents. Elliptic Curves are so much sexier.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
Yes, that’s the scenario I was imagining. The hashed part presumably could be arbitrarily verbose and specific, thus rendering it indecipherable.
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s the gist of any digital signature algorithm.
As for using it in a wedding? I’ve never been to such a ceremony, certainly...
But you already signed the contract. Like what if it happens before you get divorced?
Ridiculous? This seems to actually be rather similar to what wedrifid is describing (correct me if I’m wrong).
It’s ridiculous to assume that it must mean the latter when we generally take it to mean the former (although even then, not always). I am not sure it is ridiculous to allow both options, but confusing the two is harmful.
Okay, agreed.
Indeed. I was clarifying, more than correcting. I think the perspective you introduced (or made explicit, if that’s what wedrifid was thinking) is interesting and relevant to the discussion.
What is the intended message of the Deuteronomy quote? It seems to imply that rape implies non-consent. In this case the relevance of the rape is that the betrothed rape victim is excused from punishment for the crime of adultery.
Right, consent is relevant insofar as it determines whether the maiden is complicit in the harm to her fiance. But it’s not a determinant of whether harm was done, or even the severity of it. If you have sex with another man’s wife or fiance, you die. If she’s not betrothed then the pottery barn rule kicks in and you make restitution to her owner. If there’s contested ownership (e.g., if she’s your slave but someone else’s fiancee) you pay a fine (Leviticus 19:20-22.)
In all cases the person whose consentH^H^H^H^H^H injury matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
That’s certainly not the case in the passage quoted here. In fact in no place in the passage is the fiance, husband or father even able to give consent. These particular rules apply even if for some reason the fiance or husband said “go for your life, she’s yours for the taking”. The only consent that is mentioned at all is the consent of the betrothed damsel, the giving of which will get her killed alongside her lover—it is male consent that does not happen to matter at all.
The issues you have with sexism in these collections of religious text seem to be overshadowing what this passage has to say about rape. (And those issues may be valid and important in their own right as independent subjects!)
You’re right, consent was the wrong word to use in that context. I was being sloppy and meant that the men in question were the wronged party.
That does seem likely to be the reason there were such strict laws against adultery. Robin Hanson explores why adultery (and so cuckoldry) is a more significant issue for males.
The relevant comparison would be vandalism or theft.
Yes.
In many traditional cultures marital rape is/was not considered as rape.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
Which seems ridiculous to me. And that isn’t an objection with respect to people should being punished for what is called statuary rape. It is an objection to the crime against language!
Won’t somebody think of the statues?!
I know, the poor statues already get enough unwelcome deposits from seagulls and pigeons. They certainly don’t deserve any more!
I’d say it falls naturally out of the construction of consent, actually. Looks pretty different from a consequential perspective, but from a deontological one the only relevant problems show up around the consent-capable/consent-incapable border, or relate to what to do when both partners are considered incapable—none of which is much of a surprise if you’re using a consent criterion. I’m pretty sure there’s similar strangeness in contract law.
There’s some more or less analogous stuff going on in the earlier property-crime construction, too.
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Not True consent. Because we want to call the sex ‘rape’ and rape is forcing someone to have sex with you without consent. So what they did when they said “I want you baby. #$%# me now.” then tore of the clothes of the ‘rapist’ and forced them down on the bed couldn’t have been consent. Consent in this context must mean “whatever it takes for me to not call the act rape”.
Repeated disclaimer: This isn’t a claim about morality or what punishment is appropriate for any given sexual act. It’s about word use!
Why is consent required for sex but not for killing and eating?
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living. But whether or not this is right it’s clearly just a post-hoc rationalization of the fact that I/DoubleReed/most people think it’s super duper gross.
If that was really the reason, people would express more outrage and disgust over the idea of factory farming than over the idea of bestiality (I suspect zoophiliacs would also argue that they treat their animals very well and that the animals enjoy it—I don’t doubt some enjoy it more than what factory-farmed animals go through).
So yes, I think that that, and consent, are post-hoc rationalizations, and are not remotely related to the true reasons we find bestiality super duper gross.
You know, I agree that at first my ideas were post-hoc, but that could just be where it started.
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues. There are still issues of course (usually in terms of irreversible or serious harm).
On the contrary rape is exactly the example I bring up to reject that adage as a moral absurdity.
I don’t go and tear a girl’s clothes off and do to her just because I’d like it if she tore off my clothes and did to me!
That would be rape. And rape is bad. Therefore following the adage would make me bad.
Did you somehow miss the “when you factor in ideas of consent” part?
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent. Along the lines of of “Three Worlds Collide” morality (as it applies to me and by those in the set I consider to be the pool of potential mates and without any interest in being free to do such things myself to others). That would be seriously awesome. Much more exciting!
Wait… are we talking about the old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or the new adage that doesn’t appear when googling for it, “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you”. I was assuming the former whereas the latter is actually kind of awesome. It’s kind of like pre-emptive tit for tat. If people want to kill you then you are morally obliged to kill them.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual. That does not defeat what I am saying. It’s not like first part overrides the second part or something.
Anyway, this is getting way off topic.
That is not what he said. He said, “If I did not consent and she did, I would still want her to do it.” Your objection does not apply to this, but others clearly do...
Edited to add: He may be conflating “consent” and “voiced consent”?
More like the idea of precommitting to consent, really. After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent? This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
Hmm. Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood). And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Reminds me of the idea of designated, legally-sanctioned areas where anyone in the area can use violent force against anyone else in the area without fear of prosecution for such, but which develop a social equilibrium with very little nonconsensual violence because people mostly go there to enjoy the polite-with-undetones-of-danger ambiance.
I believe I would call this “still consent”, provided the draw of the situation was the fact of the situation including such acts.
The more you elaborate, the more I find myself intrigued by the idea.
Are they allowed to use roofies or tasers?
This would be the one of the other objections I was alluding to, yes.
I understand. What I mean is:
Is it something I would like them to do to me? Yes or No.
Do all parties involved consent that this is what they want to do? Yes or No.
The first question doesn’t override the second question. Both parts has to say yes. If the you don’t care about consent, that only affects the first question.
FYI: Could have been but wasn’t.
OK, I begin to understand how you are including consent into the moral principle. It seems like it puts most of the moral work into the “Don’t do things to people without their consent” part but that is at least safer than actually following the adage itself and does rule out any problem which includes “things are done to people without their consent.” This leaves only those inefficiencies that, well, fall short of the extremes of brutal, unwelcome violations.
Yeah, the currently established rules of consent are really for the purposes of safety—to prevent tragedies borne out of miscommunication, to prevent plausible excuses from either party.
It’s an excellent rule, but it’s not the absolutely fundamental point, the goal unto itself—the real goal is to prevent the physical and emotional suffering associated with undesired violations of one’s person.
In a hypothetical world where true preferences could be determined and established without a hint of potential miscommunication or the possibility of denial-after-the-fact (e.g. by the electronic monitoring and recording of thoughts), the situation could well be different and the issue of consent might drop away to be replaced by the concept of ascertained shared preferences—atleast in persons mature enough, well-informed enough, and in a stable enough mental state to be able to evaluate said desires/preferences in a sane manner.
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Uhm… did you miss “is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent.”
If the girl consents to that, then there is no rape and it is not bad.
I was referring to pets in that statement.
Clearly, we don’t care about animals’ consent when we kill and eat them. So I guess we can have sex with them all we want. Kind of an odd train of thought, I admit...
Huh? No I don’t. I didn’t even mention pets until you did. Your replies in this conversation all seem non sequitur.
Although the meaning is already unambiguous if you reread the part in your third “[...]” it should be even more clear.
I am against having sex with ALL animals (ie. a number of sex acts upon animals that is as at least as large as the number of animals) because I can multiply. This isn’t a terribly important point so I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it if was going to make DoubleReed so confused. It is only relevant in as much as it was part of an explanation of why the Err… didn’t make any sense in the context.
I get it. I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur. (Though it would be more clear if “I’m against it” were quoted between “also bestiality” and “You’re against it?”)
Also, I wish you would stop using such hurtful terms as “pervert”. I highly doubt I’ll make my way through all the sponges in the next hundred years anyway.
They would have to also not understand the part that is plain logic and even then requires “would seem to make perfect sense to them” since sincere misunderstanding doesn’t make things logically follow.
I know, the problem being that it you presented it with an “Er...” as though somehow it made my comment about bestiality incorrect… which it wouldn’t unless bestiality involved having sex with any or all animals… which it doesn’t.
Following along on your tangent for curiosity’s sake I note that I have killed and eaten my pets. They happen to have been sheep, cows, a goat and some roosters (that we raised by hand). They tend to get fairly obnoxious at a certain age. Especially the roosters, given that the mating habit of that species is basically rape.
This is what you said:
But you DO have objections to bestiality. Just not all cases of it.
Having sex with any nonhuman animal is bestiality. That’s literally what it is.
No I don’t. I have no idea why you are saying that.
Which is why I am still rejecting the relevance of pets. Since bestiality only requires that a person have sex with one animal even if someone declared or assumed sex with pets was forbidden (which you seemed to) it still wouldn’t be a rejection of bestiality. Because it does not require that you have or desire to have sex with all animals including pets.
I’m really confused.
1) You said you had no objections to bestiality. 2) I bring up pets. 3) You say that you are against that. Therefore, (3) is a clarification of (1).
This is not a meaningful direction for debate. Let me clear things up for both of you.
He meant: “I have no objection to acts just because the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
You took him to mean: “I have no objection to any acts to which the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
Thank you.
No, he specifically said:
In other words, he’s against an alternative, nonstandard definition of bestiality, which is not the same thing as the kind of bestiality for which he has no objections.
The allusion to torture vs. dust and his emphasis of standard bestiality “only requir[ing] that a person have sex with one animal” suggests that he is against this sort of serial bestiality because the numbers involved become large.
No, I said I’m against “the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts”. I said that because that would be what required for your mention of pets as a reason to reject or ‘clarify’ my earlier declaration of non-objection to be valid.
The issue of consent is probably how I’d choose to justify my objection to bestiality on the basis of rights. The concept of rights is among the highest-status deontological ethics in the world today, so may have the best chance of convincing others.
But I think my true objection may be just that I feel it horribly demeans the humans involved, lowering them to the status of (lesser) animals.
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
“Sex between adults and young teenagers, as long as there is no obvious coercion involved, is not nearly as harmful as generally supposed” is definitely something that you can’t say—and the fact that you can’t say it has been demonstrated experimentally.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia depending on which stage of adolescence you’re talking about.
I’ve no disagreement with your comment Atelos, but—why do those words exist?
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
Eliezer on the subject of words that should not exist:
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations. Also note that 15-25 and 18-21 are typically given as the prime age ranges of female physical attractiveness by Roissy and his commenters (although since these are arbitrary cut-offs, there’s no need to give them a name). The 15-19 age range of “ephebophilia” cuts across this age range seemingly at random.
The same goes for hebephilia, attraction to 11-14 year-olds. There is no discontinuity in the characteristics of a typical human between 14 and 15 years of age, and I don’t see why hebephiles should form a compact cluster in thingspace either.
On the other hand paedophilia does seem a valid word, because attraction to pre-pubescents seems qualititatively different from attraction to fertile human beings (there are evolutionary considerations at play, and there are great physical changes in a short space of time during puberty). Properties shared in common by paedophiles are presumably qualitative differences in “brain wiring” in comparison to humans of typical sexuality.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
There are people with a sexual preference for people from the age of their birth right up to and even past the age of their death. Since there are many such people it is easier to have words that give a ballpark to their sexual preference than to say “someone with a specific sexual preference for humans between the ages of X and Y” every single time.
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
(With the caveat that it is stupid to use the same word for the preference for males and females at this stage. Both groups are more similar to adults of their sex than they are to each other!)
Or, in this case, the opposite. In most cases injecting the word ephebophile into a context will expunge connotations rather than introducing them. In the case of a sexually active ephobophile using the word ensures that all “people who have sex with those who are under the age at which it is legally permissible to have sex with them” aren’t lumped in together. Because they aren’t @#@%ing pedophiles and because while both practices are illegal they have entirely different moral connotations. For that matter the active practice of the various illegal chronophilias also have different practical implications. Counter-intuitively (unless you think about it) in the case of rape I seem to recall that a rape of a girl that is sexually mature does greater psychological damage on average than than the rape of a younger girl (probably something Robin Hanson cited).
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females) the age range 15-19 is rather close to the widely agreed-upon (by men) 5-year age range of females in their physical prime of roughly 18-22. 15-year olds have been reproductively viable for about 4 years on average. 19-year-old women are about as attractive as they’ll ever be!
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Even if the girl in quesiton is 15, it seems that the extent to which an older man might target her as a mate in today’s society depends more on how up-tight, how scrupulous or how socialised he is – whether he prefers slightly younger (by 3 years) women than the average man would generally be difficult to tell from outside, and being “normal” in this regard doesn’t preclude attraction to a 15-year-old any more than it does attraction to a 25-year-old in any case.
There are words like “creeper” and “pervert” that might be used to describe the type of person who appears to pay undue attention to younger teenage girls. This seems to exhaust the social utility of having a word for someone who prefers slightly younger women than does the average man. Note that this concept is also highly contingent; plenty of human societies would consider overt sexual attraction to young teenage girls, insofar as sexual attraction is acceptable in general, to be unremarkable (as Hanson’s piece points out).
Ephebophilia therefore appears to be useful, if at all, as a scientific term only. And in that case, where is the evidence that ephebophiles form a meaningful category? Why not have special words for adults who are attracted to 22-25 year-olds in particular (equally unusual), and so forth? Why name a specific age range at all, rather than having a general word for “prefers fertile women, but of unusually young age”, if not just to lend the term a bogus scientific air?
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms. I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”. On the other hand achondroplasia dwarfism is a term that cleaves reality at its joints. (NB: no offense intended by this analogy, which implies no similarity beyond the use of words to refer to variations in some characteristic of humans).
In most cases that’s probably true, but the more discriminating question might be why this confusion exists so widely. After all it’s quite a severe accusation.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults. So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
If you actually did wonder that back through the analogy you would probably look at the third sentence of the wikipedia article and follow the link.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
The point is about arbitrary “scientific” gradings pulled out of thin air. Short, very short, diminutive—they are vague context-dependent categorisations that are suitable given the continuous nature and contingent relevance of the variation in question. This is not comparable to rigid, highly specific classifications like my putative “veryshortman”, which is how I would characterise words like ephebophilia. There should be a good reason for the existence of such a term, and that reason is not apparent.
The other problem with the specificity of “ephebophilia” is also that it overlaps with the typical 5-year window in which an average male would find a female most physically attractive. Therefore it can’t even be justified on the grounds that the psychologists are binning males into continuous but arbitrarily demarcated categories of “normal”, “ephebophile” and “hebephile”.
You said: “Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with”. I pointed out that this alleged use to which the word might be put is redundant, since 15-19 year-old women are among the most attractive to men in any case. Generally the large majority of heterosexual men would want to have sex, if the conditions were right, with an attractive girl of this age, particularly a 19-year-old!
I went on to point out that if we look at the other extreme (15-year-olds) scrupulousness and other character traits probably play a bigger role than ephebophilia in assessing the likelihood of a man attempting to mate with a girl of that age, in this society.
That sounds about as reasonable, given the definition of ephebophile, as suggesting that an average man would be more attracted to a plain 18-year-old than to a 27-year-old supermodel. I.e. unreasonable, unless I missed the part where it is defined as exlusive attraction to 15-19 year-olds (in which case I would ask for some evidence that such people even exist).
I did so already, and noticed that teleiophilia and gerontophilia are not specified by age range. If ephebophilia and hebephilia were likewise merged into a word that meant “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical” (I agree with you that having the same word for female-male and male-female attraction is also foolish) then I would admit the legitimacy of that word. It is the pretense to specificity, or having idenitified some actual clusters in thingspace that I object to.
Such a word could be the word meaning “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical”. No need to pretend that there is clustering into the groups “sexually normal men”, “ephebophiles” and “hebephiles” rather than a continuum.
I don’t see why another word apart from pederasty is needed for that.
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures. Paedophilia… I would have put that one as an even split with perhaps the most notorious sterotypical applications being with respect to male attraction to young boys (eg. ‘priests’).
I’d say it depends on the man’s age, too. A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me. And, while most men prefer younger women, it’s not like the typical man prefers women between 18 and 22 no matter how old he is—see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see. The writer is advocating the idea that men should target older women, because they’ll face less competition.
I’m sure the 70-year-old, given the opportunity to be transported into a younger attractive body with his mind in-tact, would be just as keen on the 16-year-old as the 22-year-old is. You are probably trying to imagine a 70-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old, which would indeed be remarkable but is beside the point.
The median 23-year-old man sets 18 years as the least possible age for a match, whereas the median 48-year-old man sets 32 years for the same. This effect is much smaller if you see who people write messages to, but it’s still there (see the red in the bottom right corner of the relevant graph).
Imagine asking a lot of men of different ages if, all other things being equal, they’d prefer a 16-year-old woman (assuming the men are from somewhere the age of consent is less than that—tweak if necessary) or a 26-year-old one. Do you really believe that many more men from any given age range would choose the former? (Heck, I would choose the latter, and I’m 24.)
I suspect that the difference between messaging behavior and the minimum age setting is related to the fact that those settings are publicly available. That adds a signaling component to the game, and for 48-year-old straight males I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the dominant one: I don’t have any actual data here, but it seems likely that a middle-aged man setting the age of consent as his threshold sends a clear “dirty old man” signal that a 32yo threshold wouldn’t. Not a signal that a hypothetical dirty old man wants to send, I think; meanwhile, you can send messages to whoever you like, and large-scale messaging preferences are opaque to everyone but password holders. Actually, messaging someone below your nominal age limit might send a weak positive signal: “I like you enough to make an exception”.
The smaller of the effects discussed is probably genuine, though.
okCupid data. Of interest is the third graph.
Fascinating. Following those links I just discovered I’m a teleiophile. Also a gynephile but I probably could have guessed that one myself.
I’m somewhat nonplussed with having the word ephebophilia refer to a preference for either females of approximately 14-16 or for males of an equivalent level of development (so slightly older). Unless for some reason people with one preference have a particularly high chance of also having the other preference. Because by this age it is an entirely different kind of preference so if you are going to go to all the trouble of making up names for various categories you may as well have “likes young men” different to “likes young women”. Having just one word for pedophilia and perhaps hebophilia makes somewhat more sense given the much smaller difference between sexes at the younger ages.
It’s very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma”, and many other people interpret as “raping particularly vulnerable people”.
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to “reclaim the word” by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It—unsurprisingly—still didn’t go well for him).
This guy is a hero. Okay, not a very effective hero, but still.
Heroism in the classical sense (as I understand it) means being great, and has little if anything to do with being good or getting good results.
Unsurprisingly indeed. Still, somebody has to be first, and I admire his willingness to do so.
Which word is this?
Isn’t it perfectly clear which one MixedNuts means?
Err… no? That’s why I asked. Could you write the word please?
Oh, wait. I read “can’t” literally. As opposed to “it is illegal to”. The meaning was entirely changed.
What person would it be physically impossible to have sex with? Though, that depends on what qualifies as “real sex” vs. what is merely foreplay/Xth base/etc., which is a whole other issue.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object: that is, if A wants to have sex with B and C and D, but A is unfortunately trapped inside a giant transparent hamster ball, with B-Z all on the outside looking in.
You would achieve the same effect if A were attracted to people trapped inside giant transparent hamster balls. Now we just need a single word for this kind of attraction.
Ahaptophilia? (Attraction to people whom you cannot touch)
Pushing Daisies had both its protagonists suffer from this.
Yes, I was primed to think in terms of the subject—and the kind of subject that people are inclined to shame. That is, pathetic people. As in, “pathetic people who can’t get laid”.
To translate into the language of physical impossibility would, I suppose, require observing that humans are not black boxes that can freely do anything within the realms of human possibility. Going against instinct and indoctrination really is hard and for the kind of people I was primed to think about (pathetic people) they just couldn’t. Because being proactively vile and evil requires initiative and the ability to overcome inhibitions so most people in that hypothetical category couldn’t have sex with the people they wanted to (due to their pathetic nature).
It seemed entirely plausible to me that there was a jargon term for “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with [because you’re a pathetic loser], and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma” that people also used as an indicator that the subject is more likely to be a rapist. That is exactly the kind of prejudice that humans tend to enjoy engaging in. What surprised me was that I wasn’t familiar with the jargon in question. My confusion is now resolved.
I’ve heard of people getting crushes on historical figures. I don’t know if there are people with a strong preference for famous dead people.
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. “Reviled” should be replaced with “reviled by ___” in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I’ve rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically “lefty types,” not that “lefty types” typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can’t quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn’t call him a “lefty type” personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn’t much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who’s doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I’m here, I will note that eliminating the comma between “types” and “who” would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”? I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the US mainstream endorsing what amounts to technocracy; I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom. I’m fairly sure that this is both the main thing that Emile meant when he was thinking of what you can’t say, and the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Consider someone who wants judicial fiat to impose some policy they approve of- like, say, gay marriage. Is that anti-democracy? That’s the extent to which I’m including anti-democracy in that position.
The desire for a progressive regulatory state is conditioned on the idea that some people know what should be done better than others, which is an inherently anti-democratic notion; democratic opposition to things in the people’s best interest is an obstacle to be overcome not an objection to be heard out.
That said, I think most of the people I know would at least complain if they had to move to a Singapore-style “democracy” (well-run but lacking rights like free speech). People have inconsistent political preferences all the time.
A number of people I know take overpopulation and environmental threats very seriously. Many of them approve of the results of China’s multiple-child tax, though many of them complain about the implementation and the limitation on freedom. I don’t remember any of them acknowledging that the only way to get Chinese levels of results was with Chinese levels of political freedom, but I’m sure at least one made that connection.
Ah. The first thing that comes to mind for me, when comparing the Chinese government and the American government, is that the Chinese government is comprised of engineers and the American government is comprised of lawyers, and I suspect that is true for most people who would hold some version of that opinion.
That’s not necessarily a win for China.
Engineers may not be a great pool to select political authority figures from, but I have to say that lawyers strike me as an even worse option.
Hm. I appear to have lost 3 karma for agreeing that the offending text should not be part of my comment. Anyone have an explanation?
No idea—I revoked my downvote from the grandparent after you changed it.
Edit: On further reflection, I suspect you are getting dinged for positing a technocratic-democratic dichotomy. It is possible to be a technocrat and a small-d democrat. A more accurate opposition would be technocratic-populist, which is not the same thing.
He’s not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but Scott Adams seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is “dance, monkeys, dance”.
I briefly read that as a colon...
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don’t support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I’d probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it’d be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don’t think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I’d not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don’t think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it’s synonymous with treason in Greece.
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it’d be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I wouldn’t call any of the above “ideas” at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, “support for incest” is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Aw, no mention of Necrophilia? It’s even a victimless crime!
Lifeist! (There are credible reasons why dead people can be considered victims—even if I don’t happen to share them as values.)
Well, that’s one way to pay the rent while you’re in cryonic suspension.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it’s still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don’t see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
Necrophilandering, not “necrophilarizing”.
(Note to self: don’t have sex with any of wedrifid’s stuff.)
Feel free to buy it off me if you are really want to. It’s a territorial thing, not a moral judgement! :P
Yeah, no redneck would be caught dead marryin’ his sister. Nosirree!
If you have statistics about sibling incest being prominent to “rednecks” in a significantly higher degree than other populations, let me know. If not, I don’t approve of unsubstantiated stereotyping.
That’s absolutely hilarious. I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t, because “redneck” isn’t an acknowledged sociological distinction. It’s a stereotype. Anyone who gestures toward vaguely “redneck ideas” should not be surprised when incest comes up. The fact that you did not know this makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
I’ve heard the jokes about cousin incest, and even made an initial reply to your pre-edited post, saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries—when you edited your post to refer specifically to sibling marriage, I deleted that answer which no longer applied.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece, no need to assume anything.
Wikipedia tells me that “redneck” is a term that refers to rural southern whites and then got connotations of all-around bigotry. But if you want data about these topics, here’s the map that shows South was the last to repeal antimiscegenetion laws, here are maps for estimated same-sex marriage opposition, here is which states didn’t ratify the Equal Rights Amendment
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
Perhaps I exaggerated a little too far for the sake of the joke, then.
I actually didn’t know this, interestingly.
I did that a lot for a while, but it seemed like hardly anyone put anything there so I eventually stopped bothering. Also, I’m surprised (and a bit disturbed) that someone in Greece knows anything about ‘rednecks’, so nevermind.
I guess I must be a redneck then!
I knew all this already, and am not disputing it. That’s not the point.
Look: there is a difference between “green-eyed black-haired ideas” and “wiggin ideas”.
They seem not to exist; apparently the best indicators would be some unreported fraction of general child abuse, but no leads on what the fraction might be.
I know the jokes about cousin marriages—but frankly such didn’t even count as incest in most Western societies until relatively recently, and it still doesn’t count as such in some non-Western societies.