...if you’re smart people will ask you for advice, if you’re strong people will ask you to lift things for them, if you’re tall people will ask you to reach things for them, if you can program people will ask you to write webpages from them, if you’re female men will ask you to have sex with them...
One of these things is not like the other. In your first four examples, the requests for assistance do stem from a clear advantage at performing a particular task—smart people are presumably better at giving advice, strong people are better at lifting stuff, etc. But what is the advantage associated with being female in this particular example? The only thing I can think of is that women are better at the task of being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual men. This is not what I would ordinarily categorize as an “advantage”, but even if it is, the purported advantage is symmetrical—men are better at being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual women. Yet most men do not frequently get approached by women for sex, seemingly falsifying your general thesis. Was there some other advantage you were thinking of here, or is this just a poorly chosen example?
But what is the advantage associated with being female in this particular example? The only thing I can think of is that women are better at the task of being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual men.
Gender normative females have a much easier task when it comes to finding casual sex partners than average males. This advantage could be said to have some similarities to the other advantages listed.
Yes, but that doesn’t make sense in context. OrphanWilde’s point was that possessing advantages leads people to expect that you will deploy those advantages in their favor. When a man approaches a woman for sex, in what sense is he asking her to deploy her advantage in being able to find casual sex partners? The fact that men approach women for sex may be a manifestation of that advantage, but it is not caused by that advantage in the same way that people approaching strong people to lift things is caused by the strength advantage.
It is less core than the height example but not nonsensical or irrelevant.
OrphanWilde’s point was that possessing advantages leads people to expect that you will deploy those advantages in their favor. When a man approaches a woman for sex, in what sense is he asking her to deploy her advantage in being able to find casual sex partners?
If a randomly selected male and a randomly selected female have casual sex the direction in which this is most likely to be considered a favour is from the male to the female. See the direction payment usually goes in prostitution for example, or the way sex-for-influence tends to work in general. If the advantage went in the other direction then it would not result in men seeking sex from women in the same way. The men in question are seeking favours because of the way the advantage works. This makes the advice provided relevant.
Develop and follow a strategy for dealing with this as rapidly as possible
If a randomly selected male and a randomly selected female have casual sex the direction in which this is most likely to be considered a favour is from the male to the female.
Maybe this is true, but the (overwhelmingly, I think) most likely situation is that it is not considered a favor at all, in either direction. In most cases, casual sex just isn’t seen as a favor. I’m not a woman and I may be wrong about this, but I really doubt that many women are inclined to agree to casual sex out of a sense of obligation or altruism.
This makes the advice provided relevant.
The general advice of developing and following a strategy is of course applicable in all four cases, but that’s just because the advice is so general. The reason I brought this whole thing up is because the particular strategy that one should follow will, I think, be importantly different in the casual sex case than in the other three examples. I think a decent strategy for a tall person, say, would be to accede to requests for help if the request doesn’t require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm. The same strategy would work for the strong person and the smart person. But it most emphatically would not be good advice for how a woman should deal with sexual propositions.
Many people (including me) feel that people with certain advantages do have an obligation to deploy that advantage for the benefit of others in certain cases. I think a tall guy who had a policy of refusing to ever help someone reach stuff unless there was something in it for him would be a dick. I do not think a woman who refused to sleep with someone else unless there was something in it for her is a dick. The “advantage” in this case, such as it is, is not obligation-generating in the same way. Seeing that example along with three others where some obligation does exist raised a red flag for me.
If I remember correctly, OrphanWilde is an objectivist, so perhaps his equivocation of the casual sex case with the other three has the opposite motivation—he doesn’t think any obligation exists in any of the examples. From that perspective, perhaps the fourth example doesn’t stick out quite so much, but it is not a common perspective and it isn’t mentioned in his comment, so I didn’t really think of it until I read his reply and recalled who he was. In the absence of that information, I read his comment as indicating a somewhat unsavory attitude towards women’s sexual autonomy. Now I see that my disagreement with him is probably in the opposite direction—in how he thinks about the first three cases rather than the fourth—but I still think the fourth example doesn’t fit.
I think a decent strategy for a tall person, say, would be to accede to requests for help if the request doesn’t require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm. The same strategy would work for the strong person and the smart person. But it most emphatically would not be good advice for how a woman should deal with sexual propositions.
But having sex with unattractive people does usually “require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm”, so you don’t need a special case for that.
It’s a continuum: the fraction of times it’s reasonable to pick stuff off shelves for people as a favour is close to 1, the fraction of times it’s reasonable to write Web pages for people as a favour is close to 0.5, and the fraction of times it’s reasonable to have sex with for people as a favour is close to 0.
(And anyway, if I understand correctly what type of people OW is talking about, they feel obligated to reach stuff for shorter people even when they need to go out of their way or risk harm to do so.)
But having sex with unattractive people does usually “require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm”, so you don’t need a special case for that.
In my experience this (positing a special case when sex is involved even though a special case isn’t needed) is a such a general and epidemic problem in modern american culture that most people don’t notice they’re doing it even when you point it out.
(And anyway, if I understand correctly what type of people OW is talking about, they feel obligated to reach stuff for shorter people even when they need to go out of their way or risk harm to do so.)
I agree with pragmatist in that someone who has an advantage “should” help others that do not, in certain cases, but I don’t think the language of obligations is the right one for this “should”. It is more suitably discussed in the framework of virtue ethics. Part of being “a good person” is helping others who ask this kind of favors of you, within reasonable limits. Refusing consistently to do them is not accurately described as neglecting an obligation, if there haven’t been any promises/contracts, but it is (to use pragmatist’s words) “being a dick”—a character trait it is better not to have.
I don’t understand the question. What’s a moral mechanism? If you are asking for a general moral principle that establishes the obligation, I should point out that I’m a moral particularist. I don’t think that appeal to general principles is essential for sound moral reasoning, and I don’t think there are many true, simple and general moral principles.
The essential problem is that this is the sort of thing someone who is functionally a creepy misogynist says. See the last LW Women thread and be sadly unsurprised.
The n-th percentile woman tends to be more sexually attractive to men than the n-th percentile man is to women, at least for n not very close to 100. Dynamics between attractive men and unattractive women are similar to those between attractive women and unattractive men (see e.g. here), though the former are rarer.
You are of course right, it’s not like the other three. One of the differences is that it is a perceived advantage, not a real one. (Like stereotypes of Asians being good at math, so hey Wei, can you calculate this tip for us?)
But that’s not the reason I included it. The reason I included it is because it helps illustrate the issue with social obligations to say “Yes”; many women do in fact feel obligated to have sex with some guys, and guys complaining about rejection, even if they don’t intend it, makes some women feel uncomfortably obligated to say “Yes” more frequently. If you don’t grasp the dynamic behind the sense of advantage, people who react very defensively to these complaints—as if they were demands that women be* less picky about sex—make absolutely no sense; they seem to be denying the humanity of the person complaining, denying their right to be unhappy about their own situation.
It’s not the only example, but it is the one I found most… instructive, as an explanation, and given that at least one of them was cause for a total psychological meltdown for me (which is part of why I’ve been largely quiet here for the past few weeks, and which I’m still not fully over), I think maybe sharing some of the examples freely might not be a wise move. I don’t know that everybody would find any of them the crippling emotional basilisk I found the one, but I have no effective means of judging that.
The opportunity cost to a tall person of being asked to reach something for a short person is generally quite small. This remains true even if there are many short people who require such assistance.
The cost to a woman of having sex with every man who asks, in terms of pregnancy risk, disease risk, and status loss from being perceived as promiscuous is rather more significant.
I can see why an objectivist would try to include them in the same reference class; a utilitarian, on the other hand, doesn’t have to reach far to find reasons not to.
OrphanWilde also made an example about writing Web pages, whose opportunity cost is much higher than for reaching stuff but much lower than for having sex, so there might be more of a continuum than you realize.
I can point to a conversation on these forums where a woman stated she had pity sex with guys, for pretty much the reasons I laid out—that’s what pity sex -is-, it’s having sex with someone out of that sense of obligation arising from a perceived social advantage. It’s not like I took an entirely fictitious example and presented it as an analogue of real-world things, they’re all real-world things, and they’re not the only ones.
You’re stating that they’re different, but that’s from an objective outside perspective; from the inside obligation feels like obligation, regardless of its reasonableness.
It depends on who exactly the person feeling the obligation is. For example, I definitely don’t feel obligated to write Web pages for free for anyone who asks regardless of how busy I am.
It depends on who exactly the person is. For example, I haven’t felt obligated to write Web pages (or similar) for people for at least a decade (though this doesn’t mean I never do that as a favour), and when people (well, actually almost only ever happens with a few people¹) try to make me feel that way, I deliberately start giving “if you insist, I will give a tantrum” vibes.
Yes, I realize that the correct solution normally is to get the hell away from those people, but when they share 50% of my genes that’s not viable.
One of these things is not like the other. In your first four examples, the requests for assistance do stem from a clear advantage at performing a particular task—smart people are presumably better at giving advice, strong people are better at lifting stuff, etc. But what is the advantage associated with being female in this particular example? The only thing I can think of is that women are better at the task of being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual men. This is not what I would ordinarily categorize as an “advantage”, but even if it is, the purported advantage is symmetrical—men are better at being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual women. Yet most men do not frequently get approached by women for sex, seemingly falsifying your general thesis. Was there some other advantage you were thinking of here, or is this just a poorly chosen example?
Gender normative females have a much easier task when it comes to finding casual sex partners than average males. This advantage could be said to have some similarities to the other advantages listed.
Yes, but that doesn’t make sense in context. OrphanWilde’s point was that possessing advantages leads people to expect that you will deploy those advantages in their favor. When a man approaches a woman for sex, in what sense is he asking her to deploy her advantage in being able to find casual sex partners? The fact that men approach women for sex may be a manifestation of that advantage, but it is not caused by that advantage in the same way that people approaching strong people to lift things is caused by the strength advantage.
It is less core than the height example but not nonsensical or irrelevant.
If a randomly selected male and a randomly selected female have casual sex the direction in which this is most likely to be considered a favour is from the male to the female. See the direction payment usually goes in prostitution for example, or the way sex-for-influence tends to work in general. If the advantage went in the other direction then it would not result in men seeking sex from women in the same way. The men in question are seeking favours because of the way the advantage works. This makes the advice provided relevant.
Maybe this is true, but the (overwhelmingly, I think) most likely situation is that it is not considered a favor at all, in either direction. In most cases, casual sex just isn’t seen as a favor. I’m not a woman and I may be wrong about this, but I really doubt that many women are inclined to agree to casual sex out of a sense of obligation or altruism.
The general advice of developing and following a strategy is of course applicable in all four cases, but that’s just because the advice is so general. The reason I brought this whole thing up is because the particular strategy that one should follow will, I think, be importantly different in the casual sex case than in the other three examples. I think a decent strategy for a tall person, say, would be to accede to requests for help if the request doesn’t require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm. The same strategy would work for the strong person and the smart person. But it most emphatically would not be good advice for how a woman should deal with sexual propositions.
Many people (including me) feel that people with certain advantages do have an obligation to deploy that advantage for the benefit of others in certain cases. I think a tall guy who had a policy of refusing to ever help someone reach stuff unless there was something in it for him would be a dick. I do not think a woman who refused to sleep with someone else unless there was something in it for her is a dick. The “advantage” in this case, such as it is, is not obligation-generating in the same way. Seeing that example along with three others where some obligation does exist raised a red flag for me.
If I remember correctly, OrphanWilde is an objectivist, so perhaps his equivocation of the casual sex case with the other three has the opposite motivation—he doesn’t think any obligation exists in any of the examples. From that perspective, perhaps the fourth example doesn’t stick out quite so much, but it is not a common perspective and it isn’t mentioned in his comment, so I didn’t really think of it until I read his reply and recalled who he was. In the absence of that information, I read his comment as indicating a somewhat unsavory attitude towards women’s sexual autonomy. Now I see that my disagreement with him is probably in the opposite direction—in how he thinks about the first three cases rather than the fourth—but I still think the fourth example doesn’t fit.
But having sex with unattractive people does usually “require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm”, so you don’t need a special case for that.
It’s a continuum: the fraction of times it’s reasonable to pick stuff off shelves for people as a favour is close to 1, the fraction of times it’s reasonable to write Web pages for people as a favour is close to 0.5, and the fraction of times it’s reasonable to have sex with for people as a favour is close to 0.
(And anyway, if I understand correctly what type of people OW is talking about, they feel obligated to reach stuff for shorter people even when they need to go out of their way or risk harm to do so.)
In my experience this (positing a special case when sex is involved even though a special case isn’t needed) is a such a general and epidemic problem in modern american culture that most people don’t notice they’re doing it even when you point it out.
Exactly.
What moral mechanism generates the obligation?
I agree with pragmatist in that someone who has an advantage “should” help others that do not, in certain cases, but I don’t think the language of obligations is the right one for this “should”. It is more suitably discussed in the framework of virtue ethics. Part of being “a good person” is helping others who ask this kind of favors of you, within reasonable limits. Refusing consistently to do them is not accurately described as neglecting an obligation, if there haven’t been any promises/contracts, but it is (to use pragmatist’s words) “being a dick”—a character trait it is better not to have.
I don’t understand the question. What’s a moral mechanism? If you are asking for a general moral principle that establishes the obligation, I should point out that I’m a moral particularist. I don’t think that appeal to general principles is essential for sound moral reasoning, and I don’t think there are many true, simple and general moral principles.
But surely you recognize that the cases share internal similarities even if you want to distinguish them?
I agree that they share certain internal similarities, but not along the particular moral dimension you seem to be talking about here.
The essential problem is that this is the sort of thing someone who is functionally a creepy misogynist says. See the last LW Women thread and be sadly unsurprised.
By “that” you mean what pragmatist said, what wedrifid said, or what OrphanWilde said?
OrphanWilde.
The n-th percentile woman tends to be more sexually attractive to men than the n-th percentile man is to women, at least for n not very close to 100. Dynamics between attractive men and unattractive women are similar to those between attractive women and unattractive men (see e.g. here), though the former are rarer.
You are of course right, it’s not like the other three. One of the differences is that it is a perceived advantage, not a real one. (Like stereotypes of Asians being good at math, so hey Wei, can you calculate this tip for us?)
But that’s not the reason I included it. The reason I included it is because it helps illustrate the issue with social obligations to say “Yes”; many women do in fact feel obligated to have sex with some guys, and guys complaining about rejection, even if they don’t intend it, makes some women feel uncomfortably obligated to say “Yes” more frequently. If you don’t grasp the dynamic behind the sense of advantage, people who react very defensively to these complaints—as if they were demands that women be* less picky about sex—make absolutely no sense; they seem to be denying the humanity of the person complaining, denying their right to be unhappy about their own situation.
It’s not the only example, but it is the one I found most… instructive, as an explanation, and given that at least one of them was cause for a total psychological meltdown for me (which is part of why I’ve been largely quiet here for the past few weeks, and which I’m still not fully over), I think maybe sharing some of the examples freely might not be a wise move. I don’t know that everybody would find any of them the crippling emotional basilisk I found the one, but I have no effective means of judging that.
The opportunity cost to a tall person of being asked to reach something for a short person is generally quite small. This remains true even if there are many short people who require such assistance.
The cost to a woman of having sex with every man who asks, in terms of pregnancy risk, disease risk, and status loss from being perceived as promiscuous is rather more significant.
I can see why an objectivist would try to include them in the same reference class; a utilitarian, on the other hand, doesn’t have to reach far to find reasons not to.
OrphanWilde also made an example about writing Web pages, whose opportunity cost is much higher than for reaching stuff but much lower than for having sex, so there might be more of a continuum than you realize.
I can point to a conversation on these forums where a woman stated she had pity sex with guys, for pretty much the reasons I laid out—that’s what pity sex -is-, it’s having sex with someone out of that sense of obligation arising from a perceived social advantage. It’s not like I took an entirely fictitious example and presented it as an analogue of real-world things, they’re all real-world things, and they’re not the only ones.
You’re stating that they’re different, but that’s from an objective outside perspective; from the inside obligation feels like obligation, regardless of its reasonableness.
It depends on who exactly the person feeling the obligation is. For example, I definitely don’t feel obligated to write Web pages for free for anyone who asks regardless of how busy I am.
It depends on who exactly the person is. For example, I haven’t felt obligated to write Web pages (or similar) for people for at least a decade (though this doesn’t mean I never do that as a favour), and when people (well, actually almost only ever happens with a few people¹) try to make me feel that way, I deliberately start giving “if you insist, I will give a tantrum” vibes.
Yes, I realize that the correct solution normally is to get the hell away from those people, but when they share 50% of my genes that’s not viable.