Additional comment years later: I don’t think this actually makes any sense. Ignoring cases of people unable to give consent at all and a few more edge cases, the cases in the real world where you are permitted to do something to someone nonconsensually are cases where initating force is irrelevant (assuming you don’t want to count the act itself as force). I can talk to you without your consent, because I don’t need to say “let my sound waves reach your ears, or else I shoot you”—sound waves reach your ears automatically under most circumstances. But if you use earmuffs and I say “take out those earmuffs, so you can hear me, or else I shoot you”, that would be illegal.
If this future society allows nonconsensual sex only when no force is used, that is a coherent concept, but except in a few edge cases that would just be equivalent to requiring consent but changing the defaults and changing the methods allowed to communicate lack of consent. You can have sex with someone “against his will” but you aren’t permitted to tear off his clothes, hold him down, or threaten to hurt him if he refuses. That isn’t really a society allowing rape at all.
And if this future society allows nonconsensual sex even when force has to be used, that would not only be different from how we deal with rape, it would be different from how we handle everything else as well. Are we expected to believe that this society doesn’t permit “take off those earmuffs or I shoot you” or “take off those glasses so you can see my ugly shirt, or I shoot you” but it does permit “have sex with me or I shoot you”?
(Actually there’s one case I left out: Governments get to do lots of things to you nonconsensually. But I don’t think Eliezer is just postulating that the world has a tax that is paid in sex and is otherwise just like our own world with respect to sex.)
Additional comment years later: I don’t think this actually makes any sense. Ignoring cases of people unable to give consent at all and a few more edge cases, the cases in the real world where you are permitted to do something to someone nonconsensually are cases where initating force is irrelevant (assuming you don’t want to count the act itself as force). I can talk to you without your consent, because I don’t need to say “let my sound waves reach your ears, or else I shoot you”—sound waves reach your ears automatically under most circumstances. But if you use earmuffs and I say “take out those earmuffs, so you can hear me, or else I shoot you”, that would be illegal.
If this future society allows nonconsensual sex only when no force is used, that is a coherent concept, but except in a few edge cases that would just be equivalent to requiring consent but changing the defaults and changing the methods allowed to communicate lack of consent. You can have sex with someone “against his will” but you aren’t permitted to tear off his clothes, hold him down, or threaten to hurt him if he refuses. That isn’t really a society allowing rape at all.
And if this future society allows nonconsensual sex even when force has to be used, that would not only be different from how we deal with rape, it would be different from how we handle everything else as well. Are we expected to believe that this society doesn’t permit “take off those earmuffs or I shoot you” or “take off those glasses so you can see my ugly shirt, or I shoot you” but it does permit “have sex with me or I shoot you”?
(Actually there’s one case I left out: Governments get to do lots of things to you nonconsensually. But I don’t think Eliezer is just postulating that the world has a tax that is paid in sex and is otherwise just like our own world with respect to sex.)