Jamie Bernstein had to deal with a hypothetical, one that’s even better than the ticking time bomb scenario. This gentleman was wondering when it would be OK to rape someone, in response to this article on Skepchick, and he was straining hard to plop out a possible situation, and he came up with this one:
No, I’m saying: There’s a wizard. He says you can either do nothing and this women will set of a nuke, or you can press this button and she will be raped in such a way that prevents her from doing it. Which should you do?
All right. When you have to reach this far to justify raping someone, I think we can effectively say…never. Nope. There aren’t any circumstances where it’s OK.
But pz if we dont rape them they’ll think they’re *people*
*spits*
This is coming right after i watched missrepresentation on netflix. I just wanna curl up and cry.
Okay, maybe I’m being too literal but the original article was about whether rape/death/misogyny ever justified which is *entirely* different than ever a practical alternative if the other is worse. Anyone can make up a mad man wizard with a bomb to make two awful situations a trade-off but that doesn’t make the lesser of two evil situation justified.
It doesn’t bear discussion but rape is never justified.
I see somebody is playing the torture fuckwittery again. Hypotheticals are for mental wankers who don’t want to deal with reality. Which is why they should be laughed at.
According to the Facebook, Chippy Thee Fernandez is a “Philosopher at unemployed”. Public description says:
I lost one bet, but won another (gambling with self is fun!).
(1) I figured he’d be a Skeptic™, not a missionary. Maybe he really does believe in wizards.
(2) Of COURSE he’s a “philosopher”.
My dad summarized anglo-saxon moral philosophy as being about figuring out a hypothetical situation where it might be OK to do horrible thing X. And so he studied continental philosophy instead.
(I forgot the best part: and ended up teaching finance, which puts out what are demonstrably the most amoral students in the academy.)
I should note that his self-description seem a bit iffy, for reasons which will be left as an exercise for the reader.
What if all Jews suddenly become living nuclear bombs and the only way to prevent them from exploding is to gas them with inseticide?
What if all black people were programmed to become Godzilla once a certain percentage of them rises above the poverty line?
What if women sucked the life force of men during se- oh wait there’s people who believe this one.
Are these people just desperate to hear the phrase “Rape is ok if…”?
I guess I’d say that you go ahead and press the button to cause the rape, to prevent the nuke, but that doesn’t make the rape “OK”. It makes it more like… the lesser of two evils. This situation only means that we should all point to the WIZARD and say that HE’S the one doing wrong.
Reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Peter is made to testify against Brian, and is asked to describe him as either a problem drinker, or an African-American haberdasher. Peter is forced to choose the former, since the latter doesn’t begin to describe Brian, but it’s all just a twist of wordplay to hear what they want to hear.
As soon as you need to posit a way-out hypothetical where an action might just possibly maybe sort of be a least-bad option, you’re pretty-much admitting that you can’t think of a real-world situation where that action is justifiable.
Alethea H Crockoduck Dundee has already said everything that needs to be said about this in old abortion thread here at Pharyngula (the relevant part is about halfway through).
Duh. Since we’re in the Wonderful World Of Open Carry, shoot the wizard since he’s obviously the psychopath who set this who set the whole stupid scenario up. With him dead, the spell is broken, and neither rape nor nukage is required.
The only thing that stops a bad wizard is a good wizard with a gun. I saw that in a documentary back in the ’70s.
Well if we’re going to be super-technical about it, it’s stipulated that a woman has the nuke. No telling how many others are involved if the nuke explodes, or whether the woman/you/wizard group would be nuked as well. And of course, like all wizards, this wizard’s traits evolved on the Pleistocene savannas of the Forgotten Realms, where coercive behavior like this was adaptive for them and should not be questioned. Maybe it’s not a big deal anyway: the wizard simply talks about a magic button which happens to be under their control … or maybe it’s a normal button and the wizard is using magic incantations … or maybe the wizard isn’t actually doing anything. Okay, yep, I have no idea what the fuck this asshole is even saying.
Which should we do? Go fuck yourself. That’s the right answer.
It is okay to waterboard, give three hundred lashes to, and then vivisect, on live TV, this “Chippy” guy in exchange for not nuking New York?
Or to say it in clear English:
Garbage in, garbage out.
This reminds me of how people try to defend corporal punishment, and to that I say, there is never a situation where hitting is the last resort. If you can hit them, you could also just retrain them. If you could hit them, you could remove them from the situation. In this case it is even more ridiculous, if you are in a position to rape them, then certainly you can detain them while you call the police to keep them from setting off the nuke.
The problem with asking these questions is that it means you’re looking for reasons to do it. If we agree that hitting Johnny is wrong and then you start asking how hard a touch is a hit, and is it wrong if he hit you first, and how mad do you have to be before it’s excusable… you don’t think that it’s wrong, because you still want to do it, and you’re looking for excuses to do it. The idea is not to want to do wrong things. I find that focusing on that principle really helps.
Why does the wizard have to rape someone to stop the nuke going off? Is that really the only spell he knows?
I can just see the gears turning in this guys head… “OK, so there’s a woman with a nuke, and you have to rape her to stop it exploding. Wait, that makes no sense. If you can rape here, surely there would be other options, and very few nukes have rape-based triggers anyway…. OK, what if I add a wizard? Then it’s airtight!”
From the department of Oh Shit, Cops Did Whatnow, some signs of progress in the right direction: actual police actually going to trial for raping a woman while on duty.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/12/queensland-police-officers-to-stand-trial-for-alleged-of-woman-while-on-duty
If you have to invoke convoluted situations to justify it (rape, torture, etc.) it’s probably wrong under all actual circumstances. Hell, it’s wrong even when all choices are pretty damn terrible: this is not a video game. There’s no rule that there has to be a solution that neatly solves all the problems without any ethical complications.
Is the wizard Sam Harris? In the scenario am I Michael Shermer? Or am I Jack Bauer?
Oh, I know what I’d do: I’d wake up. Because outside of a drunken dream the scenario isn’t ever going to happen.
That’s why, in those psychology “experiments” involving throwing someone off a bridge to stop a train and save more lives, the only thing we can reasonably conclude from the experiment is that utilitarians are full of shit.
At this point I really have to wonder if some of these people would be happier if they could just admit that they really want to rape women/kill black people/torture Arabs/etc., and stopped trying to come up with zany hypothetical scenarios to justify it. Wouldn’t it be more expedient to admit they want to be evil?
Of, course, but then they would have to admit they are bad people…..
Wouldn’t it be more expedient to admit they want to be evil?
I agree. I mean, then you can build a giant concrete replica of Barad Dur, and hoist the banner of the lidless eye, and just roll with it.
It’s pretty creepy they chose rape as part of this psychological experiment.
Suppose the wizard tells you you can either do nothing or rape a woman to prevent a nuke, and then he LIED because holy shit, what kind of wizard would have fucking RAPE as their only tool of saving lives? So instead you just raped a woman because you’re a gullible asshole acting on what we will politely call “imperfect information” in a crazy bullshit scenario where you should have known better? Because I’m pretty sure anyone who would still defend hypothetical wizard rape-sidekick is a monster.
It’s almost as if Consequentialism has been a moral philosophy for centuries and has been written about by thoughtful people who aren’t only capable of speaking in 140 characters.
It’s like the “Ticking time bomb” torture apologia, except applied to rape. And even stupider. And even less moral. Which is truly fucking amazing feat, honestly.
Gotta love thought experiments proposed by people incapable of thought, let alone experiment.
In my callow youth I deployed the nuclear bomb scenario to justify ignoring a medical emergency. Clearly I wasn’t thinking big enough.
On a lighter note, “What if there’s a wizard …” needs to be the new PYGMIES + DWARFS.
Has anyone asked Sam Harris his opinion of this conundrum?
fmitchell,
Fun fact, I came across PYGMIES + DWARFS after an Adventist massage therapist told me the true story of Noah and the Ark. The one with the epic battle between the angels and the ark vs. the dinosaurs (amalgamations) and fallen angels. She was dead serious. So I looked it up, and ordered the book, and lo, I discovered PYGMIES + DWARFS.
Some years ago, someone pointed out that the “what if it’s a nuke?” torture apologists never offer hypotheticals like “what if the only way to get the terrorist to give you the secret codes was to let him torture your child to death,” even though the two scenarios are equally (im)plausible. The person suggested this was because the makers-of-immoral-hypotheticals don’t secretly (or not so secretly) want their own children tortured to death by terrorists. [If anyone remembers where I saw this or who came up with it, please provide the reference; I suspect it was somewhere in rec.arts.sf.fandom.]
Uh… Philippa Foot, who came up with the trolley problem, was trying to work through some issues with consequentialism, yes, but she was a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics type. The point of the “experiment” simply is not about demonstrating consequentialism is right (or wrong, or anything general and conclusive like that). You might assume that, or it might be presented that way to you, but that isn’t the only reason anybody would think about it. Do we conclude that virtue ethics people are full of shit instead or in addition to consequentialists? I mean, I just don’t get what the quoted statement could mean, if you’re still following along at home. About the only vaguely-coherent option left for us to agree with Kant or something … and fuck, that’s really loaded with some horrific problems — like “don’t lie to Nazis about Jews you’re hiding in the attic, because there is a rule that lying is bad” type of horrific problems. Let’s not even go there. Which isn’t to say he was entirely wrong about everything.
But we could just agree that simplistic fuckwits on twitter aren’t doing these people or their ideas justice. That much is obvious.
Hark! I would dare venture a guess that you and your conventional morality would dictate that it is “immoral” to disembowel a teenager and use their entrails as jumping rope! Surely, you would not be alone in such an assumption! Yet, I find such a notion woefully short-sighted and naive! For you see, what if there was a dimension hopping giga-beast that was about to destroy a whole bus full of school children, unless you appeased it with a rich glass of the ginger ales? And what if also, you had no opener of bottles ready and had not the muscular wherewithal to open the seal upon said glass bottle of gingered ale? What if it was the case that your only recourse was to request the services of the neighborhood Compost Heap Ogre, who would only offer his mighty hand to aid you if compensated the Gentleogre with a giddy and yet morbid routine of jumping rope with the entrails of a humanoid aged 13 to 17? What if that specific form of entertainment was the only compensation acceptable for such a transaction and there were no other items, people, creatures, or transdimensional utlities available with which to unleash the ale of the ginger? Truly your previous naive moral standards are shaken to the core by this scenario! It may be time to rethink your petty and ill informed worldview!
Another case of ranking evil deeds such that the lesser evil deed is justified when it prevents the greater evil deed. buuuut. Where does this ranking come from? Is that exactly Chippy’s point; objecting to others saying rape is the worst possible crime? That evil is evil, they are all bad, not worse than a different one. The absurd hypothesis is just an illustration of how ranking evils is a trap.
I can’t conceive of anyone trying to use these hypotheticals as justification for evil deeds he plans.
but then again I’m a very accommodating/optimist, so a poor objective judge of people. All I can say to that hypothetical is reply “WTF, yuck, I can’t … blech”
I would not disembowel the teenager, anteprepro. I would try to negotiate with the dimension hopping giga-beast and the Compost Heap Ogre, but their choices are not something I can control. I’m feeling kind of shaken to the core (maybe? would it make you feel better if I said that?), but I’ll be okay. There is a wizard here who is helping me through it. Yeah, that’s it. You don’t need to worry, because there is a wizard.
If you are in a situation where you could ‘rape’ her to stop her, what exactly is preventing you from, say, just shooting her in the head? Why torture her instead?
WithinThisMind,
Indeed, if one has enough physical advantage over someone that they are able to rape them they have myriad other ways of incapacitating them. Same goes for corporal punishment, as I said above. If you are close enough to hit them (sorry, ‘spank’) them, you are close enough to restrain them or move them from the situation.
–
The thought experiment goes somewhat wrong for me when people are trying to justify their desire to harm other humans. They are literally designing scenarios where they could rape with impunity. FSM be praised there are no wizards holding nuclear weapons to prone women’s heads, lest they be raped to save humanity.
WithinThisMind:
You wouldn’t even have to shoot her, just restrain her. But really… if someone has to include wizards into some scenario that makes rape a solution, they should be asking themselves why they are trying so hard.
Consciousness razor@#31 – I didn’t realize Foot had come up with that problem!! I first heard about it in the context of some psychology survey and thought it was a ridiculous thing thought up by psychologists. Gah.
I think virtue ethicists are full of shit as well as deontological ethicists and consequentialists; they simply call their opinions “virtue” and the rest is hand-waving. Why is the only remaining option to agree with Kant? Why not abandon the whole project of ethics as fruitless? (I am completely willing to agree that there are objective ethical systems, but that there is a completely unique one in each of our heads, and they change constantly, and are indistinguishable from personal opinion.)
Hypotheticals like this are traps because it is virtually always possible to craft one is such a manner has to practically force you to endorse, reluctantly, a lesser of two evils choice. All it proves is that it is possible to conceive of terrible situations in which a bad choice is forced on you.
A classic example of this is Sophie’s Choice. In this scenario Sophie is sent with her two children to a death camp there she is informed that she must choose one of two children who will be allowed to live the other will be taken away and gassed. Sophie is told if she doesn’t, refuses to make a choice both children will be gassed. Sophie makes a choice and one child is killed and the other lives. A lot of ink has been wasted on the ins and out of Sophie’s choice but in actuality the moral dilemma is not really Sophie’s but the horrible person who forced the choice on her. Like the Wizard mentioned in the example, (As referred to above), that person is the real moral agent by using his power to force people to make terrible choices and are being ruthlessly manipulated.
Nope. Philosophy did it, for better or worse. Psychologists have their own uses for such things, obviously. And shitheads on twitter are neither.
So do you think that there is nothing better to do on this front than opining and hand-waving? If this is so, how do you know it and why couldn’t we do better? I expect more than opining and hand-waving from you if that’s going to be your criticism.
Indeed, you were making some very compelling claims about torture in the other thread (as you have on numerous other occasions, concerning other issues)…. Do you think you’re full of shit when you do things like that? I’m just going to call your bluff here. I don’t think you appreciate what you’re saying, and you certainly don’t act in your life as if you believe it. As belief is a propensity to act (or at least actions are a good judge of it), I think your actions speaker louder than your words do. Which means we’d more or less agree.
There certainly are problems with all three approaches you’re talking about, but doesn’t mean they’re all useless and we should give up on the whole project itself. It would be like saying we should give up on GR and QM because they both have problems and don’t play well together. So let’s end physics? It’s all opinion? All hand-waving? Not even close.
I don’t even know where to begin with this…. If you really meant abandon ethics, then get in the fucking in the sack with the “there is a wizard” guy. But I’ll leave you a quote from Keynes:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
@38
You could very easily abandon all ethics as fruitless, if you so desired. However, you would lose any basis for claiming that rape is actually wrong. “I don’t like it.” or “It’s appalling in my opinion.” are about all you’d be able to say. The most you could get away with is “Most people think it’s bad.” Of course, that’s utterly vacuous, as appeal to popularity is a basic logical fallacy. Moral nihilism is completely intellectually defensible, but it does neuter one’s ability to actually condemn anything, because “Right and wrong are just, like, your opinion man.” The fact that you’re both a social change advocate and someone who rejects the field of ethics is tremendously amusing to me.
Err, not “in the fucking in the sack.” Getting in the fucking sack would suffice. But I don’t think you’re making a serious complaint, Marcus Ranum, so it doesn’t matter.
So do you think that there is nothing better to do on this front than opining and hand-waving?
No, I don’t think that anything I’ve seen is better than opining and hand-waving. That’s quite different from saying there is nothing better to do … I read Foot because Richard Carrier wrote glowingly about her book “Natural Goodness” It didn’t convince me, but your mileage may vary. If you think there’s someone out there who really nails it, do please let me know and I’ll see.
why couldn’t we do better?
I didn’t say we couldn’t. Maybe we can’t. Maybe we can. I’m open to suggestions; I think this is an interesting and important topic for humans.
Indeed, you were making some very compelling claims about torture in the other thread (as you have on numerous other occasions, concerning other issues)…. Do you think you’re full of shit when you do things like that?
Of course not. Do I need to put “in my opinion…” in front of absolutely everything I say? That seems like rather a heavy burden given that pretty much every fucking blog comment ever posted is someone’s opinion about something, no?
I don’t think you appreciate what you’re saying, and you certainly don’t act in your life as if you believe it.
Ah, the old “you don’t act in accordance with your beliefs, therefore … you must not really believe them” argument? Pardon me, I strained my eyeballs rolling them when I read that… Uh, I don’t believe I have free will, either, but I act as if I do because that’s how I am. I offer my opinions about ethics and don’t preface everything with “in my opinion” because, as it appears to me, that’s how people talk about ethics: they leave that part out because to each of us our opinions are more important than everyone else’s. Gosh, is it your opinion that I need to start every one of my sentences with “it appears to me now that…” or “it would seem..” too if I am making what might appear to be a dogmatic statement of fact?
As belief is a propensity to act (or at least actions are a good judge of it), I think your actions speaker louder than your words do.
It’s my (eyeroll) opinion that our beliefs affect our actions in as much as something guides them (and that also neatly explains mistaken actions based on mistaken beliefs) I try to be consistent in my actions and beliefs because I also happen to be of the opinion that that’s a nice thing. I don’t think it’s absolutely a nice thing for everyone, though – it’s just how I roll. It seems to me that my upbringing and past experiences formed that opinion for me, and I’ve reinforced it as I’ve thought about these things.
There certainly are problems with all three approaches you’re talking about, but doesn’t mean they’re all useless and we should give up on the whole project itself.
I guess it depends what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to accomplish a refinement of your opinions, then it’s grand. If you’re trying to get everyone to share a common opinion, then it sure doesn’t seem to be going so well. I think it’s a great idea to encourage people to think about their opinions about how they want to behave, and to understand them, and to consider others’ opinions as well. That seems to me to be a capital idea, and I try to live that way, myself, because it makes me comfortable. And – yes – like (it appears) everyone else does, I expect others to live in accordance with my opinion of how they should live, whether they want to or not.
It would be like saying we should give up on GR and QM because they both have problems and don’t play well together.
In my opinion, that’s a stupid thing to say. GR and QM appear to be facts of how the universe behaves. Why would we give up on them, just because a bunch of philosophers can’t get past reifying their opinions as though they were facts? (other than the fact that they have opinions, which we all do) Just because philosophy doesn’t appear to be accomplishing that particular goal in a way that convinces me doesn’t mean it should be ditched!! Besides, they’re going to do whatever the fuck they want to do, as humans have always done, whether I think their efforts are accomplishing much, or not.
For me to say that they should ditch their efforts (where on earth did you get that from?) I’d have to value my opinion about their efforts a whole lot more than I do.
So let’s end physics? It’s all opinion? All hand-waving? Not even close.
Wow, so you’re equating physics with philosophy? Grandiose much?
Here’s what may be a useful clue for you: if philosophers were producing work that had the kind of predictive power and consistency that physics has, maybe it’d be a lot more convincing. Imagine if the utilitarians actually had a moral calculus with the predictive power and accuracy of QED!!! Then we would probably, actually, be able to converge on some of those underlying “should” and “should not” and that’d be fantastic.
But don’t blame me, or come up with farcical fantastic straw-men like “abandon physics” because philosophers fail to convince me. That seems to be a reasonable request, to me, but you may not agree.
If you really meant abandon ethics, then get in the fucking in the sack with the “there is a wizard” guy
It seems to me that we have abandoned ethics, in the sense that we never accepted a shared understanding/opinion of how to behave ethically. So, I’m not saying we should all start killing eachother, or whatever stupid thing you christians say when you discover that we atheists don’t believe god gave us morals… uh, wait… that is the line of argument you’re taking, right? It appears to be.
So, let’s suppose that I’ve abandoned ethics but I happen to live according to my own opinions, and I believe (in my opinion) that generally I’m an OK guy. Someone else might not agree. Well, whatever. Abandoning the project of establishing a shared understanding of how we should behave doesn’t mean that our response ought to be to cut eachother’s throats. Maybe we just … try to understand that we’re dealing with opinions and other people’s opinions and that it’s difficult and, well, people don’t handle that very well. It’d be nice to add “…so let’s try to be kind to eachother” but we wouldn’t be able to agree on that, but I’m willing to be (what in my opinion is kind) and (what in my opinion is honest) it seems to be not too hard, to me.
But I don’t think you’re making a serious complaint
That, it seems to me, is your opinion.
But I don’t think you’re making a serious complaint
BTW, it’s my opinion that someone who makes arguments like that “get in the sack with the wizard guy” or equating rejection of ethics with rejecting physics – almost certainly doesn’t share my idea of what “serious” is. Perhaps by “serious complaint” you mean “lampshade”?
How about a choice 1 rape vs 100 rapes? Are they equal? If they are it seems that the rape’s evil factor is infinite. Not very useful IRL. Is groping equal to rape? Is rape the same as rape+murder?
Don’t you think that the infinite evil factor makes perpetrator indifferent (as per game theory) to the outcome?
What would acting as if you have free will be like? You act as if nothing causes you or motivates you or interests you, when you make choices? That’s pretty wild. That’s not how I act.
What about just a normal statement of fact, which isn’t dogmatic? Or if you personally don’t know something or don’t know it precisely or with some degree of certainty, you might say it’s close, moving in the right direction, give some probabilities, tack on any useful qualifications about its domain of applicability, etc. Lots of things you could do.
Nope. I’m saying your argument, such as it is, would hold just as well for them, as it would for a lot of other things. That makes it not a very great argument. It doesn’t make physics and moral philosophy equivalent.
But if you don’t what the fuck you’re talking about when it comes to moral philosophy, as is clear enough already, then you should learn a little more about it before you go around making grandiose claims yourself.
Selfmade:
How are any of your questions useful in real life? What is your end goal?
I love thought experiments like these. They’re very illustrative. One of the things they illustrate most clearly is the lack of thought people put into their thought experiments and into their underlying context. “So, there’s this wizard, right, and he’s got a nuke -” might be a great hypothetical kickoff for two people on beanbags holding Playstation controllers and/or (possibly more likely) fat joints, but in the realm of discussing the ethical and moral landscape of actual, real, living human beings and how they interact, you might as well invoke Yahweh in your “what-if?”.
In short, The Nuclear Gandalf Hypothetical™ is not helpful when discussing whether raping somebody is wrong (or can ever not be wrong). Why? Because wizards are as likely to exist as some scenario where raping somebody would save the world. Maaan.
If you want to discuss why rape is wrong (or better: how to better serve victims and educate people about consent, among other things), talk all you want. If you want to discuss whether rape is wrong, please talk to people who aren’t me.
NOPE
I’m done with the internet for the day.
selfmade #44
Bless Your Heart.
Have A Nice Day.
Somebody else said that the argument that convinced you to kill the first child (or 10.000 others will die!) will also convince you to kill the rest of them minus one (well, the others are dead already, nothing to be done about them now, but look, you can save 9999, 9998,…)
The scenario where you have to choose one kid over the other is one that happens in real life. It’s probably every parent’s biggest nightmare. It happens in drowning cars and burning houses, without any malicious entity who could easily safe both of them. I don’t think anybody really thinks that this is a decision that even falls into the category of “moral”.
anteprepro
Just ask the teenager. Believe me, there has never been a teenager who couldn’t open a bottle because some of them contain beer.
Ehm, which is obviously equally true for teenagers and bottles. Some of them contain beer.
Umm okay, wow, a level of stupidity never seen before.
Giliell:
But does whether or not a teenager contains beer affect it’s bottle opening ability? And do we know if the giga-beast is able to open the bottle itself? Is a glass really needed? Why wouldn’t a glass bottle count? These are important questions I’m just asking.
Of course! Everybody knows that any proper rape scenario needs mountain lions!
+++
But to echo what has been said before: Once you convince yourself that there are indeed cases where rpe is justified, everything else is just a misjudgement. You’re no longer worng as such, you just made an honest error in mistaking this situation for another one. Come on, everybody makes mistakes once in a while.
These guys hopelessly confuse moral stance with response.
Rape is morally wrong.
Someone chooses to rape someone else we deal with them in a way that minimises the possibility of repeat offense.
Someone rapes someone else under the instructions of a third party due to a real threat? The rape is morally wrong, the person inciting the rape is the culprit to be dealt with. The rapist may be pardoned or not depending on if there was a credible alternative to their actions.
Someone rapes someone due to mental defect? The rape is morally wrong. We will deal with the rapist differently to a person without mental defect.
You rape someone to stop them setting off a bomb? The rape is morally wrong and there are plenty of other ways to stop them from setting off the bomb, e.g. restraint without rape.
The ‘pro-rape’ scenario a former friend thought was so clever was:
“So what if she’s like the last woman on earth but she doesn’t want to have sex or kids. Wouldn’t it be morally right in that case to have sex with her anyway and force her to carry to term?”
My response was along the lines of ‘if you think that way, it’s probably best for the human race to just die out rather than have you as it’s progenitor.’
Bingo. Also see the constant fudging about how drunk, exactly, someone can be made to be before it is “rape-rape”.
Wait, you have ONE fertile woman. Even if she doesn’t die from pregnancy and childbirth, she’ll have a dozen kids at the most. Many of them will not grow into adults because we’re fucking post apocalyptical so there’s a good chance humanity will die out anyway (who’s also getting all the food you need for those kids?). But even if you force her to reproduce and there are boys and girls, you now force the boys to rape their sisters. So you’re literally rebuilding society on the basis of rape (not that you have many chances of that working with a bottleneck of 14 or so.) Yes, extinction is a much better idea, I think.
There definitvely is a valid use of hypotheticals in discussions about morality. They can make people think about their biases, their unchecked privileges, their unexamined opinions and unsubstantiated claims.
This one does None of the above.
Why not just kick the wizard in the shins, steal his wand and magic the nuke out of existence? And Rube-Goldbergian horror show plays out when you push that button? Actually no, I don’t even want to think about that second question.
Er… yeah, there should’ve been an extra “what” in that last comment.
Hypotheticals were often used in my military training – especially with regards to armed conflict. One that stuck was the moral viability of criminal acts.
While it was relatively easy for us to concoct scenarios that morally justifed crimes like murder and theft that did not seem contrived, all scenarios to justify rape followed similar extremes as that originally put forward above – our conclusion was the same as PZ… No justification for rape.
I’m surprised that nobody has pointed out so far, that even in this fantastical the wizard-nuke scenario raping the woman wouldn’t actually save any lives.
In fact it would cause more harm than good, because the wizard’s imp assistant would just use the distraction caused by the rape to set off TWO nukes AND a car bomb.
The Nuclear Gandalf Hypothetical (thanks Hank_says @47) is just stupid, it would be far better to take a sock and a half-brick (thanks Rincewind) to the wizard who obviously wants the explosion to occur.
The “would you throw someone off a bridge to stop a train crash” hypothetical has always truck me as being the most ridiculous idea. The answer is that you jump off the bridge yourself.
Rape is wrong, murder is wrong.
Why did they choose a woman? Why not a 3-year old cancer patient?
Ok, so leaving aside all of these ridiculous hypotheticals…
If the morality of an act depends upon its consequences, and the consequences depend upon the circumstances, then morality depends upon circumstances. Under this view, there are no moral absolutes, and no universal rules.
I agree that there is something deeply disturbing about the apparent glee with which people seek to find unlikely hypothetical justifications for odious actions. But strictly speaking, they’re right.
I don’t even understand why you need an inane hypothetical here.
Back in the 90s in Rwanda, many stories emerged where sons were forced to rape mothers, uncles raped nieces, etc., with the proviso being that if the rape did not occur, the entire family would be mutilated or killed. This is not just a hypothetical — it happened and probably continues to happen. Whether or not the “rapist” is justified here isn’t for me to decide — as others have pointed out, the real responsibility lies with the bastard holding the gun.
http://westwing.bewarne.com/fourthquestions/4genocide.html
I wonder how those rape-justifying jerkwads would respond to a (preposterous, absurd, unrealistic, hypercontrived) hypothetical that puts them in the ‘hot seat’?
“A time-traveler materializes in front of you and says he must harvest your organs to prevent humanity from going extinct in the year 3100…”
Maybe the best way to frame this is: it’s the dude with the gun doing the raping, of both sides. Or, in case of the theoretical, a wizard with a nuke. And a button. By forcing (using some means) other people to commit sexual acts against their will.
jenny@67:
Even THEN the hypothetical would still suck. If a person were forced to insert an object inside themself at gunpoint, would that person then be said to be raping themself? The rapist is obviously the individual with the gun. And as for the Rwandans in question, as neither individual wanted the encounter, you couldn’t pin the rapist label to either person. Rape isn’t simply a matter of who puts what into whom. If an adult woman forces a young boy into the act, nobody who isn’t a scuzzbag would say the boy raped her. It’s all about consent.
nich,
You’re right. I didn’t even think of it that way. That scenario has two rape victims. All Chippy has done is create a rapist wizard.
Rape is always wrong. If you have to nightmare up disgusting scenarios just to kinda, sorta get within vomiting distance of a justifiable rape, you’ve really disproven whatever it is you thought you were trying to prove.
And this all sprung from a post telling people that, yes, the Food Babe is an idiot, but no, you should really not threaten to rape her? Once again the internet has proved to me that the skeptic who’s a crotch is a real thing. It’s just not outspoken atheists and skeptics, it’s misogynists who’ve embraced every bit of logical fallacy, special pleading, and cherry picking of poorly sourced “evidence” to pretend their hatred of women is “logical”. Well honestly, I’d rather everyone think I believed and advocated for everything the Food Babe says than think that I was represented in any way by those misogynist fuckwads.
@WMDKitty (#48) – Now I’m flipping through your photobucket of responses, which is a nice palate cleansing bit of humor after reading this crap.
My take on nuclear Gandalf is quite simple:
The rape is still morally wrong, the best result you can argue is that responsibility for it transfers to the wizard in question.
“But what if there was only one woman left in the world and we had to repopulate and she didn’t want to …?”
“Well, is this the sort of world where the only men left are the kind who make up all sorts of ridiculous, hypothetical scenarios in order to find a way to create a justified rape?”
“Uh …”
“Yeah. We should probably just let the human race go extinct in that case.”
…
Although the real answer is, “If the woman in question doesn’t want to have sex/make babies, that’s her call, which she’s presumably making based on the evidence available to her. Please read the ending of “Cat’s Cradle”. Thank you. Good night.”
Jennyjfwlucy @67.
I was thinking of stories out of Yugoslavia.
“But what if there was only one woman left in the world and we had to repopulate and she didn’t want to …?”
Masturbate into a cup and hand it to her. No raping necessary.
As others have pointed out, if she doesn’t want the entire human race to be descended from you, then clearly humanity already passed the point of no return.
What I don’t get is WHY it would be the moral thing to do to bring a child into a world that has obviously gone to such shit? I mean so moral that you’d violate another human being to bring it about? In fact in order for this world to continue you would either have to impregnate her again so there is something for fictional baby to breed with OR you’d have to breed with your own children. So you want to force a woman to have sex in order to bring a child into a horrible world where the only way to propagate humanity is to commit incest over and over and over again? The first few generations would face horrendous obstacles to continued survival. I think by far the more humane thing would be to simply let humanity come to its natural end, or at least a helluva lot more humane than raping another human.
And it’s not like the darn planet wouldn’t presumably still teem with non-human life. Again, if you have to invent nightmarish post-apocalyptic scenarios to maybe justify just one single rape…yeah.
I find these sorts of hypotheticals quite useful… the people who pose them are quite likely to be rapists and worth avoiding. So, great utility there for avoiding rapists.
For investigating morality and ethics as they relate to rape? Not so much.
If I were one of last two people on Earth, and we were both interested in each other, I’d make pretty sure we use protection. I don’t understand how people can put survival of our species over suffering of people.
Consciousness Razor @#46:
I’m saying your argument, such as it is, would hold just as well for them, as it would for a lot of other things.
No, and I explained why that’s wrong. Physics makes testable predictions.* The argument doesn’t apply because physics, unlike moral philosophy does not appear to me to be worth abandoning. Be a little honest, will you?
(* see? A statement of what appears to me to be fact)
And they are, at the same time, wrong. Because if morality depends on circumstances, impossible circumstances lead to invalid morality.
The wizard/nuclear scenario is an absurd thought experiment. There is no situation in the real world where raping a woman would be the only way to prevent her from ‘setting off a nuke’. Also, what in the hell does the wizard do in this scenario? Is the raping button magical?
There is no such thing as ‘raping defensively’. This is purely a violent “conquering and subduing a ‘dangerous woman’ who ‘deserves’ to be raped because she’s such a threat” fantasy that clearly comes from the fevered, pornographic imagination of an adolescent-brained Dudebro. This kind of thinking imagines rape as just another form of sex, rather than a method of assault and torture, which is precisely what it is and how we should be talking about it.
What if the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns were 2:1 instead of 0:0? WHAT THEN???
drewvogel:
The problem is that if the upper limit of morality is so high you have to conjure wizards and impossible situations in a still failed attempt to reach that upper limit, any realistic application is absolute and universal. The alternative is stupidity. WIZARDS….
So yeah. Strictly speaking they’re still wrong.
Then every leprechaun in the unicorn cavalry would have a spare when they ride into battle against the nuclear-armed wizards.
Duh.
Er… That should be lower limit.
I’d just get on my dragon, take the nuke Between and leave it there.
For certain values of “contains,” yes.
2:1 you say? Hold on…
(Scribbles on napkin…)
Huh. Regrettably, this equation isn’t reducing…
Is there a manatee present? This seems to be the unknown, here. If I knew manatees where greater than 0, this whole thing becomes almost trivial.
And sorta seriously:
Now and then–usually while slightly drunk–I look at stuff like this and feel something akin to pity…
It’s not so much rational. I just have this hope that somehow, someday, we’ll grow beyond this stuff. We’ll look back on the early 21st century (or, you know, one of the 60 or 70 survivors clinking to the slopes of Everest, above the high tide mark, will do so), look back into the archives of the net at stuff like this, and think to ourselves, oh, dear, yes, the nukes+wizards+rape guy… What the hell was that about? Did making oblique excuses for clinging to privileges born of this ancient inegalitarian mess make a lot of peope this silly? (I guess said survivor could check, seeing as they now have the archives of the entire internet over the past millenium on a thumb drive embedded in their actual thumb.)
One of the descendants of wizards+nukes+rape guy has improbably survived, too, in this scenario. She hears this semirhetorical question, and happens to know that yes, it did make a lot of people this silly, nor was it her great uncle’s final embarrassing word on the subject. But she decides against bringing this up.
@Drewvogel #67
This.
The fact that everyone in this thread seems to think that just pointing out that wizards aren’t real proves your case should be a clue that you’re missing something. It feels just like when someone smugly declares that evolution can’t be true because monkeys are still there.
Why do you all think someone uses “wizards” as an example in the first place? Do you really think it’s because they’re trying to produce a realistic example, or show you how it could be realistic? When you think your blindingly obvious observation is knock-down, stop and reconsider.
Has really no one else in this thread taken even the first philosophy 101 course where you should have been exposed to this kind of concept? If you think that making a hypothetical scenario realistic is important, you have already totally missed the point.
You know what? I’m going to go along with that hypothetical.
If you find a wizard — a real honest-to-goodness person who can violate the laws of physics with magical words and the aid of a magic stick — and he says you can either do nothing and this women will set off a nuke, or you can press this button and she will be raped in such a way that prevents her from doing it — well then, in THAT case and THAT case alone, rape is justified.
No other case. It’s repugnant to think of rape as a solution to any other problem other than that which involves a wizard and a woman with (apparently) a nuclear vagina.
There. Someone seriously addressed the awesome serious philosophical exercise. A great question has been answered.
Philosophy 101 sounds so fun!
I find myself getting really angry when I come up against ridiculous hypotheticals, I feel I am just being manipulated there is no way to even engage in rational discussion in such cases. About the only thing that can be learned out of them is that the person who is proposing them not to be trusted and any further discussion will be fruitless. The more implausible they are the more distrust they generate.
uncle frogy
governmentman @94
We know that these philoso-wankers are trying to have a philosophical discussion. The point others have been trying to make is WHY. Why are they trying to come up with some scenario-no matter how outlandish, unrealistic, or downright impossible-that allows them to justify rape? Are they really in that much of a hurry to find a justification for violating another human being? Why is this a worthy undertaking? How does anyone benefit from trying to find a “rape is Ok” card?
No one is missing anything. They’re rejecting the idea that trying to find a justification for rape is a worthwhile thing to do.
That you can’t see this (or refuse to understand it) is worrisome.
Because it has nothing to do with rape as such. See #67.
The point is to get people who want to be moral absolutists about rape and nothing else to stop it. You won’t be moral absolutists in tons of other cases, and you’ll excoriate religious people for doing the same thing. Except about these *shocking* cases, where things are just ALWAYS wrong.
It is ridiculous to talk about why anything is “always” wrong, and admitting that is the first step towards an honest conversation about morality. It’s not about justifying rape. No one is trying to do that. Just like they’re not trying to imply the plausibility of wizards. They’re saying that if you don’t want to be a Kantian, which you don’t, then you need to admit that moral actions and behavior are on a spectrum that has to do with many possible circumstances. The outrageousness of any particular example is just to get you to admit to the fact that there is SOME CONCEIVABLE example.
That you can’t see this, or refuse to understand it, is worrisome.
governmentman@94:
Yes, sometimes constructing an absurd scenario to illustrate a point is perfectly fine. Schrodinger’s Cat and the FSM come to mind. But you might consider that people’s objection isn’t to the absurdity of the fucking scenario but to its fucking purpose.
I am glad to see the manipulation by way of absurdity spelled out so clearly thank you for the clarification. Now why should anyone seriously consider continuing to engage to this kind of speculation? What possible good can come out of it?
uncle frogy
governmentman@99:
JESUS FUCKEDUP CHRIST. Yes, most here will probably concede that there are wild, wacky, crazy scenarios in which omg you have to rapedy rape rape rape the fuck away to save the entire fucking universe from destruction from the goddamn nuke wizardzz. So in that stupid fucking philosophical sense, rape is not absoabsoabsoabsolutelywithvomitontop immoral but what the fuck is the POINT of saying that???? Do you seriously fucking think the entire purpose of the wizard nuke helvetica fucking scenario was purely to have a fucking honest conversation on morality and to just get the moral absolutists to knock it off? If you seriously believe that, you are absolutely the thickest fucking person on the planet. OH SHIT I USED THE WORD ABSOLUTELY!!! CONSTRUCT A CRAZY FUCKING SCENARIO TO GET THE THICKNESS ABSOLUTISTS TO JUST STOP IT!
Look out, she’s got a snuke! And the only thing that can disarm it in time is my magic penis!
Honestly, it’s this second line quoted from the response thread, the one NOT by the rape apologist, that is more weird to me. It sounds like a denial of reality, though obviously not as bad as the wizard rape apologia. Our hands are not as clean as this David Tortos supposes.
We are NOT at the point where our fucking society condemns prison rape universally, or even on a broad scale. As such, we are still basically punishing rapists (and other criminals) with rapes and sexual assaults in our prisons, inflicted by other prisoners or their guards.
Our society jokes about that shit, which happens to huge chunks of the prison population of men and women on the regular. What’s it at, like 1 in 5 men, 1 in 4 women in prison? It’s bad.
There’s still the TV stereotype that pedophiles get specifically raped/attacked in prisons by other prisoners, and it’s usually said with some manic glee that the pedophile is getting back some of what’s owed them. Our TV hero cops threaten that kind of shit to get criminals to turn on each other. Rape is obviously okay with our culture when it happens to “them”.
Same with torture: we regularly throw people into solitary for no fucking reason at all but petty vindictiveness (or our prison guards do it for us, but still). Solitary confinement is torture. We torture the shit out of regular prisoners, not even just our illegal detainees or terror suspects (or whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning). We don’t even call it torture, and it’s a common threat or deterrent to keep prisoners in line. TV depictions…well, fuck, we have so many dark heroes willing to torture their enemies for info, who we consider “good”, it’s frankly embarrassing.
So, I’d agree if this person was saying our society OUGHT not to torture and rape torturers and rapists along with all the other criminals, but unfortunately, saying “our society isn’t okay with raping rapists” is just untrue. We do not have anything like an actual prison culture of “penitence” or “corrections”, despite the names our prison system uses. Our justice system is pretty fucking rotten as it stands, before we even get to the racism of cops and prosecutors and the drug war.
I’d love for society to be so cleansed of rape culture that we could say “never rape, even against rapists”, and a majority of society would agree, and our laws and systems would enforce that ideal. We are so far from that goal.
Well, yes and no. The purpose of these things seems to be to determine if one’s philosophies are absolute or practical. Which is a valid topic. Do the ends justify the means? Morally no but practically yes?
What these absurd either or situations miss is that there is no merit or insight in comparing a pile of X on one side and a completely unrelated Y on another.
I think these scenarios are flawed in that some immoral acts (stealing, murder, calling someone a rude name, hogging the ice cream) can have good results and thus questionable in a moral vs. practical concern. While others (kicking puppies, rape) do not. They are all-loss propositions. Thus there is no scenario where raping or puppy-kicking has a practical good.
But there is utterly *nothing* philosophically interesting or profound in the question.
If that isn’t definitive, philosophical proof that castration is justified, go away and learn how to think.
WithinThisMind #57:
Aside from the responses others have given, including your own, the other problem with that scenario is that it views the woman in question as an object to be utilised, not as a human being with her own moral code, motivations, etc. It is entirely possible that, in that situation, if she was simply informed that she was the last fertile woman on the planet, she might put aside her own preferences and have babies, even though she doesn’t particularly want to. No rape required.
governmentman #99:
I will say that rape is always wrong because that is my experience and the evidence I have seen, in the form of dozens, if not hundreds, of attempts to justify rape that simply have failed to do so. If you can actually come up with any evidence, in the form of a realistic scenario where rape is actually a justifiable act, and explain how and why it is a justifiable act in that scenario, I will change my mind and say that rape is sometimes not wrong. Until I see this, I will continue to say that rape is always wrong.
It is ridiculous to talk about why anything is “always” wrong…
Not if it really is always wrong.
The point is to get people who want to be moral absolutists about rape and nothing else to stop it.
I, for one, an not in that category — there’s plenty of other things I’m a moral absolutist about, for the simple reason that I believe there should be at least some basic standards of morality that are absolute — otherwise what’s the point of having a moral code at all? Seriously, if you think “moral absolutism” (whatever the fuck that even is) is bad, what’s your alternative? Amorality? “Moral relativism?”
It’s not about justifying rape. No one is trying to do that.
Um…they’re inventing scenarios where rape is justified. So yes, they ARE justifying rape. Seriously, are you a friend of “professor” Landsburg?
They’re saying that if you don’t want to be a Kantian, which you don’t, then you need to admit that moral actions and behavior are on a spectrum that has to do with many possible circumstances.
And you really think a wizard and a vagina-mounted nuke is a possible, or remotely probable, circumstance?
The outrageousness of any particular example is just to get you to admit to the fact that there is SOME CONCEIVABLE example.
No, the outrageousness of an example is proof that you cannot justify a particular act in the real world. And that, in turn, proves (or at least very strongly implies) that the act is absolutely wrong for all moral choices made in the real Universe.
Yeah, you see, here’s the thing. “Moral actions and behaviour are on a spectrum”… I have a huge problem with that. Because there is no way that rape is ever “moral”. It might be the least immoral from immoral choices, in which case whoever set the choices would be the morally evil one, but there is no spectrum, anywhere between “morally good” and “morally evil” that has rape on any place other than ‘morally evil’ and no circumstance that can move rape towards ‘morally good’.
One more thing, governmentman: why would anyone want to say anything about rape in such a totally unreal scenario? Could it be to give oneself an excuse to blather on and on about rape without having to listen to any of the people who deal with the issue first-hand, such as victims, friends, counselors, cops, prosecutors, judges, etc.? This isn’t a valid or useful philosophical exercise, it’s nothing more than a bunch of overgrown middle-schoolers saying demeaning shit about women and rape and pretending they’re being intellectual pioneers. And your willingness to go along with it is something I find worrisome. Not to mention disgusting and contemptible.
The reason they’ve chosen “rape a woman” to save the world instead of “mutilate a 6-month old baby” to save the world is because they don’t like hurting babies so they didn’t choose that. But they like rape a little bit, so they wanna talk about rape.
Hush everyone. You and your talk about a maddeningly widespread crime, frequently immensely traumatizing, and emblematic of and deeply entangled with longstanding, wounding, and themselves maddeningly pervasive inequities, a crime which, to this day, in our allegedly enlightened civilizations, continues to receive an odd, tacit sanction, and for which victim blaming remains widespread, to the point that actually reporting it is as likely to aggravate the trauma, as result in any justice… Clearly the important question is: is there a possible situation under which persons attending first year philosophy courses can justify this crime? Yes, let us dwell on these absurd, hilariously awkward-to-construct technicalities, rather than naively and too-absolutely excoriating the crime itself, or the inequities themselves… I mean, clearly, it’s ever so important to leave in this hedge, rather than to say, simply and clearly, for the benefit of so many who still somehow don’t seem to be getting the message at all: that thing people keep excusing, it simply isn’t excusable…
(Actually, this brings up an interesting–if somewhat meta–problem for these hypothetical students of bizarrely contrived justifications: is there a social context in which it isn’t pretty much talking hugely outside the glass/a highly suspect derail likely to bring the wrath of pretty much anyone who gives a shit about the world down upon ye/somehow itself vaguely ethical even to bother with this hypothetical? I mean, I’m talking hypothetically, of course. Yes, your solution may involve wizards, if you feel this helps.)
Yes. The rape with drugs allegations about Bill Cosby are bringing to mind to me the professor who thought the philosophical discussion of unconscious “harm-free” rape was cool to toy with. I’m alarmed that people might take away “gee it didn’t actually hurt her” as a conclusion. Sometimes people act on their beliefs and impose their ideas on others. The jump from hypothetical to actual does happen in many areas. (I’m not to worried about wizards stirring things up, though.)
@111 Saad
Precisely so. The hypothetical is built around the immoral act as a way to promote the justification of an immoral act. As if invoking an impossible scenario (really? wizards?) makes all other real-life rapes somehow less morally repugnant.
Make it about dissecting a baby, and suddenly it’s a different thing. Heck, even make it about vivisection of a dog, and these same hypothetical-generators would probably howl with righteous indignation.
governmentman said it explicitly in 99: it’s about proving that morality is basically a spektrum, and that individual and/or collective circumstance determine the morality of an action. In other words, there ARE scenarios where rape would be morally good, we just have to think hard enough and be ridiculous enough in our hypotheticals to tease out that one time and place. Then we can look at all of these “shades of grey” with regards to rape and see how much of a moral spectrum rape really is.
Because we don’t want to be Kantian, trust Governmentman on that. And not being Kantian means accepting that there are circumstances where something like rape could be morally good.
What do you mean no such circumstance has been shown yet? Have we involved dragons in our hypotheticals yet? yes, that’s what we need – dragons.
That’s the end-goal, isn’t it. To show what a morally grey area rape can (be made to) be. So maybe rape’s not really-really that bad. No moral absolutes. Right? At least, not that bad all the time. There could be this wizard, see, riding a dragon…
So if, in some post-apocalypse scenario, there was just governmentman and one fertile woman left and he has the noble desire to repopulate the planet then questions arise.
For instance, why does he assume that he is fertile? Anything capable of killing the rest of the species is more likely than not to have affected his gonads.
If he decides to rape the woman then the chances of her becoming pregnant and carrying the pregnancy to term and safely delivering a healthily baby are below 1%. Law and order having completely broken down she’d be perfectly free to kill him at the next convenient moment. End of Plan A.
If, on the other hand, he were to discuss the matter with her and reach an agreement then they could both have lots of fun sex and have several children, each with a much better chance of survival to reproductive age. Make that Plan B – with a much greater hope of success, even with a genetic bottleneck producing its own problems.
So why is he even considering a one-off rape for his hypothetical? Either a complete failure to understand the human reproductive system or, just possibly, he’s an arsehole. Certainly, his attempt to justify rape lacks even that smidgeon of credibility which make more informed hypotheticals useful to us.
woozy
Fixed borkquote.
woozy
I think that’s the most concise framing of it on the thread, not to denigrate all the other folks here who’ve made some very good replies.
withinthismind
This person appears to be working on the unstated premise that the continued existence of the human species is not just a moral good, but the ultimate moral good, neither of which premises I subscribe to. I consider the well-being of individual humans to be a moral good, and protecting the well-being of individual humans will, in most cases, also be the course that leads to the continued existence of the species, but given a situation where that isn’t the case, I’m afraid the future of the species will just have to take care of itself.
Also, as a practical matter, if there’s only one fertile woman left on Earth, humanity’s fucked anyway, whether she devotes her life to having kids or archiving pre-apocalypse literature; that’s just not a sufficient population base.
Based on the fact it is a reaction to the skepchick article, I think the end goal is the only slightly less nauseating notion that it is OK to threaten certain women with rape on the internet because rape isn’t the worstest of possible worsts, especially if those women are in some aspects pretty crappy themselves: “Since Jenny McCarthy is anti-vax, and rape might be ok if it prevents the Helvetica Scenario, I am morally cool with tweeting out a pic that implies I would like to desecrate her corpse.”
Or some shit.
I just want to add to Kevin Kehres up at 95: No.
No. It’s still not justified. That rape is still a morally reprehensible act. And I agree with the commenter earlier and nich in 120 who say that it’s all just one elaborate way of trying to find a justification for wishing rape on someone you don’t like, or who threatens you in some way. But that aside, my answer to the “hypothetical” is the same as PZ’s: it’s still NO.
I mean come one. It’s one step away from saying that a girl who’s being sexually abused should keep her mouth shut and go along with the abuse, because otherwise her abuser would just abuse some other girl, maybe more than one (given that the incarceration rate for sexual predators is something like 4%, that is the likely outcome even if she tells the cops about it, gets believed and is able to, over YEARS of legal battles, retain a full and perfect video-recorder-like memory of exactly what happened with timestamps and everything, and even then he could just come out of jail, the rehabilitation rate for sexual predators, especially of children, is abysmally low), so for the greater good, she should just shut up, take one for the team and let him continue abusing her because in the end, fewer people will be hurt.
When we weigh something like”mandatory rape” against the “greater good”, then it was fine that I was raped because at least the rapist wasn’t doing worse to someone else (someone better, with more use to society or whatever) or more than one someone.
Just no, man.
Marcus Ranum:
Well, honestly, I have no clue why you would assume that everything worthwhile must make “testable predictions,” as if that were the only point of saying or thinking about or doing anything. (And that wasn’t present in the original “argument” — or assertion — that I was responding to anyway.) Lots of things we do are not like that. Plus, it’s hard to know what you might mean by that, if you also sincerely believe this:
It’s interesting and important, but it’s also worth abandoning. Yet there is room for improvement, or at least you’re open to that possibility. And it’s not really worth it to you to abandon it in practice; you just act “as if” you don’t believe in something about it (I know not what), in the same way that you approach free will … whatever that could possibly mean. Back and forth. I mean, maybe that’s all correct somehow, but it’s a very fine line you’re trying to balance on right there. And it isn’t a very clear fine line, which I’d expect if you were really onto something in the neighborhood of being correct; there’s a whole lot of blurriness (for me, at least) when it comes to what you’re even trying to say.
But I’ll leave it at that, because this is getting way off-topic. Thunderdome is waiting for us if there’s any more to be said.
I’ve got an alternate hypothetical: There’s this wizard. He’s programmed all the dudebros’ computers to cause a nuclear war if dudebros type more than 1000 more characters on them. Are we justified in mocking all dudebros so mercilessly that they never approach a keyboard again?
governmentman:
For the record, I am 100% opposed to rape. There is no circumstance under which rape is a moral choice. If that makes me a moral absolutist on the subject of rape… ::shrugs::
Kevin Kehres @114
THIS. Babies? Sacred. Dogs? People care. But the violation of a woman’s* body in a violent and traumatizing manner? Eh, that’s fine, not like anyone’s hurt by it…
*I said “women” because, well… we’re discussing whether or not it’s “okay” to rape a woman to stop a nuke. And most victims of sexual assault (up to and including rape) are female-bodied.
dianne @124 –
The real danger here is that Monsignor Michael Nugent would end up destroying the world and possibly the solar system with his many-thousand-word angry rants that he’s cranking out week after week after week. It seems that no amount of mocking will deter him unfortunately so we might need another approach.
I’ll just leave this here, because it is one of the best things I’ve read about victim blaming, and the socialization of women that leads to the whole “imperfect victim” syndrome, that I’ve read in quite a while.
https://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/another-post-about-rape-3/
I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone anyone who is an absolutist about rape and nothing else. I actually know a many people who are absolutists about many things; many who are practical of all things; and then there are folks like me who call ourselves absolutists but have practical limits but consider the practical limits to be artificial and contrived and not valid for all practical sake of conversation. Yes, I’d support raping a poor woman (and *sheesh* would I apologize for a long, long time afterward) over a wizard destroying the world, but I don’t consider such “inconsistency” to be either moral or justifiable as the lack of choice and options preclude any such label. And such situation or of no practical concern for discussion as it’s a purely artificial scenario.
Also I don’t think anyone criticizes christian for their absolutist attitude. I only criticize them for their dishonest application of attitude.
well, one of the first cases of this sort of stuff I came across was a sci-fi novel (I think it was Cities in Flight by James Blish) that had a scenario who medical research on new-borns was required in a war against aliens who would actually destroy the world.
Then again Evolution by Stephen Baxter has a last-humans-on-earth-and-the-one-female-ain’t-willing scenario in which it seems the human race wasn’t really worth saving in the circumstances.
It’s a variation of any standard argument of “is there any arbitrary point at which you would abandon your morals?”
The essential problem with all of those is that they must include absolute knowledge, or else the test is meaningless. You MUST know that pulling the lever will kill 1 and save 10, and you MUST know that there’s no other choice and you MUST know that there are no further long-term consequences to your actions and you MUST know that the lives are essentially equivalent and ad-nauseum.
In the real world, you stick to your moral and ethical guns and hope for the best, because we don’t have that sort of perfect knowledge. When people try to apply this shit in the real world we get the CIA Torture Program, producing nothing of value and causing great harm.
For the SF fans, Joanna Russ addressed the hypothetical situation of raping the last few women on the planet (not actually Earth) to propagate the species in her novel We Who Are About To…. This was a reply to an earlier story in, I think, Astounding which set up a similar hypothetical and decided that, yes, it is okay. Russ disagreed. Quite strongly.
I couldn’t quite get my head around Russ’ story when I first read it a couple of decades ago, but then I heard about the earlier story and then it clicked into place. I’m not sure I agree completely with the protagonist’s actions but I think I understand them better now.
Russ hasn’t been published much, if at all, since her death, and she’d in danger of suffering one of the fates she outlines in her non-fiction How To Suppress Women’s Writing, that of being remembered for only one book, The Female Man. Which would be a shame, since it seems her writing might have even greater resonance today than it did back then.
About raping to propagate the species: These stories seem to be taking it for granted that propagating the human race is so paramount it doesn’t bear discussion. But if it were indeed so obvious and clear, no-one would refuse to breed for the sake of humanity. And if so, then it wouldn’t be rape.
governmentman, it seems you either did not read or did not understand the comments on this page.
This hypothetical fails for multiple reasons, strongly for this one:
The rape in this absurd and impossible scenario is still not justified even if considered on its own terms. Because the scenario assumes that moral onus of the rape lies in all cases on the person performing the act. This is false assumption. It lies always on the person responsible for the act. In this case, the responsible person is the wizard and the person performing the act upon pressing of the button is only means for the wizard to rape someone by proxy. Because the wizard is capable to bend laws of physics and therefore has other options to deactivate the nuke by definition, the wizard is the real rapist in this scenario.
This hypothetical is not clever, it is just lazy armchair philosophy not even of 101 level, and therefore possibly manifestation Dunning-Krueger effect.
Consider another, not so implausible scenario (trigger warning for text in italics – bullying and rape description):
A bully leader of a teenage gang engage in bullying one boy. They torture him into essential helplessness where he does anything to avoid future torture. Which means he obeys what they tell him. He gives them his lunch on demand, he gives them his money on demand, he drops on his knees and barks like a dog on demand. One day the bully orders him to rape a girl whom the other members of the gang hold so she cannot resist. The subdued boy does not want to do it but obeys for fear of dire consequences.
Who is the rapist in this hypothetical (which, alas, is not so hypothetical at all)? The bully, because there are two rape victims. Both the girl and the bullied boy are used for rape by proxy for the pleasure of the bully.
In conclusion, your allusions to philosophy 101 in topic populated by people much more informed about the topic and better equiped to discuss it than you are imply you are a smarmy idiot.
@ governmentman
If all you’re trying to do is teach a college freshman some basic principles of logic, sure, making a hypothetical scenario realistic is unimportant. Making them unrealistic may actually be good since it can help avoid any kneejerk, emotional responses some might have to realistic scenarios. But rape is not unrealistic, now, is it? Wizards are but rape certainly isn’t. You’d have a job finding a philosophy 101 classroom that doesn’t contain at least one person who at least knows at least one rape survivor so good luck avoiding any emotional reactions. So this hypothetical would be a bad choice even for intro level philosophy.
If, on the other hand, you’re trying to reason about the real world, impossible hypotheticals are at best useless. If you want conclusions that track with reality, you use realistic hypotheticals. It does no good to understand that you’d do X thing you otherwise would never consider in some impossible circumstance. If you have to reach for impossible circumstances to find the point at which you’d consider X, then X, for all practical purposes is still always wrong.
TW for the whole damn topic of rape and other violence.
Seven of Mine has said it first and better, but I am so unimpressed by your philosophy 101 “contribution”, governmentman – you have failed to note that if you want to examine the actual reasoning – if you want to focus on people’s logic and lapses thereof – you need to use an example that nobody normally regards as acceptable in the real world. So you could use, say … roasting human babies to eat in the midst of plenty, or cutting off your own foot or Vengerov’s hands, or shooting your own children and/or parents, or burning a folio edition of Shakespeare or a Rembrandt or something. You know, the kinds of things that generally speaking people tend not to do or approve of.
You can’t use rape in this kind of construction. For very fucking obvious reasons.
And you seriously thought we were quibbling about the wizard? Doesn’t say much for your reading comprehension, it really doesn’t.
But just you go ahead, dear, and pretend that you can legitimately take as your example behaviour so common that most people have either experienced/perpetrated it or know someone who has (they just might not have told you … or if they have you might not have noticed. Ever joke with your pals about spiking the punch, all that kind of thing? Hilarious, isn’t it?)
Just to pick apart this ‘thought experiment’ pretension:
Why would you trust the wizard? If the wizard is a wizard then he presumably has powers to do things that you can’t do, including stopping the nuke without raping the woman. And what if he’s lying, that there is no nuke but pressing that button will still cause the woman to be assaulted? In every hypothetical case in which there is an evil, coercive power threatening to do or not do something based on your ‘choice’ in the given scenario that they have set up for you, the right ethical choice is to do nothing, because you can’t freakin’ trust the evil power either way.
Here’s the thought experiment in another version, sans nukes, wizards, or person-to-be-raped-as-threat:
Evil Person kidnaps you and your child, brings you to a location where there is a man or woman held captive and restrained in a room. Evil Person tells you that they will kill your child if you don’t go into the room and rape the man/woman, but if you do, you and your child will be released unharmed. What to do? Well, the truth is that you can’t trust the Evil Person to honour their promise, so hypothetical scenarios like this fall apart at this point. But for the sake of the thought experiment, the question is whether you should do something horrible that harms another person to save your child from harm. Let’s say you do rape the man/woman and the Evil Person honours their promise: Raping someone is still wrong, still not ‘okay’. Doing something for a good reason doesn’t make the act itself ‘okay’. The ethics in this scenario are complicated: The parent who rapes the man/woman in hopes of freeing their child and themself is acting under duress and is not the agent of the rape, but rather is being used as a weapon by the Evil Person, and their experience of being coerced to rape makes them a victim of the rape. However, the experience of the man/woman being raped is the same regardless of whether the person doing the raping is being coerced or not, so it’s not ‘okay’ to rape.
If you have to reach for impossible circumstances to find the point at which you’d consider X, then X, for all practical purposes is still always wrong.
This, exactly.
The end does not justify the means.
Person A: “So what’s your philosophy? Are you an absolutist/idealist or a practicalist that believes things in circumstance?”
Person B: “I guess I’m an absolutist. I think some things are always wrong.”
Person A:”Killing?”
Person B: “Always wrong.”
Person A:”What if there’s a killer slashing through a crowd and coming at you and the only way to stop him is to kill him.”
Person B:”Well, that’s a bit extreme but that’d be self-defense and acceptable but it’s a horrible choice and last result. So I think I can accept that but still say I’m opposed to killing.”
Person A:”Okay, fair enough. What about rape?”
Person B:”Always wrong.”
Person A:”What if there’s a wizard with a nuke who will destroy huge sections of the population unless you rape someone.”
Person B:”Well, that’s ridiculous.”
Person A:”Answer the question! Rape or millions are dead. Which is it?”
Person B: “Well, if those are the only two options, I can’t let millions die so ,.. gee…”
Person A;”HA! YOU ADMIT IT! You support rape and there are no absolutes! CHECKMATE!!”
Somehow, I don’t feel this discussion is being as objective as it could be.
I’m reminded why I stopped reading Dominic Deegan.
Thank you for saying something succinctly that I’ve been thinking of how to articulate.
Doing something terrible for a good reason doesn’t absolve you of guilt – you’ve still performed a bad act.
Take the Fat Man and the Trolley example – it’s completely absurd, but fine, let’s take the hypothetical at face value. You kill an innocent person to save ten.
You and those ten people owe the slain innocent – nay, the sacrifice is what he is at that point. You don’t get a free pass just because it was the lesser of two evils.
Zimmerle @ 142.
And the question may arise then if you should do yourself in, if you were the active agent.
1) having a philosophical discussion about whether there might be situations where rape is okay is gross and inappropriate given the actual situation in the real world with regard to rape and rape culture.
2) if the scenarios considered are not merely unlikely but are known to be impossible for non-philosturbating values of “impossible” there IS no point.
Seconded. What am I to conclude, when someone has to resort to literal fucking magic to try and construct a refutation of a general moral principle, except that they have tacitly admitted it to unassailable as applied in the real world, but have an emotional investment in the counter position?
Justice demands recompense to someone – their family if possible, society if nothing else. I don’t think a life pays for a life, but if I was compelled by circumstance to perform such an act I would gladly accept an appropriate penance.
Not that I’d ever do such a thing in real life, it would be ludicrously unethical to even try – that’s why these are stupid hypotheticals, because they demand hypothetical reasoning that can’t exist in the real world.
This reminds me of the Star Trek:TNG episode “Skin of Evil”. I think Data’s response to Armus is a great summation of these hypothetical situations: the control over actions is no longer in the observer’s control as more contrived conditions direct the situation, unreal as it already is, in a means to get the thinker into a position they would otherwise feel disagreeable. Beverly Crusher’s response (to end her own life rather than choose to harm another) is pretty much the only moral course of action in many of them. It wasn’t my inaction that caused those deaths, it was the person posing the question.
Ugh, these bullshit hypotheticals…
Okay, multiple responses:
1) It’s verrrry interesting that these horror-justifying assholes always have a nuke in their example. The torture victim knows where there is a nuke or the woman to be raped has a nuke. We need to stop the nuke. Why is it interesting? Because these assholes inevitably turn out to be the same jingoistic assholes who try and handwave away the damage and violence America committed in the two and only two times nuclear weapons were used on people. So yeah, these fuckers not only care about the situation beyond its utility in getting people to support whatever monstrous thing they want to jutify, but they don’t even care about the supposed consequence other than its ability to generate fear in the types of people who were adults in the 50s-80s and thus have a knee-jerk fear response to the very concept of nuclear annihilation.
2) I kind of “love” these clean, dissociated thought experiments in Philosophy, because by trying to avoid the “emotions” of a particular act, what they really do is sanitize and prevent any real calculus of the consequences, any real informed thought of what the cost is for the supposed horrible action they’re “deeply thinking about”. Which may be why so often, the arguments circle around coming up with implausible scenarios to do sanitized versions of horrible things in order to stick it to other philosophers rather than anything that has any practical applicability.
So like the bus scenario. What’s the minutes after the deed is done and the adrenaline dies down and the relief of saving has faded? How do you struggle with the intimate physical knowledge of having just murdered a man in cold-blood, the PTSD, the night terrors, the crippling shame. How do the passengers manage the survivor’s guilt.
The douchlosophers say not to focus on all that (aka, not to focus on the real impact of doing an immoral act or having to make a terrible choice) in order to keep it “clean” and “logical” and thus entirely poisoned by a frame of mind usually possessed by someone with intense privileged who hasn’t had to make the choice over whether they die or someone else does. Where they haven’t had to watch a man die in front of them.
Where one can justify the unjustifiable because it becomes just numbers, disassociated from names and history, from friends and families who loved them and miss them and want to see them again. From all the small things they add to the world. (For a comedic take on the blind spot, there’s the bonus scenes of Austin Powers where they follow up on the henchmen who were killed and the impact on friends and family).
And the sick part of that is this form of “moral philosophizing” actually makes the “philosopher” a worse person because dehumanizing a person to numbers, to situations and so on is the first step to justifying horrible acts and committing them. There’s a reason our soldiers are trained to view enemy soldiers as inhuman or to perform on muscle memory and that reason is because it is a monstrous thing to take another’s life. It’s why propaganda exists and it’s part and parcel of how the cop is trained to view the young black man as a thug or the serial killer learns from society that the sex worker is not a person, merely a public pound of flesh.
By avoiding “emotional contamination”, the “philosopher” also becomes evil in avoiding the central tenet of morality, which is empathy. To understand the true impact of an action, you must put yourself in the shoes of the person(s) affected by it and the way this act will haunt them. That is the real life legacy of such an action and if you can divorce yourself from that, you can justify anything, because the person becomes something inhuman and not worthy of consideration beyond how it inconveniences the narrative the douchey white rich asshole is trying to justify in a magical not-world that has no connection with reality.
3) That last sentence. Specifically this hypothetical la-la land setting for all these hypotheticals instead of pulling from real life scenarios and ways that human beings justify their actions when they know they will impact another person. And there’s several aspects to that:
3A) The problem of if the world presented doesn’t resemble the world we live in, what’s the point? Yes, it’s possible to imagine a world where a Purple Leprechaun named Seamus McGee gives direct orders to his army of ninjas to keep the stars spinning in the sky and in such a situation it may be important to consider Seamus and his ninjas when contemplating the cosmos, but here on Earth, there is no Seamus and so this hypothetical has little relevance other than an illustration of how we think and how we can fantasize.
It’s like the deists who are like “oh, in my hypothetical world, what if God had no measurable impact, but just floated around and had no orders, wouldn’t he not be disproved by everything we know about the natural world” when the reality of that is that a God with so little impact would have equally little relevance. A God who could not communicate his will, affect material things, or control any aspect of the universe beyond conforming to natural laws is meaningless to contemplate because it will never impact our life in any real way.
Similarly, a rape scenario like that above or the train scenario where an innocent needs to be killed to save a dozen or the dirty bomb scenario don’t actually occur and are statistically impossible to occur, so untangling the ethical knot has no real relevance in anyone’s life other than making the speculator feel “deep” by thinking about “EXTREME” examples, dude!
Which leads to:
3B) There’s better real examples of what people have to face. Ones that do have an impact and are socially important to think about and explore. We should be considering the horror of a choice of a mother between feeding herself or feeding her child and the heartbreak that causes. We should consider the fallout of wars for those who live in warzones when we contemplate starting another one because the fucked up in our society want to masturbate to falling bombs. We should consider the amount of shit we would take personally in tragedy before we would want to rip shit up and break the social order before we condemn those who’ve been pushed to their limit. We should consider what exactly shapes the moment in which we couldn’t support our country, before we blindingly devote ourselves to patriotism. And yes, we should actually look at the excuses people offer for why they rape or abuse and how people try and justify the actions or demonize the victims, because it should make us look at our own situations and what unconscious bad morality we’ve inherited from society.
There’s value in looking at real situations and learning real empathy for those who suffer before thinking that having to learn a new pronoun is somehow worse than living with violence and dysphoria or having to choose whether to relive painful Hell forever or escape into the welcome embrace of a drug for a moment or two makes someone “weak” or “an unperson”.
But instead, the douchelosophers don’t want to focus on the real world and find it messy, because it’s hard to construct a clean fantasy where the douche can do what he wants with no consequences and thus avoids the most useful lesson in ethics, which is that there’s a real person at the end of the chain. In real life, a man thrown off a train leaves behind a swath of broken PTSD ridden people in his wake and a woman raped to end a bomb, leaves perpetrator and survivor haunted and the survivor with one hell of a motivation to hate the perpetrator personally and wish them death for all the trauma they have been given. And the assholes making these hypotheticals could learn something from that if they would just be willing to pull their heads out of their asses and listen to someone who has actually experienced trauma in their life on what these words actually mean in reality.
But they won’t because…
3C) These assholes are moral tourists. I mean, let’s be frank, the majority of college students are rich white people, those who haven’t been broken and bloodied in their teens, because it’s really hard to limp up to that level without a large amount of supprt network, especially now that college has been priced far beyond what all but the most wealthy are able to pay. As such, the average philosophy class is going to be filled with the more privileged in society on average. Not always, but often.
And one thing these douche-bro “philosophers” have in common is that they are almost always cis white het dudes with little to no history of genuine trauma. They usually have not directly experienced rape or domestic violence and certainly are very rarely coming from backgrounds where they really have had to choose between saving themselves and at least trying to save another person or having to make desperate choices surrounding base survival needs.
So the other big reasons there is a resistance to making these examples “real” and “life-like” is because that would actually cause the person to experience some small level of what experiences are like for the other and the douchelosopher is not interested in that. The douchelosopher thinking “deeply” of suffering does not want to actually dive into the sea of suffering and actually subject themselves to an iota of what that genuinely feels like.
He instead wants to get credit for thinking about something horrible and thinking about it in the least involved and most detached way in order to justify going through life that way. To going through life turning a blind eye to real suffering people in favor of the clean narrative you have formed in your head, where ignorance is rewarded for not being subjected to bias and where you never ever have to really dip into genuine suffering on any real level or the sorts of terrible choices real terrible people and real terrible systems force on us. Like the choice given to black men of either subjecting themselves obsequiously to authority that views it as inhuman and accept injustice meekly or die.
Instead we get wizards with magic rape powers.
Because that is a world where one doesn’t need to think of the rape survivor unable to hug their romantic partner because it causes full body horror or where they wake up in the middle of the night in a blind panic.
And can instead think of how there’s a way their decision to rape another person is justified because that’s what their sick little moral system really wants to do. And if its justified somehow then it couldn’t be so bad when they do it, right?
So yeah, fuck these guys and their bullshit pretensions to “deep” thought.
Cerberus:
That was well worth the read. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Worse than meaningless. It requires an additional assumption that adds no explanatory power, insofar as a god that does not interact with the universe is literally and categorically indistinguishable from one that does not exist at all.
whoa, flashback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgol5_00prc
funny, I’ve never met someone whose only moral absolutism involved rape.
have you?
fuck off, you disingenuous asswipe.
Tour de force, Cerberus, tour de force.
Philosophy 10-fucking-1, being all edgy and wunderkind-y and shit:
Question: WHY? Tell me in 140 characters or less WHY precisely being absolutist about rape is a Bad Thing™.
If not being willing to entertain some scenario (apart from something like the ludicrous Nuclear Gandalf Hypothetical) where rape is the right thing to do, then fine. I’m a moral absolutist regarding rape. I’m cool with that. I’m cool with being completely opposed to even hypothetically discussing whether it could ever be okay to violate someone.
As for hypotheticals: I think they can be very valuable and very entertaining – one of my favourite shows as a lad was Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals. Robertson, a barrister & QC, would convene a panel of athletes, politicans, journos etc, construct very plausible national or international political/public interest situations, assign relevant roles to all present and take them through the ensuing legal & ethical landmines, asking them to make their own decisions and generally acting rather like some diabolical dungeon master. But Robertson’s situations all had a ring of plausibility, which I think is crucial if your hypothetical is to have any value.
I think if you have to concoct a hypothetical as far-fetched as Nuclear Gandalf in order to “just get people to think, maaaaaaaaan” about whether rape can ever be morally justified, you’ve already conceded that it never can be and thus your hypothetical is a two-fisted wank – and you should probably stop talking, lest people get the idea that you’ve already justified rape to yourself on some level.
Oh addendum on the whole these arguments breed worse behavior thing, you’ll notice the reason we always get these monstrous situations that justify monstrous actions is because they want to frame a monstrous thing in a way that it either becomes necessary and justified or downright heroic. You kill a person and you save a train. You torture a person and you save a building. You rape a person and it saves an entire city.
Suddenly its not bad and wrong to do this action, but downright praiseworthy, so long as the victim is bad enough.
Which basically sets up not a system of noticing that the action is bad, but rather setting up a mental pattern of deciding that people are “bad” enough to deserve it. Hell, we see this play out in horrible ways all the time, whether it be military propaganda painting the enemy as “vermin who hate our way of life” so we don’t feel bad about bombing them or its media demonization of black victims of white hate crime violence so we can justify the murder of literal children, this course of thought becomes about finding a way to demonize the hated figure enough that any action is justified against them, no matter how ill supported.
And it follows into other BS arguments. Like with torture, how the ticking time bomb scenario didn’t predate us only ever using this technique when there literally was no other way, but rather being used all the damn time with us just defining down what a “ticking time bomb” scenario was until we could justify using it against people who shared a guy’s name or who might have family who may know information about something related to what we were interested in or the guy was ornery and disrespectful.
And of course we see it in how ill treatment of prisoners is justified, because “they did something wrong to deserve it” and we see it in the routine demonization of non-powerful victims.
And we see it in rape and domestic violence. The abuser using this logic just expands what “bad person” is and voila the person they want to victimize now fits that bill. Oh, she deserved to be hit because she cheated on me. She deserved to be raped because she teased me and refused to fuck me. She friendzoned me or was misandrist or some other made up thing, and that’s worse than Hitler and deserves death. Oh, she didn’t tremble respectfully enough or burnt the dinner or made me angry. Oh, she dared be a lesbian or a trans* person and that’s a crime against God.
Whatever the excuse for a crime, the punishment is set. It’s why we see all the Gamergate assholes weaving epic fantasies about the ill behavior of the people they’ve decided to target. Because if they can somehow concoct a way in which they are morally terrible and doing harm, then that’ll somehow justify horrible actions against them per this logic fail.
Or why hate groups trying to rile up or continue violence against queer groups try and pretend that the queer individuals are committing some grand crime against God and all religious people everywhere. Because if these people are doing something so fundamentally wrong, then any “lesser” evil perpetuated against them is justified in countering this evil.
So yeah, not only wrong and morally bankrupt philosophizing but downright dangerous for our society too.
And no points that this is the point. That this wizard situation is set so that there could be some point as which rape is justified and to be heralded so that it merely becomes a function of proving that your target is some vile creature deserving of it.
Re: Raping women is ok if they are the last of the endangered human race.
What really annoys me about that argument is the idea that the woman/women don’t want to have children or save the species. That women are somehow the enemy and they have to be forced to conceive and carry. Why are women NEVER co-collaborators in the goal of saving the species? The majority of women I know want to have children, and the majority of women I know choose to have regular, consensual sex with the person of their choice, with or without the goal of conception.
@Hank_Says #154 – I loved those hypotheticals. I was allowed to stay up to watch them. (I don’t remember what time they aired, but I remember them being close to bed-time) Thank you for reminding me.
Ichthyic @151
Fuck. Yeah.
Chapeau, Cerberus. Thank you.
loopyj #137:
It’s kinda even simpler than just “you can’t trust the villain.” Somehow in these scenarios the villain gets stripped of all agency and suddenly all moral responsibility is thrust on the subject. But why? Sure you can write the villain off as evil, but that’s kinda the point. Moral questions are all about good or evil and right and wrong. So rape doesn’t become justified in the situation because the rape is the villain’s decision, and the situation they put the subject in is in no way justified. Like you said, the subject is also being raped in that scenario. This is why all scenarios that try to show rape as morally relative fail. Rape is superflous. In order for rape to “save the day” a third party must have set it up. And you can’t “justify” setting up a scenario that makes rape “save the day”.
The wizard nuke scenario in the post is especially poorly conceived.
The subject isn’t actually raping… they’re pressing a button that somehow starts the raping. So the moral question isn’t even about justifying rape, it’s justifying pressing a button to make rape happen. That implies a 4th party that does the actual raping. Are they choosing to rape? Are they mindless? How does “raped in such a way that prevents her from doing it” even work? Wouldn’t there be countless of other ways to prevent her from doing it? This is what I meant about rape being superfluous. That just makes no sense. And why is a wizard setting anything up with buttons? That sounds like a device. Shouldn’t it be like, “if you say a magic word” or something magicy. Too cross genre-y.
[Radioactive Elephant @159
Just need to clarify: I didn’t say that the person coerced into raping is being raped, but that they are a victim of the rape. Being forced to hurt another person, or even just watch another person being harmed, carries with it a special kind of trauma (and if it doesn’t, then the person being forced is a sociopath).]
The way I read the stupid wizard/nuke/magic raping button scenario was the pushing of the magic button wouldn’t require another person to do the raping, but rather result in some inanimate object penetrating the nuke-planning woman in some way that would prevent her from setting off the nukes, because in the cartoon-sexual-violence-mind of the scenario-builder, the inanimate raping object couldn’t simply knock her over the head with whatever it was going to penetrate her, because ONLY RAPE CAN SATISFY.
And on the subject of forcing the last women on Earth to procreate in order to ‘save the species’: Save it for what? A world in which half the species rape the other half and force them to give birth until the population is big enough that the men in charge decide it’s time to stop raping?
Absolute morality isn’t a problem for atheism. All we have to ask ourselves is what actions, behaviors, attitudes, etc. are likely to produce the sort of world we would like to live in. I think that absolute bodily autonomy ought to be a given.
Loopyj #160:
I’d say they are. If the ultimatum was to give the “evil person” oral sex or else they’d kill the child, I don’t think you’d have trouble saying the subject was raped. In your scenario, from a consent point of view, there is little difference, sure they have the added knowledge the other individual isn’t consenting either, but they aren’t consenting any more than in the other.
governmentman, #99
An honest conversation about morality does not involve a wizard, a nuke and rape.
This isn’t an exercise in philosophy or morality. This is an exercise in rape apologia.
That you can’t see this, or refuse to understand it, is worrisome, you dumb shit.
If you need to fundamentally change the parametres of reality in order to set up a scenario in which a certain action (rape, torture) is suddenly morally OK you’re demonstrating quite effectively that in this world and this reality that action is always wrong.
I can set up a realistic scenario in which it is absolutely permissible for me to kill somebody. To steal. To burn something down. To not give help. Even to go to war. That’s why those things are not moral absolutes.
Cerberus
To the godsdamn fucking coreof the problem as usually.
Saad @163
This.
And another addendum to my rant, I have special loathing for the whole search to make rape honorable and heroic, not just because that is a vile philosophy, but also because three of the identities I belong to are deliberately targeted for that type of heroic rape. By that I mean, the justification of rape as being for our own good and to help us out and totally justified in getting us to knock off this silly delusion and become “normal” again. And by that I mean corrective rape and those who regularly justify its use against lesbians, trans* people, and asexuals. Raping us to “fix” us.
Again, this isn’t an empty clean humanless null set, it’s a despicable thought “experiment” that has real life consequences for marginalized and oppressed groups.
What’s ridiculous is having to invent from whole cloth outlandish fictional scenarios in order to spur your “honest conversation.” Like I said upthread, hypotheticals should have one foot in plausibility if we’re to take them seriously. “There’s this wizard, right -” is beanbag philosophy and you do yourself and your humanity a disservice by engaging in it to find a justification for rape.
I believe that some things will always be wrong, but that they can occasionally be justified, such as the big one: killing another human. Almost everybody could conceive of a self-defence scenario where killing their assailant to protect themselves or someone else would be justifiable (or even killing large numbers of people to defend against an invading force). The key word is “justifiable”, which is not equal to “not wrong”.
But imagining such a situation is easy, as history is replete with examples of both justifiable homicide and defence against conquerors. A thought experiment exploring the morality of justifiably killing other humans is so trivially easy to set up you could probably search last week’s newspaper for an example.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an example of rape in self-defence though. As creative beings with a ton of murderous history behind us, it’s easy to project ourselves into a life-threatening situation, stick a knife into a serial killer and tell ourselves we did the right thing or, more accurately, that we did the understandable and justifiable thing. But projecting ourselves into some fantastical scenario where raping someone will save the world takes a little more creativity than can be justified.
Even real-world examples of coerced or forced rape remove responsibility from you anyway. As mentioned upthread, someone forcing you at gunpoint to rape a person to prevent the murder of someone else places the moral responsibility on the gunman for creating a life-threatening situation where your only possible defence (of your life or anyone else’s) is cooperation.
In short, the whole Nuclear Gandalf scenario is a gratuitous two-fisted wank and smacks of an attempt to appear edgy in a post-lecture discussion group.
governmentman
I think what gman is getting at is the fundies who say “What is moral is what God says is moral; if God said disemboweling infants and masturbating into their entrails was moral than it would be moral”. We (and gman make huge errors of overclassification; we are not all moral relativists and we have varying degrees of “absolutism” vs. practicality– and, yes, even moral relativists can believe in some things absolutely) disagree with this.
But we don’t disagree with this because it is an absolute. We disagree because it is a bad authority. When we say puppy-kicking is always wrong (I’m sorry– I can only go so far being glib about rape without getting neauseous so for every future post I do on this thread I’m going to talk about puppy-kicking instead) we aren’t saying that there is an absolute authority declaring puppy-kicking is by definition never good. We are saying puppy-kicking has never been a positive good and it’s inconceivable that it ever would be. Artificial comparison puppy-kicking vs. anhililation of every planet in the galaxy because of wizard is not conceivable.
Now, why do I say puppy-kicking will never be a positive good? Because it is in every aspect of it’s definition a violation of a person’s well-being. In any morality based on people’s well-being it has no good.
(Sorry, if puppy-kicking seems to be trivializing. But this entire discussion is an abstract trivialization and … well… I apologize, if I offend anyone.)
RE: “You just want to justify rape.”
This whole conversation is about whether things we all admit are horrible can nevertheless be justified when contrasted with the possibility of things that are even more horrible. OF COURSE I’m going to be ostensibly trying to justify horrible things. That is literally the conversation. I have said directly that we could just as easily substitute “puppy-kicking” or anything at all that someone feels like saying is “always” wrong, and the points are always the same.
Certainly I can’t imagine any realistic scenario in which rape is justified. I’m sure that there has never throughout history been a moral instance of rape. It should certainly always be illegal and will always be immoral in all circumstances that all humans will ever encounter. None of this was ever in dispute. If at this point you find yourself saying “then why talk about it?” you are still missing the point.
The way in which this is so wrong is much of my point. Wizard-nuke-rape is the kind of thing that comes up all the time in serious philosophy because everyone involved in those conversations already knows what I am trying to explain. There is simply no way to be “edgy” in philosophy, by design.
governmentman
To me that sounds more like an argument against “serious philosophy” than against the commenters on this blog.
Then every single thing can be justified when contrasted with such a bullshit “possibility”, rendering this whole “philosophical exercise” utterly meaningless.
Think about what you’re saying. If every single morally reprehensible action can be shown to be justifiable by introducing wizards (and it can), what the hell is the point of such a conversation?
Also, there’s a problem with that dumbass’s scenario in the first place. The rape isn’t being committed by the person having sex with the woman. The rape is being committed by the wizard. If there’s a gun to your head telling you to have sex with an unwilling person, you’re not the rapist. You have a gun to your head.
And yeah, what Giliell, said. If things of this nature are happening “all the time” in serious philosophy (and I highly doubt they are), then philosophy fucking sucks.
You just don’t get it, do you.
governmentman, if you want to logic (or even to logic-chop), you have to pick an example which is not already considered perfectly acceptable behaviour by a significant proportion of the population. Sheesh.
(and don’t bother pretending that there is not a very considerable proportion of the population – probably a majority in many parts of the world – who think rape is just fine and dandy. They might not all say so openly, in as many words, of course. But seriously, just look at the reaction to Steubenville – just for one example. Look at the reaction to the vast majority of cases that even make it as far as the legal system in the first place. A great many people, predictably, instantly and always, criticise the behaviour of the victim. They don’t criticise the behaviour of the rapist. They actually don’t have any criticism to make of the rapist acquaintance/relative/party-goer/etc. etc. etc. They think rape is fine – they just dress that up a little in talk about the victim’s “irresponsibility” “provocation” “misunderstanding”. Lots of people think it’s fine to rape someone who is LGBT. Lots of people think it’s perfectly fine to rape someone who is drunk or drugged, and quite happily pour extra-strong drinks for this express purpose. Lots of people – maybe most people – think its absolutely fine to rape someone the rapist is living with/going out with/married to.)
Pick. A. Usable. Example. for your precious philo 101. Rape does not work as an example in this context.
Goodness, anyone would think you didn’t bother to read the thread.
governmentman #168:
Quite frankly, this makes ‘serious philosophy’ sound like a totally pointless, pseudo-intellectual wankfest totally divorced from reality.
This whole conversation is about whether things we all admit are horrible can nevertheless be justified when contrasted with the possibility of things that are even more horrible.
Like we keep on saying, you’re making up outlandish fantasies tailor-made to encourage people to think that rape is justified; and to undermine people’s certainty in a basic moral principle. THAT’S JUSTIFYING RAPE. I really don’t know how to put it any more simply.
The way in which this is so wrong is much of my point. Wizard-nuke-rape is the kind of thing that comes up all the time in serious philosophy because everyone involved in those conversations already knows what I am trying to explain.
First, if that’s true (citation required), then “serious philosophy” is nothing but stupid self-important mind-wankery, and a disgraceful waste of college resources and students’ precious time.
Second, if everyone involved in those conversations already knows what you’re trying to explain, then why do you have to explain it? Do they already know because you keep on doing the same sort of stupid-assed mind-wankery over and over again, pretending you’re teaching something?
And third, if it’s really so important for you to blather on and on about rape, as opposed to kicking puppies or mutilating babies, why don’t you have a conversation about rape that includes people who deal with that crime directly in the real world?
Goodness, anyone would think you didn’t bother to read the thread.
Empiricism?! Is that all you have to offer?
If at this point you find yourself saying “then why talk about it?” you are still missing the point.
So what, exactly is your “point?” It looks to me like the only “point” of such ignorant-assed “thought” “exercises” is to create a self-centered bubble-verse where you’re the only one who “gets” the “point” and everyone else — including people who are actually affected by the crime in question — can be sneered at from a safe distance.
Seriously, governmentman, you’re really coming off as a juvenile little shit pretending to be a grownup philosopher. How you can embarrass yourself so thoroughly while pretending you’re the smartest guy in the room is beyond me.
And on the subject of forcing the last women on Earth to procreate in order to ‘save the species’…
One woman would not be enough to carry on the species anyway, so raping her would not be justifiable in any case. Just let her have sex with whoever she wants, if anyone, and at least the species can die off with a little dignity.
governmentman
Philosophy 102 is not really “serious philosophy”.
government man @168
Huh… I don’t think there’s a sentence that more encapsulates the central problem of douchelosophy (not to be confused with philosophy as a whole). And that is that this particular subset of philosophy consists of a bunch of white privileged assholes blowing smoke up their own asses in order to aggrandize themselves for being coldly logical (to the point where they don’t even see edgy, because they have nerves of steel, maaaaan) by openly ignoring and erasing any real life applications or responses from their arguments.
If rape was a fish… or more importantly, if rape was a word divorced from the actual action, divorced from the pain of having actually experienced the crime, divorced from the flashbacks or the nasty triggers that can result from dwelling on it, then yes, it wouldn’t be “edgy” to contemplate.
And that’s the central problem. Douchelosophers don’t want to think or examine their own biases. They want to feel superior to people who have real, visceral, practical knowledge about the stuff they blather about by dismissing that as “distracting” from the wholly clinical examination of what it means to be a man, maaaaaan and do so in a way that communicates strongly that said people are unwanted in the entire program.
Oh, do you have real PTSD from having to kill a person to survive in a horribly abandoned community? Do you not find rape an innocuous and emotionless topic for cold meaningless pontificating? Do you feel uncomfortable being surrounded by a bunch of “logic-obsessed” dumb white guys patting themselves on the back because they don’t think a conversation that reduces rape to a meaningless word exercise is edgy or notable?
Well, fuck you then. Leave us be so we can continue to spin in circles and gain nothing of use from our philosophy classes.
And yeah, the rest of this post demonstrates this nicely as so many others have pointed out. The reality is not that rape is universally understood to be a bad thing. Heck, it’s not even universally understood to be the thing it is. Nor does that post show any understanding of what it means to be raped or what the emotional consequences of that are nor the “moral arguments” that often go into play in justifying it or legalizing it.
And that’s where this is most fucked up, because the type of thought experiments or careful methodology of philosophy could become of use if the douchelosophers cared. An examination of what each person means when they talk about consent. Having each person define consent for themselves and actually consider the ramifications of bodily autonomy and how it is violated in the real world. There is room for real useful results and personal growths.
But that might make douchelosophers sad, so instead it gets reduced to thought experiments of no real world relevance that nonetheless wants the “shock” value of borrowing the label of genuine real world ills.
You know, I think the same thing about someone asking me if I would redirect a train from one set of rails with 5 people on it to another set with 1 person on it. No, I find the third option, I switch the track half-way and DERAIL THE TRAIN!
There’s a third option, you can lock the wizard in a prison made of magic-blocking stone. Why can’t I? The scenario is ridiculous on the face of it already.
Actually, there was an Outer Limits episode with this premise (pre-September 11th). In it, someone found a way to make a fusion bomb from everyday materials, demonstrated that, and threatened to set off a second one unless some very specific people he named were murdered by the US government on television. They did it, and kept doing it until they were able to find them.
So where’s that movie? It’s easy to write the movie where you torture the bad guys for information, but how about the movie where Jack Bower has to torture innocent people on national television in accordance with the bad guy’s wishes, just to buy enough time to find them? Well, Fox News? What’s your position on that?
Even if one accepts that some greater good can come out of doing something horrible whether it’s rape, torture or whatever that doesn’t magically make the horrible thing no longer horrible. Whoever does the horrible thing is still on the hook for the horrible thing. If you start excusing the inexcusable because of exigent circumstances people come out of the woodwork with what they feel are exigent circumstances. Our recent experience with CIA torture should make that clear to everyone.
Then you just killed the conductor and all the people on the train. It is a ridiculous hypothetical that would never happen, but it isn’t as easy as that third option to escape.
I daresay that if you can invent a magical rapey wizard, you can invent a safe way of derailing a train that doesn’t hurt anyone.
Just in case you need a reminder of just how twisted your opposition is, try this article. Here’s hoping a few of you pay them a visit.
scienceavenger@183:
Just like blacks have a role in ending racism by being EXTRA polite to white people, amiright? Eyefuckingroll.
Check out this article about a small bit of racial profiling involving a semi-famous white woman (SFWW):
http://deadspin.com/the-blind-side-lady-shares-a-heartwarming-racial-profil-1671442935
In it those kids took the “wise” course of action and simply showed the SFWW the contents of their cell to convince her they were on the up and up, but they would have been totally justified in telling her to leave them the hell alone and mind her own business. Might it have caused them some trouble? YES! But nobody who isn’t an asshole would ever say that they should have played a role in “ending racism” by just giving in to her demands.
Same with women. Do a lot of women take the “wise” course of action and avoid going out alone, or drinking “too much”, or dressing in a way that might attract attention? Sure! But if a woman says fuck that jazz, I should be able to live my life just like anybody and wear what the fuck I want and go get a drink even if I can’t find somebody to go along with me and then walk home alone, they should have every expectation that decent fucking people will back them the fuck up if something bad happens and not blame accuse them of the crime of being a woman, when in fact they were just being a fucking human. They shouldn’t be told that because they wore a short skirt or had that extra drink that they OMG FUCKING NO failed to play a role in ending the scourge of rape. The right’s solution to ending rape is ALWAYS to tell women to stay the fuck home and wear sweatpants, NEVER to tell men to keep their fucking hands to themselves.
And HIV doesn’t slip something in your drink and then take you home and have its way with your fucking T-cells. Seriously, how low can your opinion of men REALLY be if you basically compare them to AIDS and obesity? What a dumb, dumb, DUMB fucking comparison.
grewgills, sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was under the impression that in that hypothetical, the train was automated and unoccupied. Otherwise, why would I be making the choice here? If there was a conductor on board, wouldn’t that person be making the call?
I agree on the wrong still being wrong even in service of a greater good though. I will add one thing. Even if it never inspired anyone to find their own flimsy justifications, it would STILL be wrong for the very simple reason that someone got hurt. Someone begged for it to stop and looked around at all the world as they all looked the other way in uncomfortable acceptance of the need. Someone grew to hate all the world that day, eventually deciding THEY would be the one to end it all, for this proves that the universe was a mistake.
I just went and put the ‘wizard rape question’ & ‘the fat man in front of a tram’ question to my brother & his mates drinking out on the porch- it took them about 5 mins to get from the superficial, Pragmatist response, ie “the most lives saved trumps everything”, to “no, the wizard is the rapist” and to, as Zimmerle pointed out, that in real life you would not know the outcome for certain, i.e. you could not know the wizard wasn’t lying, you could not know in a real situation if the fat man would really divert the tram, or derail it, or simply die without saving the other people. They reckoned that none of them would actually push him off the bridge in real life because the consequences would never be as clear as that.
This is why this sort of thought experiment is so useless in informing practical ethics, which are the only ones that count. A bunch of drunken boys can get beyond them in a few minutes & frankly Shrodinger’s cat doesn’t explain quantum uncertainty very well either.
PS I don’t think we have to chose between Kant & relativism- governmentman, read some continental philosophy, even if it does turn you into a financial advisor .