In 2010, economist Robin Hanson gained some notoriety by writing about “gentle silent rape”:
Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but the added rape would add greatly to the crime in the eyes of today’s law, and the added punishment for this addition would be far more than for cuckoldry. . . . A colleague of mine suggests this is gender bias, pure and simple; women seem feminist, and men chivalrous, by railing against rape, but no one looks good complaining about cuckoldry. What other explanations you got?
Hanson’s wikipedia entry contains this quote from Nate Silver from 2012:
He is clearly not a man afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. Instead, Hanson writes a blog called Overcoming Bias, in which he presses readers to consider which cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives might constrain them from making optimal decisions.
Taking these phrases one at time:
– “Cultural taboos” = attitudes that the many people have but which you don’t share.
– “Ideological beliefs” = ideologies that many people hold that you don’t share.
– “Misaligned incentives” = incentives for people to do things that make you unhappy.
– “Optimal decision” = decisions that you approve of.
In any case, the “gentle silent rape” thing sounded like a bizarre thought experiment. But then a news item recently appeared in which it really happened: a man had drugged and raped his wife and kept it secret for decades. The result was neither gentle nor silent, which I guess might lead Hanson to say that this real-world case wasn’t an example of what he was talking about, but I would take this argument in the opposite direction and say that the real-world horror story demonstrates a problem with the thought experiment, which is that gentle silent rape isn’t really a thing—the phrase is a way of minimizing a real crime by giving it impossible modifying qualifiers.
The point of this post is not to have some sort of gotcha on Nate. Rather, it’s just a horribly vivid demonstration of a general issue with thought experiments in social science, which is that to work they should be internally coherent and also consistent with reality.
Andrew wrote, “But then a news item recently appeared in which it really happened: a man had drugged and raped his wife and kept it secret for decades.”
But, it is much worse as can be seen from the NYT article itself:
From the NYT:
Woman in France Testifies Against Husband Accused of Bringing Men to Rape Her
“Gisèle Pelicot spoke of the horror of being told by the police that they had evidence her husband had drugged her for years and brought men into their home to join him in raping her.”
Now that I have written the above, I do not understand how that was overlooked, especially since that is part of the headline of the article in the NYT.
I agree with the point: many social science thought experiments are about the same as many real experiments: loaded with unfounded and unlikely assumptions and bear virtually no relevance to realistic circumustances.
The fact that many other men were involved and that there are many other lurid details is shocking but not relevant to the analogy. The main relevance to the Hanson analogy is that she suffered terrible psychological and physical consequences just from the drugging (although there may also be unstated physical consequences of hte sex), even without knowing she had been raped, much less raped by multiple men ad nauseum. In his thought experiment, Hanson used a magical drug and magical people, not the kind that are in the real world, invalidating the relevance of the experiment.
I have not read Hanson in years. Has he uploaded his mind to a computer yet or resolved the Fermi paradox? When he began focusing his blog on those two issues, I lost interest.
I’m confused about what the point of the “experiment” is. Is he confused about why direct harms (to the abused) are more staunchly punished than indirect harms (how the abused persons spouse would feel)? Or is this guy just one of those cowards who avoids saying what he means in hopes of achieving plausible deniability in case anyone takes him seriously?
Gec:
It would be up to Hanson to say what the point is of his thought experiment. My guess is that he is trying to make a statement about differences between how men and women are treated in society. The problem is that he’s constructing the statement conditional on an unrealistic hypothetical. I suppose he would say that a social scientist talking about “gentle silent rape” is no different than a physicist talking about a “frictionless surface.” As a social scientist, I think the unrealism of his hypothetical invalidates his argument—and this can be seen by considering the example of the secret rape that happened in the real world.
I think Hanson himself explained the point in his post. At the very top of it, he brings up his earlier posts making an ev-psych comparison between cuckoldry & rape as part of his argument on mandatory paternity tests being efficient due to there being a market failure resulting from signalling effects. Then he introduces the “gentle silent” hypothetical modifier in response to objections to such comparisons. We can discuss how the actual example in this news does or does not (I can think of some ways, though they aren’t specified in the post above) match that hypothetical, but there hasn’t really been an attempt to connect it to the background argument Hanson was making.
An unrealistic assumption can be a failing for many arguments. If I assume surfaces are frictionless, I would be hopeless trying to design brakes. Hanson’s argument was about law/policy and his thought experiment resembled ones sometimes found in ethical philosophy (pushing a fat man in front of a trolley to stop it killing even more people isn’t especially realistic, but Steve Sailer appears to be fairly alone in finding that a sufficient objection to it). I wouldn’t consider such ethical issues to be “social science”. But Hanson’s belief that putative fathers would be reluctant to request paternity tests they actually want is empirical enough to qualify, and we could potentially test it by use of different defaults or masking the signal somehow.
>the real-world horror story demonstrates a problem with the thought experiment, which is that gentle silent rape isn’t really a thing—the phrase is a way of minimizing a real crime by giving it impossible modifying qualifiers.
Well said.
This seems to be a thought experiment in ethics, not social science. I’m not sure why an economist set the scenario up, but philosophers ask such questions all the time; indeed, it is considered a fundamental mode of inquiry. Thus a philosopher might ask, “Why is murder wrong?”, not because he believes prohibitions on murder are mere “cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives”, but because exploration of the underlying premises, reasoning, and values behind ethical judgments is among the things that philosophers, especially ethicists, do. Asking the question might lead to deeper and stronger arguments for the prohibition of murder: the deck is not stacked against the claim being investigated. Coincidentally, this morning I received word of an advanced undergraduate seminar at the University of Colorado this coming summer that will be considering, among other things, “controversies about specific legal prohibitions”.
Merely asking the question, of course, does not make it good philosophy; it is the answers that count, too. I must say I am mystified by the claim that “gentle silent rape” is somehow the same as “cuckoldry”, except for “gender bias”. I don’t get the suggested connection at all, other than that both involve sexual ethics. If we pose the question “Why is ‘gentle silent rape’ considered more reprehensible than ‘cuckoldry’?”, my immediate reaction, as a non-philosopher who happens to know a couple of ethicists, would be that the two situations differ vastly due to considerations of consent, agency, and free will (all standard philosophical concerns), and that these considerations would figure importantly in addressing the question.
Gregory:
You give the example of a philosophical question, “Why is murder wrong?” This is different than a question about “gentle silent rape” for the following reason: Murder is a real thing, gentle silent rape is not. That’s why I used the term “thought experiment.” The point of my above post is that it is relevant to the discussion that “gentle silent rape” does not exist—the phrase is a way of minimizing a real crime by giving it impossible modifying qualifiers.
Andrew–
Murder may have not been the best choice as an example of this type of inquiry in philosophy. Although murder is quite real, philosophers often use unlikely or hypothetical scenarios as well. (See for example, the many variations of the “trolley problem”.) I was trying to make the point that ethical philosophers often take up questions about things most people find disturbing, odious, or reprehensible, and that this does not signal condoning, excusing, mitigating, or otherwise minimizing such behavior. Rather, it is an examination of the premises and reasoning that lead to the moral consensus. The examination might lead to concerns about the truth of the premises or the validity of the reasoning, but it might not. This mode of inquiry can be misunderstood, and can get philosophers into trouble: the SUNY Fredonia philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar went from being an award-winning teacher to being banned from his campus for “doing philosophy” after brief clips from an hour-long interview on sexual taboos he did on a philosophy podcast went viral. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/02/suny-fredonia-philosophy-professor-under-attack-for-doing-philosophy.html
I am defending the mode of inquiry. The scenarios may be odious or inoffensive, realistic or wildly unlikely: all could lead to useful examination. Whether that examination is useful or not is another question. From the brief excerpt you give, I can’t see that Hanson is making any useful or even relevant analysis. You suspect him of “minimizing” the crime, and your analysis of Nate Silver’s commentary imputes to Nate unexamined and unjustified biases. It might be the case that economists or social scientists are generally bad at this form of inquiry. But defects of analysis and motivational bias do not undermine the utility of the commonly-practiced philosophical mode of inquiry of asking questions or posing scenarios that others may find reprehensible.
Your defense of the mode of inquiry sounds a lot like when Vance, confronted with the facts about Haitian refugees eating pets, defended his repeat of the lie by saying it points to an important public policy issue. What I detest about such arguments is that they are hurtful, and unnecessarily so. There are many ways to highlight issues. The need to do it in ways that hurt, ridicule, or otherwise harm people suggests more than a “mode of inquiry.”
Dale– The “just asking questions” and “people are telling me so I bring it up” mode of political argument is not what philosophers are doing at all. Vance did not propose a scenario and ask what are its moral implications. He advanced a claim which turned out not to be true, and then tried to weasel out of it. I really don’t see any relation at all between Vance’s political tactics and, say, Prof. Kershnar’s discussion of sexual ethics. The “hurtfulness” of an argument can never be a measure of its validity. Many sincerely religious people are offended by the results of studies of earth history, and recovered memory advocates are offended by the results of studies of he constructive nature of memory, but this offense has no weight in evaluating those results.
I see the distinction you are making. I’m not taking a stand against what you portray as a philosophical mode of inquiry, but I still don’t think it provides a blanket excuse for provocation. People are still responsible for the examples they choose to use in making their arguments. If you choose an example that others find hurtful, then you are responsible for that. This doesn’t mean it is wrong – and, as you point out, many people find things hurtful so it may be impossible to avoid that reaction. But many times an argument is known to trigger particular groups, and when someone chooses to make that argument they bear responsibility for that choice. It may be the only way to make a point or engage in discussion, but often it is not.
I’ve seen this practice used by many economists, so I’m not really thinking of philosophers. Perhaps they don’t engage in such practices – I simply don’t know. But I do think that Hansen illustrates a fairly common practice of economists, and I question the need to trigger in these instances. Even the word “trigger” is something I’ve seen people object to and then purposely engage in the practice to make their point. But I think the act of triggering carries moral responsibility – it isn’t always bad, but often it is not necessary and harmful at the same time.
Gregory:
The point of my post is that I think it is a sign of weakness of Hanson’s argument that he is comparing something that does not exist (“gentle silent rape”) with something that does exist (parents raising children who are not their biological descendants).
I have issues with the trolley problem for the same reason. What made me think of Hanson’s example recently was reading about the real-world case of surreptitious rape, which was neither gentle nor silent.
Philosophers and economists seem to think that a lot can be learned about the real world by considering unrealistic hypothetical examples. I think a lot can be learned about philosophers and economists by considering the discrepancies between their hypothetical examples and the real world.
Another such case is the notorious “burly coolie” story.
@Dale and @Gregory
I think the “hyperstitious slur cascade” is a good (albeit difficult to remember) way of concretizing and legitimizing the idea that it is your responsibility to avoid offending people.
It may be a useful concept to have on hand.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way
Great explanation. I’m honestly baffled by otherwise smart people’s need to grandstand about this, as if they think he was advocating for rape. It doesn’t seem flattering for academics to act like Victorian prudes, nor do I see the point of nitpicking about the realism of hypothetical scenarios.
Will
I don’t think rape victims would consider it “nitpicking.” I certainly don’t think Hansen is advocating for rape, but the choice of terms is – intentionally and unnecessarily in my view – inflammatory and hurtful. There are an infinite number of hypothetical scenarios that could be chosen for exploring philosophical issues and I think a person should be held accountable for what they choose.
Will:
It’s not being a “Victorian prude,” nor is it “nitpicking,” to consider the differences between a hypothetical scenario and reality. Or, to put it another way, “nitpicking” is what I do, as a quantitative social scientist. I think it’s important. This is the same sort of “nitpicking” that led me to look into the ridiculous claim that North Carolina was less democratic than North Korea, the ridiculous claim about the “burly coolies,” the ridiculous claim about beauty and sex ratio, the ridiculous claims about “nudge,” etc etc. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that many if not most of the ridiculous claims made in social science are founded on assumptions that are far from reality, and much can be gained by looking carefully at these gaps.
Anyone is free to make any argument they want–I’m not trying to be some sort of Victorian censor. Also, once something is published, we should feel free to criticize, without criticism being seen as problematic in itself.
A person cannot “consent” to something they never knew happened unless they somehow specified that ahead of time. The hypothetical cuckold thus did not consent to raising another man’s biological child. You could make an argument about things involving the body being inherently different from tricking someone into taking certain actions (though, tying back to rape again, there are laws against “rape by deception”).
Hanson’s argument is actually stronger (as in making a more extreme claim rather than being defensible) than claiming cuckoldry is “the same” as rape. He claims it’s worse!
This is also more my thinking. I agree that fictional thought experiments, even with absurd premises, can be illuminating (or not illuminating https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxwy82855v67d1.png). That this thought experiment is fictional or unrealistic is not outrageous to me. What is outrageous about this thought experiment is that the premises indicate that Hanson is an awful person with a severely underdeveloped moral compass. He implies that the only harms of rape are the physical violence and the “reproductive harm”, so if you eliminate the physical violence, since the reproductive harm is less than cuckoldry, such a rape would not be as bad as cuckoldry.
What he misses is the basic fact that people have rights, and generally the most basic right is the right to choose what you do with or put in your body. In his moral framework, silently slipping lard into a vegetarian’s food instead of butter or putting on a puppet play with a patients’ bodies under general anesthesia or putting one’s penis in someone’s mouth while they’re passed out at a party (which does happen in real life) are in fact morally neutral acts since they’re gentle, silent, and carry no reproductive risk. Or to put it another way, Hanson demonstrates that he doesn’t understand one of the most basic reasons why rape is wrong, and many forms of rape that actually do happen all the time are apparently not wrong to him at all.
Not to mention that he also doesn’t understand the relevance of motive to why people might react strongly to some harms and not others.
I don’t think Hanson ever indicates that he believes there to be no moral valence in being manipulated as a puppet while under anesthesia. His minimal morality is based on people getting what they want, and if people don’t want that to happen to them, then it has moral valence. He thinks even dead people’s wishes should be respected, even though they can’t experience anything resulting from that, merely because that’s what they wanted. His “gentle, silent” hypothetical is because other people objected that the violence of rape is what makes it bad/different from cuckoldry, which is a premise he rejects (he might think the violence is an additional bad, but his argument is premised on rape being bad even without that).
It strikes me that a problem is that “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”. If you begin with the assumption that cuckoldry is morally neutral, then Hanson saying that it’s morally comparable to rape means he’s saying rape isn’t immoral. But the point he’s actually arguing for is that it’s very bad and thus mandatory paternity tests are efficient, so assuming the opposite conclusion (which I thankfully haven’t seen people explicitly due as part of their arguments) is “begging the question” in the original sense of that phrase. If you don’t begin with any such assumption, but instead hold the moral valence of rape as a constant, then you can step through his argument and see whether it leads to a correct conclusion (I personally don’t think it does, but for entirely different reasons).
It strikes me that you keep telling other people to look at the post more carefully, but you don’t appear to have read it. These are his exact words
The obvious explanation is that rape violates one’s right to control their body, while cuckoldry does not. That Hanson doesn’t see this and ONLY compares the two on the axis of “reproductive harm”, and in three posts never mentions any other moral dimension, only reiterates that the intensity of emotions should depend ONLY on that “reproductive harm” and anything else is an irrational bias. If he believed that there were more moral sophistication, then how would that argument make any sense?
And no, I do not believe that tricking a man into raising a child that isn’t his is morally neutral. I just reject that you can compare the two things on the axis of “reproductive harm” and say “surely the men suffer more”, in complete ignorance of the violation of basic rights as a major harm
I read the post when he initially wrote it and reread it after Andrew linked it. I just didn’t make the inference you did, which I claim is unsupported.
Hanson writing about reproductive harm in no way implies that he believes that is the only kind of harm. Here is a quote from a separate post from him:
That is an expansive concept of “hurt” that you could object to on libertarian grounds for not involving physical harm and requiring restrictions on freedom beyond not being able to swing your proverbial fist as far as another man’s proverbial nose, but it’s not explicitly tied to reproduction at all. Reproductive harm is just one category of harm that Hanson thinks we would evolve to be highly averse to. He is not claiming that any objection to harm is “irrational” (as should be clear, his argument is based on rape actually being harmful), he is arguing that our dismissal of one kind of harm is morally baseless (though it could perhaps be based on the sort of libertarianism he argues against in the quote above).
I am not claiming that Hanson is defending rape. I am claiming the question as a premise misses major reasons why rape is wrong.
“The reproductive harm of rape is less than that of cuckoldry, but people are still are more outraged by rape. I can’t think of any other explanations than gender bias.”
Hanson not understanding that there is more that is wrong with rape than “reproductive harm” and physical violence is a plain logical implication of the text as it is written. If he understood that there were more harms, then he would understand why it’s not necessarily gender bias that rape is more outrageous than cuckoldry and the core question of the post would make no sense. You’re just bringing in information about Hanson’s values from other things he’s posted, rather than engaging with this text as it is actually written.
Wonks:
I would say that (a) Hanson is in the minority in that he thinks it is “puzzling” that “our law punishes rape far more than cuckoldry,” and (b) he chose a scenario of “gentle silent rape” that does not exist. I think these are connected.
somebody:
You’ve got that in quotation marks, but do a CTRL+F and you will not find that quote in the linked post (is that “engaging with this text as it is actually written”). I will provide the actual quote:
Properly applying literalism to this statement, how does it differ from your false “quote”? Hanson does not claim that the explanation is his own or that he can’t think of others (the top of the post contains a list of counterarguments, though he rejects them), but instead attributes it to an unnamed colleague. He then invites commenters to provide their own explanations (which you could still do, as the comment section remains open nearly two decades later).
It is true that I am bringing in information I know from other things Hanson has written. If those other things he wrote were inconsistent with his GSR post, then you’d have a point… but they’re not! Instead his conception of the wrongness of both rape & cuckoldry comes from the same place as his belief in the harms of speech and ignoring the wishes of the dead: a morality based on people getting what they want. It is the person who made the incorrect inference from the post that he must be fine with puppeteering anesthesia patients who has misread the post, for nothing in there that actually implies that (rather, the opposite).
Andrew:
I agree Hanson is in the minority, although I also think the majority don’t think about that asymmetry at all. I still don’t know why specifically you think the item you linked doesn’t qualify as GSR (and how those factors relate to punishment), and will not project my own beliefs about it onto you.
Oh nononono, you see, Hanson doesn’t actually state his opinion, he’s just refuting a bunch of reasons for why people might be justifiably more outraged at rape, then providing a colleage’s opinion without refutation, and then inviting discussion in the comments. Maybe he actually sees the obvious problem with the argument advanced in the post, but just wants to invite discussion in the comments. After all, it’s not like it’s HIS argument, it’s his colleague’s.
Give me a break.
somebody:
The person who should be giving others a break is you. You are the one who falsely attributed a quote to someone else, and you arrived at an incorrect inference by attempting to read Hanson’s mind rather than what he literally wrote. There are some glaring vulnerabilities in Hanson’s argument (shouldn’t his own writing on construal level theory undermine his confidence in surveys on unlikely hypotheticals?), but you overlook them as you try to tackle an argument he only made in your own head.
Wonks:
You write, “I still don’t know why specifically you think the item you linked doesn’t qualify as GSR.”
Read the news articles. There was nothing gentle about it at all.
I agree with the basic point of this post, which aligns with Dewey’s approach to ethics (which I also agree with): inductive, from real or could-be-real cases. The problem with a lot of thought experiments is that they are deductive in disguise, where a theoretical idea is pseudo-concretized into what is presented as a case. Then you have Andrew’s point, that ethically relevant considerations will be excised because they arise from real-world complexities.
But there is another aspect to Hanson’s thought experiment that should be mentioned. His approval of “gentle silent” rape is characterized by what seems to me to be an implicit application of the hedonistic utilitarianism of blinkered economics. Hey, if the rapee doesn’t know she was raped and doesn’t feel any physical aftereffects, what’s the problem? There are shelfloads of criticism of such a standpoint, so I won’t go there. Let’s just say it’s pretty naive.
And of course the comparison to adultery (cuckoldry!) is bizarre and not-in-a-good-way revealing.
Hi Peter,
Can you send some links to the ” shelfoads of criticisms of hedonistic utilitarism”? And does this critique extend to other, non hedonistic, variants of consequentialism?
I am really interested in moral philosophy and I read Derek Parfit’s “Reasons and persons”. It is an influential book and Parfit is more or less a consequentialist I think. I would be greatly surprised if this school of thought is pretty naive, as you say.
Hanson never expressed any “approval”. His argument was that something else was comparably bad and thus should be prevented via policy reform! This is something quite basic which many people have gotten wrong, but really should be simple if you read his original posts. After all, people don’t say “abortion is murder” in order to argue that murder should be legal.
I suppose the thought experiment is whether a crime has been committed, if the victim does not know that she has been victimized.
Perhaps there are better examples. A polluter could make you sick, without you knowing the cause. Or you sell stock at a loss, not knowing that the buyer had illegal insider information. Or someone invades your privacy with a hidden video camera, and posts the videos in another country where you never hear about it.
Hanson’s argument is ridiculous, but I don’t think that’s because the thought experiment is unrealistic or inconsistent with reality. It’s both, but so are frictionless planes (like you mentioned), and so are many features of real experiments. When scientists study the frog prey detection system, they often study the frog’s response to cardboard cutouts shaped like worms, rather than real worms. And a frog encountering cardboard cutouts of worms in its real environment is arguably less realistic than Hanson’s thought experiment.
But the deviation from reality is used intentionally: to make stimuli controllable; and to test which features of the environment drive a frog’s behavior (it has a prey capture response to the cutouts as long as they have the same general shape and movement pattern as real worms, meaning those are probably the features that drive the prey capture response to real worms as well). What matters is that the deviations from reality, however extreme, support (or don’t undermine) the inferences we make from the experiment.
So I don’t think Hanson demonstrates a problem with the lack of realism in thought experiments. The problem is that his deviations from reality undermine his inferences about the harms of real sexual assault. In this case, as you point out, the unrealistic features actually *minimize* the real effects of sexual assault. To my mind, that point — about what the impossible modifying qualifiers do, not just that they are impossible — is the better criticism. And it leaves room for unrealistic thought experiments to play a scientific role, with only the same restriction as real experiments: they have to be designed so that they can support the specific inferences we draw from them.
I dont think example is good because is so bizarre to begin with.
Like, I think there is a lot to discuss related to gender bias and sex and violence. One could ruminate about different treatment our society gives to man raping woman, man raping man, woman raping man etc etc. One may even go through a couple of stupid thought experiments… but this is not what happens here
Hanson says “Imagine a gentle silent rape, and now imagine me hitting a fridge with my toe. Surely I suffer way more!” and this is just so weird.
Hanson doesn’t say anything about hitting a fridge with his toe. The argument was about unknowingly raising someone else’s biological offspring.
Wonks:
As discussed in my comment above, the key difference is that “unknowingly raising someone else’s biological offspring” happens, and “gentle silent rape” is a fiction. One might as well compare the actual NYPD to Sherlock Holmes or, for that matter, to Spiderman.
Rather than Spiderman (who fights superpowered villains more than street criminals), I think the more common comparison is between the police and Batman. And actual philosophers have written books like “Batman and Ethics” in addition to many academic papers making such comparisons as part of a broader argument about vigilantism. Since Sherlock Holmes collaborates with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard (rather than operating independently), there’s less need for such comparisons there.
Something I haven’t yet seen anyone claim was that IF your proverbial frictionless surface was achieved and a rape matched Hanson’s criteria, then it should not be punished as there wouldn’t be moral implications. Anyone making that claim would thus defeat Hanson’s argument.
Wonks Anonymous: Yes, the “thought experiment” of “Should Batman kill the Joker?” is actually a common and much-debated one, as a way of discussing the issues around the death penalty and vigilante justice. Note, in modern comics, the Joker not a flamboyant bank-robber, but a mass-murdering psychopath.Thus, “the Joker” is kind of a stand-in for “committing premeditated murder with extreme depravity”. One counter-argument to it, is that revolving-door escapes in fiction make this an unreasonable hypothetical case, since life in prison is being implicitly eliminated as a viable choice. Though people can definitely say these sorts of thought experiments are an entire genre of advocacy in disguise. Myself, I’d compare what Hanson says to the “ticking time-bomb” torture hypothetical.
I think the fact that Hanson’s example is ridiculous is his point. Like a number of other economists, the point is to provoke – and using sensitive topics (such as gender, sex, race, violence) are prime topics for this. What bothers me about this practice is that it dovetails with how political discourse (and much public discourse) has evolved. “In your face,” “bullying,” and similar practices are aggressive and insensitive – a feature not a bug from the point of view of their practitioners. The fact that it has become so popular is deeply disturbing to me. Many of the reactions to censorship are like that. Censorship (all too common in academia) is a worthy target, but why must hurtful examples be used? That seems to serve something other than the purpose of highlighting the insidious practice.
I agree with Andrew’s portrayal of the damage caused by such thought experiments that minimize real harms. But I think it is often intentional, not accidental, and that is what bothers me the most.
I don’t think the example was tying in gender with the intent to provoke. He had been making an argument in favor of mandatory paternity tests, so sex/gender was already entangled with it.
Another “gently rape” real world issue.
Pelvic examinations under anesthesia by medical students without consent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelvic_examinations_under_anesthesia_by_medical_students_without_consent
“A study done in 2003 found that 90% of Pennsylvania medical students had done pelvic exams on anesthetized patients during their gynecology rotation.[5] One medical student described performing them “for 3 weeks, four to five times a day, I was asked to, and did, perform pelvic examinations on anesthetized women, without specific consent, solely for the purpose of my education.”
In his recent posts on cultural drift he has been lamenting that he DOES share cultural taboos/attitudes that may be ill-founded but he doesn’t know how to determine which ones are or what to do about it. And he even refers to libertarian ideology as something he’s long been favorable toward but now can’t trust his feelings on. However, even before then his attitude toward different ideologies was that he should be proposing deals/reforms to help adherents of them to also get what they want.
“a man had drugged and raped his wife and kept it secret for decades. The result was neither gentle nor silent, which I guess might lead Hanson to say that this real-world case wasn’t an example of what he was talking about, but I would take this argument in the opposite direction and say that the real-world horror story demonstrates a problem with the thought experiment, which is that gentle silent rape isn’t really a thing—the phrase is a way of minimizing a real crime by giving it impossible modifying qualifiers.”
When you compare someone to Hitler you usually do it to criticize that person, not to praise Hitler. Similarly, the point of my comparing cuckoldry to gentle silent rape (GSR) was to criticize cuckoldry, not to praise GSR. It is not at all a part of the definition of GSR that it is not a bad thing; my whole point was that GSR is in fact plausibly a bad thing. So the real example you point to seems to fit the definition of GSR just fine, those qualifiers aren’t at all impossible.
How is the example of Gisèle Pelicot a gentle silent rape, i.e. “suffered no noticeable physical harm”? Prior to the rapes being revealed, Gisèle Pelicot went to the doctor because of the after effects of drugging (her children thought she might have dementia) and for gynecological problems because of the rapes. Medical examinations as part of the police investigation revealed she had suffered from multiple STDs.
-“-:
The drugging as a crime separate from the rape is discussed in the original post. I assume you would agree that the penalty for drugging + raping should be higher than for the drugging alone.
The infections are why I would distinguish the real case from GSR, even though she appears to have been unaware of them until she knew to look for them. In order to better match the hypothetical, the rapist would either have to be free of any infections or using protection (which I recall was the case in the thought experiment Steve Pinker has mentioned with siblings engaging in incest but not producing any inbred children). I’m pretty sure there have been cases of rapes following druggings in which that was the case, even if this one doesn’t qualify.
Without knowing her medical history, it’s impossible to say one way or the other whether Gisèle Pelicot knew about her STD infections prior to being medical examined as part of the police investigations. (And many people reprot that the police/investigation/court process is incredibly traumatising so that’s another harm.)
Many STDs can be silent while still causing harm to the person (e.g. one of her rapists had AIDs) but also, depending on her physician she might not have been told that she had an STD in order to protect her marriage – I don’t know enough about French culture to know if that is still a thing.
This is the definition “Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. ” The definition doesn’t separate the harms from drugging from the harms from rape. And the next sub-clause is about drugging so it seems to me that drugging was still part of the context at that point.
I have no disagreement with drugging + rape being worse than drugging (all other things being equal).
Anyway, your argument appears to be with Robin Hanson who seems to think the rapes of Gisèle Pelicot were consistent with his definition of “gentle silent rape”.
Wouldn’t a more suitable mirror image (reversed for sex) of cuckoldry be something like a hypothetical case where a couple (consisting of man M and woman W) agree to have a surrogate (S) carry their child to term, and unbeknownst to W a child is conceived by M and S and is then given to the couple to raise in place of the child that W believes is hers? This would flip the sex of the betrayed party, while still maintaining the basic idea (one of them invests resources in a child that is not theirs, as a result of a betrayal by their opposite-sex partner), and avoiding other dissimilarities with the (incredibly creepily-named, IMO) “gentle silent rape” (e.g., drugging and bodily violation)?
If so, in that hypothetical situation, what would the “crime” be? I would say breach of contract if a formal surrogacy contract were entered into, but in my (extremely) limited understanding of the law in any jurisdiction I’d suspect that to be a civil rather than a criminal matter.
While it’s not exactly a mirror image, it’s probably the more common case (than the surrogacy example), that a man has a child outside the current relationship and pays for it’s upkeep and potentially invests time in the child without telling the current partner of the child’s existence. While the current partner doesn’t directly raise the child, the loss of time and money to the secret child comes at the expense of the current family unit i.e. they may not be able to afford (time or money) their own child (or a wanted additional child) causing her “reproductive harm”.
The point of my article was to say that even “gentle silent” rape is BAD. I was not praising it.
Robin:
You might be saying in your post that “gentle silent rape” is bad, but I don’t think you were saying it’s BAD.
From your post: “I [Robin] was puzzling over why our law punishes rape far more than cuckoldry, arguing: Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it.”
“Cuckoldry” is kind of an obscure word, so to be on the safe side I decided to look it up in the dictionary. The Merriam-Webster definition is “cuckold: a man whose wife is unfaithful.”
From my reading, your post seems to be saying that rape is not as bad as cuckoldry, or at least no worse. So, you’re not “praising” rape–nobody said you were!–; you are just saying that rape (a violent, nonconsensual assault) is about as bad as cuckoldry (which is a woman consensually deciding to sleep with someone other than her husband). That seems pretty extreme to me, a real minimization of rape, and not a statement that rape is BAD.