> An interesting interview with an author of A Natural History of Rape.
>
> It's very unfortunate that words like "normal" are used, since the word
has
> both a merely statistical historical meaning -- as they use it when they
say
> rape is "normal" -- and a moral meaning, which they emphatically don't
use.
>
> Frankly, social scientists will often enough intentionally conflate these
> uses when it suits their own ideological views (thereby deceptively,
> fallaciously, and extremely subtly transferring whatever strength their
> empirical claims seem to have to their ideological views. Sexologists
[who
> typically seem barely to be scientists, if at all, and certainly not
> philosophers, though they play them on TV] in particular seem to have a
deep
> passion for this). But this time that common erroneous but "useful"
> conflation is making a theory even more controversial than it would
> otherwise be.
> http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion.jsp?id=ns222611
>
There are many variants of this fallacy. It appears to appear obviously
fallacious to you, as it does to me, and yet, you are right: It is committed
ad nauseum by a certain kind of "liberal" scientist, and by some
philosophers as well (and, of course, by many laypeople). I find it annoying
no matter when it's committed, but I have a special distaste for it when it
is committed in an attempt to support views I agree with and want to see
*objectively* supported.
I think, though, that there is a kind of "natural" reason for committing it.
Many people, especially scientists, reject traditional views of morality,
but they have no rational alternative (and, in fact, generally believe that
there is none), so they fall back on the idea that whatever is normal in
some biological sense must also be normal in a moral sense. It's a pitiful
line of reasoning, but it's all they have. Oddly, many people don't see any
conflict between claiming that there is no objective basis for morality
*and* simultaneously claiming that something *they* dislike is immoral (I've
even seen such people become morally outraged by the claim that there *is*
such a thing as an objective basis for morality -- if there is no such
basis, then such outrage cannot be justified).
Interestingly, many on the religious right commit the same error in a
slightly different form. Many such people hold that whatever is
traditionally *accepted* by their culture or subculture as morally normal
*is* morally normal.
Both the liberal and the conservative versions miss the point of morality,
which is to specify what is right and wrong objectively, *independently* of
any such accidents of history. Morality *must* be based on our nature, but
not on what we happen to do or be inclined to do, but on what we our
objective *needs* dictate. It may be "normal" (statistically) for males of
some species to rape, but it is *harmful* to one's chances of happiness to
do so, even if one is not caught (anyone want to try to claim and prove that
rape *contributes* to the rapist's happiness (if any)?).
In the case of humans, it does not even seem to be normal in a statistical
sense (that is, rape is, I hope, committed by less than 32 percent of the
male population physically able to do so (outside the middle two standard
deviations, so to speak)). Of course, there is another sense of "normal":
Evolutionarily successful in the sense of persisting as a stable component
of the population because it spreads the genes of the rapist and thus
encourages their perpetuation.
However, this cannot rationally be used to justify any claims of moral
normalcy, either. The rapist's genes may be better off because he rapes, but
*he* is not better off. And, now that we are about to be able to manipulate
genes even after birth, it may well become suicidal for any genes that truly
promote rape (if there really are any; my suspicion is that there are only
genes that encourage a general pattern of mental behavior that happens at
times to lead to rape).
--Chris
--Chris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 11 2000 - 22:56:57 EST