Roderick:

No word on a running mate yet.

Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse.

Mike:

Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders in, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

While I absolutely agree with you about the bankruptcy of uncritical “support the troops” appeals, I think that the question of willingness and criminality are a bit more complicated than that.

To the extent that soldiers willingly engage in deliberate violence against innocent people, they are certainly complicit in the crime and should be held accountable. But it’s not quite true that all soldiers in the U.S. military are “willing agents” or “volunteers” unless they “desert or disobey.” Everywhere else in the world besides the military, when someone willingly signs on for a job, they can always quit later if they have second thoughts about either the job in general, or about specific requirements imposed on them by their employers. But in the military these are treated as crimes, and can be punished by death if the government so chooses. Soldiers, even so-called “volunteers,” who want to leave the military, but are coerced into staying by the threat of imprisonment or death, should not be considered willing participants, any more than should victims of the draft.

That’s not an excuse for soldiers who directly commit acts of violence against innocents; nothing can excuse that, even if you were drafted rather than “volunteering,” and you should be willing to face imprisonment or death before, say, gunning down a child or a family on patrol. (That’s true of conscripts no less than it’s true of “volunteers.”) But it does make the situation a lot less clear-cut a case of “willing agency” when it comes to, say, a payroll officer or a mechanic or a truck driver, who is coerced into playing some role in the war machine but is not directly committing violence.

Now, that said, on the question of uncritical blanket “support the troops” messages, and moral responsibility, I agree with you, and it reminded me a lot of something really valuable that Utah Phillips said, at the time of the first Gulf War:

I spend a lot of time these days going to demonstrations and vigils, talking to people who support the war. They can be pretty threatening. But I always find there are people there–and I don’t mean policemen, but there are people there who will protect you. I don’t go there to shout or to lecture, but to ask questions. Real questions. Questions I really need answers to.

When I joined the Army, it was kind of like somebody that I had been brought up to respect, wearing a suit and a tie, and maybe a little older, in my neighborhood. Think about yourself in your neighborhood, and this happened to you. He walked up to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, See that fellow on the corner there? He’s really evil, and has got to be killed. Now, you trust me; you’ll go do it for me, won’t you? Now, the reasons are a little complicated; I won’t bother to explain, but you go and do it for me, will you?

Well, if somebody did that to you in your neighborhood, you’d think it was foolish. You wouldn’t do it. Well, what makes it more reasonable to do it on the other side of the world? That’s one question.

Well, now hook it into this. If I was to go down into the middle of your town, and bomb a house, and then shoot the people coming out in flames, the newspapers would say, Homicidal Maniac! The cops would come and they’d drag me away; they’d say You’re responsible for that! The judge’d say, You’re responsible for that; the jury’d say You’re responsible for that! and they would give me the hot squat or put me away for years and years and years, you see? But now exactly the same behavior, sanctioned by the State, could get me a medal and elected to Congress. Exactly the same behavior. I want the people I’m talking to to reconcile that contradiction for themselves, and for me.

The third question–well I take that one a lot to peace people. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity going on around here, with the peace people who say, Well, we’ve got to support the troops, and then wear the yellow ribbon, and wrap themselves in the flag. They say, Well, we don’t want what happened to the Vietnam vets to happen to these vets when they come home–people getting spit on. Well, I think it’s terrible to spit on anybody. I think that’s a consummate act of violence. And it’s a terrible mistake, and I’m really sorry that happened. But what did happen? Song My happened; My Lai happened; the defoliation of a country happened; tons of pesticides happened; 30,000 MIAs in Vietnam happened. And it unhinged some people–made them real mad. And what really, really made them mad, was the denial of personal responsibility–saying, I was made to do it; I was told to do it; I was doing my duty; I was serving my country. Well, we’ve already talked about that.

Now, it is morally ambiguous to wrap yourself in the flag and to wear those ribbons. And it borders on moral cowardice. I don’t mean to sound stern; well, yes I do, but what does the Nuremberg declaration say? There’s no superior order that can cancel your conscience. Nations will be judged by the standard of the individual. Look, the President makes choices. The Congress makes choices. The Chief of Staff makes choices. The officers make choices. All those choices percolate down to the individual trooper with his finger on the trigger. The individual private with his thumb on the button that drops the bomb. If that trigger doesn’t get pulled, if that button doesn’t get pushed, all those other choices vanish as if they never were. They’re meaningless. So what is the critical choice? What is the one we’ve got to think about and get to? And, friends, if that trigger gets pulled–if that button gets pushed, and that dropped bomb falls–and you say I support the troops, you’re an accomplice. I don’t want to be an accomplice; do you?

And I don’t want to dehumanize anyone. I don’t want to take away anybody’s humanity. Humans are able to make moral decisions–moral, ethical decisions. What do we tell the trooper who pulls the trigger, or the soldier who turns the wheel that releases oil into the Persian Gulf, that they’re not responsible–just following orders, just doing their duty, have no choice–bypassing them, making them a part of the machine, we deny them their humanity, their responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions. Look, I’ve been a soldier. I don’t want any moral loophole. I need to take personal responsibility for my actions. And if we don’t learn how to do this, we’re going to keep on going to war again, and again, and again.

Utah Phillips (1992): from The Violence Within, I’ve Got To Know

Micha,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

I agree with you that worker ownership of the means of production wouldn’t instantly solve all the problems of labor, and that — for all I’ve said in the King Ludd post — there might be other reasons why it turns out not to be viable, or at least not universally practicable. My main point was just to show that one alleged problem with unionism, presented by De Coster and others as if it were intrinsic to unionism as such, was actually only a problem with the particular model of union organizing that both anti-union business types and the establishmentarian union bosses fetishize, and which the Wagner/Taft-Hartley system actively subsidizes and protects in the name of “industrial peace,” at the expense of competing organizing models — like, for example, the worker-ownership model of the IWW. Those other organizing models may have problems of their own, but they don’t have the problems that De Coster treats as intrinsic to unionism.

After all, one of the myriad justifications for profits going to the capitalist is that the capitalist takes on the most risks, using her own money as an entrepreneur to start an uncertain business, with a high failure rate, and also extending in time when she will get recompensated, assuming the business becomes successful. Whereas a poor laborer just scratching by may not have the wherewithal to take such a large risk, nor be willing or able to withhold present consumption for the chance at a bigger future payoff – the poor laborer just wants a certain payoff now, in the form of wages.

Well, O.K., sure, but two things.

First, insofar as this argument works, it seems like it’s an argument for capitalists to take a role and get a cut in the high-risk start-up period for a firm; not necessarily much of an argument for capitalists remaining as residual profit recipients after the firm is already well established. It’s perfectly possible to have both an infusion of working capital during the start-up period and a worker co-op at the end (either because the capitalist agrees to those terms, going in, or because the workers organize after a while and use their stronger bargaining position to convince her to disentangle herself and find a new entrepreneurial opportunity). The question is why that sort of thing doesn’t happen now. Maybe it’s because there’s some other reason why it’s not viable, but I’d suggest that a lot of the reason has to do with the way in which prevalent business models and prevalent union organizing models are supported and rigidified by government economic regimentation (as well as the establishmentarian business and union culture that that regimentation promotes).

Second, it’s true that, especially for very low-paid wage workers, a lot of their economic decisions are going to be made as a reaction to the extremely precarious economic situation that they are in. This will naturally tend to make people more risk-averse and more interested in certain and quick pay-offs than they might otherwise be. But the precarity isn’t a fixed natural fact; it’s largely the product of specific government policies which ratchet up fixed costs of living while ratcheting down opportunities for homesteading and labor, with workers’ livelihoods caught in the squeeze. Eliminate those policies and you’ll begin to see workers with more of their costs of living safely covered and with more in the way of back-up options should their current arrangement fail.

But becoming an investor and a risk-taker generally presupposes some level of acquired wealth, where you have taken care of basic needs and have some money left over to risk and save. Poor laborers aren’t generally going to have access to that sort of capital, and they are the ones who seem to benefit from organizing their labor the most.

Well, organizing your labor and providing a cushion of wealth to fall back on aren’t mutually exclusive options. Unions themselves can (and, in the past, often did) provide an institutional vehicle for helping cushion workers from economic falls — by improving wages, but, more importantly by providing institutions that help workers on the bum to find new work (e.g. union hiring halls, now illegal under Taft-Hartley) or for workers to help each other provide for themselves and their families during lean times (e.g. mutual aid societies, now partly illegal, or heavily regulated — if they do anything that might be construed by the government as selling insurance — and in any case crowded out by government welfare).

If it turns out that one aspect of radical labor solidarity (worker ownership of the means of production) works out best when accompanied by another aspect of radical labor solidarity (a vibrant network of mutual aid), well, I’m happy enough with that conclusion.

• Jerry: “If she is wrong and mischaracterizes the causes, what does that say about her conclusions regarding the effects?”

Nothing at all. If Brownmiller advances a false theory of the form “X causes R” (N.B.: I’m not conceding that her theory about the causes of rape IS false; nor am I insisting that it’s true; my position is that it’s not salient to this discussion whether it’s false or true), and then advances another theory of the form “R causes P,” based on an independent argument that doesn’t refer back to the first theory, the falsity of the first theory tells you nothing at all about whether the second theory is true or false, and nothing at all about whether the theory well-grounded or ill-grounded. What will tell you something about the merits of the second theory is a consideration of the independent arguments that are given for it.

• “F => F is True. F => T is True.”

If you mean the arrow here to express a material implication, that’s an accurate description of the truth-values of material implications with false antecedents. But what has any of this got to do with the comments you’re trying to respond to?

There is no argument that I made, or which Susan Brownmiller made, in which her theory about the causes of rape is the antecedent in a conditional of which her theory about the effects of rape is a consequent. The theory in which rape is the explanans is not part of the evidence given for the theory in which rape is the explanandum, so disputing the first doesn’t undermine any of the reasons given for believing the second.

Again, speaking generally, you seem to be awfully muddled about causal claims, implication, and the proper places in which to attack an argument. This discussion is about causal claims, and causal claims are not claims about material implication. (A causal claim of the form “P’s being true causes Q to be true” is not truth-functional at all, because causal claims, among other things, have to support counterfactuals.) Maybe you are running into problems here because you believe that if someone advances a theory of the form “X causes R,” and another theory of the form “R causes P,” the direction of causation and the common middle term somehow suggests that the first theory is somehow logically prior to, a premise for, the second theory, and so that the evidential basis for the second theory somehow must depend on the evidential basis for the first theory. If you do believe that, I don’t know what to say except that it’s a hopeless muddle of really distinct causal, logical, and epistemological relationships, and you need to try to more carefully distinguish claims about complex causal chains between events from claims about complex logical and evidentiary relationships between statements asserting the existence of simple causal chains between events.

If that’s not what you’re confused about, then you’ll have to state more clearly why exactly you think a discussion of Brownmiller’s theory about the causes of rape has any evidential bearing on her theory about the effects of rape, and also just what precisely the antecedent is supposed to be and what the consequent is supposed to be in the material conditionals you keep trying to use.

• Jerry: “your post contains quotes from women that basically blame men for most violence in the world (MacKinnon’s quote especially)”

MacKinnon’s quote does not say anything at all about either what absolute quantity or what proportion of the violence in the world is committed by men rather than women. What she actually says is that men commit some violence against other men (she doesn’t say how much), and men commit some violence against women (she doesn’t say how much), and then she contrasts the different ways in which the one kind of violence and the other are committed. I’m sure she has views on that, and so do I, but those views aren’t expressed in the quote and they aren’t material to this discussion. Any claim about how far men are to blame for how much violence is a claim that you have projected into the quote, not something that was there to be found.

• Jerry: “Your claim that you are not saying men are bad and that it is just the science that makes them that way . . .”

I literally have no idea what this means. I have not advanced any theory at all about what either the causes of rape are, or what the moral status of men, either individually or collectively, may be. I also have no idea what you mean by “the science [making] them that way.” What science? What claim are you even referring to?

• Jerry: “You and Brownmiller have done none of that accounting.”

I already told you that I’m not attempting to provide a comprehensive defense of Brownmiller’s claims against all possible objections; if you want that, you should read Brownmiller’s book. My aims for a mid-length blog post are quite different. As for Brownmiller, unless you have read her book (I mean the whole thing, not just the handful of quotations that I or somebody else has pulled for brief consideration), then you have literally no idea at all what she does or does not account for.

• Jerry: “Ad hominem covers the kind of insult you used, which dismisses the argument by demeaning the target of the insult as someone that unfairly shouts and worse, shouts irrelevancies.“

Jerry, characterizing your argument as irrelevant is, I repeat, not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not an argumentum of any kind, because it has no internal inferential structure. It’s an assertion about your argument, which happens to be the conclusion of an argument drawn from a distinct set of premises. You might find the characterization, or the wording in which it is expressed, insulting. But “statements which you find insulting” and “examples of argumentum ad hominem” are two distinct classes, and their members have different logical properties.

As for that argument from distinct premises, I provided several reasons in my comments for saying that your reply was largely irrelevant to the point you were supposedly replying to. Those reasons may be good reasons, and they may be bad reasons, but they are reasons which had specifically to do with the structure and direction of the argument itself, not with any of your personal characteristics or circumstances as the person advancing the argument. You cannot simply point at the conclusion of an argument, declare “I find that conclusion insulting!” and then write off the entire argument as an exercise in argumentum ad hominem. (Or rather, you can’t do that without proving that you don’t understand what the term “ad hominem” means.) Argumentum ad hominem hasn’t anything to do with your reaction to the conclusion; it has to do with the kind of premises that the argument appeals to.

• Jerry: “‘Since kharris disagrees with you, and DRR tells you to stop, I must consider I have won the argument!!! ZOMG!'”

I didn’t say that I won an argument. I said that you were devoting a lot of energy to topics that weren’t on-topic for the discussion, weren’t responsive to the specific claims advanced in my post, and which a number of people have repeatedly said they’re not much interested in discussing at length with you.

• Jerry: “Here is a transcript of a speech from Wendy McElroy. . . .”

I’m not interested in your views on male victims of domestic violence, or the ERA, or on the debate between liberal and radical feminists, or your beef with contemporary feminism broadly. These issues have nothing to do with the proper interpretation of Susan Brownmiller’s theory about the systemic effects of stranger-rape.

Matt Simpson:

I’m a conventionalist when it comes to property.* A cursory glance at the current convention in the geographic region we call Israel shows that the Israeli government does, in fact, have the right to be there.

Whose conventions show that?

Last I checked, a lot of Palestinians, for example, do not accept the property conventions in question (e.g. they reject the colonialist conventions behind the Mandate and Balfour, accept property conventions that would allow for a right of return after forcible exile from traditionally-held lands, etc.). So what then gives the Israeli government the right to force Palestinians to act according to the boundaries set by its own property conventions, as opposed to the property conventions that they themselves accept?

(Note that you can’t answer by appealing either to conventions that allow for that kind of imposition, or to the alleged legitimate authority of the Israeli state to fix property conventions, without crassly begging the question.)

dhex,

Well, “politics” derives from the Greek root “polis.” At the time the word was made, “polis” was ambiguous between (or consistently conflated) (1) the organized government of the city, and (2) civil society within the city. So when Aristotle wrote about “politics” he was talking about government processes, but about public life broadly, including many institutions within the city (religious, civic, educational, etc.) which today would be thought of as part of the private rather than the government sector.

Nowadays most people use politics to refer mainly or only to the business of the government, but some traditions (especially on the Left and in the feminist movement) use “politics” in a broader sense to include not only government processes but also struggles within civil society, especially if they have a common impact on a lot of people and if the civil society dynamics are structured by the balance of power between different social classes (such as men and women, or white people and black people, or…).

So “political” is not being expanded so far as just to mean “affects other people” (presumably remembering your friends’ birthdays affects other people, but I wouldn’t call it a political commitment); rather, “politics” is being being used to describe anything that acts to systematically structure public life in terms of the power relationships between groups of people. That includes governmental processes but it also includes a lot of other things, such as the way in which rape dramatically constrains the freedom of movement of all women, as women, and puts women in a state of greater dependency upon men.

Does that help clarify?

Incidentally, I’ve discussed the use of the term “politics” at some more length in section 2 of the Libertarian Feminism essay that I co-authored with Roderick Long.

• Jerry: “P.S. Ad hominem attack: ‘You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it,’ — I think it’s clear I have not been shouting irrelevancies, regardless of how you would like to characterize my argument or me.”

That’s not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not even an argument at all; it’s a piece of advice which neither draws from premises nor moves towards a conclusion. It contains an implied characterization, which you may find personally insulting; but insults may be either called-for or uncalled-for, depending on the breaks, and are not the same thing as argumentum ad hominem, which is always a logical fallacy.

• Jerry: [after a quotation from Brownmiller and a quotation from MacKinnon] “This is what RadGeek buttresses her argument with.”

No, it’s not. You seem to be having consistent problems with understanding the direction of inference in arguments. (For example, you also have repeatedly spoken as if the part of Brownmiller’s theory that was under discussion in the post was attempting to explain or make predictions about the causes of stranger rape. It’s not; it’s about the effects.) Here, you have failed to grasp that my post was intended to EXPLAIN THE CONTENT of the claims in those quotations using terms which a certain part of my audience would be likely to understand and find interesting.

The post was not intended to establish some further conclusion BY MEANS OF those quotations. The quotations are not introduced as evidence for a conclusion. They are introduced as texts to be interpreted; the evidence for the interpretation I favor is provided elsewhere in the post.

• Jerry: “RadGeek’s point of departure is dubious and weak. Her conclusion seems to be . . .”

My conclusion is that Susan Brownmiller is advancing a theory on which patriarchy is substantially reinforced by a spontaneous order arising from the effects of pervasive, random acts of sexual violence against women.

Any other suggestion as to what my conclusion “seems to be” is sure to be overreaching on your part.

As for your beefs with a random assortment of popular feminist bloggers, other claims that Susan Brownmiller happened to make about a different topic (e.g. false report rates), Women’s Studies programs in Universities, feminist analyses of domestic violence, social constructionism, zero tolerance policies, or the price of tea in China, I honestly don’t care. Judging from the response that your comments has gotten, I doubt much of anyone else here does, either. I’m sure that these issues are all very important to you, but they are not actually material to my post, or to the part of Brownmiller’s theory that’s under discussion, or to the discussion that basically anyone other than you has been pursuing. I would call them red herrings, but even an accusation of misdirection would require a degree of coherent direction that your posts have, so far, not demonstrated.

• kharris: “By the way, RadGeek admits to Women’s Studies, but so far, not to being female that I can tell.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever taken one course in my life that would qualify as a “Women’s Studies” course, and it was a fairly straightforward Psychology of Sexuality course, which wasn’t especially feminist in content. (It was cross-listed as Women’s Studies but taught by regular Psych department faculty.) Not that I think there’s anything wrong with taking Women’s Studies courses; that’s just not the way my academic career panned out.

However, I will happily concede just about any empty polemical label that jerry wants to throw at me, without argument, because I don’t give much of a damn what he calls me, and I’d just as soon get it out of the way in order to discuss something that matters.

• Jerry: “I think of spontaneous order as molecules forming dna. As fines reducing speeding. As incentives encouraging good behavior.”

Look, I don’t want to be a dick about this, but if this is how you think of spontaneous order, then you don’t have a very good grip on the concept of spontaneous order.

If a government agency decides that it wants to reduce speeding, and in order to reduce speeding it institutes a fine for speeders, and, due to the threat of that fine, people don’t speed as much as they used to, that’s not an example of a spontaneous order. It’s a paradigm case of a designed order: legislators wanted a different social outcome, so they instituted a law in order to achieve it and people complied with that law in order to avoid the penalty.

Whether “incentives encouraging good behavior” counts as an example of a spontaneous order or not depends on what the incentives are and why those incentives exist. If those incentives are the unintended byproduct of things that are done for reasons other than producing those incentives, then you have a spontaneous order (for example, when ATM card issuers standardize on a common shape and size for ATM cards, not because anybody set out to encourage standardization by creating specific incentives for it, but rather because, without anybody setting out to make it that way, it turns out to be most cost-effective to make ATM cards that fit existing wallets and ATM card readers). But if they exist because someone who plans to bring about a particular social outcome is deliberately creating those incentives for that kind of behavior, then what you have is an example of a designed order, not a spontaneous order. (As, for example, in the case of fines deliberately instituted to reduce speeding, or in the case of, say, offering to reward children with honors or money for good performance in school.)

• Jerry: “Instead of ad hominem arguments against me …”

Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of criticizing an argument by appealing to properties of the person advancing it, instead of assessing the argument on its own merits. As far as I know I have not used an argumentum ad hominem against you at any point. If you want to accuse me of doing so, you had better actually produce an specific example to substantiate the charge.

• Jerry: “since you have ignored other arguments against your theory (rape in mammalia, …”

I have no idea what the ethological argument is supposed to be refuting. Are you trying to make a claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape? If so, I think that’s absolutely false (as does Brownmiller: http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thornhill.html), but it doesn’t constitute an objection to Brownmiller’s theory as discussed in my post. The part of Brownmiller’s theory under discussion is about the social effects of rape, not the causes of an individual man’s decision to commit rape, and rape could have those effects whether or not it is rooted in some underlying biological predisposition.

If you aren’t trying to make the claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape, then what claim are you trying to make, and how does it relate to Brownmiller’s claim about the social effects of the systematic threat of stranger-rape against women?

• Jerry: “mothers protecting children”

I have no idea what the objection here is supposed to be. Is the claim supposed to be that mothers don’t gain social power over children in virtue of their role as protectors against certain kind of danger? Of course mothers gain social power over children that way. Parents enjoy immense social and political power vis-a-vis children, and most of the reason for that has to do with the “protector” role that they play.

If, alternatively, this case is supposed to demonstrate that, even though mothers do gain power over children, it’s not always a bad thing for one group of people to gain power over another by serving as their protectors–well, that much is certainly true. But I don’t think that the relationships between adult men and adult women ought to be like the relationships between parents and their children. Do you?

• Jerry: “rape decreasing with increased pornography and legal prostitution”

Again, I have no idea what point of mine or Brownmiller’s this is supposed to be responsive to. If you’re right about there being a direct causal connection here (again, I don’t think you are, but even if you are) how does that refute or even respond to absolutely anything in Brownmiller’s claims about the social effects of the systemic threat of stranger-rape against women?

Suppose it were true that the best way to reduce rape would be to make pornography and prostitution as widely available to all men as you possibly can. O.K.; what then? Does that logically undermine Brownmiller’s claim that the threat of stranger-rape has the effect of substantially limiting women’s freedom and substantially increasing men’s power over women? If it does undermine that claim, how does it undermine it? If it does not undermine that claim, why bring it up?

Generally speaking, you seem to want to make this into a broad discussion about feminism and radical feminist theories of patriarchy generally, rather than about the much more specific topic (Susan Brownmiller’s analysis of the social effects of stranger-rape) that my post addressed. If you want to argue about that other stuff, fine; there are lots of arguments about that kind of stuff on the Internet and I’m not about to get in your way if you propose to have another one. But that kind of argument is not actually a reply to the points that I was making in my post, and I for one have better things to do with my time than try to rehash those other arguments yet again with someone who obviously doesn’t have much interest in or sympathy with the perspective that I’m coming from. My interest here is only with making sure that as many people as possible understand a much more narrow and specific argument.

• Jerry: “I am still curious to why you think mothers collaborate with bullies as part of their invisible fist and spontaneous order.”

I think that there is no empirical basis whatsoever for treating this as a social problem of a comparable scope to rape and its effects on women. But if there are men out there who stay in a bad relationship because they are afraid of losing a relationship with their children, should they leave, and if being legally deprived of a relationship with your children is an example of violence against the person thus deprived — a claim that I’m not at all sure I’d be willing to endorse — then, sure, I’d say that IF both those things are true, then those men’s decisions to stay in those relationships is an example of an invisible fist process. There are lots of invisible fist processes in this vale of tears; my aim was only to explain one of them, partly for its own sake and partly for the sake of making something clear about the concept of “spontaneous order” than most libertarian writers have thus far failed to make clear. It was not to discuss each and every invisible fist process in the world.

Eric:

It’s a criticism of the idea that this point is some shocking revelation to libertarians.

Well, I don’t know about “shocking revelations.” But I think that we can safely infer from the number of comments, by self-described libertarians, describing the article as making an interesting connection that they hadn’t thought of before, that this does come as “news” to at least some libertarians. It may not come as news to you, but you are not all libertarians.

Leonard:

Still, I find the tone of Johnson’s article off-putting. Part of it is the confrontational tone of it, combined with the lack of actions offered, that are any different than anything libertarians already say. How, specifically, are we supposed to “fight rape” with our new understanding of “rape culture” or whatever? Johnson doesn’t even offer the libertarian standby, of trying to convince women to arm themselves.

I understand that it can be frustrating to have a discussion of some big problem dumped in your lap without having much said about what you can do about that problem. But keep in mind that the post had a specific purpose, which was to consider Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape and the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order in relation to one another, as a means to getting a clearer understanding of each. It’s an intellectual exercise, not an attempt at offering either political strategy or personal advice. If you want to know what kind of antirape or more broadly feminist I think people should be doing, I’ve talked about that in many other places (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. etc. etc.), one of which I linked from the post, but honestly it’s a very big topic and a very hard problem, and it’s not something you can treat comprehensively, or even make much of an approach to, in the course of one article on the Internet which is already trying to deal with a related but distinct subject.

I also think that there are many sources other than me who can do a much better job than I can in providing ideas on what to do — especially women who are involved on a day-to-day basis in local antirape or feminist activism in or near your own community. My goal, as far as concrete actions are concerned, is mainly to get more libertarians to a place, in our analysis and in our priorities, where we are ready and willing to seek out those people and those groups, to ask them what they are working on and what they need help with, and to get involved. I think that’s unlikely to happen unless and until more libertarians have a sympathetic understanding of the feminist analysis of rape culture. Since that’s something I feel I’m in a good position to try to address, by means of trying to translate feminist analysis into terms that some of my readers may more readily understand, that’s where I’m trying to devote my labor and exploit my comparative advantage.

As for women arming themselves in self-defense, I think that’s a perfectly fine idea, as is organizing other forms of women’s self-defense training (e.g. Rape Aggression Defense and similar mixed martial arts systems for women). Neither is a comprehensive solution, or ideal for every woman’s individual needs, but, then, nothing is; I think that what we need are a bunch of small parts, loosely joined with each other, attacking many different aspects of the problem from many different angles.

That is, something undesigned is as evil as something designed, something intended. No. Evil requires intent: mens rea. This is a category error.

The word “evil” has many different usages in the English language. Some of them require specific individual intent and others do not. (Many do not involve individual action at all; for example, “natural evils,” often used in English to refer events like hurricanes or earthquakes, or “social evils,” often used to refer to conditions like ghettoized urban poverty, without any suggestion that the evil in question is the result of anybody’s conscious intent.)

Of course, if I were using the sense of evil you have in mind (something along the lines of a deliberate sin of commission), then I would be committing a category error. But I wasn’t. So, as far as I can see, I’m not.

Consider a village, in India perhaps, where a man-eating tiger is loose in the neighborhood. People there are constrained by fear, in just the same way as the fear of rape restricts women. They don’t go out far alone, or at night, etc. Is this a “coercive” social order?

No. Tigers are not deliberating moral agents. They aren’t the sort of being which could be said to have either coercive or consensual interactions with human beings.

Men who commit rape, unlike tigers, are deliberating moral agents, and, unlike tiger attacks, rape is a deliberate, coercive act committed by men who are morally responsible for their actions.

A spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger posed by a natural evil, such as random tiger attacks, will have some things in common with the spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger that some people within the society force on other people by committing deliberate acts of violence. It will also have some important differences, both in terms of how appropriate certain kinds moral and political criticism are, with respect to that social order, and also in terms of the best way to try to deal with the situation.

Jerry: Your theory is that the non-rapists put up with a certain amount of rape of their daughters and wives because it helps keep women down, and keeps women seeking the protection of the non-rapists.

I doubt that this is Queequeg’s theory. I know that it is not mine. Nor, on my understanding, is it Susan Brownmiller’s.

Jerry: I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down.

Then you’re not talking about my post, but rather something else.

Much of the explicit purpose of the post was to reject interpretations of Brownmiller’s position which, quote:

… treat this kind of analysis as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory about rape — as if Brownmiller were claiming that, say, every first Monday of the month, all the men got together in a big meeting at the Patriarchy’s underground headquarters and decided to have some men commit stranger rape as a way to keep women down. Or, to be more charitable to uncharitable critics, as if Brownmiller were claiming that ‘police-blotter rapists’ and other men who do not commit rape are consciously collaborating with one another, in some kind of social plan, promulgated from the top down, to intimidate women and bring about and sustain male supremacy.

My alternative interpretation of Brownmiller’s theory rejects this in favor of a “spontaneous order” theory, as that term is used by economists such as Friedrich Hayek. It is a hallmark of spontaneous order theories that the individual people participating in a spontaneous order do so by engaging in self-interested actions, for reasons of their own, without needing to make any conscious effort to create or sustain that form of social coordination. (Hence “spontaneous,” in the sense of “undesigned,” as opposed to forms of coordination created by many people consciously following a single plan.) In this case, I read Brownmiller as arguing that men who commit rape do so for reasons of their own, without conscious coordination either between each other or with men who do not commit rape, but that the rapists’ actions nevertheless redound to the benefit of — serve the class interests of — men, including the majority of men who do not commit rape, and who (I presume) consider rape a serious evil and wouldn’t consciously seek to benefit from it. The idea is that when the threat of sexual violence against women is intense, pervasive, and random enough, this produces systematic effects on all women’s freedom, as well as the balance of social power between women and men, whether or not any of the individual people concerned had that outcome in mind, or would have accepted that outcome if they thought about it, when they made their choices about how to act.

Maybe that explanation is right and maybe it’s wrong, but it is what it is, and not something else. You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it, and the fact that your summary of the explanation reads more or less exactly like a condensed version of precisely the strawman view I was explicitly repudiating, and to which I was trying to suggest an alternative, indicates to me that you haven’t done yet gotten that far.

In any case the primary purpose of the original post was to help explain what Brownmiller’s claims are, as against a common and extremely uncharitable reading of them, not to provide a comprehensive defense for the claim. If you want a comprehensive defense, then you’d be better off actually reading the book (which covers a lot of ground over the course of 407 pages of text) than trying to find it my attempt to provide exegesis of four paragraphs in which she summarizes a couple of her conclusions. But before you can understand the defense, you will need to exercise the care and charity needed to understand what the claim being defended is in the first place.

As for the sanctimonious women’s studies set, yeah, O.K., you got me, I’m a sanctimonious Women’s Student. I’m also anti-male, anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life. Let’s move along and talk about the argument as it was actually presented.