Soi-disant “libertarian” Steven Landsburg is in the news for a simple-minded and clearly-supposed to-be-show-off-ily-“brave”-and-“provocative” hypothetical about rape that compares it to being “penetrated” by photons, and the psychic cost of knowing one was raped while unconscious to the psychic cost of knowing that other people are looking at pornography. The post demonstrates, first, the familiar problems with blunt hedonic utilitarianism that has been detached from utilitarianism’s roots as a moral theory, and, second, the selection effect about what kinds of people are attracted to that theory. Lansburg is entirely too pleased with himself for being willing to Think Challenging Thoughts (thoughts that pretty much get covered in a first semester moral philosophy class as the frosh learns why blunt hedonic utilitarianism is not a very good theory), and determined to get through his cute hypotheticals for the fun of it, regardless of whether they convey anything useful or not.

In light of that, I’m all the more glad that Sarah Skwire and Steve Horowitz have been doing the blogging they’ve been doing around here. The sting of having the word “libertarian” attached to the coverage of Landsburg is slightly diminished thereby.

Update:

One thing I forgot to mention is that I found the University of Rochester’s response to be exemplary:

At the University of Rochester, we honor our Communal Principles: fairness, freedom, honesty, inclusion, respect, and responsibility. We are committed to academic freedom and free speech.

Professor Landsburg is entitled to his opinions and his independent publishing of them. His opinions do not represent the views of the University—we work hard to promote a culture of mutual respect and to combat sexual violence.

Unlike what often happens, the university reaffirmed the importance of academic and intellectual freedom right alongside its distancing the institution from the content of the comments.  This is exactly the sort of thing that, say, the University of Rhode Island failed to do with respect to Erik Loomis and the University of Calgary failed to do with respect to Tom Flanagan.  It’s also worth noting– I’ve seen some commentary lose sight of this– that the hypothetical was in a post on Landsburg’s personal blog, not in a classroom lecture.

And one more update:

It’s true that I haven’t offered a philosophical argument in defense of the proposition that the rape of an unconscious person who never finds out about it constitutes a harm.  Neither am I going to do so.  But I will offer a brief account of why I won’t do so.

Landsburg proceeds takes for granted that

1) Pleasure, in an undifferentiated way, counts as a good in the evaluative scales (note the idea of the “benefit” realized by the rapist);

2) Pain, in some sense that includes an undifferentiated psychic discomfort at whatever the experiencer happens to dislike, count as a bad in the evaluative scales; and

3) the inclusion of anything else in moral evaluation is mysterious or anomalous and in need of defense.

Note that he doesn’t think (1) and (2) don’t stand in need of defense; they’re treated as moral primitives, the basic building blocks out of which our morality has to be constructed and the tools we have to use to solve puzzles.

Now, (1) and (2) are both objectionable.  But even before one gets far enough to be showing why , it’s important to deny that (1) and (2) are entitled to unique status as moral primitives.

“I experience discomfort at knowing that you are doing something I don’t approve of” is not  basic building block of how humans express morality to each other.  “I disapprove of what you are doing because…” is the normal way to begin– and it doesn’t count as a successful end to the sentence to say “… because it causes me psychic discomfort to think about your doing that.”  The attempt to build Rube Goldberg machines that approximate basic moral judgments using only the utilitarian building blocks of pleasure and pain is sometimes successful, but even when it is, it looks like (as Bernard Williams put it) thinking one thought too many.  The reason for moral disapproval is primary; running it through the fact that other people experience psychic discomfort at the activity is, at best, taking the long way around, and, normally, a misunderstanding of what’s at stake.  Human actors have, and offer, reasons for their moral reactions, and don’t treat the mere fact that they have the reactions as substitutes for those reasons.

Those reasons are of course subject to responses, challenges, and complications.  But when I say “rape is wrong” and you reply asking me to show how the balance of pleasure and pain works out, and throwing new complications in to alter the balance, you’re (in my judgment) reversing the order of morally-explanatory building blocks and rationally-explained systems of morality.  The balance of pleasure and pain, where those are allowed to smuggle in all kinds of reactions that people in fact have so long as they’re treated as brute facts (“being raped makes me sad”) rather than as reasons or arguments, isn’t entitled to any presumption that it’s more fundamental than any other part of our basic moral vocabulary (“don’t harm people,” “don’t use people,” “act virtuously,” “do unto others,” and so on).  And so the fact that someone can concoct a hypothetical in which “don’t harm” or “don’t treat other people as objects” or “don’t do unto others as you would not wish to have done unto you” can’t be broken down into pleasure-and-pain components is of no particular interest.

Landsburg’s thought experiment only illuminates an interesting puzzle if pleasure/pain is an uncontroversial moral primitive, and nothing else is.  There are some (not all!) economists who think this, but it’s no less mysterious a view than those they hand-wavingly dismiss, and it’s certainly not so self-evidently true that the anomalies it generates should be treated as important puzzles to solve rather than as evidence against the theory.

So I’m not going to get into the game of thinking thoughts too many, of trying to break down the wrong of raping an unconscious person in terms of psychic discomfort at disapproval.  It’s the wrong game to play.