Can Prediction Markets Reduce Sexual Harassment?

Recently the @litenitenoah twitter account observed that:

Prediction markets for sexual harassment accusations don't seem very ethical, but I bet they would successfully expose a lot of real harassers.

— Probably not Noah Smith but you never know (@latenitenoah) May 11, 2018

I'm not certain what ethical objections not-Noah has in mind, and suspect that I probably don't care about them. If prediction markets in sexual harassment (henceforth PMSHs) have the effect of reducing sexual harassment, then this is good and it will take a lot to convince me that the markets are overall not worth having.  (There used to be a prediction market in terrorism, which was shut down after outrage from politicians.) That said, it remains an open question as to whether or not PMSHs actually will have this effect.

After a couple of weeks of on-and-off thinking about this, I want to suggest that any PMSH will have both some specific advantages and some specific disadvantages. At present my fear is that the disadvantages win out; however,  The size of these effects will of course depend upon the precise way in which these prediction markets are implemented. One of my aims with this post, then, is to open up discussion about how exactly these markets can be designed so as to maximise the good and minimise the bad.

It is also worth stating, as a preliminary, a couple of limitations on all of this. Firstly, prediction markets are means of aggregating information, but they are not by themselves a means of governance. They can function as part of a government mechanism, as in Robin Hanson's futarchy, but only as a part. What this means is that while PMSHs may give us a reasonable idea of which men are abusers, it does not in itself provide a means towards actual trying men who may be guilty: any trial will require a concrete accusation from a concrete victim. This does not mean PMSHs can't reduce harassment, however, as we will shortly see.

Second, it is typically assumed in discussions of prediction markets that the existence of and odds given by markets do not affect the outcome being predicted. This may well not hold in this case - a victim might be emboldened to speak out against her harasser if the prediction market says he is probably a harasser, or might alternatively conclude that someone else is likely to come forward and there is no need to subject herself to examination in court. The fact that prediction market odds can affect the outcome is not by itself a problem - one might imagine a prediction market for individuals' health and life expectancies, with individuals buying bullishly on themselves so as to have a financial incentive to eat well and exercise - but it can cause problems, which we will discuss later.

Lastly before getting onto the ins and outs: I shall be proceeding on the assumption that prediction markets are basically efficient at aggregating information. If you disagree with this premise, please take that up elsewhere with Robin Hanson or someone, and accept it for the sake of argument in this post.

The case in favour

In my view, there are two large advantages which any PMSH would have, and two other advantages which PMSHs might have depending upon their design and size, and one other advantage whose size is difficult to gauge.

Firstly, there already exist informal whisper-networks, mostly though by no means entirely between women, about which men are not to be trusted or enabled. These networks can enable women to reduce their vulnerability to potential harassers, and can enable concerned third-parties to jump in to head off and stop harassment at an early opportunity. The effect of a prediction market would be to make this information, in an admittedly less-finely-detailed format, available to all concerned. Women should not have to change their behaviour to avoid being harassed, but since in some cases they can having access to PMSHs would give them a better idea of when this is necessary; concerned friends, similarly would be in a better position to know which men ought not to be left alone with young women for significant lengths of time, and which men really are harmless.

Second, harassers are frequently enabled by the institutions in which they work or serve. Larry Nassar, the former medic at Michigan State University and USA Athletics, was able to abuse over 300 women and girls because of silence surrounding his activities which had been going on since the 1990s. Such silences can only be maintained because institutions and the people within them have plausible deniability about whether they were truly aware of abuse going on. PMSHs would remove that deniability: having a high predicted odds of being accused of harassment would be an instant red flag that would make it much harder for institutions to engage in the kind of motivated ignorance which allows abuse to continue over extended periods of time.

An advantage which I think would be real, but can only speak for anecdotally, would accrue to men with prediction markets on their own odds of being accused of harassment. I do not wish to harass women; being of imperfect social intelligence, however, I frequently struggle to identify which behaviours will be taken as playful flirting or everyday platonic compliments, and which will be experienced as threatening by the women at whom they are directed. Of course I try to err on the side of safety, but I can hardly pretend that I have always succeeded here. Having an external evaluation of how threatening I am seen as would allow me to better calibrate my behaviour - was that girl giving of signs of distress that I didn't pick up on and the other guy did, or did he just want her to dance with him instead? Do I need to reduce the amount of alcohol I consume when going out on the town? Certainly I'm not alone in asking myself these questions - more than one male friend has expressed similar concerns in private conversations.

I wish to mention two other ways in which PMSHs might - might - serve to reduce sexual harassment. One of the biggest problems in tackling sexual abuse is that victims are, entirely reasonably, unwilling to publicly accuse their abusers because doing so will mean exposing deeply personal aspects of their lives to strangers. Whether you consider this to be the Patriarchy in action, an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of having a well-functioning justice system, or a bit of both, this is the constraint within which we have to work. PMSHs would allow women to provide information about their abusers anonymously, by buying bets that the abuser will in fact be accused.

The advantage I am most doubtful about - and which I think a PMSH would ultimately have to jettison - is that it may provide some material compensation to women who do expose their abusers. A woman who has bought bets on the man who harassed her may stand to make money by actually going public, which may make her more likely to go public and/or may alleviate her loss of privacy, for example by allowing her to spend a while in a new location without running down her savings.

The case against PMSHs

There are two issues with this, however, which I suspect mean that a well-functioning PMSH would have to prevent women from financially benefiting by accusing men. Firstly, it is not clear that this incentive would only affect cases where abuse actually did occur. This may therefore create cases where men are falsely accused of harassment by women who want to make money out of the accusation.

This is unlikely to be an especially widespread problem - while false accusations of rape do occur, they are at most a small minority of actual accusations. That said, the prospect of such accusations means that there will be an obvious new brush with which genuine victims can be tarred - any man accused of harassing women may simply claim that his accusers are mercenaries trying to destroy his reputation for money. This will both create extra stress for genuine victims, and may lead courts to wrongly fail to convict a higher proportion of genuine abusers.

It is possible that we may come up with a way to prevent false accusers from financially benefiting from their accusations. Suffice it to say, however, that I have not yet thought up such a way, and this is my greatest worry as to why PMSHs may ultimately be unworkable or counterproductive.

A second major concern is that rich abusers may be able to cover up perceptions of their threat level by buying all bets on their being exposed. This is not the absolute worst possible scenario - it would at least mean that they would pay some price for their misdeeds - but it might allow them a pretence of harmlessness which the informal whisper-networks would have quickly dissipated. We all know stories of rich artists who have raped young women and got away with it; while it might be better that they were in prison, at least their reputations provide a warning to other young women who fall into their orbits. These men might be able to counteract or upend these reputations by betting financially on their not being accused.

There are other, smaller, objections, mostly of the form that PMSHs do not go far enough or are insufficient - that they would only take into account abuse of women with money, or that only men who are already in some way notable would have PMSHs surrounding them. These objections might well be correct, but they are not reasons to oppose PMSHs, merely to think that they must serve as part of a whole package of measures we might take to reduce abuse.

Conclusion

My current suspicion is that the disadvantages win out - that PMSHs might well, on balance, make it easier for men to get away with abuse. There are ways to combat this - for example, by preventing men from betting on their own behaviour, and by preventing people from both holding bets that a person will be accused and accusing that same person. If these are even achievable, however, they may undermine the advantages that are supposed to make PMSHs useful.

This should not be the final word. I would welcome any suggestions as to how PMSHs can be designed so as to avoid incentivising false accusations - and as importantly, to avoid giving the impression of incentivising false false accusations - and as to how they can prevent rich abusers from rigging their own reputations. But it seems clear to me that such suggestions are sorely needed before PMSHs can serve as a tool for making women safer.

The Pinkerian Case for Campus SJWism

Last week, courtesy of a commercial offer which I am shamelessly and ruthlessly abusing, I was able to attend a talk by Steven Pinker discussing his new book Enlightenment Now. I haven't yet had the time to look beyond the opening pages, so if you want a review on the book you should go to the one written by his ultimate fangirl. However, after the talk I was able to ask him the question:

"Many people who accept the trends you point to argue that due to the decline of religion and of thick communities, it is harder for individuals to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Do you agree with this assessment, and either (a) why not? or (b) do you expect it to continue?"

He disagreed with this assessment, giving two counterarguments. The first, which I don't find especially compelling (although IIRC I found it rather more compelling when Peter Singer said the same thing in a book I was otherwise disappointed by) was that people can find meaning in making a better world in general. People are not, in general, motivated strongly by the prospect of making the universe better. (Ctrl-f "charity"). There definitely are some people who are, and more power to them, but I don't think universalism can play the role in people's lives that, for many years, deities did.

His second, more convincing response was that people are finding new ways to build meaning in their lives. The example he himself gave was social justice movements on campuses - a purpose which many people choose for themselves as a purpose to which they can dedicate themselves. People may no longer identify as Christians, but they are very happy to identify as feminists.

Two brief thoughts

Some thoughts that I really ought to write up properly, but don't presently have the time for:

-Many people appear to think either that (P) all social constructions are bad, or (P*) that belief in (P) is central to SJWism. Hence much mockery has aimed not to point to clearly beneficial social constructs (e.g. respect, love, money) but to suggest that almost anything can be a social construct (e.g. the penis).

A more sophisticated view is that something's being a social construct points not to it being bad, but to it being replaceable or at least malleable. But even this is perhaps too simplistic. Musical harmony is a social construct - while in the West we use a 12-tone scale, many other cultures (or composers within the West, e.g. Harry Partch) use different scales with greater or smaller intervals between notes - it is hard to see how we could overturn many aspects of harmony. (Though we could of course tweak it in particular ways, e.g. moving from equal temperament to just intonation).

(edited to add: this is probably old hat to anyone who reads my blog. I'm not trying to say anything especially original here, but it occurs to me that it would be useful to have something to point to, making this point, which isn't the length of a Slate Star Codex post or three)

-In a liberal society, we want both a principle of exclusion and a principle of inclusion. Thus our society can take in and integrate outsiders, but need not roll over in the face of those who threaten it. A "Propositional Nation" goes much of the way towards this - anyone who affirms the key propositions can become a citizen, people who do not affirm those principles cannot. Contrast this with historical or blood-and-soil nationhood, as exists e.g. in UK and Scandinavia. (France is a weird case - it ought to be a kind of propositional nation given the way French nationhood developed after the revolution, but it's still more of a blood-and-soil nation). Blood-and-soil has practical advantages - among other things, a country can hardly expel native-born citizens for their political views - but lacks such an easy criterion of inclusion. Should places like the UK aim to become more "propositional" in terms of their national spirit? Can they do so without abandoning their present identities? (Can "loyalty to the queen" function as the kind of proposition that would bind a nation?)

Why MRAs should avoid Julian Assange

In the news: "Pamela Anderson to campaign for men falsely accused of rape - inspired by Julian Assange friendship."

First, let me be clear. Men's Rights Activists (MRA) have a reasonable case to make: when couples divorce, women automatically get a presumption in favour of keeping children. It's commonly claimed that men who get raped struggle to be taken seriously, I haven't looked into this but it seems very plausible. Women are able to abort unwanted children regardless of what the father wants, fathers are not able to abrogate responsibility for children they do not wish to bring into the world. Men get consistently longer sentences than women for the same crime (one of my troll positions is that in fact women should face longer sentences than men). etc etc. The Red Pill doesn't come from nothing.

That said, there is plenty of genuine misogyny within the MRA movement. Moreover, it's easy to form a false narrative of being oppressed ("In fifteen or twenty years the black man will have the whip hand over the white man in this country,") or to generalise from particular bad experiences with women to claims about all women.

An ideal MRA movement, then, would in some areas work with feminists - working to disestablish certain social presumptions about gender roles, for example - and in other areas serve as a corrective to feminism that has gone astray (such as the various universities in the US which are expelling male students merely for being accused of rape, regardless of the evidence). The worrying alternative is that, just as popularised neo-reaction abandoned all intellectual nuance and became identity politics for whites, a more mainstream MRA movement would simply be identity politics for men. I think there is less risk of this than there was with white identity politics, and almost no danger of it becoming electorally significant: most men have at least some inkling that open and extreme misogyny is not great for their prospects with women, and the ones who don't realise this (or for whom misogyny is no obstacle to sexual success) are not generally enthusiastic or regular voters.

But even so - the way in which a movement is founded and popularised matter, both for public perception and for internal culture. That's why I'm deeply concerned about Julian Assange, however innocent of rape he may be, becoming any kind of cause celebré for MRAs. Wikileaks' associations with Russia and the nativist right are deeply distasteful, and risk contaminating the movement for years to come. I don't know the best way to cultivate a stronger movement, but embracing Assange most certainly isn't it.

My Experience of Race

Michael Story has yet another interesting question on Facebook:

Facebook pals, what's the most direct personal reason you have for your political beliefs? Not ideology, but experiences, wants, cares etc. 
Like I (probably wrongly, genetics etc) attribute my vague conservatism to living in the 3rd and 2nd worlds and seeing our 1st world political and social institutions from distance as immensely precious, fragile and in need of protection. My vague liberalism comes from being eccentric, highly open to other eccentric people and wanting us all to flourish.

Several of the responses deal with issues of race, which led me to think about my own experience of it. I'm as WASP as they come, but have known plenty of people of other races - both immigrants in the UK, and fellow students from around the world at CEU. It's hard to pinpoint any particular views I hold as a result of this, but it's also difficult to deny that my perceptions of race have been affected by what I have seen.

My primary school had a minority of immigrants, although it's long enough ago that I struggle to remember exactly what proportion of the school they were. I remember H (presumably Korean descent, I won't name this person for reasons which will soon be obvious), Nafees and Pardeep (Indian subcontinent), Reuel Clarke (Caribbean maybe?), David Edeke (going by surname, clearly African), Paige (if Mauritians count), Jason Inniss (African maybe?), and am fairly confident there were others who came and left before them. There was also Nikolai, who was half-German half-Russian and left for Germany when we were ten. Again this reliant upon a shaky memory, but I'd guess the school was on average working-to-lower-middle class; I, being upper-middle, was probably in hindsight one of the poshest people there. (I was also one of three people in my year, our of 27 who were there at the end, to go to a selective secondary school. It will not surprise you one bit to learn that the other two were Nafees and Pardeep).

Were the friendship groups in that group stratified by race? Can't really say by memory, since I don't really remember what they were outside my own (none of my most immediate friends were among those mentioned above, although I got along well enough with Nafees and Pardeep of course, and another friend, Jacob, was American if memory serves). I do remember that the most persistent victim of bullying was H. (I was what you'd call complicit in the bullying - pretty certain I never practiced any violence on him personally, but I was watching and laughing when various of my friends - and one guy in particular - would push him down the slope next to the playground. Certainly my behaviour then is something of which, in hindsight, I am deeply ashamed).

Then we move on to secondary school. I went to King Edward VI Camp Hill Grammar School for Boys, where white were definitely the largest ethnic group but more likely a plurality than a majority. We had lots of people from the Indian subcontinent, a notable contingent of Chinese descent, and the occasional person from various other races. At least within my year group, race was visible and was treated as a joke. When choosing sides for football, we would name one team - typically the one with the most blacks - "EDL". We had Racist Wednesdays, in which everyone would tell jokes about the other races (I remember that whites were mocked for our lack of athletic ability and Asians - "freshies", as in fresh-off-the-boat - for their accents) in a spirit of good fun. Less edgily, the combination of A-levels in Maths and three Sciences (possibly plus Further Maths) was referred to as "the Asian equation", although there were plenty of white guys taking it as well.

So race was visible, noted, and mocked. What of the friendship groups? Well, that's the thing - while absolutely everyone (so far as I could tell) had some friends of different races, and there definitely wasn't anything you could refer to as tension between the races, any given pair of people were considerably more likely to be friends if they were of the same race. Years 10 and 11 come to mind, when during form period we had a room with a fairly clear racial divide in seating patterns - Asians in the back left (aside from Nafees - a different Nafees from the one mentioned earlier, to be clear), whites and Immarni through the front and right, and Chinese all dispersed into other classes within the year group.

In contrast to my primary school, this was a very fine grammar school in which pretty much everyone had at least one parent in the civil service. It was what you would rightly expect to be a beacon of progressivism in the most Moldbuggian sense imaginable. And yet we still had this pattern of racial division.

Then I went off to the University of Manchester to study PPE. The PPE course itself was mostly, though by no means exclusively, white - but it was also noticeable how much the racial composition of different courses varied. Our economics lectures contained vast numbers of Chinese students, here for a degree, who you would never ever see outside the classroom. There were actually a couple of far-eastern students, Haydn (Hong Kong maybe? He's not on Facebook, which makes checking hard) and Shuen (Malay) on the edges of my immediate friendship group, and in first-year halls I had a couple of Chinese students as flatmates - one of whom left his room for lectures, to cook, and by the end of the year to play us at chess, and one who I saw perhaps twice in the whole year and who I don't think even went to lectures.

Philosophy, by contrast, was the whitest discipline imaginable. (That said, white did not just mean English - I met a surprisingly large number of Cackalack Americans on philosophy courses). Politics had plenty of minority students, but they were immigrants or progeny of immigrants rather than students from abroad. A more general note, and a very sad one for what it says, it that this was perhaps my first time with absolutely no peers of African descent. They'd been present at St. Mary's Primary School, they were unusual but just-about present at Camp Hill; the only people of that ethnicity I can remember from Manchester were a black-Jamaican medic who went to my church and the security guard at the on-campus Sainsbury's.

With the aforementioned caveat about lots of Chinese students with whom we didn't really interact, I had a reasonably racially mixed friendship group. Among my ten or so closest friends on the course were Naz Nahar (Bangladeshi descent, though we joked that it was spray-on tan), Rachel So (Cantonese descent, though her Cantonese was about the level of my Hungarian) and Jawdat Nassour (from Lebanon, although after graduation he made his immigration permanent; I don't know what Haydn did, and Shuen is currently at grad school in New York City).

Outside of the course, my friends were rather whiter. I did kayaking, a hobby in which I can't ever remember seeing a single non-white comrade; I went to church, which had black families but few black students (although in first year I was friends with a visiting Singaporean student). Giving What We Can: Manchester was very diverse within Europe, being led by a guy of Romanian descent and having as one of the most active members a Portugese student, but was ultimately as white as the rest of philosophy.

So then, on to CEU. CEU is a highly international university, with students from all around the globe. Earlier today I cooked alongside a Pakistani (?) woman, while some far-eastern-European girls nattered in the background and sighed over my use of a cheese grater (yes, really). We also have two Americans, a Canadian, a Swede, two Iranians, a Portugese-French-Swiss, an Assyrian who grew up in Georgia, a Hungarian, several Ukrainians, an Italian, and many more besides on the floor. Go up a floor and you'll find my good friend Bhavya from India; up another floor and you'll meet my lunch-companion for tomorrow, Ethelred (Hong Kong), his girlfriend Laura (Romania), the girl who I wish was my girlfriend, Ágnes (AKA Nesi, Hungary), and a whole bunch of others.

These people, by doing to a graduate school and travelling internationally to get there, are strongly selected both for openness to other countries and for intelligence. In short, for progressivism. And yet there are strong ethic lines of friendship. The Balkans kind of form a conglomeration around use of the Serbo-Croatian language, there's a pan-African group, Russians and Russian-speakers get together to smoke, etc. That's not the only thing - courses and academic interests are also pretty important - but it's an undeniable tendency.

So we have a variety of contexts in which you have highly progressive populations with racial divides, and these racial divides are replicated in friendship patterns. This need not mean any kind of prejudice, in fact I think it's primarily driven by shared cultural (and in particular linguistic) background - CEU is rather more polarised than Camp Hill, where we all had the same first language, and a fair few of my friends from UK minorities - Rachel So, for example, or Dwayne Spiteri (a guy of Jamaican descent who joined Camp Hill for Sixth Form) - were very "white" members of those minorities. I don't think the far-Eastern-European women who were enjoying my cheese-grating are from the same country - one is Armenian, one is some kind of Turkic, and no idea on the third - but they were enjoying the use of a common tongue other than English (and are on occasion joined by one of the Ukrainians).

This was originally intended as an answer to Michael Story's question, but it's far too long for that and doesn't easily lead into any particular belief I hold. But it does effect the kind of racial harmony that I think it is realistic to hope for. A world in which all were truly colour-blind would be wonderful. But ultimately, I don't think even the elites of global society believe in the ideal strongly enough to practice it.


(Incidentally, a context I haven't yet mentioned: online. #MCx is mostly but not exclusively white, most of the people I've come to know through online libertarianism are white continental Europeans; I don't know how different this is from the base rate of young neoliberal or conservative people from the UK. At Freedom Week 2015, which wasn't online but was how I came to know various people who I now know mostly through the web, there was one Asian Muslim guy who was very much at the Toryish end of the people there; Young Liberal Society is mostly white, although if Elrica can use her mixed race as a defence against accusations of prejudice then so can the rest of us in this case.)

Patriarchy is the Radical Notion that Men are People

Anne has a post arguing in favour of a libertarian feminism. It's well worth reading, not least because she's right. But as a persistent contrarian and well-meaning intellectual troll, I want to express some worries, hopefully mixed in with some encouragements, about the project.

To begin with a note of important agreement: libertarians should be more feminist, and should be open to revising their notion of coercion along feminist lines. The NAP is an insufficient framework for understanding oppression, and we should recognise that ideas can contribute towards material coercion even when they are just words. If we can recognise Marxism as a harmful ideology that oppressed the people of the Soviet Union, then we ought to be able to recognise the possibility that patriarchy is a harmful ideology that oppresses women.

Second, she is right that libertarians frequently ignore non-state sources of coercion. This is an accusation which can be made in a number of contexts - nostalgia for the clan systems which states displaced, private crime, etc - but which is not made often enough with regard to the household. The suffering of a citizen compelled to pay the wages of a social worker he will never need to access, while genuine and regrettable, is pretty trivial when compared to the suffering of a woman trapped with an abusive partner. Protesting the former situation while coldly observing that the woman is bearing the consequences of her foolish choice of partner makes it hard for libertarians to be taken seriously by anyone who gives compassion a role in their politics.

My main concern with the libertarian-feminism project is not that these ideologies are incompatible, but that their motivations might be. Libertarianism goes hand-in-hand with methodological individualism, the belief that the primary (perhaps only) actors in society are individual people. This is hardly surprising: if your political theory places great weight upon the choices of the sovereign individual, then you'd better be pretty sure that that individual exists.

By contrast, Marxists view the individual as insignificant when compared to the great movers of history: the economic classes. I'm not going to go into the details of this, not least because I don't know them. These are not the only ways of viewing the world - one might think human behaviour is best explained at the level of communities, of families, of genes, and probably many other levels besides - but they are both popular ways, and they are fundamentally incompatible. Hence individualists struggle to make sense of class conflict, while Marxists view all ideology as ultimately a cover for class interest.

Feminism, it seems to me, has a tendency to view the sexes in much the same way that Marxists view the economic classes. Men collectively oppress women in the same way that the bourgeoisie collectively oppress the proletariat. If Marxism is the attempt to understand the oppression of the proletariat and to unite them for the overthrow of the ruling class, feminism is the attempt to understand the oppression of the female sex and to unite women for the overthrow of men. (This is an exaggeration of most feminists' views, but there was indeed a strain in the 1970s, connected to the Wages for Housework campaign, arguing that the only way for women to escape male oppression is to disassociate from them entirely and adopt lesbianism en masse). They even suffer from the same inconvenience of having to explain why the state, which has hitherto acted only to promote the interests of capital/patriarchy, can suddenly be turned to the advantage of the working class/women.

It's hard for me to tell how far Anne subscribes to this view. For the most part she seems to endorse it: "The sort of radical feminism I’m interested in, and that I see as fitting quite well with libertarianism, sees that society is a patriarchy in which the class of ‘men’ oppress the class of ‘women’." At the same time, she observes that "Women are of course not uniformly oppressed or exclusively victims, and most definitely not a homogenous group with unitary concerns." Perhaps the tension between the positions is smaller than I think, perhaps she has a tension in her views. I don't know.

The picture of feminism I have presented is of course not the only vision of the movement. Intersectional feminism pays a great deal of attention to how different oppressions can interact, and (from my fairly cursory knowledge of feminism) seems like the kind of thing Anne might well be interested in. There are dangers with this view: firstly, that you end up in a kind of "Oppression Olympics" in which different minorities engage in interminable arguments over who has it worst. Secondly, one may ask in what sense this actually remains feminism, rather than merely a "coalition of the oppressed". Such a coalition is unstable, relying as it does upon nebulous judgements about what is oppression and what is merely misfortune (or indeed, self-inflicted harm). It also raises the question of why one cares about the things one does: if your aim is simply to make the world a better place, it seems highly unlikely that this is most effectively achieved by feminist activism. If your aim is to promote the interests of women, it seems equally unlikely that one will achieve this by allying with groups selected for being unsympathetic to mainstream society.

Once again, I don't wish to say that libertarianism and feminism are incompatible. Methodological individualism is compatible with all sorts of theories about why people behave the way they do, including a recognition of the power that ideas, whether or not they are consciously held, can have on society (ctrl-f "idealism"). Patriarchy may just be one such (harmful) idea. But the existence of such a tension may prove a barrier both for libertarians sympathetic to the oppression of women and for feminists leery of relying upon the state for their salvation.

Why Racism Against Oppressed Minorities Isn't Racism

When it comes to generating unusual and (to many people) offensive opinions about morality, scepticism about the ability of anything to affect long-run happiness truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

A relatively tame example is the idea that, since most lives are good, we should therefore devote our resources as fully as possible towards increasing the world population. The moral premises here are controversial but I think defensible - ultimately, total utilitarianism across the span of actually-or-potentially-existing moral patients.

An edgier way to take this is to observe that people from oppressed and marginalised groups are likely to be used to their subjugation due to having grown up in similar (or indeed worse) circumstances, and therefore to suffer far less from it than someone who is thrown into this situation. That is to say, the experience of a white person who suffers racial discrimination is likely to be severely more negative than the experience of a member of an ethnic minority who suffers similar discrimination. Combine this with premises about the interests of all counting equally, and you end up concluding that racism against whites is significantly worse than racism against (for example) black people.

This is a surprising conclusion, and my inclination before endorsing it even tentatively would be to go over the reasoning leading to it with a very fine-toothed comb. That said, if an SJW proclaims that racism is what occurs within a context of oppression and therefore is not significantly problematic when practised against privileged groups, it is fun to be able to argue that they are not only wrong but have precisely the opposite of the truth.

Some Thoughts on Gawker, Hulk Hogan, and Privacy

We know from Wesley Hohfeld that one person's possession of a right implies duties on the part of others. My property right regarding a bike implies that everyone else has duties to let me use it how I so choose, and not to use it themselves unless I have given them permission.

People sometimes talk about a right to privacy. I'm inclined to disbelieve in such a right, on the grounds of the duties it must imply. Suppose I have a right to privacy concerning an affair I have had. That implies a duty on the part of other people not to talk about the affair. In other words, it's a limitation on other people's free speech. Unless they have promised not to talk about the affair, I would not believe in such a duty.

For this reason, my inclination in the recent Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan case is to support Gawker's right to publish the video. They ought not to have done so, sure, but we should be very concerned about the law acting to punish them for this. Not because Gawker itself is worthy of defending - it most certainly isn't - but because government overreach must always be stopped at the first hurdle, before it can become tyranny.

That said, I think there may be an actual case for Hogan here, relying not on a right to privacy but on sexual consent law. Consider that consent to a sexual act is generally not taken to apply merely to the commission of the act in question, but also to the way it is performed. Julian Assange is currently hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in order to dodge prosecution for rape; the claim is not that his alleged victim did not consent to sex, but that she did not consent to sex-without-a-condom. It used to be the case that women could sue men who promised them marriage, slept with them, and then abandoned them. A few years back, a man was imprisoned for rape by deception in Israel after it turned out he was not as Jewish as he had pretended to a woman before sleeping with her.

There are a variety of things which, if not revealed prior to sex, can cause any consent to the sex to become invalid. STIs are a familiar example; I would presume that being filmed is another. Hulk Hogan was not, I believe, aware that we was being filmed; it seems fair to assume that had he known that the resulting video would be made public, he would not have engaged in the sex act in question. This would imply that his sexual partner, and Gawker through their complicity, have engaged in rape.

"Rape" is a far-ranging term, of course, and not all rapes are equally bad. On a scale of one to ten, where Gilles de Rais is something around an 8 and Amnon somewhere in the region of 5-6, Hulk Hogan's story can't be worse than a 1.5. But there's definitely a case there.

On #FreeKesha: Why You Can't Skip Due Process

NB: This article was written as an attempt to persuade social-justice types. As such, while there is nothing here that I actually disagree with, the emphasis on certain issues is different. This notice may be removed if I become happy enough with the state of the article to publicise it at all. Currently I feel that it needs more feminist shibboleths. It could perhaps do with an actual defence of the presumption of innocence rather than merely its assertion, but I'm wary to include that since the way that I think about this (roughly: how much sense does it even make to speak of this once you accept a Bayesian epistemology, in which all beliefs are probability distributions?) is so radically different from the way in which most people, including most intelligent people, do.

I

Currently in the news: pop singer Kesha (formerly Ke$ha) has attempted to get her contract revoked by court. The contract obliged her to work with producer Dr. Luke, who she alleges raped her on several occasions. The court, however, found that she is still bound by the contract which has predictably resulted in great uproar across the social justice movement under the hashtag #FreeKesha.

If you accept the claim that she was raped, this is entirely appropriate. If he is a rapist, then Dr. Luke ought to be in prison and the contract torn up entirely. But there's a large problem with this, in the form of a thing called "the presumption of innocence". We can't just assume he is guilty of rape - and in this case, that means we have to assume that any alleged intercourse between the pair was consensual, or at least in a sufficiently grey area that Dr. Luke cannot be held legally culpable. This is hard to do, but in the case of every crime except rape the presumption of innocence is held to be a fundamental part of living in an enlightened, civilised society.

Time for a musical break!

II

Let's clarify exactly what is at stake. #FreeKesha is not about a woman being forced to work with her rapist, it is about money.

One of the basic legal limitations on contracts is that while a party may be entitled to compensation, they cannot be entitled to specific performance. That is to say, if Ana agrees to pay Bob £50 in exchange for Bob mowing Ana's lawn, she pays him the £50 and he then decides that he really doesn't want to mow the lawn (for whatever reason): Ana will usually be entitled to get her £50 back, often with extra money on top since she has lost out by not knowing that she would need to employ someone else to mow her lawn. What she is not entitled to, however, is to force Bob to actually mow the lawn.

So while the question of whether Dr. Luke raped her is about whether he ought to go to prison, the question of whether the contract should be rescinded is really about money: it is about whether or not Kesha should have to pay compensation in order to be free of the contract, or whether Sony and Dr. Luke should be obliged to release her for free.

This isn't to say that money is unimportant. Is Kesha was raped, there's no reason why she should have to pay her rapist in order to be released from the contract. But it's important to be clear about exactly what the issue is.

III

Now it's obvious how the presumption of innocence applies to the question of whether or not Dr. Luke raped her. While we ought to express sympathy for every person who claims to have been raped, this does not mean we should skip the procedure of going through a fair trial before we declare the accused party guilty and imprison them. Imprisoning someone merely on the basis of an accusation is a clear breach of their basic civil rights - indeed, their basic human rights - but merely having a contract rescinded? What harm can that do?

In this individual case, not much. As I have already said, all this is about is the matter of a few million dollars. If we rescind the contract without a court case Kesha is a bit richer, if we maintain the sanctity of the contract until Dr. Luke is proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in front of a jury of his peers, he and Sony are a bit richer. Unless there's some inherent reason why one of them deserves the money more - a topic about which there will be a thousand and one arguments, all of them awful - there's no way to answer the question of which ought to get it without first answering the question of whether Dr. Luke did indeed rape Kesha. Which takes us back to the presumption of innocence.

To be honest I'm not really familiar with Kesha's music, so here's a

cover of one of her songs by one of my actual favourite bands.

What about the wider effects, though? Rescinding the contract without a full trial would send a clear and public message that if you're in a contract which you want to get out of, rape accusations - whether true or not - will do that for you. False rape accusations are not something we should want to encourage, since quite apart from the effects on those who are falsely accused (overwhelmingly, by the way, men from ethnic minorities) their stories, when they fall apart, cause actual rape victims to be taken less seriously. Anti-feminist articles like "13 women who lied about being raped" are short on genuine statistics about the low incidence of false rape accusations, but nevertheless they are only made possible by the fact these incidents do happen.

Might such accusations become common? I don't know enough about the music industry to know if this might happen more widely, and there aren't that many other industries where a single individual is likely to be bound by a contract for years on end. But you can think of other cases. A woman wants to move out of her rented apartment at a single day's notice, contrary to a contract requiring her to let the landlord know a month before so her can sort out the next tenant. Most women would never even think of making a rape accusation here. But, as much as we may dislike this fact, there are some who will. And if we decide to support every alleged rape victim, we will end up supporting these people among them.

IV

What can we do then? Play whist from the side while Kesha has to endure a painful trial to obtain justice? Well, first I think we should be conscious of how little most of us can do in this one case. The fact that there's no way to short-cut the legal process in this particular case doesn't mean that there aren't a whole load of other good causes that we absolutely know the right side of: FGM, implicit bias and racial prejudice, and Islamophobia, to name just three. These are causes which we absolutely can and should protest about loudly, where there simply aren't the same contentious legal cases which have to resolved before we know exactly what we should advocate.

Secondly, if you feel so strongly about Kesha's situation, I daresay you could help crowdfund her to buy out of her contract. Presumably (NB: I am not an expert!) this would be returned to her if Dr. Luke were indeed found guilty, and then it could be returned to the crowdfunders. Maybe Kesha could put her first independent album on Kickstarter, with proceeds being used to buy her independence and contributors receiving advance copies of the album as a reward. This is what the internet is for.

The key point I hope I've made is this: you can't circumvent the need for legal process. Taking the presumption of innocence seriously means making hard choices - the urge to advocate for Kesha is the urge for justice, the very noblest urge of all - but it is a cost we have to bear for being a civil society.

One Reason to be Glad About Sexism

About the only time it'll be good for the integrity of professional chess that no-one cares about the women's events https://t.co/Np0MzYcc6n

— Andrew Pearson (@adrwtp) January 26, 2016

I don't think many people in the chess world intend to be sexist - much of the more blatant sexism is of the "benevolent" kind - the tournament livestream watcher who, writing in, addresses the commentators as "wise Peter and beautiful Sopiko", for example. But the demographics are very much male-dominated, and the culture surrounding the game reflects that - not helped by the fact that FIDE, the game's international governing body, is one of the last remaining bastions of the USSR.

Perhaps because of this culture, perhaps because of sexism in the communities from which chess players arise, perhaps because men tend to think more analytically, and perhaps simply because men tend to exhibit more variation than women in their abilities, there are vastly more strong male players than female players. Hou Yifan, the strongest female chess player in the world, is the world's 68th strongest player overall. I don't know how many male players are stronger than Humpy Koneru, the female no. 2, but a bit of extrapolation from the ratings at the lower end of the top 100 men suggests she's probably some way outside the top 200.

This means that there are a great many men who could potentially choose to identify as transwomen and compete for the women's world championship. I can definitely imagine some men doing that to become Women Grand Masters, the bar for which is set considerably lower than that which exists for Grand Masters proper, but I think it's unlikely to happen for the world championship.

Firstly, success in top chess tournaments has a lot to do with preparation. Magnus Carlsen, not a player noted for his strength in the opening, had no fewer than four grandmasters helping him on a daily basis during his last title defence - three of them "Super-GMs", members of the elite group of fifty or so of the world's very strongest players. (Only one woman - the great Judit Polgár - has ever been a super-GM). I imagine that it would be easier for someone uncontroversially accepted to be a woman to find willing aides than someone who might be seen as a huckster.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, people don't really care about the women's events. Judit Polgár was the undisputed greatest female player in the world for over 25 years, and never once bothered to compete for the title of Women's World Champion. Hou Yifan's dominance of the female chess world is not as total as that which Polgár had - though still very solid, even more than Magnus Carlsen's domination of the men's game - and she is a past Women's World Champion, but at the time of the most recent Championship she simply didn't bother to compete. Granted, it was because of a clash with another tournament, but the tournament she went to wasn't especially high-status either. To Kirsan Illyumzhinov and other bigwigs at the Federacion Internationale d'Echecs (FIDE), such events are an extra source of kickbacks. To everyone else, they're just yet another low-level tournament, reports of which tend to include rather more pictures than normal.

The Past was Way Creepy

86% of people asked would rather see the lanterns with Flynn Rider than dance in the forest with Prince Philip. This is not enough, because the dancing-in-the-forest-scene from Sleeping Beauty is horrendously rapey:

I mean, what was Philip thinking?

(1) I'll creep up on this teenage girl who is all alone in the woods!

(2) I'll grab her and start dancing with her before she even knows that I'm there!

(3) Every time she gets loose from me and starts walking away, I'll grab her wrist and pull her back!

Or more to the point, what were the animators thinking? Did they realise how creepy Prince Philip's behaviour is, or did they just see it as a mixture of confidence and love-at-first-sight?

Step by step...

...gender equality progresses.

Kurdish defenders have victory in their sights. After exactly a month of fighting, they say they have driven Islamic State from most of the city.

But from a hilltop across the border in Turkey, it is clear there is still fighting going on, particularly in the north of the city. Small and heavy arms fire can be heard, as well as occasional explosions. There have also been several air strikes this afternoon by the US-led coalition.

One 32-year-old Kurdish militia commander, who leads the fighting in the east of the city, told me she hoped the city would be "fully liberated" very soon.

(from a BBC article on the war currently going on between ISIS and the Kurds).


Notice that little word in the final paragraph: "she". At almost any time before now, the idea of a woman leading an army (with certain rare and very charismatic exceptions) would either have been laughed at or would have called to the mind the Amazon stereotype. Instead, women of ability are able to lead armies, and to be taken seriously. Perhaps The Onion laughs at this kind of thing, but I view it as a genuine step towards genuine sexual equality.

What are the rights of Children? Part One

This is (hopefully) the first in a series of posts discussing the raising of children from the perspective of political philosophy.

A topic in political theory which is particularly close to my heart is how children can and should be raised, and what claims they have on parents and on other agents. I recently attended my first academic conference, and while there I encountered three papers within this area.

The first paper, Is obligatory child support possible in a private law society? A contractual approach, by Lukasz Nicolaus Dominiak, was presented as part of a workshop on The Current State of Libertarian Political Philosophy. He was responding to the position set forth by Herman Hans Hoppe and by Murray Rothbard, which states that parents have no natural positive obligations towards their children any more than they do for any random person in the street, and therefore that mandatory child support represents unjust aggression towards the parent compelled to pay it. Lukasz argued that in a stateless, common-law society couples would sign contracts and that these contracts would specify child support to be paid in the event of a separation. He had what seems to me to be rather a confused argument that child support would be lower in such a society than it is in ours (the argument being that the current system of courts turns the parent with children into a monopoly. What, I wonder, does he see as the "product" being sold by this monopoly?) and some sound economic analysis to demonstrate various ways in which child support would vary from couple to couple.

My opinion, and I think that of everyone there (including Lukasz) was that, regardless of how accurate this was in a predictive sense, it relied on a set of moral premises one of which is completely unacceptable: Rothbard's account is far too permissive towards bad parents. According to Rothbard, if a child is left by its parents to starve, this is no violation of its rights; moreover, it would be impermissible for an outsider to violate the parents' property rights in order to rescue the child. Lukasz, I believe, thought that such behaviour by the parents (apart from being despicable, or course) would represent the abandonment of guardianship rights over the child, leaving another person free to homestead that right by taking the child in. My own preference would be to construct some account of how the child acquires positive rights against the parents, but this is proving problematic, as I will explain in my second post of this series.


I'm not certain I understood the main message of the second paper, Injustice and the Child's Perspective by Christina Schuees. It had references to Plato (bad) and to Miranda Fricker (good), and the most I got from it was the idea that children are the victims of various kind of injustice and are not in a position to do anything about it.


Finally, Gunter Graf and Gottfried Schweiger presented their work-in-progress Securing Justice for Children. Who is responsible for what? I liked this paper. It was clearly set out, which made it easy to tell where they were making howlers. There was at least one point in the conference when I felt like saying "OK, I understand your conclusion. Please could you provide an argument for it?" This was not one of them, for the simple reason that they were clear about this being a work in progress and the arguments not being fully worked out. One of the howlers was that, in the absence of arguments, they still had a conclusion (and one which sounded awfully like "We need world socialism!"); that said, it was an excellent demonstration of why all philosophy should be analytic philosophy and for that I thank them. I intend to refer to this paper in the third post in this sequence.

An actual defence of homophobes

A (himself gay) friend of mine wrote a blog post entitled "In Defence of Homophobes". I have a problem with is his post: it's not an actual defence of them, merely an argument that we should not be getting them fired from jobs (outside of politics) for their views. As it happens, I pretty much completely agree with him, but for the record, an actual defence of homophobes, one that actually attempts to defend the thing which distinguishes them from the population at large - their homophobia - instead of merely treating it as an unfortunate flaw, would look rather more like the following:


Any minority group within society which cannot interact romantically with non-members of that group places its members at a severe disadvantage. Such groups include homosexuals, most Christians, and probably a fair few other groups which I have less exposure to. In a society of 100 men and 100 women, where exactly 8 members of each sex are homosexual, each straight person has 92 potential partners whereas each homosexual has only 7. Straights are therefore able to be more selective about their chosen partner, and so their relationships are likely to be better optimised for happiness. Moreover, the assumption when meeting someone in whom you have a potential romantic interest is that they are straight, which means that in order to find a partner a homosexual will generally have to go to some specialised place. For example, this is why there are specialised nightclubs for gays - it's not that gays have systematically different tastes in music to straight people, nor is it that they are more fussy about the décor - it's to facilitate a hookup culture in which gays do not face a 90%+ chance of being rejected without any consideration.

Of course, homosexuality is not something that is chosen, so it is unfair to blame homosexual people for the position in which they find themselves. But that doesn't mean we can't try to shift people's preferences towards being more straight. If there is less talk about homosexuality, then it is at least plausible that reduced exposure to the possibility of finding someone of the same sex attractive will cause people to think less about being homosexual, act according to a "straighter" set of sexual preferences, and hopefully find more satisfying relationships as a result.

It should be noted that the argument would apply the other way if homosexuals were the majority and straights the minority. Indeed, the ideal would be for everyone to be bisexual, which would raise each person's number of potential partners in the example above from a mean of 85.2 to 199. But because a) currently the majority is straight, which provides as easy coordination point, and b) it's easier to reproduce (if not necessarily to actually raise children) within the context of a straight relationship, it just so happens that barring a major shift in favour of bisexuality, it makes sense to push towards a greater homogeneity around heterosexuality.


There are counter-arguments, of course. Given that there are significant similarities between members of the same sex which do not exist across the sexes - e.g. men supposedly having a greater appetite for sex than women, and tending to be more interested than women in things like sport and computer games - homosexual relationships could have a natural hedonic advantage over straight relationships. Without doing empirical research I really don't know which effect would be larger; the point is that an actual defence of homophobes - as opposed to an argument that they should be tolerated - would treat them as reasonable people with reasonable grounds for their beliefs and actions. Of course, no actual homophobe holds his/her position because of the reasoning I have laid out above.

We need a new terminology for rape

A couple of weeks back in a politics tutorial, I was called upon to defend a Nozickian view of punishment as  being about restitution of the victim. In particular, I was to explain how it is even possible to compensate someone for being raped. (Rape was probably a bad crime to use as an example, being rather a hot-button issue, but it wasn't me who chose it). I didn't make a very good job of it, partly because of a lack of time and because the audience I was explaining to did not understand the axioms of microeconomics. I attempted to draw a standard graph of bundles of goods, with one axis representing monetary income (or rather, the optimal bundle of goods which could be acquired at a given level of income) and the other axis representing not-getting-raped. Due to the limited time available and because this is a rather tricky topic, I didn't get any further than this, but I did just about manage to mention something which had occurred to me: that rather than phrasing it as rape, we should phrase it as "sex one would rather not have."

This isolates the sex-crime, and removes the violence, betrayal of trust, and other wrongs that go along with it. The problem is that this isn't modelling rape - it's modelling prostitution. We can quite easily say "Person X would rather not sleep with person Y, but if Y were to pay X £x in exchange for the sex, then X would accept the exchange." But this wouldn't support a hypothetical-consent defence of rape if Y were to leave £x to X after the rape. Firstly, rape is almost inevitably going to involve some element of force, intimidation, deception, concealment or some other skulduggery. Each of these could be realised in a number of ways, and I really don't feel like describing them further unless necessary.

I would not go so far as to say that such skulduggery is necessarily a part of rape, however. Certainly it's present in the majority of cases, but we can conceive of cases where it was not. Indeed, there are some hideously complicated cases. Suppose a tall, muscular guy and a petite, naive girl meet in a nightclub, head back to the guy's room after several rounds of drinks. The guy then asks consent to have sex with the girl; she has sobered up a bit and doesn't really want to, but is afraid because she's in an unfamiliar place, he's much bigger and more powerful than her, it wasn't unreasonable for him to assume that he would be sleeping with her and he's lost the chance to spend the night with anyone else, and combined with the alcohol she's afraid that he'll get angry. So she says she consents.

This guy has specifically asked for, and apparently received, consent. That alone places him above the vast majority of males engaging in casual sex. And yet, the consent could reasonably be put down to duress and is therefore highly dubious. It's hard to see exactly what the guy has done wrong, and yet he is arguably guilty of rape.

What this tells us is that we need a more nuanced discussion of rape. Not all rapes are identical; not all rapists are necessarily blameworthy. We should distinguish undesirable sex (which someone might voluntarily take part in, in exchange for other services) from the means used to procure it, and we should distinguish between different means. I think we can agree that threatening suicide in order to get someone to sleep with you is worse than assuming consent from a one-night stand, so I think we should have different terms for these.

I am not optimistic for the chances of this actually happening, for reasons which I may go into at a later date.

PhilChat, Women in Philosophy

Today marked the first meeting of a 'PhilChat' group at the university. About fifteen people went - a mixture of postgraduates, especially dedicated undergraduates, a trio of rather less dedicated undergraduates who had apparently been press-ganged into coming by the postgrad who ran one of their tutorials, and of course our speaker - the esteemed Professor Helen Beebee, who gave a talk on women in philosophy. She had just been taking a two hour lecture so we had a short wait for her to arrive, during which time the postgraduates (most of whom were down to give talks in future weeks) introduced their own specialisms, which were mainly metaphysical but included one guy who had spent a long time considering the precise meaning of the word "allegedly" and was down to do a talk on the philosophy of swearing. Oh, and it took precisely three-and-a-half minutes before the discussion turned to laughing at MMU and their study of Continental Philosophy (as UoM students of Analytic Philosophy, we of course look down on both of these).

The talk itself was interesting. If I were a person with the slightest bit of power, then I would have demanded more statistics, but there were enough statistics present to demonstrate that women are a minority and the argument as to why this was certainly seemed plausible. (Essentially, it was the classic "Philosophy, as practised by most departments, is a rather intellectually violent discipline. This has a greater propensity to turn off woman than men." Professor Beebee cited the example of another professor at one of her previous employers who had kept a score of "Home Wins" and "Away Wins": whenever they had a visiting scholar, the home scholars would attempt to tear the scholar's article to pieces and if, as usually happened, they succeeded, the professor would chalk it up as a Home Win.)

After a short break, during which the less interested undergrads sloped off, there followed a Q&A session. Both of the questions I had in mind were asked in slightly different form before I was called upon to ask a question, but I learned some of the way in which philosophy seminars work. In the process I was introduced to the hand question/thumb question distinction, a distinction on a par with the analytic/synthetic distinction in terms of its importance to a young philosopher. Having arrived slightly late, I was near the front and did not see the raising of hands/fingers and so remain ignorant of the workings of this phenomenon; however, to use Donald Rumsfeld's terminology it has moved from an unknown unknown to a known unknown, which in my book is a significant improvement.

Eventually we ran out of time - in fact, I think we overran significantly - and the postgrads headed off to the pub. I went to the aquatics centre for kayaking, spent an hour capsizing in a controlled fashion, another hour varying between sitting on the edge and screeching around the pool at top speed, and eventually headed back to the house.