debitage

21.10.06

Women And Children First?

A common example of anti-male sexism used by those who think men are oppressed is the "women and children first" philosophy of evacuation in the event of a disaster. The usual response to this claim is to point out that this philosophy is condescending and infantilizing to women, and that any benefits they get from it are trivial compared to the many forms of anti-woman sexism in our society. As it turns out, though, in the case of wildfires, spiriting the women away to safety puts them even more at risk:

More women and children are dying in fires trying to evacuate the family home while men stay behind to defend it.

Head of the Centre for Risk and Community Safety and RMIT researcher Professor John Handmer believes this scenario is occurring more frequently than in the past.

"We have documented that in many cases men will order women and children to leave the property at the last moment fearing that it looks very ugly," Professor John Handmer said. "Women and children are put in the car and told to drive off � into the fire front unfortunately in many cases � while the men remain behind protecting the house, so they are in relative safety."

Australian research -- and I have no reason to suspect this wouldn't be true of the US as well -- has pretty clearly shown that nearly all civilian deaths occur from hasty, last-minute evacuations. Further, most homes burn down well after the fire front has passed. If your home is well-prepared (defensible space cleared around it, screens over windows and eaves, etc.), you can safely wait out the main wall of flame inside. Then you'll be there to put out the embers that could eventually torch the house. So condescending attempts to spare the weaker sex from active front-line defense of the home in reality puts them in greater danger.

Stentor Danielson, 13:08, |

19.10.06

Religion And Science Are Complements

The Worldwatch Institute has a poll on its site, asking "What role should religious leaders play in the movement to cultivate an environmentally sustainable and just society?" One choice -- currently the lowest vote-getter -- is "Abstain from involvement and leave the leadership of the movement to those with a scientific approach to environmentalism." I think this choice is wrongheaded, because it improperly imports a "science versus religion" framing into an issue where that framing does not apply. With respect to the environment, science and religion are complements.

There are two ways in which religion can conflict with science. The first is substantive: religion proposes factual theories that are incompatible with those of science. The best current example of this, of course, is creationism versus evolution. Literalist Christianity contains certain factual propositions, such as "the world was created in six days," which conflict with science's factual propositions. The other way science and religion can conflict is epistomological: religion asserts a moral injunction against the pursuit of certain knowledge by science, either because that knowledge is intrinsically something that we are not meant to know, or because the only feasible methodology for acquiring that knowledge would be unethical. Stem cell research is an example of the latter sort of conflict.

While I can't speak for all religions, neither of these sorts of conflicts are present in the case of Christian environmentalism. There is no substantive conflict, because the Bible does not contain any ecological theories. God may have told the Israelites where all the animals and plants come from, but he never pronounced on food webs and successional patterns. Christianity also does not offer any epistemological opposition -- nowhere in the laws of Moses or the teachings of Jesus are we told "thou shalt not conduct a biodiversity survey or build for thyself a computer model."

In the case of environmentalism, what religion provides is a value system. Science alone cannot tell us what to do. Science may find that expanding palm oil plantations cause declining biodiversity, but it takes the addition of an extra-scientific value premise -- "we ought to preserve biodiversity" -- to give us an agenda for action. Religion is, of course, not the only source of values, and one may reject religious environmentalism due to disagreements with the basis or content of that value system. But science is useless without some extra-scientific value system. To eschew Christian environmentalism in favor of science-based environmentalism is like saying that instead of getting a car with automatic transmission, you're going to get one with wheels. Regardless of how much you enjoy driving stick, it doesn't change the fact that automatic cars need -- and are perfectly capable of having -- wheels.

Stentor Danielson, 23:54, |

Bestiality, Vegetarianism, And Consent

I don't mean to turn this into an animal rights blog, but in his latest column, Dan Savage raises an interesting argument for vegetarianism (or bestiality), but then gives a nonsensical rebuttal.

However, it needs to be said that if zoophilia is wrong because animals can't consent to sexual acts, then hamburgers, lamb chops, and Jell-O brand gelatin, along with leather shoes, belts, pants, slings, and hoods, are all equally wrong. It's possible that meat and leather are, you know, wronger. If we could talk to the animals, I'm pretty sure they would tell us they would rather be screwed than stewed. But until we can talk to the animals, I fully support eating them and wearing them, not fucking them.

The standard argument against bestiality -- animals can't consent to it -- seems to apply equally to carnivory. Savage tries to weasel out of it by invoking a strong notion of consent (it must be verbal), and applying the burden of proof inconsistently. With regard to sex, he says we should assume (just like we do with humans) that it's forbidden unless animals explicitly tell us we may. But with regard to eating, we should assume that it's permitted unless animals explicitly tell us we may not. I see no reason for this. After all, Savage himself admits that insofar as animals can communicate nonverbally, and insofar as we can guess their thoughts by analogy to our own, they refuse to consent to being killed for food in stronger terms than they refuse their consent to sex.

It's interesting that with regard to sex, we happily elevate animals to moral agency -- after all, nobody would think of asking whether a vibrator consents to being used for a person's sexual gratification. Yet with respect to food, we deny animals that moral status.

Stentor Danielson, 11:35, |

18.10.06

Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me

As a denizen of the dregs of the feminist blogosphere, I seem to have been tagged to do the "Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me" meme. So here we go:

1. It removed some of the cultural barriers to me being a house husband. (Now if only socialism would get on the stick and remove the economic barriers ...)

2. It jump-started my academic career, as my first conference presentation was the paper I wrote for my Feminist Geography class.

3. It kept me interested in high-quality blogging, since I'm not sure I'd have lasted five years if I was still just reading Kevin Drum and his ilk.

4. It led me in to recognizing and understanding other forms of inequality (race, ability, size, etc).

5. It made life a whole lot better for a great number of non-me people, who I care about either personally or in the abstract.

Stentor Danielson, 22:14, |

Down With Dryer Sheets

I knew it -- dryer sheets are a bad idea. I stopped using them after my first trop to Australia when I couldn't find them, but my clothes came out of the wash just fine. Now if only I could convince my apartment complex to let me put up a clothesline.

Stentor Danielson, 22:12, |

16.10.06

Pretend Punishment

This article gives a fairly succinct summary of the retributivist versus utilitarian theories of punishment. But it also gives an interesting test of which side your moral intuitions lie on. The author discusses two scenarios in which a utilitarian punishment system would lead to outcomes we'd find unacceptable. The first is the classic anti-utilitarian thought experiment -- we can concieve a scenario in which punishing an innocent person would have beneficial effects, and hence strict utilitarianism would demand that we do it. He then goes on to present a second scenario, billed as even more unacceptable and ridiculous -- utilitarianism would demand that we pretend to punish a person, rather than really punishing him, if that would have an equal or greater deterrent effect. My moral intuitions, however, are so strongly utilitarian that my first reaction to that scenario was "oh, if only it was realistic to imagine that pretend punishment would work!"

Stentor Danielson, 01:40, |