What can we learn from the lawmaker who used the word "beautiful" to describe a child born from rape?

West Virginia state representative Brian Kurcaba infamously said:

For somebody to take advantage of somebody else in such a horrible and terrifying and brutal way is absolutely disgusting. But what is beautiful is the child that could come as a production of this.

My mom, Ann Althouse, has some incisive points about this:

[W]e are all descendants of rapists, aren't we? In the genetic line that led to each of us, there must be ancestors who were the product of a rape. How could it be otherwise? . . .

If every woman who was raped in all of human history and pre-history had had the ability to abort and had done so, not one single person who now lives on the face of the earth would exist. We all contain the inheritance of rape, and if life is beautiful, Kurcaba had a point. But it's a point they can kill you with in our aggressive American political discourse. That's the lesson here.

Imagine the completely different set of persons who would populate the earth instead of us if no rape-conceived child had every been born. What would they be like?!

Another perspective is: What are we like? What part of our cruelty and selfishness comes from this genetic inheritance?

A third thought experiment: If, beginning now, every woman would terminate every pregnancy caused by rape, how would humanity change?

I posted this to Facebook and one of my friends said my mom's "What are we like?" point was very interesting. I added:

Yeah, and it's the kind of interesting point that our conversations would happen upon more often if most people weren't so stifled by the prevailing political correctness.

Is Obama's drone war giving us exactly what we want?

Matt Lewis thinks so:

President Obama has been consistent in practicing what I call "politically correct warfare" — which is to say that for most Americans, these drone strikes are out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

And here's the ugly truth: Obama is giving us what we want.

We have an unspoken agreement with the president. Obama never promised America he wouldn't kill people more aggressively than his predecessor. But with a wink and a nod, he gave us plausible deniability.

Americans, it turns out, don't really have the stomach for the unseemly business of taking prisoners, extracting information from prisoners, and then (maybe) going through the emotional, time consuming, and costly business of a trial.

American citizens want someone who will make the big, bad world disappear. Problems only exist if we have to confront them. Obama has made warfare more convenient for us — and less emotionally taxing. We should thank him.

What do affirmative action, abortion, and the death penalty have in common, aside from being controversial issues?

My mom, Ann Althouse, writes this after attending a debate about the University of Wisconsin's use of affirmative action:

The students at a university are always the students who were admitted. They feel hurt or outraged if they think the message is that they shouldn't be here. They're here, in the room, and the individuals who did not get in are not here to cry out with corresponding outrage.

It reminds me of debates about abortion. Those who were aborted are never present in the room to express their perspective on the issue. . . .

The difficult thing — and the true moral challenge — is to visualize those who are affected who are not in the room to express pain when you hurt them.

Back in 2008, I wrote:

[W]e tend to care about the harm that's done to specific, knowable people, while we give short shrift to the harm done to "statistical" people -- people about whom we can't say "We know their names," but only "We can calculate that this number of people probably would have done this in an alternate world."

I then quoted from a study by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule called "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required?" (that link goes to an abstract with a link to a free PDF):

Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. Some of them have been subject to multiple forms of unfairness, in the legal process and elsewhere. At least some were wrongly convicted. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere “statistical people.” They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the advocates of capital punishment often focus on the heinousness of the (salient) offender, while the abolitionists focus on his or her humanity. We suspect that the discussion would take a different form if the victims of a regime lacking capital punishment were salient too, and the example of police behavior in hostage situations supports the suspicion. . . . But it does raise the possibility that moral intuitions, for many people, are a product of the salience of one set of deaths and the invisibility or speculative nature of another.

Are you thinking enough about the people you can't see or hear? Oh, and this isn't just about "people." Don't forget animals.

Anyone who likes to analyze the world in terms of "privilege" should be especially alert to this problem, since it's a "privilege" to be able to easily ignore someone else's hardship.

UPDATE: More thoughts, from Althouse and Instapundit.

Why do we care more about the miners in Chile than the flood victims in Pakistan?

We have a bias in favor of "specific" victims.

"We are much less interested in helping a victim – we only want to help the victim," Jonah Lehrer says in that blog post. He correctly calls this "deeply irrational." It makes no sense to distinguish between people who are "specific" and those who aren't. Everyone is a specific individual!

Lehrer quotes a new study that asked people questions to try to determine how much they used analytical thought as opposed to hunches. The more analytical people showed less of an emotional bias in favor of specifically identified victims:

Individual differences in analytic (“rational”) processing style moderated the effects of different request types on donations to a Zambian relief fund. Less-analytic processors donated more to a single identified victim than to requests describing statistical victims or a combination of both; more-analytic processors showed no differences.

Lehrer also notes:

[T]he floods in Pakistan have received far less attention than warranted, in part because most of the stories focus on the vast scope of the disaster, and not on individual tragedies.

There are a couple ways that the "focus on the vast scope" could diminish people's caring. Lehrer means it causes us to view the victims as faceless and indistinct. But that wouldn't seem to fully explain the disparity: we are seeing photos of specific victims in the flood, not just statistics.

Another factor is that, even if we understand that the flood is taking an enormous human toll, the huge scale (it's said to have affected 20% of Pakistan, which has a population of 170 million) makes it seem so unmanageable that we instinctively throw up our hands. Trying to solve the problems seems hopeless. With the trapped miners, there's a discrete mission that needs to be accomplished, and we can imagine instantly feeling joyous once it's over. Despite the suffering and anxiety, the miners can eventually be reunited with their loved ones, and everyone will have a new perspective on life. With Pakistan, the best imaginable success would be to gradually mitigate the enormous damage; saving everyone or nearly everyone is out of the question. It's similar to why movies with happy endings are so popular.

"Do you see what's happening?"

There's only been one day in my life when I could get a phone call, hear "Do you see what's happening?" as the first sentence from the person calling me, and, without having any context aside from being in America, know exactly what it was about.

I'm sure there have been other events in United States history when that would have also been understood — the assassination of JFK or MLK. But those were before my time.

And those were deaths of single individuals. As sad as it is for a sitting president to die, it's bound to happen sometimes. People die, and we need to have a way of dealing with it. But we should never have needed to deal with our greatest city being torn down.

Commentators on the right and left (William Safire, Matthew Yglesias) have compared the deaths in those attacks to car accident statistics. More people die in car accidents each month in the United States than died in the attacks.

Well, I think that's wrong on a lot of levels:

1. It's easy to focus on the deaths you know about; it's harder, but equally important, to focus on the hidden deaths that you can't see or that haven't even happened. The terrorists didn't go to all that effort "just" to kill 3,000 people. The fact that such a relatively small number died while so many more escaped is amazing. Tens of thousands of people escaped the World Trade Center. The terrorists foolishly attacked shortly before 9 a.m., when many people hadn't gotten to work yet. One of the four planes didn't even strike its target. They were trying, and are still trying, to do a lot more damage than they did on September 11.

It's common to use "3,000 deaths" as a shorthand for "the extreme consequences that can result from terrorism." But this number is (understandably) used for its emotional resonance, not because of any genuine numerical exactitude. The September 11 attacks have already happened; we can't change that. We need to be worrying about the number of people killed in the next terrorist attack, and there's no telling what that number will be. It could be 3, or 300, or 30,000, or 300,000.


2. Yes, only a tiny proportion of deaths are due to terrorism, but it doesn't follow that terrorism should be a negligible concern. As impolitic as it may be to point this out in our "culture of life," some deaths are more worth accepting than others.

We've spent a century getting used to cars. Over time, we've collectively decided that having the widespread benefit of cars is worth the tradeoff of resulting deaths — which are a tiny percentage of the beneficiaries even though the absolute numbers are huge.

Cars can kill people; they can also make life more comfortable. They can even save lives if, say, you need to be rushed to the hospital for life-saving treatment, or you need to leave town to escape a natural disaster. Most people basically accept this calculus, and those who don't like it have a lot of power to minimize the role of cars in their lives by not driving, being extra careful when crossing the street, and so on.

You can't say the same thing about terrorism. We haven't gradually gotten used to its presence in our life and systematically worked on minimizing the damage in a way that's broadly acceptable to most people.

I also find it really odd when people argue, in effect, that "we don't take car accidents seriously, so we shouldn't other deaths seriously either." The fact is, we do take car accidents very seriously, as well we should. We've taken all sorts of measures to try to reduce the harm they cause: speed limits, drunk-driving laws, airbags, etc. If one of the premises of your argument is that cars aren't a very morally serious issue, then you simply have a false premise.

Above all, there is no real cost-benefit tradeoff with terrorism because there's no benefit! Terrorists don't offer us a mix of good and bad that we look at and say, "Well, we'll accept that, on balance."

Al Qaeda-style terrorists offer an obsession with death and a dehumanizing ideology, and that's it.


3. The death toll alone doesn't capture the enormity of the destruction caused by terrorism.

Again, people use "3,000 deaths" as a synonym for "the harm caused by the attacks" -- understandably so, as it would seem crass to focus on some of the other harms. But if reality is a little crass, then so be it.

There was enormous economic loss. For some estimates, look at this list and scroll down to the dollar figures. (New York magazine link.) One that stands out: the cost to NYC in the month after the attacks was over $100 billion. That's a million dollars, multiplied by 1,000, multiplied by 100, for just one city, in one month.

There were the toxic environmental effects in Manhattan.

There was a deep psychic wound left on our country's soul.

And there were people who didn't just die, but had to live their last moments hanging out of skyscraper windows and deciding to plummet to their deaths.

That's what I try to remember every year this day. But it's so unfathomable that I can't imagine it.

I don't know how you factor that into a cost-benefit analysis. I don't know how you balance that against the costs of annoying airline security measures, or library records being given an extra look beyond just checking for late fees.

Maybe you can't. You just keep trying to do whatever you can, whatever tiny amount that might be, to stop this from ever happening again.

(Photo of September 11 memorial by Denise Gould. I got this photo from pingnews, which got it from the U.S. Department of Defense photo collection.)

Chameleon tricks

1. Republicans to Republicans: just try to be something -- anything -- besides Republicans!

2. Barack Obama's logo seems to be in the middle of a months-long morph into the presidential seal.

3. An octopus can disguise itself as 15 other animals. See a few of them in this YouTube clip. (Via this Slate article about how smart octopuses are.)

4. Albanian women in their 70s and 80s talk about living their whole adult lives as men in order to provide for their families in the absence of male heads of household.

They've never had sex-change operations, but they've played the part. And they're all virgins to this day, apparently because there would have been no socially accepted way for them to have a sex life.

One of these women says the masquerade would no longer be necessary because of the gender equality that now exists in rural Albania:

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing.... Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman."

Think about that: rural Albania. An incredibly remote, conservative area of the world. If even they have been transformed by gender equality, can we really doubt that feminism has basically won the argument, if not eliminated every last vestige of misogyny?

Of course, due to the pessimistic attitude of many so-called progressives, it will instead be spun the opposite way: America isn't even as good as Albania!

And you know, even the idea that women used to be worse off than men in Albania might not be so obvious. After all, why was there a big problem with absent male heads of household? Because so many men were dying -- in war, feuds, and who knows what else.

Now, maybe it's just harder to think about them because it's easier to take account of the person who's talking to you face-to-face than someone you can't see.

But doesn't the tendency of men to die through acts of violence count as yet another disadvantage of being a man (for my list)? Or should we not take that into account because ... that's just what men do?

(Chameleon photo by Jeff Kleber.)


UPDATE: In the comments: "Aw, that chameleon looks like Larry King."

Follow-up IM:

you know how i have a feed of
the latest comments in the sidebar?
the top one right now is: "Aw, that
chameleon looks like Larry King."

ha ha

just made me LOL

that's me of course you know

i know

and don't you agree?

yeah

as if Larry King is really adorable

if you think of him as an animal
he becomes cute

Unknown people in the Florida and Michigan primaries and the death penalty debate

Josh Marshall makes a key observation about the controversy over what to do with the delegates from the Florida and Michigan Democratic primaries, from which I want to draw a very attenuated connection to my recent posts about the death penalty:

The Clinton campaign argues that if the delegates from these non-sanctioned primaries are not seated hundreds of thousand of voters in Florida and Michigan will be disenfranchised.

The other side argues that it is wrong to change the rules under which the nomination process after the fact in order to advantage one candidate over another. The latter is an argument I agree with -- but there's no question it lacks the emotive impact of the disenfranchisement argument.

What doesn't get mentioned, however, is this: it was widely reported and understood in both Florida and Michigan that the results of these primaries would not be counted. And based on that knowledge, large numbers of voters in both states simply didn't participate.

If the DNC were now to turn around and decide to make these contests count after all, these non-participating voters would be disenfranchised no less than the people who did turn out would be if the DNC sticks to the rules and doesn't seat any of the delegates. The simple fact is that large numbers of people, acting on accurate knowledge and in good faith, decided that there wasn't a real primary being held in their state on the day in question and on that basis decided not to participate.

He backs it up with statistics from another blog post appropriately titled "Do Florida And Michigan Primaries Really Reflect The Will Of The People? Nope." But we don't need statistics to see that a rational, informed person would have stayed home on primary day since they'd believe their vote wouldn't count. This has nothing to do with whether you agree about the decision not to count the Florida and Michigan delegates; it's just about the fact that people who were told that that would be the case.

Here's the key point. The people who voted are specific and known. We know their exact number, and everyone knows for sure whether they're in that group or not. The people who didn't vote but would have if there had been normal primaries are speculative and statistical. We can only think about them by extrapolating from untaken paths. No one person can definitively claim, "I would have voted, so I was disenfranchised." (I'm sure there are specific people who would make this claim, but there's no way to know if they're telling the truth.)

Now, it would clearly be irrational for our only concern to be whether we're disenfranchising the people in Florida and Michigan who actually did vote, right? We also need to be concerned with the people who choose not vote because they were under the impression that there wasn't a real primary going on in their state. If a different policy -- a policy of counting the states' delegates and announcing this beforehand -- would have caused more people to vote, then we need to think about the alternate universe in which that was the policy and those people really did vote.

The fact that you could find out the names of the people who ended up voting as things happened, while you couldn't say for sure which of the non-voters would have voted if things had been different, does not give any legitimate reason for differentiating between the two groups. They're all citizens -- we shouldn't want to disenfranchise any of them.

OK, so let's follow this reasoning where it leads us ...

[A] great deal of recent work has emphasized the possibility that heuristics and biases can be found in the moral arena, making it possible that deeply felt moral intuitions are a result of errors and confusions. ... Statistical lives and harms are pervasively neglected in policy, in part for cognitive reasons.

In other words, we tend to care about the harm that's done to specific, knowable people, while we give short shrift to the harm done to "statistical" people -- people about whom we can't say "We know their names," but only "We can calculate that this number of people probably would have done this in an alternate world."

The above block quote wasn't talking about elections, though. It was from the paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule that I've been blogging in some of my posts on the death penalty. Here's what they say about the difference between "statistical" (speculative, not specifically known) people and "salient" (specifically known people -- people whose names we know) as it affects the death penalty debate:

Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. Some of them have been subject to multiple forms of unfairness, in the legal process and elsewhere. At least some were wrongly convicted. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere “statistical people.” They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the advocates of capital punishment often focus on the heinousness of the (salient) offender, while the abolitionists focus on his or her humanity. We suspect that the discussion would take a different form if the victims of a regime lacking capital punishment were salient too, and the example of police behavior in hostage situations supports the suspicion. ... But it does raise the possibility that moral intuitions, for many people, are a product of the salience of one set of deaths and the invisibility or speculative nature of another.

I think instead of calling these people "statistical" or "speculative" -- either of which makes it sound like they're just some figment of an academic's imagination -- we should call them "unknown" people. We don't know exactly who they are -- but that's just a byproduct of our inability to physically observe what-would-have-happened-if-things had-been-done-differently. They're unknown, but they're just as "real" as the people whose names we happen to know.

Granted, that's a lot more clearly true in the case of the primaries than with the death penalty, because the question of who was disenfranchised in Florida and Michigan is certainly less mysterious than whose lives have been saved (if any) by the death penalty. There's a reasonable chance that this blog post will be read by someone in Florida or Michigan who didn't vote in the primaries but will say, "Hey, I see Jac's point: I would have voted if I had thought it would count." But there's no way this blog post is being read by someone who can say, "I see his point: I would have died if it hadn't been for the death penalty's deterrent effect on murder." (As for whether there really is a deterrent effect, I've blogged about that extensively: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

But there's a big difference between your ability to know something on the one hand, and how real something is on the other hand. It seems to me that everyone is as "real" as everyone else, whether or not we happen to know their names so that we can point to them and say: "Ah, these were the exact people who were affected."

In practice, that's not how humans make decisions. We value the people we can actually see over the people we can only hypothesize. But that just shows that humans are imperfect decision-makers.

Bonus law observation: couldn't you use this point to argue for more lenient standing or ripeness requirements for having a justiciable claim against the government?

(Photo by Steve Ford Elliott)