Yesterday I sat down with Lukeprog for a few hours and we produced this ten-page interview for the Singularity Institute blog. This interview contains information about the Singularity Institute's technical research program and recent staff changes that hasn't been announced anywhere else! We hope you find it informative.
On "rape in marriage" you are clearly wrong. Freedom of contract is morally superior, the traditional contract for the past two thousand years being that a man and a woman each gave their consent to sex once and forever:
The concept of "rape" in marriage defines marriage, as it was originally understood out of existence, marriage as it was originally understood being the power to bind our future selves to stick it out
According to the New Testament:
If consent to sex is given moment to moment, rather than once and forever, then marriage cannot be a durable contract: Consent to marriage then has to be moment to moment, which is to say routine hooking up, rather than marriage, thus producing the present situation where men are reluctant to invest in children and posterity, and where eighty percent of fertile age women have sex with twenty percent of men.
The concept of "rape" in marriage defines women as incapable of contract. Like so much of feminism, it infantilizes women in the guise of empowering them.
Saint Paul phrased it more delicately than I phrase it, or people in the eighteenth century phrased it, but what he meant, and what he rather delicately implied, and what people in the eighteenth century said plainly enough, is that if a fertile age wife is not getting done by her husband, she will be getting done by someone else pretty soon, and if a fertile age wife knocks her husband back, she is probably thinking about getting done by someone higher status than her husband, and pretty soon will be so. If she violates the marital contract by not servicing her husband, she is about to violate the marital contract a lot more drastically.
I could consent to have you shoot me, but it will still injure and possibly kill me. A child or their parent could consent to being shown graphic sexual or violent imagery, but it would still cause psychological damage. Rape is not theft but assault, and society does not allow such harm to be perpetrated just because someone thought they could handle it.