All of jfpbookworm's Comments + Replies

Part of the issue is that, even when the hurt is minimal, it's a decision that one's own self-interest outweighs the harm to someone else, and as humans we're not very good at making that calculation objectively.

2Rachael
Exactly, thank you.
2HughRistik
Hi jfpbookworm, long time no see. I agree with skepticism when making decisions over whether one's self-interest outweighs harm to someone else, which is why in this post I advocated weighing in the potential benefit to the other party also (emphasis added): I think I came by this way of thinking from reading Mane Hajdin's The Law of Sexual Harassment. He wrote an article in this book that has some relevant comments (read page 297-299, though we don't get 298 in the preview): He then sets up three hypothetical advances: 1. 10% chance of success, 88% chance of mild annoyance, 2% chance of offense 2. 10% success, 89% mild annoyance, 1% offense 3. 11% success, 69% mild annoyance, 20% offense He says that advances #2 is obvious preferable to advance #1. As for advance #3, the relevant question to ask is: When pickup artists think about ethics, I suspect this is the kind of implicit moral framework they are using. Of course, all of these calculations have subjective factors, but they are better than nothing.

Compounding this is that when men are subjects and women are objects in a rationalist forum, this draws on some long-standing tropes about men being essentially more rational than women.

Of course, that leads to offenders trying to assert status by accusing offendees of status-assertion (because we regard status-protection as more worthy than status-assertion), and round and round we go.