UNIVERSAL JUSTICE IN A DIVERSE WORLD

Some Moral Minima

Lenn E. Goodman
Some years ago I took part in an international meeting of prey to the relativists charge that now they fail of universality. philosophers. Around 180 thinkers attended. Many took the Do the claims of truth, for instance, debar all lies? And if lies are occasion to showcase their values. Socialism was still much countenanced to spare a fugitive, can we debar other appeals to bruited in those days, and several speakers scrapped their preexpediencelying for political or personal ends, or pious fraud pared remarks to sing its praises. I admired Hilary Putnams to aid others in this world or toward the next? Do we guard truth courageous confession when he branded the socialist ideal as verbally but allow prevarication? Or does deference to truth die the now universally discredited. For many still imagined that civil death of a thousand qualifications, surviving only when unchalrights and human flourishing were adequately served only when lenged? a single-party state controls law and politics, the media and Setting aside dramatic confrontations and dropping down the means of production, science, inquiry, and the arts, the councils memory hole any thoughts of, say, Lysenko and his Stakhanovite of labor, sources of capital, vehicles of distribution, land and methods, we still must ask: Does the love of truth exclude white marketplace. lies and false compliments? When does tact sink into fulsome Since ours was an intercultural as well as an international cant? When does candor turn brutal, or honesty wax literalmeeting, many spoke out for relativism, and its expected benminded? Can such questions even be asked outside an overarching efits in tolerance and cultural accommodation. Bimal Matilal, ethos, and can an ethos subsist outside a culture or a community whom I remembered as a handsome young scholar at Oxfords of language users? Is there an ethos without an ethnos? Oriental Institute, now broken in health Matilals aim was consensus, which and pushed in a wheelchair by his wife, often carries blandness as its priceif made a spirited effort to distinguish not compromise of principle. Yet comWith the best intentions, relativism from pluralism. Conceding promise is the stuff of politics. America global formulations can turn that human norms must vary in their might never have won its independence culture-bound. But, when couched particulars from society to society and or framed its constitution if the slavery too broadly they turn vacuous, culture to culture, he scanned the tradiquestion had first to be settled on princiespecially once duly hedged and tions of India to help him sketch some ple. If politics is the art of the possible, qualified, and faced with pushback 1 norms worthy of universal support. virtuosity in that art must lie in seeing from interested parties. He named four: respect for life, defto it that the compromises that build erence to truth, abhorrence of theft, and consensus do not immolate principle rejection of adultery. In each case, he sought to sculpt specific so heavily paper over principled divides that ambiguity itself principles from the broad norms he drew from Indias rich array becomes a point of law and a juridical tactic, leaving vital issues of religious and philosophical traditions. Although he used to fester or smolder out of sight. Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and at one point cited the moral Not every compromise is praiseworthy or even tolerable. That and spiritual authority of Gandhi, he worked hard not to rely on is easy to see and say but harder to live by or die for in practice, the prescriptions of anyones deity. in the clinches: There is no proper compromise with Nazis in But sectarianism is not the only risk in a project of this kind. full spate, or the Khmer Rouge. What can link us morally to American courts will overturn a statute for unconstitutional the Hutus at the door, or Mongol invaders, Inquisitor torturers, vagueness, and ethical principles, as well, can fail if framed Red Guards, ethnic cleansers, Mujahidin, or Janjaweed? Here 2 too broadly to specify what Aristotle called the doable good. the human bonds demanding universal respect and sincerity can With the best intentions, global formulations can turn culturebecome otiose, even obscene. bound. But, when couched too broadly, they turn vacuous, espeFacts like these, on the ground and in our faces, in this age of cially once duly hedged and qualified, and faced with pushback suicide bombers, raise the question forcefully: Even if it is true that from interested parties. every state and culture makes its compromises and has its modus Matilals four rubrics are noble enough. Yet they do teeter on vivendi, even if it is true that no norm can be made absolute unless the edge of vacuity, begging for the specificity that only law or some other is compromised (and, as with grammar, and even logic, settled custom can impartalways at the risk of overand falling laxity here demands rigor there, and rigor here means a loosening
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elsewhere), are there no overarching norms of life and practice, no deep grammar of the normative, beyond meta-rules that tell us, vacuously, that principles are principlesno norms delineating concretely, and uncompromisingly, wrong from right? Part of what Matilal was seeking was common consent. But unanimity, I fear, is no proper standard of moral universality. Consent is a helpful marker, but neither necessary nor sufficient to legitimacy. For some whose interests are critically affected by our acts have no effectual say in our choices. These include the desperately poor, the comatose, the very young and very old, the linguistically or cognitively challenged, all those outside our deliberative communitynot only the impoverished and disenfranchised, but the members of past and future generations, whose projects our acts may consummate or desecrate. And there are those who gladly agree to outrageous abuses of self and others, including those whose interests they should, by rights, most tightly clutchout of eagerness for celebrity or wealth, or power, real or imagined.3 Morals do not rightly seek Nazi agreement, and penal laws are not rightly subject to criminal review. Thats too high a price to pay for unanimity. Making unanimity the test of normative universality is an ancient sophism, grown mossy and readily overlooked. It is also an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. The fact is, we humans and the societies we constitute can be wrong, unjust, vicioushugely or trivially, tragically or self-deceivingly. Granted, any norm, to be effectual, must be embedded in the thick of life. Still, many of the particularities constitutive in such thickness at the level of culture or character do not matter much morally. So, the cultural and personal differences that Sophists plead against efforts to meet their spurious standard do not discredit the quest for universal norms. Personal and cultural differences do set a tone; and that does matter. Customs and institutions are inseparable from the fabric of life where norms do their pragmatic work. Still, if we hope to sift style from substance, and discredit the willful muddling of the two that makes the unfamiliar look exotic, then we are looking not just for family resemblances or a behavioral lowest common denominator, but for moral threads and themes that can anchor norms to recognizably objective values. Philippa Foot strikes close to home, I think, when she predicates normative universality on the needs of living beings.4 My own approach, similar but somewhat broader, is to turn to the claims of beings at large. These, I think, are the first basis of deserts. Deserts are expressions of what beings are. They rise to a moral plateau in the case of persons, where subjecthood and agency warrant the unique deserts that we enshrine as human rights, and that our institutions rightly seek to secure, enhance, and enlarge. My brief here is not comprehensive. I will not try to calendar every consideration human beings are due or all the ways in which varied interests deserve to be respected. I think that
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all human aspirations worthy of the name deserve respect and support, materially and morally/intellectually. But that is not my topic here. What I want to do here is single out a few areas where I think human deserts are irrefragablenot because these deserts are never questioned or breached in practice, but because they never should be. My listing draws on the Jewish sources and historical experience for what they contribute to our common store of moral knowledgenot because the textual or traditional roots of these norms are so widely honored, nor because of the divine authority that monotheists find in these norms. There are too many violations of any norm to make any practice or linguistic usage comprehensively authoritative.5 And ideas of the divine are far too fluid and responsive to our norms to allow much criterial work to be offloaded in that direction. Why else, did Norsemen and Homeric Greeks have gods of war; and Vikings, a god of mischief? I would rather save the sanctity and absoluteness of norms to point toward the divine, and reveal just what sort of being we find worthy of worship. The areas I will touch on are these: (1) genocide, politically induced famine, and germ warfare; (2) terrorism, hostage taking, and child warriors; (3) slavery, polygamy, and incest; and (4) rape and female genital cutting.

Genocide, Famine and Germ Warfare

All living beings make claims to life. That is the first basis of demands for deference to deserts. The human face, Levinas writes, as if to read the words encrypted in a glance, a stare, a hesitant smile, urges: Do not kill me. It says much more than that, of course, once it is allowed to speak. It says, Do not shame me, do not pass by without offering a hand of fellowship, building far more than what we build together, cementing friendship and allowing us to create a community. Murder is wrong because it destroys a human subject. Warfare is not always wrong; it may be necessary to protect such subjects. Yet war is suspect: Its dynamic too readily escapes control through the illusion that weapons are only tools and war itself just another device, the natural extension of diplomacy. Escalating violence strips away moral barriers and blocks the view of faces. Helmets, arrow slits, night vision goggles, reveal, if not a face of fear or hatred, only a faceless enemy. Why is mass murder any different from a criminals slaying a marked victim? Why is genocide uglier than murder? The answer lies in the intent, not just the scale of the crime. Clearly, more dreams are broken and more futures cut short when more lives are taken. But genocide targets individuals as members of a group, seeking to destroy a race, a culture, a linguistic or ethnic identity, even a classas the Soviets did in the Ukraine, or Mao in China, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The target is a way of life.

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fired the oil wells in Kuwait on his defeat in the First Gulf War. Genocide is the ultimate essentializing of the exotic. It defines The same confusion of violence with power was at work in his a type and assigns it a character, projecting what is inwardly war against the Kurds and Shiites of his own land. hated or feared onto this fetish. Reflected in this invented mask it Paranoia needs an enemy. But the sees the image of the new man it hopes apparatus of a modern state allows the to create by the expulsion and destrucConsent is a helpful marker, but projection and targeting of a mythic tion of the other, whose fantastic evil is neither necessary nor sufficient to enemy. Battle against that foe focuses blown up to cosmic scale with heaped legitimacy. energies and legitimates tyrannies, up, extruded negativity, as larger waruniting peoples in a common struggle rant is sought for each new crime. that makes every victory a triumph and every defeat a tragic Racial prejudice, or any invidiousness that ritualizes exclucall to further sacrifice and struggle. Saddam saw that when he sion, marks a victim category, singles out a typeby sex or made Iran his enemy well before invading Kuwait or setting his color, language, class, or educational attainment (as in the gaze on the oil wealth and sacred cities of Arabia. Many an Arab Cambodia of the killing fields or the China of Maos Cultural and Muslim leader, from Nasser in Egypt to Bin Laden and the Revolution)is wrong, unfair, before a drop of blood is shed radical imams of Indonesia, has used the same tactic. American for the shining ideal to be polished in its name. And wrong again power and Israels very existence become goads and cankers, firfor more pragmatic reasons: for semiotic dehumanizing of those ing up followers and distracting large populations from the hard chosen as the next victims to be stuffed into hatreds maw. work of social and economic development, and the demands of Yet, for those who confuse power with violence, indiscrimispiritual growth and moral self-mastery. nate or discriminating violence is a source of power, a selffueling juggernaut that gains momentum with the escalation of its demands. A power built on violence will, as history shows Terrorism, Hostages, and Child Warriors and logic explains, inevitably burn itself out. Hitler will run out of Jews, gypsies, decadents, and misfits. Ever new types will be In terrorism, too, mythic violence is inherent in the crime. neededjust as Stalin transformed private paranoia into public To some participants and observers, the act is expressionistic policy, inventing wreckers of all sorts when sufficient enemies theater, venting frustration when history seems to slip away seemed lacking. or move in the wrong direction. Contemplating the horrors of Tyrannical revolutions do fling their fathers and children war and revolution, Camus could entertain the idea that a rebel onto the pyre and self-immolate in the end, even without the might win a kind of moral pass by risking self-immolation: The foreign interference that febrile and invasive policies invite, and saboteur derailing a train is at least willing to ask of himself that crimes against humanity demand. The bonfire collapses of what he takes from others. But that thought was silenced by the its own weight, but not before wreaking incalculable damage. intellectual dishonesty and moral contradiction of an ideal set up Maos death toll was 70 million human souls. He was ready, he to kill or die for. bragged in 1958, to sacrifice 300 million, half of Chinas popuTerrorism, as Camus saw, grows out of nihilism, and its fruits lation, for the victory of world revolution. This, he said, had are nihilistic: Young disciples try, he wrote, with bombs happened quite a few times in Chinese history. Its best if half and revolvers and their bravado marching to the gallows, to the population is left, next best, one third.6 escape the contradiction and create the values they lack.8 But Wholesale murder is wrong, then, not just for its scale but the contradiction stains all acts of indiscriminate violence (even also for willfully negating individuality, typing its victims, and if, like genocide, its indiscriminateness is targeted to a type): stirring hatred against the putative failings of the type. It is not Terrorists explode the values they claim to fight for. Their universally condemned. It has defenders, active and vocal, pasvictims blood blurs and blots whatever ends were meant to sive and tacit. So one must speak out and act against it. We, the justify the carnage. world, are culpable today for failing to take speedy and decisive Kaliaevs twisted bow toward the Golden Rule, his willingaction against Hitlers holocaust and the genocides of Cambodia, nessinsistence, in Camuson dying for his murder of the Rwanda, Serbia, and, today, Darfur. Tsars uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, was a gesture made before Along with genocide, comes political use of famine, which the world had seen suicide bombing on any great scalebefore Stalin perpetrated against the Ukraine, covered up by the comthe Tamil Tigers learned the full impact of blowing themselves plicity of a New York Times reporter sympathetic to the march up in the marketplace, before engineers and imams had made a of Communism.7 Loosing the vehicles of vindictive apocalypse cult and science of martyrdom, offering glory and Gods garden is a form of genocide. Germ warfare shares that shame with to desperate, disconsolate, or starry-eyed volunteers who hoped famine. The target is humanity at largeas it was when Saddam to erase their past and simplify their future by igniting busloads
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of school children, or strafing wedding parties with ball bearings from an exploding backpack, or crashing jetliners into public buildings. It was before Serbs were paid twenty-five cents a pop for shooting passersby from the upper stories in Sarajevo, or Iraqi insurgents got twenty bucks for lobbing a grenade. To the professional, terrorism is a tool of policy, not a cry of despair. It cynically exploits the sanctity others give to human rights and manipulates a media appetite for sensation. It blackmails democracies, intimidates civil populations, reroutes tourists, and sends aid workers packing. It co-opts journalists and academics, broadcasting a Stockholm syndrome mentality onto the public at large, by holding the world hostage to its enormities. Terrorism today is a manufactured claim to authority and authenticity, ethnic or regional autonomy, or the imposition of Sharia law and haqq penalties on diverse and diversely inclined populations. The technique is paradoxically effective, hobbling economies, altering elections, prying apart alliances among prospective victims, and winning recruits to the conviction that God sustains the violencemuch as Marxists once won acolytes to the faith that theirs was the mandate of history. Terrorism even wins sympathy among its victimsrecapturing the mood of the 1950s slogan: Better Red than dead. Why is terrorism wrong? It is worth spelling out, since Sophists shift the tactic from turpis to dubia causacalling terrorists militants, guerillas, or simply gunmen, and cloaking their organizations in referential opacity with phrases like classified as a terrorist group, or considered by x to be a terrorist group. Simultaneously, terrorism becomes honoris causa among its sponsors, the criminals feted, rewarded, beatified. Terrorism is willful targeting of non-combatants, aiming to intimidate and attract attention. It is a war crime, since war, if just at all, seeks only to block an enemys ability to make war. Terrorism, as a tactic, finds its military use in sapping the will to resist. Its intensity comes from its flagrancy. The more helpless the victims, the more lurid the light. But, like any sensate act, terrorism seeks ever higher sensations, as public response is leathered over and callused against shock: The more devastating the damage, the more inhumane, the more avidly is it sought by the strategists, ideologues, and theologians of terror. As for media and academic apologists, they soft-pedal the moral issues, finding in terrorism a natural, even inevitable response to desperation. They obliquely endorse the terrorists agenda when they speak of the need to address the root causes of the crime. That line makes them complicit with those who seek to profit politically from the mayhem. Hostage taking and the abduction, training, and deployment of child warriors are parallel violations of human dignity. They, too, make human beings means and not ends, objects not subjects. Hostages are chosen not for their military acts but for the impact
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of their seizure, perhaps torture, and brutal execution, the world made a spectator via the internet, cable, and broadcast media. Peter W. Singer estimates that there are some 300,000 child soldiers, voluntary, semi-voluntary, or coerced, under arms today.9 Recruitment of children under 15 was named a war crime by the International Criminal Court, but no one has yet been convicted of it. Child soldiers are recruited as young as nine or ten. Often they are drugged or drunk, used as sex slaves or cannon fodder. They are exploited to commit atrocities in irregular armiesnotably, the Tamil Tigers, but in many other forces toofor their relative physical and moral helplessness, childish fearlessness, desperate poverty, alienation, anger, or isolation. They grow up educationally destitute and emotionally scarred by all that they remember doing and suffering, and all that they must force themselves to forget.

Slavery, Polygamy, and Incest

Slavery is the deepest exploitation, overriding subjecthood to make a person a tool for use. Kitsch and B-movies are exploitative, since they are manipulative. But they do not destroy our freedom. Murder is destructive. But slavery keeps its victim alive while stripping her of agency, assigning it to others who do not share her projects, hopes, or interests, but subordinate her capabilities to their wants. I use the feminine gender here, although slaves today are of both sexes and all ages, since the bulk of human trafficking is in women and children. The U.S. State Department estimates that between 700,000 and four million persons are trafficked annually across international borders, including some 50,000 into the United States.10 Men are trafficked most often for agricultural or construction labor; women and children, for prostitution, domestic servitude, or sweatshop labor. False promises of employment, imposed debt, sequestered identity documents, and fear of immigration authorities are frequent. So are violence and threats of violence, unsafe and unhealthy workplaces and living conditionsand, for women and children in brothels, the risk of AIDS and other STDs. Human trafficking has grown since the 1990s. Most victims come from Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia, and the Czech Republic. They are brought to Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America. But slavery in Africa and the Middle East often slips under the radar, whether or not it crosses international boundaries. In Mauritania, women and girls are forced into concubinage or agricultural slave labor by Arab overlords. Boys in the Sudan are kidnapped in the south and pressed into northern militias; girls are made domestics, farm workers, or forced brides. Human traffickers include small gangs, crime syndicates, and drug cartels. Recruiters, abductors, transporters, safe houses, forgers, debt enforcers, brothel owners and sweatshop

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operators, work the pipeline of human misery. Fraud, extortion, wives more sorely, not only by depersonalizing the sphere of racketeering, money laundering, bribery, drug use, and gambling intimacy and trust, but also by altering the general status of are associated crimes. But central here is the inhuman use of women, making wives less equal partners and sharers, and more human beings. The victimizers find human cargo easier to ship like property to be used and cultivated.13 Incest too breaches privacy. Its chief victims are daughters, than drugs, less severely punished, and more profitable. As one although most cultures define it more broadly. But why speak of immigration official put it, Drugs are sold only once. Humans victims, when incest may be voluntary? The answer, I think, lies can be sold multiple times.11 Polygamy, too, exploitsnot usually as heinously as slavery, in seeing what it is that incest prohibitions seek to protect: the but in a similar way. Again I use the gender-marked term, since integrity of the family, surelybut why? Why are incest restricwomen are the sufferers. Defenders argue that polygamous martions so universal, when no one, to the casual eye, is necessarily riages are freely entered, freely left, well-protected by law or being harmed? custom. Would that this were so. The daily interactions that touch Utilitarians can have trouble seeing incest laws as anything the welfare and happiness of any couple are far more dependent on but ornamental. I see them as foundational. Relativists, from custom than law in any society, but still more dependent on perthe early Sophists on, love to flaunt the cultural differences in sonal character and familial practice than on either law or custom. kinship laws, or even their imagined absence. But no society In polygamous societies women become acquisitions leaves sexual relations unregulated, and the plainest violadisplays of wealth or status, objects of enjoyment, means of tions of incest prohibitions are ritualized displays of power reproduction, providers of childcare and domestic labor. As they and concentrations of charisma that feed on the frisson of the age, they often become drudges, unless they can exploit their violation. Some biologists and anthropologists ascribe what status to dominate younger wives and impose subordinate roles they coyly or quaintly call the incest taboo to an instinctual, on the newcomers. Polygamy is inherently invidious. The testigenetically embedded, aversion, rooted in the risks of heightmony of happy wives about their sisterly relations as co-wives, ened homozygosity.14 But in moral terms the matter is more does not erase the structural constraints that press toward rivalcomplex. ries for the affection of husbands and the status of offspring. Nor It is true that offspring of close kin lose some of the protecdoes it eradicate the impact of polygamy on the status of other tion of a diploid genome: The backup copies of key genes too women far removed from the happy index case. often tragically match defective alleles inherited from a comPolygamy transforms the nature of marriage. That is evident mon ancestor, and the incidence of genetic defects rises with in the apologetics and conditionals that so often speak of the the coefficient of inbreeding when kin marriages are frequent. need for fairness by a husband to his wives. The telling subtext But why raise the specter of inbreeding if some incestuous acts is that it is the husband who makes the moral choices here, the produce no offspring, or indeed cannotthe union of a grandwives who are the recipients of treatment, fair or unfair, invidison with a grandmother, say? There is evidence that children ous or even handed.12 These grounds alone suffice to show that raised together, as in a childrens house on a kibbutz, tend to marry outside their artificial sibship. Yet incest, as case workers polygamy is bad for women, and as such bad for humanity. in every city and many a rural district Relativists will say that romantic love and know, is far from rare.15 companionate marriage are recent invenTo say that an institution has a The moral issue reaches well tions, culture-bound and fraught with history or cultural setting does not beyond what any biological imperatroubles of their own. Granted, the love imply that any alternative to it is tive against inbreeding would dictate. of couples may seem new, if ancient texts equally humane. Heightened degrees of consanguinare ignored, and if love and the other ity, anthropologists observe, intensify facets of familial relations are defined incest rejection but do not fully account for it. Rather, the bionarrowly enough. But to say that an institution has a history or logical problem is underscored and given definition by social cultural setting does not imply that any alternative to it is equally and moral concerns.16 humane. The moral issue, as I see it, is the need to protect emergent Temporary marriage and serial monogamy are not conducive personhood in the matrix of the family. A growing youngsters to familial stability or the growth of emotionally stalwart chilsense of subjecthood is deeply invested in an emergent sexual dren. But polygamous relationships diminish those dependent identity. Invasion of that space, troubling the waters in which a on them, by eliminating the exclusivity of intimacy and trust new face can see itself reflected and focus desires, hopes, and that can make monogamous relations strong and strengthening visions of adult life, is inherently violativenot inevitably but to those they shelter. Polygamy diminishes husbands too, insofar intrinsically destructive. as it depersonalizes their closest relationship. But it diminishes
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So societies rightly protect the boundaries of privacy within the family. Just how they do so is indeed a cultural matter. But cultural norms are not arbitrary or irrational just because they are cultural. What incest violates may be somewhat less visible than, say, what assault violates. But incest is violative nonetheless, and no society seems to miss the point: For the task of any human community is not just to maximize the gratification of its members or even to minimize their pain, but, far more basically, to protect the delicate chrysalis of personhood. What has this to do with cliterodectomy? Only this: that ritual removal of the chief organ of a womans sexual gratification and orgasmic satisfaction robs her, in adulthood, of a vital source of satisfaction, self-esteem, and warm relations available to members of our species. Cultural norms that link the intact clitoris with promiscuity or sexual excess are invidious, rooted in a fear of women and insecurity about their fidelityassumptions reflecting puritanical norms that confuse liberty with license. Confounding male circumcision with cliterodectomy, as if this too were mutilation, is another invidious confusion. For circumcision, whether hygienic20 or spiritually symbolic, does not at all hamper sexual satisfaction in either partner. A closing word about truth.21 I have not tried to spell out all human obligations to self or others, or list every form of wrongdoing. But I do see a thread linking the few minima I have laid out as candidates for universal concern. All the wrongs my proposed norms speak against drag with them some violation of the truth. Not that truth is somehow the arch-imperative from which all others rise, as if by deduction. But the linkage does suggest a way of looking at (or looking for) key moral norms. Genocide is a denial of our common humanity. It raises the horror of murder to a higher power by negating not only individual but shared aspirations. Famine and germ warfare strike at the lowest common denominator of our biological beingas do efforts to sterilize those whom the victimizers hate, or rob them of their children. Gratuitous hatred is the motive, but denial of the life principle gives it direction. Again with terrorism, demoralization is the aim, as it is often the intent or the effect with rape. Both terrorism and rape are denials of what is affirmative in the human spirit. Both negate an inner truth that is somehow intolerable to the assailant. Hostagetaking is a form of blackmail that seeks to trade on a loss of spirit. It shares in this with human trafficking and enslavement: All three negate the freedom and claim to agency that sustain human subjecthood. Polygamy, cliterodectomy, and incest deny and thwart the fulfillment of human sexual and marital relations: incest by gnawing at the psychic roots of a mature and confident sexual identity; genital mutilation, by excising the bodily focal point of erotic gratification; polygamy, by negating, ignoring, or diminishing the exclusivity that allows marital relations to become more than a mere economic arrangement, but to blossom as true unions between souls and between the bodies in which souls flourish. Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Creation and Evolution; Islamic Humanism;

Rape and Clitoridectomy

So why is rape wrong? It is not just a violation of anothers will. For statutory rape is as much a crime as violent rape. A minor, presumptively, lacks the judgment needed for valid consent. Nor is injury the only issue. Not every rape involves physical harm. Rape is wrong because it stands at the extreme limit of a continuum of sexual acts, from the most committed to the least so, and the most alienating. Rape is exploitative, objectifying, and, yes, again violative. But what it violates is not just anothers body but that others personhood, invested, deeply in ones sexuality. It used to be said, often enough, that rape is not a sexual crime but a power crime. That is sometimes true, if one consults the rapists motives. Often there is a desire to humiliate and abase.17 But denying that rape is a sexual crime has another resonance that rings false, echoing from the myth that would have it (if it spoke out loud) that there is no bad sex. Unfortunately, there is bad sex, and rape is a paradigm casean act of hate and not love. Rape perverts and blasphemes against the trust and intimacy that give sexuality its natural and transcendent meanings. Intimidation is of the essence, during the act, afterwards, and even antecedently, since rapists often count on fear and social pressures to forestall an accusation.18 It is not true, after all, that no act has an inherent meaning. On the contrary, kissing has natural meanings. So does making love. Rape perverts such meanings, and overlays a passionate or passionless violence on sexuality that violates the victims psyche even as her bodily integrity and self-image are violated and abused. Perhaps that helps explain why rape is used, even today, in warfare, especially ethnic and genocidal wars, where the object is not just to snatch land and goods, kill troops, or destroy materiel, but also to humiliate and demoralize. Rape is wrong. It is always wrong. No circumstance can make it right.19 Rape is not, as some feminists pretend, coterminous with heterosexual relations. The rhetoric of that pretense aims to infect heterosexuality with the violence that normative and natural bonds of loving couples vigorously belie.

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In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach; Jewish & Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age; Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values; God of Abraham; Avicenna, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy; and his Gifford Lectures, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.
11. INS official interviewed at the Immigration and Naturalization Service Headquarters, Washington, D.C., December 20, 2002, quoted in Human Trafficking: International Criminal Trade in Modern Slavery, Regional Organized Crime Information Center, 2002. 12. The advocates of a social change often assume that its impact will be minimal, since few are expected to take part, and since they tend to take for granted the fruits of past improvements, even as they sap the roots that fed such possibilities. 13. Polygamy diminishes all those who take part, by diminishing the depth of their relationships. Beyond its invidious effects on women, it diminishes excluded men. Ibn al-Nafis (13th century) describes the prominence of homosexual relations in his own Islamic society as the natural outcome of the sequestering of women in polygamous marriages. In an extreme version of such exclusion, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been charged with banishing boys as young as 11 or 12, on trivial pretexts (e.g., attending movies), so as to reduce competition for multiple wives. See The Salt Lake Tribune, June 21, 2006, online. 14. W. Arens, The Original Sin: Incest and its Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) critiques Edward Westermarcks aversion thesis and includes detailed ethological analyses of ritual royal incest. 15. Brent D. Shaw, Explaining Incest: Brother-Sister Marriage in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Man N.S. 27 (1992) 26799, documents formalized marriages of acknowledged full brothers and sisters in Hellenistic Graeco-Roman Egypt. Social and economic considerationsabove all, a paramount desire to marry other Greeks of their own class, rather than Egyptianswere cited in the marriage contracts as overriding the well-known incest prohibition. Pharaonic precedents came to be cited to rationalize the practice. Shaw concludes: Certain types of incest may well be seen as morally repellent, and might be proved to be biologically disadvantageous. But the behavior is not part of an immutable law of nature. In all its various degrees and varieties of manifestation, whether of indulgence or avoidance, it is still a part of human culture, and deserves, quite simply, to be explained . . . 293; cf. Seymour Parker, Full Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt: Another Look, Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996) 36276. 16. Debra Liebermann, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, in Does Morality have a Biological Basis: An Empirical Test of the Factors Governing Moral Sentiments Regarding Incest, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270 (2003) 81926. 17. The studies reviewed in Owen Jones, Sex, Culture and the Biology, of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention 87 California Law Review (1999) 827, suggest that most rapes in Western nations are committed by young, low-status males, leading to an inference by investigators that lack of sexual access, actual or self-perceived, is a key motivating factor. But in a substantial proportion of rapes, the perpetrators are older and far less lacking in resource and sexual opportunities. Here, rapes often involve aggression and a drive to humiliate or subordinate the victim. 18. Given the gravity of rape, Sharia law takes rape charges seriously, requiring four eye witnesses to the overt act. Failing to produce acceptable male witnesses, an accuser may face adultery or fornication charges, as Tiouli Touria of Limoges did when she was raped by three men in Dubai; London Telegraph, March 1, 2003, online.

Endnotes
1. See Bimal Matilal, Pluralism, Relativism, and Interaction between Cultures, in Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991 papers from the 1989 East-West Philosophers Conference), 14160. 2. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics I 7, 1097a 2325, Ross translates: the good achievable by action; Ostwald: the good attainable by action. Joe Sachs, the good that belongs to action. J. A. K. Thompson seems more apposite here; see his The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Allen Unwin, 1953; London: Penguin, 1955, etc.), 36. 3. See L. E. Goodman, On Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 923. 4. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. Norms, indeed, are rarely voiced, let alone enforced, unless some violation is already in sight. 6. Mao Tse Tung, quoted in Keith Windschuttle, Mao and the Maoists, The New Criterion, October, 2005, 6. 7. Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow correspondent knowingly concealed Stalins punitive famine in the Ukraine, using euphemisms and charges that wreckers and spoilers caused the serious food shortage. He denied in print that there was actual starvation and famously remarked: you cant make an omelet without breaking eggs. Privately in 1933, at a party in the British Embassy, he told Ann OHare McCormick that at least 10 million had died that year. His reporting was honored with a Pulitzer Prize, citing his scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity. Malcolm Muggeridge, who tried to report the truth about the famine was a victim of retaliation and for a time was blackballed and without work. See L. Y. Luciuk, Not Worthy: Walter Durantys Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times (Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 2004). 8. Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (New York: Knopf, 1956; Paris, 1951); cf. The Just, translated by J. OBrien in Caligula and Three Other Plays (New York: Knopf, 1958; Paris, 1950). 9. See Peter W. Singer, Children at War (New York: Pantheon, 2005). 10. U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report, June 5, 2002. Francis T. Miko, Trafficking in Women and Children: The U.S. and International Response, Congressional Record Research Service Report 98649C, May 10, 2000. See also James O. Finckenauer and Jennifer Schrook, Human Trafficking: A Growing Criminal Market in the U.S., International Center, National Institute of Justice; A. Richard, International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime, Center for the Study of Intelligence, November, 1999.

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19. In June, 2002, a Muslim village court in Pakistan ordered Mukhtar Mai gang raped, as punishment for her 12-year old brothers reportedly walking with a girl from an influential tribe. After her rape by four volunteers she was displayed naked to hundreds of village onlookers. Pakistan Times, March 6, 2006. It is hard to think of a better argument for the need to separate what may be socially sanctioned from what must be deemed unacceptable. 20. Recent findings on the powerful effect of male circumcision in diminishing the impact of the human papilloma virus and other sexually transmitted sources of disease should put paid to the canard claiming that circumcision has no valid hygienic function. There is no comparable benefit to be gained from female genital cutting. 21. For a fuller treatment of moral and religious truth, see Goodman, In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Amherst, New York: Humanity, 2001), chapter 9.

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