This essay first appeared in Cliterati on May 26th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Reductio ad absurdum is a form of argument which follows the logical consequences of the thing argued against until they reach a point the opponent must agree is false, ridiculous, harmful or otherwise undesirable. Laws against consensual behavior could easily be defeated by such arguments were those who support them open to considering their possible consequences; unfortunately they never are, and so the laws are enacted and those harmful consequences must happen in fact to real human beings before most people will even begin to consider that they should be repealed. It takes even more than that to move the really staunch prohibitionists, especially those whose power or livelihood depends upon criminalizing as much of the spectrum of human behavior as possible; no matter how awful the consequences of their beloved laws, no matter how great the costs in money and ruined lives, no matter how damaging to the fabric of society or destructive to the principle of justice, they will just keep chanting “the Law is the Law” or “society needs to send a message” or “perhaps you want to legalize murder as well” while shutting their eyes, ears and hearts to the evil their policies cause. The chief weakness of the reductio ad absurdum technique is that some people are unable to recognize absurdity when they see it, or else unwilling to admit it when they do. And when the situation involves sex and adolescents, some people will adamantly refuse to acknowledge the wrongfulness of even the most outrageous outcomes:
…Kaitlyn Hunt, 18, faces two felony counts of “lewd and lascivious battery on a child”…after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges…Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, wrote in [a] statement posted to Facebook…”They were out to destroy my daughter. [They] feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay”…police arrived at the family’s home Feb. 16 and put her daughter in handcuffs…Indian River County [Florida] Sheriff Deryl Loar said that age difference, not sexual orientation, determined prosecution…”If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way,” Loar said…The state attorney’s office has offered Kaitlyn Hunt a plea deal which includes two years’ house arrest and a year of probation, which would stay on her adult record and limit her career choices…
I have absolutely no doubt that the sheriff is telling the truth, but that only increases the absurdity rather than acting as a defense as he seems to believe. Age of consent laws are currently justified by the pretense that they “protect” girls below that age from adult “sexual predators”, but that was neither their original rationale nor is it the way they’re usually applied: 80% of young men prosecuted under these laws have an established, consensual relationship with the so-called “victim”, and fewer than half are more than six years older; 55% of them are under 21, and 75% under 24. In other words, the great majority of such prosecutions are initiated to eradicate and punish boyfriends of whom the girl’s parents do not approve; as in the case at hand, the age difference is merely a convenient excuse.
But while one might (justifiably or otherwise) raise the specter of teen pregnancy or venereal disease to object to a heterosexual relationship, one would be hard-pressed to find such grounds for a lesbian one; though a few STIs (namely vaginosis, chlamydia, herpes, HPV, trichomoniasis and pubic lice) can be spread from woman to woman, several of these could also be contracted via behavior that even the most bloodthirsty prosecutor would hesitate to use as the basis for a criminal charge. And really, does anyone believe that the younger girl’s parents were truly concerned about the possibility of their daughter contracting a disease whose name they probably can’t even spell? If so, would Kaitlyn’s providing a clean blood test have caused charges to be dropped? OK, I’m indulging in a bit of reductio ad absurdum myself there, but I think y’all can see what I’m driving at. None of the possible negative side effects of this relationship, whatever they might be, justifies destroying a young girl’s entire life; morally infantile rubbish like “it’s the law” or “we mistreat everybody equally” is even worse. And if those of us who are sane can agree that these laws create monstrous injustices when inflicted on young women, perhaps we can also agree that they’re just as horrible when inflicted on young men.
I remember seeing this story break and being torn by how preposterously this law is being applied in this case versus it being the law. I’ve always wondered why, since the law is clearly designed to protect teens from “actual” predators, why the age was set at 18…
Reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly valid argumentative technique, but its chief weakness is not that your opponent will not recognise or admit it, but rather that you will fail to see its misapplication due to your own biases or limitations of imagination.
Creationists misapply it all the time (e.g. the watchmaker analogy).
I was recently dismissed by an acolyte of E Fuller Torrey with the statement “If you had your way, no one would be involuntarily committed”.
Indeed.
My work in prison abolition often gets a similar response (the last person to do so was an ALP member of parliament who is now in prison himself 🙂 ).
This story highlights all that’s wrong with this type of law, and that laws are wide nets which catch both their intended prey and others.
My great grandmother married when she was 17, and her husband was 24. Nothing was thought of it at the time. She had been on her own for several years, working as a maid. Now, it would be illegal.
I dated older people when I was “under age”.
Now I’m not in favor of child predators. I don’t defend some 40 year old haunting the school yards. But to jail a teen for dating another teen a few years young is ridiculous.
I think the most serious problem with reductio ad absurdum is that most people do not understand what an implication (or derivation step) is, and confuse it with equivalence. These people only think in (simple) correlations and (simple) correlations are always symmetric, i.e. if A causes B then B also causes A. This is the idea that you lump things together that are somehow connected. That is not how the world works, but even intelligent people regularly make this mistake.
But reductio ad absurdum only works because implications as steps in a logical derivation chain are asymmetric! If you have A is true and A implies B, then B is also true. The implication says absolutely nothing if you know B is true. But you can turn this round: If you know B is untrue and you have A implies B, then A must be untrue either. That is the “absurdum”, namely that A is absurd, i.e. untrue.
The really scary thing is that even students of Computer Science, Mathematics and Engineering have this problem. It seems to be a fundamental mental disability that many, many people suffer from.
As a result, most people cannot follow an argument by reductio ad absurdum. That makes it no less valid but difficult to use to convince people. Most just cannot follow the logic and cannot see that the conclusion is valid.
I do agree that most people also have the problem that they often fail to recognize an absurdum. That is IMO because most people to not perceive truth or validity by understanding, but only see what “the norm” is, i.e. what other people say and claim to think, regardless how ridiculous that may be. That is a cultural adaption mechanism, but it is fatal whenever actual insight is required. Such as in a voter in a democracy. One result is that voters are easy to manipulate as they are blind to reality.
This is a quite confused post about formal logic, mixing in correlations (a statistical notion) and causation (a physical notion). And then comes confused sentences like “valid conclusion”. Validity is a property of arguments/inferences, it does not make sense to say “valid conclusion” in logic.
All reduction ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd) is, is an argument form which consists of trying to derive an ‘absurd’ (i.e. false or something similar, like epistemically self-defeating) conclusion from a known premiss, usually one hold by the other person (the target).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_ad_absurdum
Equivalence in logic is also known as a bi-implication. It’s just an implication that goes both ways. I.e. it is defined as (A→B)∧(B→A), it is written A↔B. All very obvious. Apparently the poster above confused this with correlations. I think he meant relation. Implications i.e. e.g. A→B are indeed relations that are not symmetric, while bi-implications of course are symmetric.
Causation, which has about nothing to do with the formal logic here, is also non-symmetric.
Next he explains that one can still make inferences from A→B, although one cannot validly infer B→A (the inverse), one can infer the contrapositional, which is the inverse with negations added in both the antecedent and the consequent (the thing before the → and the thing after). So, from A→B one can validly infer ¬B→¬A.
I don’t know what this fact about formal logic has to do with people failing to spot reductio arguments. However, try looking up the Wason task, where people indeed often interpret if-then sentences as bi-implications instead of mere implications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_test
-your friendly neighborhood logician
Believe me, I am not confused about anything. I did mean exactly what I wrote, and I have both the background in formal logic and statistics required to understand the concepts. You may have gotten confused by the multiple abstraction levels I used though. No sense writing a dissertation here, so I implicitly appeal to intuition.
I shall then point the readers to the fact that in response to criticism, you appeal to self-authority. And then accuse the other person of not understanding the concepts. Tsk tsk! Good thing there is anonymity on the internet. 🙂
Determining maturity is one of the most difficult things to define. I know plenty of extremely mature 15 year olds, and many 40 year olds who are infantile.
I do, however, think there is some benefit to putting limits on the behavior of people who are still dependent on their parents. There is a lot of maturing that happens when a person breaks away from their parents, and while the age at which they break away is fluid, the effect of the breakage is the same. That being said, if a child has broken away, the parents should not be able to drag the kid back by way of legal action.
But really, who in their right mind would make it illegal for people who attended school at the same time to mess around? That’s just… stupid. Also, the idea that parents can persecute a person for the activities in which their own child consented too is ridiculous. Parents would not be so quick to press charges if they also risked a loss of custody in the process, me thinks.
It depends on the definition of “child”. If you mean the biological relationship and not the age, it makes sense to let someone mature enough to break away live his or her own life. However, a 10-year old breaking away is not the same as a 15-year old breaking away.
The law needs to presume that every person, even a child, knows what’s best for him/herself unless proven otherwise. No one should ever be in a position to declare someone else “not mature enough” and deny them agency. Even if they are parent and child.
Off topic, but here’s some breaking news…
http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/07/11/meshael-alayban-saudi-princess-accused-of-enslaving-kenyan-maid/
The obvious solution here, then, is to incarcerate the Kenyan maid “for her own good” and immediately create a licensing program to cover all domestics and their employers.
Yes, the previous sentence was sarcasm.
I’ve noticed that on closed captioning, sarcastic dialogue is noted by (!). Internet application, anyone?
I think sometimes we paint prohibitionists a bit too two-dimensional.
For instance, we DO have a prohibition on murder and we do enforce that prohibition through the judicial system. And – we’ve had that prohibition since basically the dawn of human civilization and yet – we have not eliminated murder.
So when you come at a prohibitionist saying … “You will never eliminate prostitution with your tiny laws!” They simply take that as a given fact – but a fact that doesn’t impeach prohibitionist laws because the legal code is not much more than a collection of prohibitionist laws against everything from “insider trading” to “speeding”. In every case – there are still instances where the law is broken and no reason to believe that the prohibition itself is wrong to enforce based on that fact alone.
Now … when we say they ignore the harm these laws cause … this isn’t convincing to them because, naturally, enforcement of the law is going to hurt others who are not intended to be harmed. For instance – the wrong people will be arrested, and perhaps convicted of murder – and this fact doesn’t mean we should chuck the law against murder. No system is perfect and one that convicts, rarely, an innocent man is still superior to no law which would allow every murderer to escape scott free for his crime – and more innocent people would die because of unfettered murdering.
Everyone is a prohibitionist to one extent or another.
Except those who aren’t who conveniently have a name “anarchists”. 😉
Apparently I don’t know enough about anarchist to comment about them. According to comixchick – one can still be an anarchist and be in favor of laws and enforcing them.
Which by the way – she’s prolly right.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarchism
#2
(specifically), a political and philosophical belief that all forms of involuntary rule or government are undesirable or unnecessary, and that society could function without a ruler or involuntary government (a state).
If there is no state, and hence no police, and no governing bodies… what use are laws? There is no one to make them, no one to force people to comply with them. It makes no sense. Anarchists are against all laws, because that’s what you get with no state.
There are subtleties. David Friedman defines the state by its double standard (its chosen people are entitled to do things you and I can’t), and since he would want to get rid of that double standard while still having laws, he labels himself anarchist. I define government differently (as the services of protection and dispute resolution, no matter how the people in that trade organize themselves), and thus do not consider myself an anarchist, but my goal is pretty much the same as David’s. I’ve linked his site because his writings explore the practical problems of getting there from here.
I have a question Maggie regarding age of consent reform. How far would you take it? In Denmark the AoC is 15 years, but the practice of the law (I looked into it) is never to file charges in cases where the young person is 12 or more and the older person is 23 or less. A sort of common law based Romeo and Juliet law. I think it’s a bad idea to rely on such practices since they can easily be broken by some feminist or similar judge.
I also wish they would get rid of the terrible term “statutory rape” which involves an obvious equivocation in the meaning of “consent”, from regular meaning to legal sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Romeo_and_Juliet_laws
I also note that the AoC varies wildly in the world. I chucked a few days ago when I read that a particular state of the US had a law AoC…. at 17. That’s like way above world average. See below.
http://static.businessinsider.com/image/51bb7636ecad044224000033/image.jpg
Perhaps instead of strict ages, one should go with “onset of puberty”. Or perhaps it is fine to rely on these Romeo and Juliet laws, that are exceptions to the general AoC law. On the other hand, it seems completely fine with me for a 14 year old to have sex with a person of any age.
One also has to remember that the onset of puberty has actually decreased in the recent decades. Perhaps due to better nutrition. Perhaps due to hormones in the environment. In any case, the AoC should follow suit if it is to be based on anything biological.
Thoughts?
I like the Denmark law.
It’s not perfect – but nothing you can write into law can be. The truth is – some kind of an age limit on AoC has to be set and y’alls numbers are just about as good as anything else I’ve seen.
Parents really need to get involved … and it would help if pop culture would get aboard and show a more balanced view of sex. The bottom line is – sex is a natural thing so why do we withhold the information from kids for so long? All my kids starting getting the info (at home) in pieces (pretty BIG pieces) from age 5 onward.
But now here’s the problem …
If you teach a kid at an early age about sex (so that you can also teach that kid about sexual responsibility) … and that kid goes to public school and displays a bit too much “knowledge” on the subject – then child protective services will come knocking at your door.
This happened with one of my Sailors who had a daughter in third grade and knew “too much” about sex. They figured she was abused.
The case was dropped – because it was discovered the MOTHER had given the info to the daughter – NOT THE FATHER. You see, fathers are fair game for the tormentations of the neo-feminists at Child Protective Services – but mother’s aren’t. They aren’t interested in prosecuting fathers.
You laugh – but a representative from CPS told me that right to my face.
Mistake … I meant to say CPS isn’t interested in prosecuting Mothers.
The story on Facebook is extremely one sided.
Admittedly, no one is without blame here, but there are some questions that should be answered. Like where the money for #FreeKate is going, and why Hunt’s parents put such an interesting confidentiality agreement on the Facebook page.
I feel like I need waders because it does get deep.
http://supporthonesty.net
”If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way,” Loar said.
I notice he didn’t make any claim that had it been an eighteen year old female with a fourteen year old boy, it would have been prosecuted the same way.
Lesbian, gay, straight, dude is a few years older, chick is a few years older, none of it should be prosecuted in a case like this.
And Emil is right: we need a better term than “statutory rape.”
OK, I can’t resist saying something about itself while I’m here.
Sometimes I run into somebody justifying pretty much every sexual prohibition out there, whether the prohibition be legal (you’ll go to prison) or social (you’re a dirty slut) by invoking AIDS. I will then ask, “So as soon as AIDS is cured, you’ll reverse your position and come out in favor of [teen sex, prostitution, orgies, general promiscuity, etc.]?”
The answer is invariably “No.” I then point out that obviously, AIDS isn’t the reason to be against [etc.], because if [etc.] is removed, the person is still against it. Typically, I then get yelled at and told that I am mean.
The real snag is that there is a conflation here from the legal perspective of Emotional, Intellectual, Experiential and Biological maturity into the “Age of Consent” concept.
As most of you are aware, most humans are biologically mature at 17, given good health and proper nutrition. This can be as low as 15 for women, and 16 for men. (Source: wikipedia, Puberty) Since this process is gradual, starting as low as 10, we’re looking at the possibility that a 14 year old “girl” could be more woman than girl. She may, in fact, be anywhere from 364 days to 1 day from her sexual maturity. That’s just the scientific facts.
Here in the UK we put AoC at 16 for both genders, with some caveats about partner status, especially if said partner is deemed to have influence over said 16 year old.
However, the state logically contests that EIE maturity takes potentially a bit longer to reach the same degree of ubiquity, which is why we place legal majority at 18 (UK).
I suspect that this is why the US has bankrolled the AoC to a single magic number, 18.
Truth is though, teenagers have won wars, raised families and built their own countries. So its quite clear they’re more capable, in some cases, than they’re creditied for, especially in the USA.