568. Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 2
This continues entry 566.
The following metaphor is about a cage, a human and a lion. The human is protected, as long as the bars of the cage separate the lion and the human. This protection is independent of who of them is inside the cage. The difference is the freedom of one and the confinement in a limited space of the other.
The metaphorical lion is a person, who by previous harming behavior has already given clear evidence of being dangerous. He is known as a beast.
The legal system in many societies including Germany is based upon the fallacy, that the lion has the free will to decide to not attack humans, therefore humans and lions are allowed to mingle freely. After the first attack, the lion is punished by being put into the cage for a limited time under the illusion, that this teaches him the lesson and enables him to derive the insight to not attack humans again. Only after several more attacks, punished by more sojourns in the cage and more releases will he finally be locked away permanently as dangerous.
The attacked victims are either told that their suffering is based upon the lion's right to be free or they are even blamed for not having enclosed themselves in the cage. In the zoo, the dangerous animals are locked into cages, so that the
visitors can walk about in safety. But when a woman walks home in the
night after having missed the last bus and gets attacked, nobody asks,
why the dangerous male animal was not safely locked away in a cage.
Instead the woman is blamed for not taking a taxi, she is supposed to
pay a lot of money for her safety.
This example shows the unjust distribution of the burden. The woman is burdened with being responsible to protect herself at her own cost, but men are not held liable for what they do.
When a man rapes a woman, in many cases the woman is traumatized for the rest of her life. In Germany, when it is the first conviction, he is released after a few years in jail. Having merely lost some years of his life in prison, he is better off than his victim, as soon as he is free again.
If the legal system would be based upon liability, the first attack of the lion would be sufficient to recognize him as too dangerous to be allowed the freedom to harm again and he would have his permanent place in the cage. The freedom would be given to the innocent, nobody would expect from them to take shelter in a cage for their own safety.
Liability means the full recognition of who is a hazard and the logical principle of distributing and imposing disadvantages according to nothing except the known probability of more harm. When someone is a known hazard, no explanations of any kind are valid to justify any leniency for his actions as excusable nor to justify the resignation of forcing risks and collateral damage upon others as future victims. A known hazard requires to reduce the risk by putting restrictions upon the source of the hazard.
When the lion's instincts are a hazard, whenever he is hungry, then the disadvantages need to be imposed upon him and not upon the victims. This makes a lot of sense to most people. Hardly anybody would agree to have lions roam German cities. But when the lion in this metaphor is replaced by a man, who cannot control his instinctive urges to abuse women, nobody holds him sufficiently liable for immediate and appropriate protection of women.
Women need to be protected from being harmed by restricting men's possibilities to do harm, no matter how many disadvantages this has for men. There is no rational justification to allow men all the freedom to do harm, whenever they cannot help it, while women are manipulated and coerced to accept restrictions to assure their protection as a fate. When men are unable to control their instincts, demanding from them the responsibility to act against their biological inclinations is futile and stupid. Instead they need to be impeded from being able to do so. The burden of preventing harm has to be born by those, who are the danger of the harm, not by the innocent potential victims.
If someone in the zoo opens the cage of a dangerous beast, and the beast harms a visitor, then the beast is liable but not responsible for the harm as it cannot help what it does by instinct. The person, who opens the cage is the one responsible for the harm, because he has the full cognition and insight of allowing danger.
It is the same with the rapist. He is a dangerous beast, who is liable but not responsible for what he cannot help to do driven by his instinct. But all those people, who make and enforce the laws giving him his freedom back are enabling the rapist to harm more victims. They are fully responsible for these victims' agony and trauma.
A zoo is a safe place while all dangerous animals are inside there cages. One escaped beast is enough to make it a dangerous place, and every beast more makes it more dangerous. Experiencing and noticing the limitations of the freedom of women by the peril of male violence does not depend on how many men are dangerous beasts, but only on the uncontrolled freedom of those already known as beasts. The danger is real, as soon as one beast is loose, and the number of additional beasts adds only more danger.
For women, the world is like the zoo, where the women are offered the cages to lock themselves in as a protection from an unknown number of free beasts.
I do not mean to be misunderstood. I neither hate nor fear men in
general. Nor do I imply that the majority of men are dangerous, even
though the fact, that men are on average physically stronger than women
is a real hazard. I fear the known beasts, who are free, and I hold
those, who allow them the freedom to harm, responsible for what they directly and
indirectly do to women. Every known beast in freedom is one too many.
