569. Differentiating Between Instinctive And Cognitive Transgressions

569.   Differentiating Between Instinctive And Cognitive Transgressions

In entry 568 I pointed out the importance of the liability principle in restraining known hazardous persons from ever harming another victim.   But I am not sure, if I made it sufficiently clear, that the objective of this is the protection of individual victims only.  

It is important to distinguish between instinctive transgressions and cognitive transgressions.   Under the myth of the free will and the religious bias towards tolerating harm to victims as a god's will, this distinction is omitted in the legal system of many countries.   It is time to acknowledge, that people's excessive instinctivity has to be dealt with to their personal disadvantage and not to that of innocent others.  

Instinctive transgressions are those harming acts to individual persons, which are done by those (predominantly men) lacking sufficient cognitive control over their sexual and aggressive hierarchy and ingroup/outgroup instincts.   They are the dangerous beasts.   

Cognitive transgressions cause material damage to abstract entities or the general welfare of society, which cannot be accepted or tolerated, but which are not directly tragic to individual victims.   
Criminals, who steal or do any kind of financial fraud against companies or the government are acting by a deliberate decision based upon a thinking process.    If punishment results in a change of their behavior, then punishment is a reasonable consequence.   In the worst case of a recidivism, the damage is limited to be material but there are no traumatized, mutilated or dead victims.    Therefore risking their recidivism can be justified.       
The same is true with people, who cause harm by carelessness as is drunk driving, which they would never do deliberately.   They can also learn to change their behavior.   The shock of their guilt is often enough punishment by itself.   

It is known, that prisoners often commit atrocities to each other.  Beasts are dangerous to harm anyone in their reach, no matter if in freedom or in jail.  The distinction between instinctive and cognitive transgressions requires a distinction between types of prison.  
The instinctive beasts should be locked away in prisons apart from those, where the cognitive criminals are supported to improve.   
If a psychopathic murderer kills a brutal rapist, it is good riddance.    If he kills a fraudulent accountant, it is a tragedy.   

568. Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 2

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.

566. Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 1

566.  Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 1

Entries 565, 554 and 552 were about the unjustifiable acceptance of and desensitization to harming and being harmed and how this is connected with religion having become a part of many cultures and being taken for granted as if there were no alternative.   
Even feminism is not free from this, often being much more politically concerned with justified anger about inequality and abuse, but not with the principle of avoiding harm. 

Lately I read an article protesting against any recognition of biological differences between the genders as a danger to feminism.    I strongly disagree.    Feminism without awareness for the insights of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology is doomed to be irrational.  
 

A rational form of feminism is needed, which focuses on ending not only the daily and ubiquitous harm to women by men, but also the tolerance to and acceptance of being harmed by women themselves.  
Feminism is rational, when it has been cleaned of all religious beliefs and myths concerning women and also of all indirect consequences of such beliefs on how woman are treated and what they accept as appropriate.     
Rational feminism has the predominant goal to avoid and to reduce harm to women.  This can only be accomplished by taking realistic account of the biological gender differences.  

Rational feminism includes the task of overcoming two fallacies.  Both fallacies are enhanced and reinforced by the underestimation of the disabling effect of instinctive urges upon the morals, the reasoning and the self-control of many men.  

• Fallacy 1 is the irrational denial of biological differences and the subsequent overestimation of the general moral qualities to be expected and demanded from men.   Men are not only believed to have a free will, but they are also considered to be able to act responsibly by always having a sufficiently strong self-control.  They are believed to be capable to behave morally by simply deciding to do so.   Whenever they don't, it is attributed to an individual man's personal failure or momentary blunder.   
  Women are considered as having no part in how they are treated nor are they held responsible for influencing men. 
  No matter how often and how strongly abuse of women is denounced and protested against under this fallacy, harm to women cannot be avoided, as long as men's attributed moral qualities are overestimated and unrealistic .  
  
  This fallacy is found by all female feminists, who focus on demanding different behaviors from men as a deliberate decision and it is shared by those more decent men of low instinctivity, who project their own rare qualities upon all men.
  
  
• Fallacy 2 is the irrational acceptance of all biased consequences of gender differences as unchangeable innate male privileges and innate female fate or doom to be harmed.  Any gender difference, no matter if by biology or by learned gender roles is mistaken to justify, condone and excuse inconsiderate treatment of women.  In more drastic cases, entitlement and grandiosity delusion lead to ruthless commodification and objectification of women.  
  Men are considered as unable to be responsible towards women. They believe their alleged male superiority as placing them above the requirement of responsibility towards women.  The trifled weakness of lacking responsibility towards women is not considered as significant enough to impair their alleged self-attributed superiority, because they perceive women as too insignificant.
  This fallacy is shared by men, who consider their abuse, domination and exploitation not as such but as women's appropriate fate, and by women, who are suffering in resignation without even feeling an outrage.  
  Women are not protected from but exposed to harm, their only method to reduce this is restricting their own liberty and scope of life.  

Both fallacies include the oblivion or denial of the fact, that the problem is caused by men's tragic defect, that their instinctive urges are far out of proportion of what would be beneficial for women.   

 
Making feminism rational means to discard both fallacies and focus upon how to end the harming of women on two levels:. 

1. Those men, whose cognition enables them, are required to take the responsibility to not harm women. 
   Taking responsibility requires to be able to have and to act by the insight, that harm to women is an outrage beyond any justifiability.  But to ask and to expect responsibility is only rational with people, who not only have this insight, but are also in the full capacity of being controlled by morals.  
   
2. When men are unable to refrain from harming women by responsibility, because they are too much enslaved by their excessive biological instinctive urges, then the protection of women requires stronger measures.  The study quoted in entry 565 is an example of the absurdity of punishing transgressors less due to biological explanations of their inability to act responsibly.  
   Such men need to be held accountable and liable by any means, no matter if and how much the procedures used are drastic, detrimental, disadvantageous, restrictive and unpleasant for the transgressors.  

When there are two option, either allowing a transgressor harm an innocent person, or to do some unavoidable harm to the transgressor to protect the Innocent, I consider the protection of the innocent as much more ethically justifiable than any clemency for the transgressor.   

The victims to be spared are innocent and therefore fully worthy of protection.  The transgressors have forfeited and damaged their worthiness by the harm already caused by them.   The innocence of not having harmed anybody is a strong moral justification for the privilege of being protected.

This general moral dilemma between protecting the innocent and forcing liability on transgressors is of course not restricted to men as transgressors and woman as victims, but it is the most drastic problem, because of the biological asymmetry  

• The average man is physically much stronger than the average woman.   Only a man has the choice between harming, forcing, dominating, coercing a woman and not harming her.  
• Men have a biological urge for homeostasis, which above a certain level of their instinctivity makes them predators, who harm women by objectification.
• The combination of urges to motivate and strength to enforce makes some men so fatally dangerous.

Rational feminism aims at finding methods, how to deal with this asymmetry in a way that ends the harming of women.

What I mean by holding men accountable and liable, will be continued in another entry.  

515. Responsibility And Liability Without The Myth Of The Free Will

515.  Responsibility And Liability Without The Myth Of The Free Will

Discarding the concept of the free will does not imply to accept, condone or excuse harmful behavior.   It only means a different approach how to protect people from being harmed.    Not harming others is a moral issue, no matter if there is a free will or not.  It requires to redefine the moral quality of behavior from the perception and experience of the target, recipient or victim.   The harm suffered by a victim does not depend on the ability of the transgressor to control his behavior or not.   The need to be protected from harm is independent from how this is done.

People's possibilities to harm others are drastically restricted by legal systems, and subtly also by social norms.     The myth of the free will limits the success of these protective methods for the innocent.   Without the myth of the free will, a person's inability to act responsibly is not a suitable and rational justification to release this person from all liability resulting from his actions.


Responsibility is the cognitive ability to behave deliberately without harming others.   The myth of the free will considers the ability to act responsibly as a part of human sanity.   Harming is legally punished for the purpose to enable the transgressor to learn how to apply his free will for not repeating the harm in the future.  
Only those declared as insane are not punished, as they are considered to have no free will to learn and to control themselves.  

As a consequence of this paradigm, the suffering of victims is considered the unavoidable collateral damage of the learning process of those, who are supposed as having merely strayed but have a free will to decide to change.    The focus is on the transgressors, the victims are considered the objects of their learning.  

The free will myth leading to dealing with a person lacking the ability to act morally by first allowing them to do harm and then punishing them is an inappropriate and cruel mistake.    It burdens too much suffering upon too many innocent victims by being too lenient with the transgressors.    Any person, who for the first time commits a crime causing serious physical or traumatic injuries to the victim, no matter if it is assault, robbery, rape, gets free after a few years.   Only when he has repeated harming innocent victims several times, is he considered as dangerous enough to be locked away for good.   

This is an outrage to the innocent second and further victims of known transgressors.   No punishment can ever undo and heal the damage to the victims.    Punishment may even impede those with lacking morals from changing their behavior.    They experience their time in prison as paying for the benefits of the crime.   Having paid is their reason to feel not or less guilty.  


Without the free will, the concept of universal responsibility has to be replaced by the concept of unrestricted liability.    Liability focuses upon the harm done by someone independent of the reasons for, causes and triggers of any behavior.   The focus is upon protecting the innocent from becoming victims, no matter, how this is accomplished and no matter the consequences for those, who are not able to refrain from harming.  

Responsibility does not require a free will, as it can be motivated by a cognitive calculation of preventing dishomeostasis and of expecting future stimulation of the pleasure center.    Responsible behavior can be the best behavior for the own long-term needs as already explained in entry 514.  

Under the liability paradigm of protecting the innocent, those able to act responsibly are the lucky ones, whose brain allows them to live without being externally restricted.    The others are less lucky, they need to be externally restricted from becoming the cause of harm. 

The ability to behave morally as experienced by the targets, to live without harming is a talent and a disposition, that people are either lucky enough to have wired in their brain or they are unfortunate enough to lack it. 

It is not in any way different from intelligence.    Logically, it should also not be dealt with differently.  
Most people take the benefits of intelligence for granted without even wondering about any injustice, when an intelligent person receives a lot of expensive formal education and reaches high positions of power in a factory.  He earns a lot more for a rewarding job than does the person lacking intelligence, who is given no choice but to do a dull repetitive job at the assembly line.  

Less intelligence is usually accepted as a justification for less quality of life, even though those with less intelligence are only detrimental to themselves.   But the lack of the ability to behave morally is even more detrimental, because suffering is imposed upon innocent victims, and the transgressors often get away with it.   It is time to accept the fact, that the inability to act morally is at least as much a justification if not much more than is intelligence for limiting and restricting the quality of life.   

Intelligence can be at least roughly measured and noticed by limited achievements, thus mistakes by wrong decision can be often prevented.  
Morals are more difficult to assess.  Unfortunately for the victims of first crimes, it is impossible or very difficult to predict the first occurrence of someone seriously harming another.  The first victim cannot be protected.   But after the first crime has been proven beyond doubt, the danger is known.   The second victim of the same criminal is not only a victim of him, but also a victim of a society, which fails to protect the innocent. 

I am not defending or justifying the inequality of chances.   Only when two needs are in conflict, then the needs of the innocent should have priority over the needs of the person known already as a potential danger.    The need to remain unharmed should have priority over the need to have a freedom, which includes the freedom to harm at the next occasion.