There is a question about what destigmatization should strive for with respect to people-category predication, and what actually happens to people-category predication during destigmatization. The worry is that some lives could become livable only by collapsing the livability of others.

I think the people-category predicative structures “C can be X” and “C cannot be X,” when installed as public meanings of the category itself, have a formally exclusionary structure.

If the public meaning of “women” includes “cannot be sexualizable,” then women who identify with “can be sexualizable” cannot live a life in which their identity is intelligible. Likewise, if the public meaning of “women” includes “can be sexualizable,” then women who identify with “cannot be sexualizable” cannot live a life in which their identity is intelligible.

The reasoning appeals to ◊A → □◊A in S5 modal logic. For reference, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/

I use ⊨ for semantic entailment, ⊭ for failure of semantic entailment, ◊ for possibility, □ for necessity, ¬ for negation, ∧ for conjunction, and ∃ for existential quantification. Let Σ_C mean the public meaning, category rules, or socially available interpretation of people category C, and let P mean “X predicates C at the category level.” “C can be X” can be represented as Σ_C ⊨ ◊P. In S5, ◊P → □◊P, so once possibility is installed as part of the category meaning, that possibility is treated as necessarily available within the relevant modal frame. “C cannot be X” can be represented as Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P, or equivalently Σ_C ⊨ □¬P.

By contrast, “C neither can nor cannot be X” should be represented as (Σ_C ⊭ ◊P) ∧ (Σ_C ⊭ ¬◊P). The public meaning of C entails neither that X is possible for C, nor that X is impossible for C. The category meaning leaves the matter unsettled.

This avoids the central exclusion problem because the first two structures install either X-possibility or X-impossibility into the public meaning of the category itself. If Σ_C ⊨ ◊P, then lives that require C to be publicly settled as not-X-readable lose intelligibility at the category level. If Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P, then lives that require C to be publicly settled as X-readable lose intelligibility at the category level. The neutral structure refuses both category-level settlements by blocking the inference from membership in C to either X-possibility or X-impossibility. A person may still be X, or may understand themself as not X, but the category itself does not decide the matter.

There is a further complication about so-called negative identities. “Living as not sexualizable” is not necessarily a life defined by absence, lack, or mere negation. It can be a positive way of inhabiting embodiment, social presence, and public intelligibility. The appearance of negativity partly depends on which predicate is treated as primitive. If P means “sexualizable predicates C,” then “C cannot be sexualizable” appears as Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P. But if Q means “not-sexualizable predicates C,” then that same form of life can be represented without a leading negation as Σ_C ⊨ ◊Q, with ◊Q → □◊Q in S5. Conversely, if Q is treated as primitive, “C can be sexualizable” can be represented through negation as Σ_C ⊨ ◊¬Q. The asymmetry is therefore not built into the forms of life themselves. It is partly produced by a linguistic convention that lets some identities appear positive while casting others as identities of negation. “Living as sexualizable” is also defined against “living as not sexualizable,” even if ordinary grammar makes only the latter look negative.

This structure can still be exclusionary in a thinner second-order sense, because it excludes projects that require one category-level predication to be installed as public meaning. Someone who needs “C can be X” to be true of the category as such, or who needs “C cannot be X” to be true of the category as such, will experience the neutral structure as a loss. That loss is less serious than the original exclusion problem because the neutral structure does not impose a sexual predicate, or its negation, on category members. It excludes rival category monopolies rather than excluding first-order lives.

There is also a related problem about the movement from existential observation to category predication. “There are some people who are women and are sexualizable” does not entail “women are sexualizable.” Formally, ∃x(Wx ∧ Sx) does not entail the generic or category-level predication G(W,S). The existence of some women who are sexualizable does not by itself make sexualizability part of the public meaning of “women.” But the absence of logical entailment does not prevent social movement from the existential observation to the category meaning. Repeated, prominent, or institutionally reinforced observations of women who are sexualizable can be read as evidence for the broader category predication, even though the inference is invalid as a matter of logic. A permitted observation about some members of a category can help stabilize a public meaning about the category as such.

This matters for destigmatization because a project can officially deny that it is installing a category-level meaning while nevertheless producing the conditions under which that meaning becomes socially available. It can say “some people who are women are sexualizable,” while repeated representation, recognition, and public habituation make the stronger category predication increasingly difficult to avoid. The formal distinction remains intact, but social interpretation does not reliably respect it.

This also gives some reason to favor eliminating gender categories, or at least sharply weakening their authority to settle what can or cannot be predicated of people as category members.

I’m asking for evidence about which meaning is more socially dominant or recurrent.

One says envelopment and entering have been stripped of hierarchy. The other says hierarchy is acceptable.

Dominant social groups who don’t usually envelop are much more likely to resist destigmatization if they read the lesson as “it’s okay to be lowered, subordinated, or degraded,” rather than “this is not lowering, subordinating, or degrading in the first place.”

It also doesn’t really help already subordinated groups if subordinating sexual legibility is accepted instead of challenged. It may save them from some intragroup policing, but there’s something dark about destigmatizing gratuitously subordinated positions.

That seems like defeatism about stripping envelopment and entering of hierarchy. It’s a faithless retreat from teaching that the hierarchy isn’t there toward teaching that being “topped” is cool.

Arousal non-concordance seems to show that bodily response does not by itself establish desire. A person can have a physiological response without experiencing that response as wanted, endorsed, identity-concordant, or erotically meaningful. If that is right, then what makes some bodily, affective, or attentional response count as sexual attraction rather than non-concordant arousal?

This question becomes harder if sexual attraction is not settled by self-report. I can see why self-report might be defeasible, since people can misdescribe themselves, repress things, or come to understand themselves differently over time. But it does not follow that third-person classification has default authority. If someone says, “that response is not attraction in the sense relevant to my sexual orientation,” what kind of evidence or conceptual account could defeat that claim?

Are there philosophical accounts of sexual attraction or sexual orientation that explain how bodily response, desire, self-identification, and social classification interact? I’m especially interested in work on first-person authority, self-authorship, autonomy, or anti-domination, as well as objections to the view that people have authority over which responses count as orientation-relevant.

The argument targets abolitionist views that do not merely reject patriarchal rankings of gendered roles, but reject moral ranking among gendered roles and gendered role-configurations altogether, while also treating counter-traditional participation as morally significant under conditions of patriarchy. Some gender abolitionists may deny that surname choices matter enough to warrant serious moral evaluation, or may reject the idea that counter-traditional arrangements have special political value, and those views are not my concern here. The target is the abolitionist who takes performativity seriously, treats patriarchy as gravely harmful, and regards ordinary gendered practices as part of the machinery through which patriarchy is either reproduced, contested, or destabilized. That view cannot easily disavow counter-ranking, because its own commitments make some gendered configurations of participation morally preferable to others.

If ordinary family practices help constitute and reproduce gender hierarchy, then surname choices are not private symbolic flourishes whose moral significance can be bracketed, but public acts through which marital authority, family continuity, and gendered deference become socially legible. A wife taking her husband’s name, against that background, participates in a patriarchal naming convention through which women’s movement into male lineage has been normalized, while a husband taking his wife’s name interrupts a background expectation about whose identity should remain fixed and whose identity should become transferable.

No single surname choice needs to destabilize patriarchy by itself for the argument to go through, since the relevant claim concerns participation in a socially recognizable arrangement rather than independent causal sufficiency. If a wife taking her husband’s name can matter because it participates in a patriarchal naming convention, then a husband taking his wife’s name can matter because it participates in a counter-traditional arrangement whose significance depends on that same convention. If individual instances are too causally thin to carry significance in the second case, they are too causally thin to carry it in the first case as well.

Once that framework is accepted, the counter-traditional arrangement has positive moral valence, becoming, other things equal, morally preferable because it contests or destabilizes a patriarchal convention while the traditional arrangement risks reinforcing one. This does not entail that every husband is morally required to take his wife’s name, or that every wife who takes her husband’s name acts impermissibly, since costs, family circumstances, cultural context, and competing obligations can all alter the final judgment. The narrower claim is harder for the abolitionist to escape, since, under the theory’s own assumptions, reversal has standing moral weight insofar as it works against a gendered default, while conformity to the traditional direction carries a standing reason against it insofar as it helps keep that default socially available.

The strongest reply is domination-sensitive, holding that counter-ranking is not a new gender hierarchy, but a response to an existing one. On this view, the husband’s adoption of his wife’s name is not morally better because feminine-coded movement is intrinsically superior, nor because men should be subordinated to women as a new marital ideal, but because it contests the inherited rule that women are the movable party and men are the fixed point of family identity. Neutrality among gendered role-configurations, under these conditions, would leave the patriarchal default undisturbed.

That reply succeeds against any charge of simple hypocrisy, but it does not remove the counter-ranking, since it explains why the counter-ranking is supposed to be justified. The husband’s movement into his wife’s name has symbolic force because it makes him occupy the transferable position historically assigned to wives, and its significance is not exhausted by the fact that he does something different from the traditional husband. He accepts, performs, or makes himself available to a position marked by relational displacement. The rival is therefore not purely anti-subordination in the simple sense, since it does not endorse domination as an ideal but does treat the managed occupation of a historically subordinated or transferable position as morally valuable when that occupation is thought to weaken the older and more entrenched subordination of women.

The asymmetry becomes sharper when surname choice is connected to the broader evaluation of men who occupy traditionally feminine roles. In this evaluative frame, men’s movement into feminine-coded positions can acquire positive moral meaning even when the same movement is punished elsewhere, and the husband who gives up his surname may be read as refusing entitlement, accepting vulnerability, sharing symbolic costs, or declining the inherited privilege of masculine fixity. Those meanings supply positive moral credit and can shield him, within this evaluative frame, from the suspicion attached to men who retain traditionally masculine advantages. A man who keeps his name may not have coerced anyone, and he may not intend to affirm patriarchy, yet the choice remains vulnerable to being read as complicity with patriarchal continuity. The counter-traditional act therefore gains its force from both sides of the evaluative field, earning praise for reversal while avoiding the suspicion attached to masculine continuity.

A view that treats reversal as corrective, resistant, or politically superior cannot also treat surname options as morally symmetrical. Traditionalism treats the wife’s movement into the husband’s name as proper, natural, or socially superior, while the counter-ranking treats the husband’s movement into the wife’s name as corrective, resistant, or politically superior. These are different moral and political stories, and the second may be more defensible under unequal conditions, but both make gendered direction normatively significant. The abolitionist has changed the grounds of evaluation rather than abolished evaluative ranking itself.

Describing the asymmetry as temporary, instrumental, and defeasible does not remove the counter-ranking. If patriarchy is reproduced through ordinary practices, then contesting or destabilizing those practices is not a merely optional tactic, but part of the moral structure of living under unjust conditions. Reversal may be defeasible in the broad sense that its value can be outweighed, but it is not defeasible in the weak sense that it can be set aside without normative loss. As long as the patriarchal background remains operative, the husband’s adoption of his wife’s name remains a candidate for praise, and the wife’s adoption of her husband’s name remains vulnerable to criticism. The asymmetry follows from the claim that ordinary gendered practices help sustain, contest, or weaken patriarchy.

The dilemma follows from the moral weight assigned to surname practice. If surname practices are too morally thin to justify a stable preference for reversal, then the critique of traditional surname practice loses much of its force; if surname practices are morally thick enough to reproduce, contest, or destabilize patriarchy, then the abolitionist must accept a counter-ranking in which some gendered role-configurations are, other things equal, superior to others. The first horn weakens the political seriousness of the critique, while the second gives up the claim to have moved beyond gendered moral ranking. The view may remain abolitionist as an end-state ideal, but its present practical reasoning operates through counter-ranking. The resulting position may still be more defensible than traditionalism, since its ranking is anti-subordinating in aim rather than patriarchal, but it is not the abolition of gendered moral ranking so much as a counter-traditional moralization of gendered practice.

Suppose one spouse occupies the primary caregiving role because they lack independent income and face serious exit vulnerability. They do not simply prefer caregiving; their position is shaped by economic dependency and unwanted unpaid labor. They then get a job that pays enough to support the household on their income alone.

I take it that exit from unwanted, economically dependent caregiving is normally presumptively good. The complication is that the exit may transfer the same dependency to the other spouse.

Fewer men trapped in unwanted, economically dependent caregiving is presumptively good.

If fewer men are in that position, the household division of labor may be moving back toward a gendered pattern in which women absorb more unpaid care work.

Fewer women trapped in unwanted, economically dependent caregiving is presumptively good.

If fewer women are in that position, the household division of labor may be moving toward a pattern in which men absorb more unpaid care work.

My question is about how feminist ethics, care ethics, or political philosophy should treat the asymmetry here. I can see why women’s entrapment in unpaid caregiving may be more historically entrenched, more culturally normalized, and more likely to reinforce a standing gender hierarchy. That seems to establish a relevant asymmetry and perhaps a severity asymmetry.

But does it establish a presumption-reversing asymmetry? In other words, is there a principled reason to say that a woman’s exit from unwanted dependent caregiving remains presumptively good despite live transfer risk to a man, while a man’s exit from unwanted dependent caregiving becomes presumptively bad or dangerous because of live transfer risk to a woman?

I am interested in whether philosophers have discussed this kind of structure, where liberation from dependency is presumptively valuable, but the risk of transferring dependency to someone else may complicate or reverse that presumption. Relevant literature or distinctions would be especially helpful.

The target here is goods-based natalism, understood as the view that procreation can be permissible because the created life contains, or is expected to contain, enough goods to justify creating the person who will live it.

Goods-based natalism needs a principle determining how much severe, unavoidable, nonconsensual suffering may be imposed in creating a life whose goods the created person could not have missed had they never existed.

The Terminal-Boiling Case

Let W be a world exactly like ours except for one added condition.

In W, each person who would otherwise enter the final stage of natural dying undergoes, from their own perspective, a terminal episode in which they fall into a boiling pit and die in extreme agony. The event replaces the person’s ordinary dying experience.

The terminal event is epistemically sealed. It leaves no evidence, no surviving witness to the pit, and no socially available record. When others are present, including family members at a hospice bed, they experience an ordinary natural death. The pit is not witnessed, recorded, inferred, or socially incorporated.

The inhabitants of W expect ordinary deaths and organize their lives around that expectation. Until the terminal event, lives in W contain the same goods and bads as lives in our world.

Controlled Features

W preserves the ordinary goods goods-based natalists usually invoke in defense of procreation.

Lives in W contain love, achievement, pleasure, agency, attachment, development, and whatever other goods ordinary human lives contain. They also contain the ordinary bads of human life until the terminal event. The case asks whether the goods of an otherwise ordinary life can justify creating someone whose life is guaranteed to end in extreme suffering.

W also removes the psychological and social effects that would otherwise make the case overdetermined.

The inhabitants do not know about the pit, do not anticipate it, and do not interpret the deaths of others through it. Their practical deliberation, social life, relationships, grief practices, medical institutions, and self-understanding are not distorted by knowledge of the terminal event. Any moral difference between W and our world comes from the imposed terminal agony rather than from anticipatory terror or the social organization of death around the pit.

W improves on the immediate-boiling case because the latter gives the natalist too many independent grounds for rejection.

If a child is born directly into boiling water, the natalist can reject the case because the child receives no life in any meaningful sense, no opportunity for agency, no relationships, no development, and no access to the goods that normally justify procreation. Because the immediate-boiling case collapses procreation into immediate torture and death, it does not isolate suffering in the way W does, where the ordinary goods of life are held fixed and only guaranteed terminal agony is added.

The Normative Hinge

A life’s being worth living does not by itself show that it is permissible to create.

Worthwhileness evaluates the life from within the life, or from the standpoint of its overall balance of goods and bads. Procreative permissibility evaluates the act of creating someone under conditions they could not accept or refuse. A natalist may claim that sufficiently good lives are permissible to create despite containing serious harms, but that claim requires a principle connecting lifetime value to permissible imposition.

Procreation is not merely exposure to a preexisting risk. It creates the person who will bear the risk.

Ordinary risk-imposition usually concerns existing people whose interests are already in play. A parent who creates a child does not merely choose among risks for someone who already needs a life arranged for them. The act brings into existence the subject who will undergo the harms attached to that life. The goods of the life may explain why the life is worth continuing once the person exists, but they do not by themselves explain why someone may create the person under conditions that guarantee serious suffering.

The relevant object of evaluation is the act that builds suffering into a life by creating the person who must undergo it.

Why W Is a Conservative Test

Back-loaded suffering is, if anything, a conservative test case for goods-based natalism.

Suffering at the end of life may be less morally serious than suffering imposed at the beginning or spread indefinitely across the life. Terminal suffering does not prevent childhood, development, agency, relationships, projects, or ordinary self-understanding. It does not structure the life from within, and in W it is not anticipated. The case therefore gives goods-based natalism its strongest version of the appeal to life as a whole, since the goods are not merely possible but have already been realized before the terminal horror occurs.

If a natalist still judges procreation in W impermissible, then the objection cannot be that the suffering prevented the life from containing the goods that justify procreation. The suffering arrives after those goods have been enjoyed. If even that kind of suffering defeats permissibility, the threshold concerns whether certain harms may be imposed at all, even as the price of a life that is otherwise worth living.

Threshold Variations

If W is impermissible, then the natalist needs an account of why the added terminal suffering defeats procreative permission.

It is not enough to say that the boiling pit is horrible. The question is how that horror interacts with the goods of the life as a whole. The natalist needs to say whether the relevant feature is the intensity of the suffering, its duration, its certainty, its position at the end of life, its nonconsensual imposition, its degradation, or some relation among these features.

The threshold pressure can be varied along three axes, severity, certainty, and rate.

Severity can be reduced from boiling agony to severe burns, first-degree burns, drowning, panic, or brief terror before death. If drowning is tolerable but boiling is not, the difference cannot simply be that boiling is worse. A threshold view needs some account of how worsening accumulates until procreation becomes impermissible.

Certainty can be reduced by imagining worlds in which the pit is possible but not guaranteed. If certainty is decisive, the natalist must explain why guaranteed terminal agony defeats permission while guaranteed exposure to vulnerability, aging, death, and nontrivial risks of illness, dependency, loss, and severe pain does not.

Rate can be reduced by imagining worlds in which everyone, nearly everyone, most people, half, or a smaller but still substantial minority die this way. The same epistemic seal remains in place, so no one anticipates the pit, remembers it happening to others, or organizes social life around it. If universality is doing the decisive work, the natalist must say why near-universality is not. If near-universal risk is still impermissible, the question recurs at the next lower rate. If the risk eventually becomes permissible, the natalist needs an account of how the probability of catastrophic imposed suffering interacts with the goods of the lives created.

Ordinary procreation already exposes created people to risks they did not choose. If severity is decisive, the natalist inherits a severity threshold. If certainty is decisive, the natalist inherits a certainty threshold. If probability is decisive, the natalist inherits a probability threshold.

Precaution Under Vagueness

Withholding procreation does not deprive the merely possible person of a life they were owed.

If no child is created, there is no subject who is made worse off by the absence of that life. Impersonal reasons to create good lives, if they exist, do not belong to a deprived subject who can complain of having been denied existence. In threshold cases, the cost of mistaken permission is borne by someone who is made to exist and suffer, while the cost of mistaken caution is not borne by a merely possible person in the same person-affecting way.

A vague threshold in the ethics of creating life is not an ordinary threshold problem.

Some vague thresholds can be tolerated because action is unavoidable, because the risks are distributed among existing people who already have claims on one another, or because the person exposed to the risk is also the person choosing to run it. Procreation does not fit that model. The act is optional. The person who bears the cost is not the person who chooses. The resulting life cannot be returned, revised, or refused by the one created. If the threshold is crossed, the created person bears the suffering. If procreation is withheld, no already existing person is deprived of the life they would otherwise have had.

Vagueness is morally asymmetric here because uncertainty about where suffering becomes too much should not automatically license creation. Where the permissibility of imposing serious harm is unclear, and where the alternative is not harming an existing person by withholding a benefit owed to them, vagueness supplies a reason for precaution rather than permission.

Conclusion

The terminal-boiling case tests whether goods-based natalism can give a principled account of the threshold at which imposed suffering makes procreation impermissible. A goods-based natalist may already accept that such a threshold exists, but the existence of a threshold is not enough. The threshold must explain why ordinary procreation remains permissible while a world with guaranteed terminal agony does not, or why that world remains permissible while sufficiently worse variants do not.

The case also changes the significance of vagueness. Many moral thresholds are vague, and vagueness alone does not make them unreal, though vagueness is not morally neutral in every domain. Procreation is optional, irreversible, and imposed on someone who cannot accept or refuse the risk. If the permissibility boundary is unclear, the uncertainty is borne by the person created, not by the person choosing to create. In that setting, threshold vagueness gives at least some presumptive support to precaution rather than permission.

Goods-based natalism therefore needs more than the claim that created lives can be good overall. It needs an account of when the goods of a life can justify creating the person who will have to bear that life’s serious unchosen harms. Without such an account, appeal to life’s goods merely redescribes the gamble rather than justifying procreation.

Assume someone cleans up their own obvious personal mess, like their own dishes, laundry, trash, spills, or anything clearly caused by them alone. They also have not agreed to a chore chart, a standard of cleanliness, or a division of household labor.

The question is about shared or unassigned household mess. By that I mean things like dust, dirty floors, bathroom grime, general clutter in common areas, trash that accumulates through ordinary household use, or other mess that is not clearly one person’s individual mess. Some of this comes from shared use, and some of it is just background household mess that builds up over time.

Suppose this person genuinely does not care whether that mess is there. They are fine living with it unless it becomes an actual health or safety issue. Because they do not care about the mess, they also do not think they have a duty to help clean it unless someone can show that it is dangerous, unsanitary in a serious way, or part of an agreement they accepted.

They also do not cook for other people, do other adults’ laundry, clean messes clearly caused by someone else, or take on caretaker-style domestic labor unless there is an agreement, dependency, or emergency.

Are they doing anything morally wrong? Are they being selfish or harmful by refusing to help maintain a cleaner or more pleasant shared space when they personally do not value that standard? Or is it enough to clean up their own direct mess and avoid creating health hazards?

I’m especially interested in whether shared living creates some default obligation to contribute to common upkeep even when there has been no explicit agreement and the mess does not rise to the level of danger.

Sexual attraction to people is treated as normal and ethically privileged.

The disutility argument holds that human-directed sexual attraction has a higher trace in some grave sexualized harms against people than pickle-directed sexual attraction does. It treats the counterfactual dependence of negative moral valence on attraction-types as morally significant. It argues that the severity and recurrence of the trace left by human-directed attraction, compared with pickle-directed attraction, matters ethically.

Attraction type	Conceptual prediction of abuse against people	Empirical abuse burden against people	Trace in abuse against people	Disutility burden
Sexual attraction to people	Higher than pickle-directed attraction	Higher than pickle-directed attraction	Stronger in some cases	Greater
Sexual attraction to pickles	Lower than human-directed attraction	Lower, with no comparable evidence	Weaker or absent by comparison	Lesser

The visual above claims that human-directed attraction has a higher conceptual and empirical connection to some sexualized abuse against people than pickle-directed attraction does.

Individuated arguments from the category:

Sexual attraction to pickles is ethically superior to sexual attraction to people with respect to child sexual abuse if pickle-directed attraction has a lower trace in child sexual abuse against people than human-directed attraction does.

Sexual attraction to pickles is ethically superior to sexual attraction to people with respect to misogynistic sexual abuse if pickle-directed attraction has a lower trace in misogynistic sexual abuse against people than human-directed attraction does.

Sexual attraction to pickles is ethically superior to sexual attraction to people with respect to anti-LGBTQ sexual abuse if pickle-directed attraction has a lower trace in anti-LGBTQ sexual abuse against people than human-directed attraction does.

Sexual attraction to pickles is ethically superior to sexual attraction to people with respect to sexualized torture, degradation, and murder if pickle-directed attraction has a lower trace in those harms against people than human-directed attraction does.

And so on.

The separate arguments show that the same comparative structure recurs across distinct categories of sexual harm. Each establishes, at minimum, that pickle-directed attraction is ethically superior in one disutility respect.

For one reason or another, the detractor needs to say human-directed attraction is still all-things-considered ethically superior to an attraction-type less prone to contributing to the rape and sexual abuse of children, women, LGBTQIA+ people, and other vulnerable people.

I’m interested in a broader structure I’d call considerable mismatch between co-participants’ beliefs about the meaning of the same sexual act.

The general idea is not merely that two people want different things from sex, or feel differently afterward, but that they understand the act itself as carrying different social, moral, or status-related meanings.

One substructure I’m especially interested in involves morally contentious meanings, including objectifying, degrading, dominating, subordinating, humiliating, lowering someone’s status, confirming someone’s status as lower than another person’s, and so on.

Suppose A and B are having sex. B believes that, in having sex with A, B is doing something morally charged to A. B takes the act to objectify A, degrade A, dominate A, subordinate A, humiliate A, lower A’s status, confirm A’s status as lower than B’s, or something in that family. A does not understand the sex that way. A also does not believe B understands the sex that way. B knows, or at least believes, that A does not understand the sex that way.

So B takes the sex to have a morally adverse meaning for A, such as objectification, degradation, domination, subordination, humiliation, status-lowering, confirmation of A’s lower status relative to B, or some related form of adverse sexual meaning. B also believes that A does not recognize that meaning.

I’m wondering what you think follows ethically from this.

To clarify, I support abortion rights and oppose forced pregnancy for numerous reasons. Here, I’m interested in the strongest theoretical version of the responsibility objection to Thomson’s violinist argument.

Thomson’s violinist case grants, for the sake of argument, that the dependent being is a person. The question is whether a person’s right to life includes a right to continued use of someone else’s body.

The usual violinist case is one where the person whose body is being used did not create the dependency. But suppose we modify the case in the strongest possible way for the violinist.

1. The violinist is a person with a right to life.
2. The person whose body is now needed wrongfully made the violinist dependent on their body.
3. It is stipulated and known that they did so intentionally, as a way of killing the violinist by later disconnecting.

In that version, disconnection looks like the completion of a wrongful killing. A permission to disconnect can’t be unrestricted if it allows someone to manufacture bodily dependency as a method of killing.

Does Thomson’s argument survive this known malicious-dependency version of the case? If not, what exactly explains the failure? Is it responsibility for the dependency, wrongful creation of the dependency, or the known intention to kill through later disconnection?

TLDR: My claim is that inconsentience and non-consent are distinct but dually sufficient wrong-makers. Children’s lack of sexual consent-capacity is enough to make direct or collateral sexualization wrongful, but it is not the only thing doing moral work. Non-consent is also sufficient. So the fact that adults are consentient is not enough to exclude them from the same kind of complaint when they are directly or collaterally sexualized without authorization. Adult consent-capacity explains how sexualization can sometimes be permitted; it does not supply permission where consent has not been given.

I want to distinguish two different ways sexual treatment can be unauthorized.

First, someone may be inconsentient in the relevant domain: they lack the capacity or standing to give valid consent. Children are the obvious case with respect to sexual consent.

Second, someone may be non-consenting: they may have the general capacity to consent, but they have not actually authorized this treatment. Adults are often in this position. A person can be capable of consenting and still not have consented.

My claim is that these are dually sufficient wrong-makers. Each is enough on its own. If someone lacks the capacity to consent, sexual treatment is impermissible. But if someone has the capacity and does not consent, that is also sufficient to defeat permission. Inconsentience blocks valid consent; non-consent fails to supply it. Those are different routes to the same moral result: the treatment is unauthorized.

This matters because discussions of sexual wrongness often treat children’s incapacity to consent as if it were the whole structure of the wrong. But even if one granted, for the sake of argument, that children were not essentially incapable of consent, even if there were possible worlds in which persons at the developmental stage we call childhood had the relevant capacity, that would not change the actual-world wrong. In this world, children have not consented, are not consenting, and will not validly authorize the sexual act. Actual non-consent is already sufficient.

The same point applies to adults. Adults are generally consent-capable, but consent-capacity is not consent. The fact that some adults can consent, or that some adults do consent in some contexts, does not show that this adult has consented to this treatment in this context. Capacity explains how permission can be given; it does not supply permission where none has been given.

This becomes important in cases of collateral sexualization. A sexual remark or frame need not name a particular person in order to sexualize people. It can make an identifiable social category sexually salient, such that members of that category can reasonably understand themselves, or people like them, as being made the object of the remark. The issue is not merely that someone hears sexual content they dislike. The issue is that a sexualized frame attaches to people through category membership without their authorization.

Category consent is difficult to obtain, but that difficulty does not create permission. If anything, it explains why collateral sexualization is morally risky in non-opt-in contexts. The fact that adults are capable of consenting does not mean that they have consented to being used as sexualized material in a joke, remark, or public frame.

So the child/adult contrast should not be framed as: children are protected because they are inconsentient, while adults are exposed because they are consentient. The better formulation is: children cannot authorize the relevant sexual treatment, and non-consenting adults have not authorized it. Either way, permission is absent.

The appeal to inconsentience identifies one sufficient basis for impermissibility, not the only one. A person can be wronged by sexual treatment because they could not consent, and a person can be wronged because they did not consent. Treating the first wrong-maker as exhaustive risks making adult non-consent look weaker than it is. But consent-capacity does not weaken non-consent. It only marks the kind of being whose authorization would matter if it were actually given.

Crucial note: saying that collateral sexualization is a wrong-maker is not the same as saying that it is always decisively wrong-making. It may give a reason against the act without settling the all-things-considered verdict. It is conceptually possible that non-sexualization has its own wrong-making features, more significant wrong-making features, or even a decisive wrong-maker in a particular case.

Is there a moral difference between two kinds of genital stimulation, considered from something like a veil of ignorance? You don’t know which goods or bads will actually occur, or their quantity, intensity, frequency, likelihood, or distribution. You only know the general kinds of goods and bads each practice could involve.

'A. Non-erotic genital stimulation' means genital stimulation for bodily release without erotic reference. No pornography, fantasy, imagined partner, sexualized memory, sexualized self-image, or use of another person, group, body type, role, gesture, or scene as arousal material.

'B. Erotic genital stimulation' means genital stimulation for bodily release through erotic reference. This may involve fantasy, pornography, imagined persons, remembered encounters, sexualized body types, roles, gestures, categories, or scenes.

Both A and B may involve pleasure, release, self-regulation, compulsiveness, shame, alienation, dependence, or conflict with one’s values. B seems to introduce an additional kind of possible bad in the use of persons, bodies, memories, categories, or social meanings as erotic material. A may avoid that, though it may introduce its own possible bad, such as erotic alienation, where bodily release becomes detached from erotic desire, relational sexuality, or one’s own embodied agency.

In the worst case, A becomes compulsive, mechanical, isolating, or deepens that detachment. In the worst case, B may involve those same bads, but also objectification, habituation to degrading sexual role patterns, exploitation through sexual markets, coercive or degrading fantasies, and the sexualization of people, bodies, categories, gestures, or social life in ways that affect nonparticipants.

Are A and B morally equivalent under these conditions? My tentative answer is that they are not. Even before the veil is lifted, B seems to carry a distinct moral risk because it routes bodily release through persons, bodies, memories, categories, and social meanings as arousal material. After the veil is lifted, we should check whether those risks are rare and detachable, or severe, recurrent, predictable, and closely tied to the ordinary operation of erotic stimulation. My further view is that at least some of B’s distinctive bads are severe and recurrent enough to make A morally preferable.

Biological essentialist explanations of patriarchy are rightly rejected, but some environmental or material explanations seem to preserve a softer determinism. The claim shifts from “men dominate because of male nature” to something more like “recurrent environmental, ecological, reproductive, or material conditions reliably produce male dominance.”

Has anyone written about this as a kind of environmental determinism, material determinism, or quasi-naturalism?

To be clear, I’m not asking whether material conditions matter. I’m asking about critiques of accounts where material conditions expand the role of “nature” rather than escape it. The explanation no longer says “male biology directly causes patriarchy,” but it may still make patriarchy seem like the recurring product of the material conditions of human life. In that sense, the account may become not less naturalistic, but more broadly naturalistic.

Glosses:

“Queer theory”: an approach that studies how norms around sex, gender, and desire make some roles more intelligible, legitimate, and protected than others, and how those norms can organize burdens unevenly across groups.

“Poststructuralism”: an approach that treats roles and their meanings as socially produced and historically contingent rather than fixed by nature, which is why their distribution and effects are open to critique.

“Distributive justice”: the part of moral and political evaluation concerned with how benefits, burdens, risks, protections, and opportunities are distributed across persons or groups. In this post, the point is that sexual roles can be assessed not only by what they permit in individual cases, but also by how their bodily and social burdens are distributed by default.

“Entering and enveloping”: role asymmetries in acts where one side occupies the entering side and the other the enveloping or receiving side. I begin there because the asymmetry is especially clear there, not because the argument is limited to those cases.

“Socially rearrange participation in sexual roles”: changing social expectations, norms, and forms of recognition around who occupies which sexual role, rather than leaving the existing pattern in place by default.

“Its social meaning”: the way a role is socially interpreted under existing norms and role patterns, not some timeless or purely conceptual essence of the act.

“Not conceptually built in or universal, but socially and interpretively relevant under existing conditions”: There is no claim that the enveloping or receptive side is inherently lower or subordinate in all times and places. Instead, under current social meanings and recognizable sexual templates, it is often interpreted that way and thereby burdensome.

“Socially created”: socially sustained by norms, expectations, conventions, and habits rather than fixed as a natural inevitability.

“Socially legible as lower, more vulnerable, or more usable”: socially intelligible as the side more likely to be treated as subordinate, exposed, acted upon, or available for another’s use.

“Unequal distribution of burdens”: the burdens are not merely different, but unevenly allocated, with larger bodily or social costs predictably falling on one side.

“By default”: as the standing pattern reproduced by existing norms and expectations, even without being explicitly defended each time.

“Anti-default-exposure posit”: the starting claim that there is no sufficient justification for a social arrangement that predictably leaves the more exposed side of a role with the same group by default.

“Recognition, destigmatization, and gender convergence in sexual roles”: reasons for making it more intelligible and less stigmatized for people to occupy roles not conventionally assigned to their gender, and for loosening the expectation that sexual roles must line up with gender in a fixed way.

“Revisability”: the claim that participation in these roles is, at least to some degree, open to social revision rather than wholly fixed.

“More insulated” / “less insulated”: relatively more protected from, or more exposed to, the bodily and social burdens attached to a role. This is a comparative claim, not an absolute one.

“The more exposing side of a role”: the side that predictably carries greater bodily costs, greater subordinating legibility, or both.

“Burden-conscious routine”: a sexual routine structured with attention to how bodily and social burdens are distributed, rather than treating that distribution as morally irrelevant.

“Leveling-down objection” (Parfit): the objection that equality is not, by itself, an improvement when it is achieved only by making the better-off worse off without making the worse-off better off.

“Structural rather than purely voluntarist moral analysis”: an approach that asks how roles, norms, and patterned expectations distribute burdens across groups, rather than treating individual choice by itself as morally decisive.

“Anatomical asymmetry”: differences in bodily structure that may make some sexual roles or positions carry different physical burdens. The claim here is that such asymmetry does not by itself justify leaving the heavier burdens on the same group by default.

“Rebuttable norm”: a default presumption that can be overridden when there is sufficient justification, rather than an absolute rule.

“Cross-role participation”: participation in sexual roles not conventionally assigned to one’s gender or usual social position.

“Compensation”: measures that offset the bodily or social burdens of a role without simply leaving those burdens morally unaddressed. Depending on context, this can be practical, relational, material, or normative.

Body:

This argument focuses on entering and enveloping because the asymmetry is especially clear there, both physically and in its social meaning. This is not conceptually built in or universal, but is rather socially and interpretively relevant under existing conditions.

If a role is socially created, and one side of that role predictably carries the heavier bodily costs while also being the side that is socially legible as lower, more vulnerable, or more usable, then that arrangement is an unequal distribution of burdens. If there is no sufficient justification for leaving larger shares of those burdens on the same group by default, then there is moral reason to socially rearrange participation in the role. The anti-default-exposure posit says there is no sufficient justification for leaving larger shares of those burdens on the same group by default.

The target remedy is not compulsory symmetry or mandatory role-switching. It is compensation or burden-reduction where possible and, where those are absent or insufficient, a rebuttable norm against assigning the more exposed side to the same group by default, together with wider social intelligibility for cross-role participation.

How far this revisability extends is contestable and unsettled here. The claim is not that the burdens of these roles cannot also be reduced. The point is that if it would be unacceptable to move more insulated groups into the more exposing side of a role, it is not obvious why it is acceptable to leave less insulated groups there by default.

One practical example of a burden-conscious routine would be alternating who takes the entering and receiving sides where possible, while recognizing that different forms of receptivity can carry different bodily costs.

This argument avoids the leveling-down objection because the point is not merely to remove insulation from the more insulated group. It is also to increase insulation, or reduce exposure, for the less insulated group.

As for liberal-choice objections, I am addressing readers already open to structural rather than purely voluntarist moral analysis.

As for anatomical asymmetry, it does not show that the current burden distribution is morally preferred. At most, it shows that compensation or burden-reduction may be needed and that, where those are absent or insufficient, some redistribution may also be needed.

If the most we can do for now is compensate for or reduce the burdens within roles, that still does not make refusal to distribute those burdens more evenly morally preferable where compensation is absent or insufficient.

This argument is not necessarily decisive on its own, but if we already accept arguments for recognition, destigmatization, and gender convergence in sexual roles, then the argument above adds further moral reason to socially rearrange participation in those roles.

All that said, what is the point of this argument? Anxious humor. It is a nervous parody of local ethics. Poststructuralism and queer theory are, for me, unavoidable, and I am unconvinced by liberal-choice objections. I accept that insulation should not be privileged, and that asymmetries of physical and social burden are real, morally significant, and practically operative. I just think this kind of local ethics is parochial, because the only total and therefore non-parochial solution would be voluntary extinction. But that is detached from reality.