This is a fantastic article; I have always disliked the demand on the far left and right that we should basically treat women as not being fully adult and equally capable of making decisions as men are. I agree that it is wrong to try to use someone's personality flaws to manipulate them into making a choice they otherwise would not have (such as taking advantage of a woman's agreeableness to pressure her into sex). But I will never cross the line into believing that the women in question lacked the agency to consent.
I will at least give the rightoids credit that they are more upfront about wanting to treat women as children. The worst is when the leftoids demand that I treat women like children but that I also pretend that I'm treating them as strong and empowered, its infuriating 😫 just let me be a soy fucking lib and treat them as individuals with the same agency as any other mentally developed adult 😫😫😫
Thank you very much, David! I agree, the argument made by the right is offensive to women but at least it's logically coherent, I mention this in my earlier piece linked below:
I like this framing of the argument you're making. I agree that woman (and men) should have agency with their sexuality and people/government should permit their choice. I would posit that all uses of agency do not equally good (support individual and communal flourishing) and a conservative sexual ethic is superior when freely chosen.
Men (and by extension women) need rules of engagement: when is it acceptable to engage without social repercussions? How do I appropriately signal interest? etc. The rules of engagement accepted by the culture poses a trade off of risking/permitting collateral damage (rape/coercion/icks) and agency/social repression. My view is a moderately conservative sexual ethic allows agency by both the women and man in that both can freely enter adult relationships, but ties sexuality to some level of commitment creating an expectation that time is required to assess compatibility and sexual expectations. If those are the norms, men are incentived to build relationship to access sex which is in itself beneficial to all parties and society. You get clearer stigma on pushy and rapey men. As relationships tend to lead to more total sex, most people end up better off in terms of access to sex. The cost is patience and constraint but not a loss of agency.
Obviously there will always be hookup subcultures with sex as recreation outlooks. I don't think these should be destroyed, I just find them to be morally inferior norms as they create more collateral damage and less social stability.
Yeah, I basically agree with all of this. I think hookup culture should remain a subculture as it doesn’t work well for most people. I don’t think we need to shame the people who engage in it, especially because they mostly just sleep with each other, but that we also shouldn’t pretend it’s empowering to most women (or men really). As I’ve said before I’m a sex positive prude, casual sex for thee but not for me lol. I’m generally against stigmatizing people with a lot of partners because they often exist in a subculture where people don’t really care and alternatively it seems common for this to just be a phase, sometimes people later regret that slutty phase but other times they just move on, and I think many previous sluts are perfectly capable of participating in a long term monogamous relationship later in life. But yeah, I guess I’m slightly older and grew up in a catholic school environment so I never had the strong message that I ought to have sex with a lot of partners, just that we shouldn’t shame people who decide to do that
Mostly agree. I'm against shaming but for some state moral ordering. I would actively encourage to aim for more fulfilling relationships and stressing risks is hookup culture. People have phases, but can move cultures.
>It’s important to treat women as agents because it’s key to creating the incentives that can lead them either to develop their assertiveness, or to learn to avoid situations where their lack of assertiveness poses a real problem.
Would you implement any changes to the legal or material incentive structure in order to "treat women as agents?" It seems to me that it doesn't suffice merely to assert the agency of women--one must create a legal regime that actively demands more agency from them. But this is tricky because returning to traditional standards of evidence for rape would be seen as antifeminist and unacceptable to virtually all women.
That is why in my initial article against your position I proposed a civil "rakishness" offense for coerced consent situations that couldn't be pushed for anything done in a man's personal dwelling. At that point she should need to slap him etc to meet any legal standard for rape or sexual assault. This would create a legal incentive for women not to go home with a guy unless she wants to hook up, and I think this is far more practical than merely exhorting women to be more agentic.
I think to meet the legal standard for rape or sexual assault a woman should have to verbally say no, and generally to have physically tried to remove herself from the situation, or to have been otherwise compromised by being drugged etc. Hence why I don't see the Ansari situation as an assault - she said she wanted to stop several times, he kind of listened but she also didn't leave or push him off and so things continued for a while. I leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder, although I'd suggest that you should do your best not to end up alone with men that could inspire that level of fear for your personal safety. As for your proposal I'm not really sure why it matters whether it's at his personal dwelling or at hers, but either way I think the value of easily interpretable laws trumps failing to prosecute some manipulative and coercive sex between adults. But most of what we're talking about are situations that never face legal judgment anyways (like the Ansari example) - and I'm saying that the cultural narrative that women shouldn't feel responsible or blame themselves for giving in to a pushy guy only makes them more likely to continue to be spineless. I lived in Malawi as a 15-16 year old and I got an absurd amount of adult and teenage male attention because I was the only white girl around - and I think that experience helped to make me comfortable being assertive when I needed to be. If you're in your 20s and you're still too sheltered and scared to say no to a man then unfortunately you'll have to learn by trial and have some regret worthy sex. But having a situation where men need to question whether engaging with women sexually could be considered "rakishness" when such a standard would necessarily be fuzzy doesn't seem reasonable to me. Nor does questioning the agency of all the other women in their 20s who are quite capable of making sexual choices.
> I leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder
This is how agreeable and neurotic women feel EVERY TIME they're behind closed doors with a guy! muh fawning trauma response, "because of the implication", etc. Differences in temperament can cause people to interpret the world in fundamentally different ways and therefore assess the risk of danger with varying degrees of accuracy.
One of the reasons these women are intractably less agentic is because they feel in their bones they're going to get murdered if they say no, even when that assessment is completely retarded. But retarded tho it may be, this intuition is morally and probably legally salient and demands some change in the incentive structure so the woman is legally compelled to exercise consent BEFORE ever stepping behind closed doors with him.
>although I'd suggest that you should do your best not to end up alone with men that could inspire that level of fear for your personal safety
It can't be a suggestion, it needs to be some hard change to the legal regime that makes a voluntary choice to step behind closed doors with a man a much more salient factor when assessing consent. This will incentivize more agreeable/neurotic women to exercise agency before the fact in public venues where they are more practically agentic.
>I think the value of easily interpretable laws trumps failing to prosecute some manipulative and coercive sex between adults
Okay fine, but if you want "easily interpretable laws" you can't also "leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder."
Those are PRECISELY the situations we're talking about. You can't be everyone's friend here; you need to either tell women their "fawning trauma response" is completely illegitimate (which will alienate feminists) or you need to mandate affirmative consent in a way most men (and women!) will find repulsive.
Or you can take the Big Brained Bismarck approach and adopt the Paglia heuristic as a hard legal standard. You can take a softer route I suggest via a rakishness exception, or you could simply raise the legal standard for rape behind closed doors (thereby alienating some feminists to maintain support among center right bootstraps Gen X types).
I'm not suggesting that I would always believe a woman who said she feared retaliation - the only time I've heard such a claim it was from someone who was very agentic and assertive and the guy went on to engage in terrifying criminal behavior. I only mention that nuance to account for the very rare cases where a woman's spidey senses are telling her she's in real danger. I agree, this would be incredibly hard to prove without the guy going on to do something else, but I bring it up more to note that I would personally not judge a woman in this situation rather than to insist that we could properly adjudicate such cases. I think much of the absurd claims of false danger are coming from younger women who've been taught that it's a legitimate reason to not hold themselves responsible for their poor choices and who've been given false ideas about the prevalence of this sort of behavior among men. I don't think women were making this sort of claim nearly as easily in the past and I see the prevalence of these claims as downstream of the cultural narratives that I'm complaining about, not as support for why those narratives are correct.
>I think much of the absurd claims of false danger are coming from younger women who've been taught that it's a legitimate reason to not hold themselves responsible for their poor choices and who've been given false ideas about the prevalence of this sort of behavior among men.
Agreed! The problem is that we're all increasingly autistic (thus bad at reading body language) and conflict averse in a way that is more physiologically prohibitive of resistance than I think you acknowledge.
Zoomer women are also terrified of male sexuality because A) they are going through puberty way too early; and B) they were raised alongside a cohort of boys who've been watching hardcore fetish porn on smartphones since pre-pubescence. Also the proliferation of True Crime prob doesn't help. In this ecology it's pretty understandable that they're ridiculously neurotic!
Zoomer women literally don't understand that an 80th percentile pushy guy will stop if you firmly say no and a 95th percentile pushy guy will profusely apologize if you slap him and will always let you leave. What needs to be cemented in their mind is that simply walking away will always work unless the guy is a complete psychopath.
>I don't think women were making this sort of claim nearly as easily in the past and I see the prevalence of these claims as downstream of the cultural narratives that I'm complaining about, not as support for why those narratives are correct.
I obviously agree about the change in women's behavior. My contention is that complaining about "cultural narratives" and exhorting people to change their behavior isn't going to accomplish anything. It feels very Boomerish.
These "cultural narratives" are THEMSELVES downstream of tremendously [problematic changes in the material / legal incentive structure that you need to meaningfully address if you want to solve this issue. Otherwise you aren't providing a satisfactory answer to anyone who is concerned about this. You are merely speaking to people who don't think it's an issue anyway.
> What needs to be cemented in their mind is that simply walking away will always work unless the guy is a complete psychopath.
Yes! And I write that and I say that we should make that more clear to women. In my piece I quote and complain about Amia Srinivasan misrepresenting this risk. But I also think the way you write about women actively contributes to the problem, hence the horseshoe point.
In terms of incentive structures, I think the Trump changes to the title IX were good. I think affirmative consent laws are a bad idea.
That's not enough. There is a huge crisis of sexual neurosis among Zoomer women that needs to be addressed if you want trads and radfems and Waltrightists to let up on this issue.
How about the following?
1) Adopt a multi-pronged approach to curb female neuroticism and make women more agentic behind closed doors by...
A) Making a serious effort to curb endocrine disruptors in the water etc. and thereby restore a more biologically normal age of thelarche, which will prevent women from accumulating too many traumatic experiences with men as a preteen.
B) Making it a felony for parents to allow a child under 13 to access hardcore porn; there wouldn't be a prison sentence, but you would temporarily disenfranchise and forcibly cane parents Singapore-style if they fuck up. Maybe put them on the sex offender registry too.
C) Putting a hard age restriction on true crime content so 11 year-old girls can't binge watch documentaries about Ted Bundy
D) Passing federal education standards for Sex Ed that very explicitly tell girls that men won't rape them if they *just leave* (and failing that scream / slap the guy; a tremendous push to bring back slapping should be the practical replacement for affirmative consent standards).
2) Pass some comprehensive federal mandate that makes it practically impossible to prosecute a rape charge that occurs in the man's private dwelling unless there are signs of an intense physical struggle. Let feminists complain and have this become a big cause célèbre that makes women *incredibly* reluctant to ever go home with a guy unless she actively wants to hook up.
I think if you did both of these things it would solve the problem.
But you'd need to pass both of them at once in a comprehensive package that is positioned as a compromise between the sexes, since 1 is clearly weighted towards women and 2 towards men.
Thanks, good review / critique. I’m probably going to write something next week on consent and desire referencing some of what you touched on re tradeoffs and sex work
This is excellent. It's something I've written about through satire. Because it's absurd: either you are an adult and you have agency or you do not have agency and you are not an adult. Well done.
“But it wouldn’t meaningfully change our application of criminal punishment, other than perhaps to reduce our natural retributive urges, which themselves evolved for pragmatic reasons. Understandable or not, a dangerous person is still a dangerous person and incentives matter because most people who are capable of violence are responsive to the threat of punishment.”
Maybe I’m missing something but I would hope it would radically change the application of criminal punishment to something like the public quarantine model. The quote also seems in conflict with your earlier statement about not inflicting undue harm on convicts (whose choices were determined by a web of prior causes).
So basically, for me personally lacking a belief in free will almost entirely removes the retributive urge. But many people disagree about free will and it’s also possible that some will still have that urge even if they buy the no free will argument. So from a utilitarian perspective if most people value some level of retribution that could be a point in favor of doing it. It’s also possible that some forms of punishment which look retributive in a single case are justified on the basis that they’re effective at deterring. But yes, I generally agree with your position I’m just giving the reasons why I was a little less strong with my statement there.
In case you haven’t read it this paper had a big impact on me and my hope is that it will be among the founding documents for the future model of criminal punishment https://philarchive.org/rec/CARJWR
"Lacking a belief in free will almost entirely removes the retributive urge."
But at the same time, it urges us to cut our losses with demonstrated sociopathy. A sociopath should be put down, out of compassion for her/him and a desire to minimise future harms to others.
This is a fantastic article; I have always disliked the demand on the far left and right that we should basically treat women as not being fully adult and equally capable of making decisions as men are. I agree that it is wrong to try to use someone's personality flaws to manipulate them into making a choice they otherwise would not have (such as taking advantage of a woman's agreeableness to pressure her into sex). But I will never cross the line into believing that the women in question lacked the agency to consent.
I will at least give the rightoids credit that they are more upfront about wanting to treat women as children. The worst is when the leftoids demand that I treat women like children but that I also pretend that I'm treating them as strong and empowered, its infuriating 😫 just let me be a soy fucking lib and treat them as individuals with the same agency as any other mentally developed adult 😫😫😫
Thank you very much, David! I agree, the argument made by the right is offensive to women but at least it's logically coherent, I mention this in my earlier piece linked below:
https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/consent-and-womens-agency?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I like this framing of the argument you're making. I agree that woman (and men) should have agency with their sexuality and people/government should permit their choice. I would posit that all uses of agency do not equally good (support individual and communal flourishing) and a conservative sexual ethic is superior when freely chosen.
Men (and by extension women) need rules of engagement: when is it acceptable to engage without social repercussions? How do I appropriately signal interest? etc. The rules of engagement accepted by the culture poses a trade off of risking/permitting collateral damage (rape/coercion/icks) and agency/social repression. My view is a moderately conservative sexual ethic allows agency by both the women and man in that both can freely enter adult relationships, but ties sexuality to some level of commitment creating an expectation that time is required to assess compatibility and sexual expectations. If those are the norms, men are incentived to build relationship to access sex which is in itself beneficial to all parties and society. You get clearer stigma on pushy and rapey men. As relationships tend to lead to more total sex, most people end up better off in terms of access to sex. The cost is patience and constraint but not a loss of agency.
Obviously there will always be hookup subcultures with sex as recreation outlooks. I don't think these should be destroyed, I just find them to be morally inferior norms as they create more collateral damage and less social stability.
Yeah, I basically agree with all of this. I think hookup culture should remain a subculture as it doesn’t work well for most people. I don’t think we need to shame the people who engage in it, especially because they mostly just sleep with each other, but that we also shouldn’t pretend it’s empowering to most women (or men really). As I’ve said before I’m a sex positive prude, casual sex for thee but not for me lol. I’m generally against stigmatizing people with a lot of partners because they often exist in a subculture where people don’t really care and alternatively it seems common for this to just be a phase, sometimes people later regret that slutty phase but other times they just move on, and I think many previous sluts are perfectly capable of participating in a long term monogamous relationship later in life. But yeah, I guess I’m slightly older and grew up in a catholic school environment so I never had the strong message that I ought to have sex with a lot of partners, just that we shouldn’t shame people who decide to do that
Mostly agree. I'm against shaming but for some state moral ordering. I would actively encourage to aim for more fulfilling relationships and stressing risks is hookup culture. People have phases, but can move cultures.
Excellent, smart! (Got here via Yglesias)
Thank you very much, Michael!
>It’s important to treat women as agents because it’s key to creating the incentives that can lead them either to develop their assertiveness, or to learn to avoid situations where their lack of assertiveness poses a real problem.
Would you implement any changes to the legal or material incentive structure in order to "treat women as agents?" It seems to me that it doesn't suffice merely to assert the agency of women--one must create a legal regime that actively demands more agency from them. But this is tricky because returning to traditional standards of evidence for rape would be seen as antifeminist and unacceptable to virtually all women.
That is why in my initial article against your position I proposed a civil "rakishness" offense for coerced consent situations that couldn't be pushed for anything done in a man's personal dwelling. At that point she should need to slap him etc to meet any legal standard for rape or sexual assault. This would create a legal incentive for women not to go home with a guy unless she wants to hook up, and I think this is far more practical than merely exhorting women to be more agentic.
I think to meet the legal standard for rape or sexual assault a woman should have to verbally say no, and generally to have physically tried to remove herself from the situation, or to have been otherwise compromised by being drugged etc. Hence why I don't see the Ansari situation as an assault - she said she wanted to stop several times, he kind of listened but she also didn't leave or push him off and so things continued for a while. I leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder, although I'd suggest that you should do your best not to end up alone with men that could inspire that level of fear for your personal safety. As for your proposal I'm not really sure why it matters whether it's at his personal dwelling or at hers, but either way I think the value of easily interpretable laws trumps failing to prosecute some manipulative and coercive sex between adults. But most of what we're talking about are situations that never face legal judgment anyways (like the Ansari example) - and I'm saying that the cultural narrative that women shouldn't feel responsible or blame themselves for giving in to a pushy guy only makes them more likely to continue to be spineless. I lived in Malawi as a 15-16 year old and I got an absurd amount of adult and teenage male attention because I was the only white girl around - and I think that experience helped to make me comfortable being assertive when I needed to be. If you're in your 20s and you're still too sheltered and scared to say no to a man then unfortunately you'll have to learn by trial and have some regret worthy sex. But having a situation where men need to question whether engaging with women sexually could be considered "rakishness" when such a standard would necessarily be fuzzy doesn't seem reasonable to me. Nor does questioning the agency of all the other women in their 20s who are quite capable of making sexual choices.
> I leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder
This is how agreeable and neurotic women feel EVERY TIME they're behind closed doors with a guy! muh fawning trauma response, "because of the implication", etc. Differences in temperament can cause people to interpret the world in fundamentally different ways and therefore assess the risk of danger with varying degrees of accuracy.
One of the reasons these women are intractably less agentic is because they feel in their bones they're going to get murdered if they say no, even when that assessment is completely retarded. But retarded tho it may be, this intuition is morally and probably legally salient and demands some change in the incentive structure so the woman is legally compelled to exercise consent BEFORE ever stepping behind closed doors with him.
>although I'd suggest that you should do your best not to end up alone with men that could inspire that level of fear for your personal safety
It can't be a suggestion, it needs to be some hard change to the legal regime that makes a voluntary choice to step behind closed doors with a man a much more salient factor when assessing consent. This will incentivize more agreeable/neurotic women to exercise agency before the fact in public venues where they are more practically agentic.
>I think the value of easily interpretable laws trumps failing to prosecute some manipulative and coercive sex between adults
Okay fine, but if you want "easily interpretable laws" you can't also "leave some ambiguity for cases where the woman verbally says no but has some reason to suspect that she's in real danger if she pushes back any harder."
Those are PRECISELY the situations we're talking about. You can't be everyone's friend here; you need to either tell women their "fawning trauma response" is completely illegitimate (which will alienate feminists) or you need to mandate affirmative consent in a way most men (and women!) will find repulsive.
Or you can take the Big Brained Bismarck approach and adopt the Paglia heuristic as a hard legal standard. You can take a softer route I suggest via a rakishness exception, or you could simply raise the legal standard for rape behind closed doors (thereby alienating some feminists to maintain support among center right bootstraps Gen X types).
I'm not suggesting that I would always believe a woman who said she feared retaliation - the only time I've heard such a claim it was from someone who was very agentic and assertive and the guy went on to engage in terrifying criminal behavior. I only mention that nuance to account for the very rare cases where a woman's spidey senses are telling her she's in real danger. I agree, this would be incredibly hard to prove without the guy going on to do something else, but I bring it up more to note that I would personally not judge a woman in this situation rather than to insist that we could properly adjudicate such cases. I think much of the absurd claims of false danger are coming from younger women who've been taught that it's a legitimate reason to not hold themselves responsible for their poor choices and who've been given false ideas about the prevalence of this sort of behavior among men. I don't think women were making this sort of claim nearly as easily in the past and I see the prevalence of these claims as downstream of the cultural narratives that I'm complaining about, not as support for why those narratives are correct.
>I think much of the absurd claims of false danger are coming from younger women who've been taught that it's a legitimate reason to not hold themselves responsible for their poor choices and who've been given false ideas about the prevalence of this sort of behavior among men.
Agreed! The problem is that we're all increasingly autistic (thus bad at reading body language) and conflict averse in a way that is more physiologically prohibitive of resistance than I think you acknowledge.
Zoomer women are also terrified of male sexuality because A) they are going through puberty way too early; and B) they were raised alongside a cohort of boys who've been watching hardcore fetish porn on smartphones since pre-pubescence. Also the proliferation of True Crime prob doesn't help. In this ecology it's pretty understandable that they're ridiculously neurotic!
Zoomer women literally don't understand that an 80th percentile pushy guy will stop if you firmly say no and a 95th percentile pushy guy will profusely apologize if you slap him and will always let you leave. What needs to be cemented in their mind is that simply walking away will always work unless the guy is a complete psychopath.
>I don't think women were making this sort of claim nearly as easily in the past and I see the prevalence of these claims as downstream of the cultural narratives that I'm complaining about, not as support for why those narratives are correct.
I obviously agree about the change in women's behavior. My contention is that complaining about "cultural narratives" and exhorting people to change their behavior isn't going to accomplish anything. It feels very Boomerish.
These "cultural narratives" are THEMSELVES downstream of tremendously [problematic changes in the material / legal incentive structure that you need to meaningfully address if you want to solve this issue. Otherwise you aren't providing a satisfactory answer to anyone who is concerned about this. You are merely speaking to people who don't think it's an issue anyway.
> What needs to be cemented in their mind is that simply walking away will always work unless the guy is a complete psychopath.
Yes! And I write that and I say that we should make that more clear to women. In my piece I quote and complain about Amia Srinivasan misrepresenting this risk. But I also think the way you write about women actively contributes to the problem, hence the horseshoe point.
In terms of incentive structures, I think the Trump changes to the title IX were good. I think affirmative consent laws are a bad idea.
That's not enough. There is a huge crisis of sexual neurosis among Zoomer women that needs to be addressed if you want trads and radfems and Waltrightists to let up on this issue.
How about the following?
1) Adopt a multi-pronged approach to curb female neuroticism and make women more agentic behind closed doors by...
A) Making a serious effort to curb endocrine disruptors in the water etc. and thereby restore a more biologically normal age of thelarche, which will prevent women from accumulating too many traumatic experiences with men as a preteen.
B) Making it a felony for parents to allow a child under 13 to access hardcore porn; there wouldn't be a prison sentence, but you would temporarily disenfranchise and forcibly cane parents Singapore-style if they fuck up. Maybe put them on the sex offender registry too.
C) Putting a hard age restriction on true crime content so 11 year-old girls can't binge watch documentaries about Ted Bundy
D) Passing federal education standards for Sex Ed that very explicitly tell girls that men won't rape them if they *just leave* (and failing that scream / slap the guy; a tremendous push to bring back slapping should be the practical replacement for affirmative consent standards).
2) Pass some comprehensive federal mandate that makes it practically impossible to prosecute a rape charge that occurs in the man's private dwelling unless there are signs of an intense physical struggle. Let feminists complain and have this become a big cause célèbre that makes women *incredibly* reluctant to ever go home with a guy unless she actively wants to hook up.
I think if you did both of these things it would solve the problem.
But you'd need to pass both of them at once in a comprehensive package that is positioned as a compromise between the sexes, since 1 is clearly weighted towards women and 2 towards men.
You might like:
https://www.kvetch.au/p/sex-and-agency
Thanks, good review / critique. I’m probably going to write something next week on consent and desire referencing some of what you touched on re tradeoffs and sex work
This is excellent. It's something I've written about through satire. Because it's absurd: either you are an adult and you have agency or you do not have agency and you are not an adult. Well done.
Walt Bismarck? The guy who used to do those right wing Disney song parodies?
Correct: https://newaltright.substack.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist
“But it wouldn’t meaningfully change our application of criminal punishment, other than perhaps to reduce our natural retributive urges, which themselves evolved for pragmatic reasons. Understandable or not, a dangerous person is still a dangerous person and incentives matter because most people who are capable of violence are responsive to the threat of punishment.”
Maybe I’m missing something but I would hope it would radically change the application of criminal punishment to something like the public quarantine model. The quote also seems in conflict with your earlier statement about not inflicting undue harm on convicts (whose choices were determined by a web of prior causes).
So basically, for me personally lacking a belief in free will almost entirely removes the retributive urge. But many people disagree about free will and it’s also possible that some will still have that urge even if they buy the no free will argument. So from a utilitarian perspective if most people value some level of retribution that could be a point in favor of doing it. It’s also possible that some forms of punishment which look retributive in a single case are justified on the basis that they’re effective at deterring. But yes, I generally agree with your position I’m just giving the reasons why I was a little less strong with my statement there.
In case you haven’t read it this paper had a big impact on me and my hope is that it will be among the founding documents for the future model of criminal punishment https://philarchive.org/rec/CARJWR
Thanks, will take a look!
"Lacking a belief in free will almost entirely removes the retributive urge."
But at the same time, it urges us to cut our losses with demonstrated sociopathy. A sociopath should be put down, out of compassion for her/him and a desire to minimise future harms to others.
This is my own view.