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So, there are two Bad Things here, if I'm reading this right. One of these is my aforementioned:
Can a person, as the law is now, get away with rape as long as they get the other person drunk enough to be made to say yes first?
This is the present Bad Thing, which is actually happening. We're all agreed that it's a bad thing, and you seem to accept its presence by saying 'no and yes', which we'll take to mean yes, because we're talking about actual people actually being put through incredible suffering.
The alternate Bad Thing - the Bad Thing which might become a problem - seems to be 'loopholes'. I'm not quite sure what these 'loopholes' are. Are you saying that were the law to go through, someone could pretend to have been raped and misuse the law?
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If so, what we're up against is the 'perceived equality' fallacy, perhaps even the 'not noticing large differences in power between persons and groups' fallacy. It's often made by well-intentioned people when talking about Israel and Palestine (e.g.,'Why can't they love their neighbours, or react peacfully like Buddhists would?'). It's a very easy mistake to make, and I've made it a lot in the past.
Now in this example right here we're measuring an actual, frequent and likely problem - people being raped - against a potential and in fact very unlikely problem (people pretending to have been raped 'for gains').
Now, real rape is far, far more common than hoax rape - and is worse, even given how bad pretending to have been raped is (assuming the pretender is fully compos mentis and making up rather than exaggerating, which two are complicators). Treating the two problems (real rape and hoax rape) as if they're equal is a mistake - which means that to beleive that 'changing this law wouldn't make there be less problems, only different ones' is also a mistake.
It's actually worthwhile changing the law from bad to better, even if 'better' is not entirely perfect, if the situation then changes from [a large ammount of people being raped] (many victims of a bad crime) to [some people being falsely accused of rape] (much fewer victims of a much less bad crime).
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By analogy - 'someone with a gun attacking someone without a gun for selfish reasons' does not = 'two people having a fight' and should not be treated in such a way. There is already a bias operative (towards the person with a gun) so to say 'We must proceed in a way that treats these people as if they mirror eachother' is perfectly ridiculous.
Likewise, if snow falls on a mountain range, we don't get a flat plateau - we get the same shape covered in snow. The snow would need to fall much, much more heavily in the valleys than it did anywhere else if it was to change the shape of the mountain. The snow is our procedure, and what we want to do is change the shape of the mountain so that instead of having inequal peaks and troughs of power we have a distribution as fair as is humanly possible. |
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