Jeremy Bentham's revolutionary views on sex
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong".
It's a shame that Jeremy Bentham's name is nowadays more associated with Lost than the utilitarianism he pioneered. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a good intro to his general line of thinking: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278
Unfortunately, the thread quickly went hopelessly off kilter. It's being heavily flagged and we're certainly not going to override that.
Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate "being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".
Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean is, though—a matter of fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean ought—a matter of opinion.)
I'm relieved to see if I google Jeremy Bentham the first twelve links are about utilitarianism with Lost not coming till no. 13.
That's only because Google knows you read this article.
Search in a private/incognito window incognito window and all the results are about Lost.
Update: I tried incognito and a US proxy and the highest Lost entry moved from no 13 to no 7, though utilitarianism was still in the lead
Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it's about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that "of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this once revolutionary way of thinking.
Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an admin?
I can't begin to generalize about my technology peers because they are such a diverse group and because intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions. From my perspective, it's just that these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them.
The latter two.
> "..intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions...these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them."
You seem to be of the opinion that it is completely possible to separate the personal from the professional. Yet a lot of us absorbed in the tech/startup world spend the larger part of our awake time (~10 hours or more) interacting with people at work. In such an environment, I don't think it is realistic to totally separate the professional from the personal. Otherwise, you turn the meaning of "personal" on its head for the majority of your working week, if you have to behave "non-personally" for > 60% of the time.'
And actually I think this is part of what I mean to say. The attitude of, "Sex is not relevant in the workplace. Let's be professional about this." Why not, exactly? Why are professionalism and sexuality mutually exclusive? Maybe if we at least explore the possible reasons why people's sexual motivations may cause them to interact in specific ways at work, we can make progress towards making those interactions somewhat positive and frictionless.
These are real things that happen, and just forbidding them from ever being spoken of is not a very good strategy in my opinion. And I think Bentham's thoughts are very applicable in this regard.
As it stands, they're not critical to doing my job. If you're standing around the water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex, you're not getting your job done unless you work for a company whose business revolves around these things. Are these things taboo at the office? Certainly not. Are they relevant to the jobs of most people in the US? I doubt it, but certainly I could be swayed by actual data on the subject.
Either you misunderstand my point, or you're making a straw man argument. I was talking about discussion on here (HN), not sitting around water coolers in the office for several hours. See how my previous comment has been downvoted without explanation? I'm talking about that sort of thing, reflexive "Ewww, he said sex!" behaviour.
> "If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office...."
Well, it isn't an obstacle to work every day, but it can be. You might have heard of the github incident recently, or if you haven't, you might want to read the details.
Speaking purely for myself I've previously read up on the history of philosophy and was a fan of Bentham. It was interesting to find this new side to him which is not in the usual text books.
This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.
I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.
This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did.
That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does.
That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.
... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah?
Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it.
> "The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history"
It presents that finding in a very poor way.
I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles.
Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker.
The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time.
As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar.
An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN.
So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging.
> "responding to something off-topic"
It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was the quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory.
Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.
Yep, this is someone who tech nerds can honestly relate with. Easily accessible. Uh huh.
http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-sex...
Hmmm...
Sounds like a sexist generalism to me. Maybe she should meet more of us. And while we're flirting with anecdote, perhaps I can take samples from within the population of my little town out in the sticks and demonstrate the same lack of abstract thinking in the women here.
With regard to "tolerance for ambiguity," perhaps there's a point to be made. I know I have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but I work with male co-workers (cough sales weasels cough) that are just as ambiguous about things as anyone else could ever be.
However, I think you've illuminated a point that I hadn't considered: that the speaker meant something other than what was said; that this self-described intelligent individual may have not been clear; or didn't understand how their words would be misinterpreted; or is oblivious to their own misuse of language. And this is usually the cause for so much animosity and/or ambivalence: that the speaker/writer can't be bothered to clarify their intent; that they throw up their hands and declare "you wouldn't understand!" rather than explain themselves; and further that their audience is all-to-eager to castigate them for being stubborn, abusive, obtuse, etc.
It seems that many people I meet with occupations that involve a lot of abstraction (like programming) also have a tendency to try and abstract things that they perhaps should not. Conversation, discussion, etiquette, and so on, tend to suffer when too much generalization (or 'control) is applied to them in an effort to abstract them.
That still doesn't really explain this phenomenon though. One could argue that it's quite possible to 'abstract' the social world: "being correct is often not the point of an interaction", "listening is valuable in itself, even if the subject matter is not always fascinating", and "imagine yourself in the position of the person you're talking to" are all simple rules that I see many people break.
Perhaps it's to do with the context where such an abstraction is applied. Especially in the IT world we spend a lot of time being able to think about abstractions, whereas in a social setting we might have to internalize these abstractions more.
Readers here may be interested in studying a somewhat different take on human sexuality, John Paul II's Theology of the Body[1], which "presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views."[2]
BTW, I'm not saying I agree with the content of those lectures. Only that dismissing them because you think the modern world doesn't hold those views is silly. And, yes, I'm aware that more recent pontiffs have expressed different views.
The teachings are most definitely relevant, if for no other reason than that perhaps a billion people worldwide consider the teacher to be directly important to them.
Please take a moment to reflect how much damage this type of thinking has done in the world.
This book isn't just useless and misguided, it's positively evil.
> It follows that many of those who died from AIDS would still be alive today had the Catholic Church abandoned its condom ban in the 1980s, as it became clear that condoms were (and still are) the most effective practical measure to prevent the spread of the disease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS
Also forbidding sane family planning and the prevention of unwanted offspring, where lack of necessary resources causes even more disease and more death.
Having been an Evangelical Christian and 'assistant teen pastor' in a previous life, I've seen this in action in many different areas of life. People constantly did things they believed were wrong, and the combination of not being prepared or informed about those things and feeling ashamed about it afterwards led to a lot of suffering.