This is a very important question.
This is an argument to not believe a person–to remain agnostic–when told that someone is a criminal. It’s not an argument to explain why it’s wrong to tell people about your own experiences.
And you say that you think every person is entitled to explain himself. So if, as a boss, I have a credible account that an employee has sexually assaulted three women, do I have to let him have his say in a court of law, or is it enough that I ask him to explain? And if he admits to the behavior, but claims he believes it to be acceptable (I was joking/they don’t have a sense of humor/it was just being friendly), can I fire him then? Or does it actually have to go to court?
I’m sorry you have had experiences that make this your view, but I just don’t believe this is true. (Which is not, you understand, the same as saying “*everyone *cares”.)
It destroyed my best friend. His name was Mudd, he immediately dropped out of school, and went back to the decaying Rust Belt inner city he had previously escaped. There, he fell back into the crowd of bad *friends *he had previously escaped. One day, after they committed a burglary, they got hopped up on meth and got paranoid that “college boy” was going to rat them out to the cops. So they shot and killed him in cold blood, dumped his corpse under a port-a-potty, and went around snickering to everyone about how *hilarious *it was that his last utterance had been “ouch”.
This is an interesting question. I’ll have to give it some thought. I will say that I think people should refrain from making serious allegations without proof, and people should refrain from *believing *serious allegations without proof; but I’m probably trying to empty the ocean with a thimble on that front.
That’s a dodge, based on a technicality. The legal system is not some mechanism that exists independent of society. It is a formalized version of the kind of thing you are talking about: collectively shunning people or otherwise making their lives more difficult based on a societal perception of wrongdoing. And if we go along with inflicting punishments comparable with, or even worse than, the criminal justice system metes out, without giving someone due process, then we have made “justice” into a sham. At that point, it becomes like we used to see with “issue ads” that were thinly veiled campaign ads. They would insert some kind of verbiage “Call Senator Smith and tell him not to be such a bad person”, but it was an incredibly thin pretext. If we ruin someone’s life without giving them due process, protesting that “this is outside the criminal justice system” rings hollow. At least to me.
It’s neither a dodge nor a technicality. Criminal punishment is reserved to the state and meted out by standards that the state is subject to.
What tou seem to be suggesting is something along the lines of not being able to choose to disassociate ourselves from people unless the state has chosen to prosecute and has successfully convicted that person of a crime. If you think about it with any sort of seriousness at all, it’s an utterly ridiculous standard. There is no reasonable moral position that requires is to treat everyone around us as if we are completely unaware of their bad behavior.
You are positing a situation in which only the criminal justice system can tell us when someone has done something bad enough such that we no longer are forced to associate with him or her. That’s so far beyond the purpose of criminal justice that I can’t imagine you are serious about it. It is not meant to replace all of our decisions about the people around us.
When it comes to friendship? No. When it comes to hiring or firing someone? Yes. But I would prefer not to expect people making those decisions to disregard things they have heard about (as absurd as expecting a jury to disregard stricken testimony), but instead punish people who spread incendiary allegations about someone without proof. (Even, yes, if they know in their heart the allegation is true.)
Well, I’m a University of Iowa girl…so there is that 
Realize what standard you are setting here. You are saying that UCB can never exclude Aaron Glaser from its clubs. That every woman who works there has to face the risks of being assaulted by him. That essentially women are required to face this risk of sexual assault in order to pursue their profession and that UCB as an employer has to be okay with sexual assault continuing under its roof repeatedly and without any recourse to stop it.
This is essentially institutionalizing rape as a bedrock condition of our workplaces.
And this because you require us to live with the fiction that unless a criminal conviction has been secured then we have to live as if nothing is happened. This is not the purpose of criminal justice. I dare you to find any reputable work of jurisprudence that says so.
So you’d hire an accountant to handle your business who you have heard persistent rumors about him skimming the top of the cash from his previous employers?
You’d hire a housekeeper who worked for a friend of yours for a bit, but was let go because things kept disappearing when she had been over?
You’d hire a babysitter for your kids who last time you had her the kids had bruises after she was over and when you asked her ‘they fell down?’
Yes, it must have been Glaser I was arguing about on Twitter, after I heard about Amy Schumer’s statement (I generally love her, but she’s wrong on this one). I didn’t remember his name, and I’ve never heard his comedy or anything like that, but it has to be the same case.
You act shocked–shocked!–with this “realize what standard you are setting here”, when I just earlier today said I’d set nine serial child torturer-murderers free rather than send them to prison along with an innocent man. :dubious:
Only this first of the three thought experiments you listed is really relevant, as it is the only one that involves rumors. I would like to think I would set that stuff aside, but no: I don’t know that I would. That is precisely why I said I thought people should be punished for ruining others’ reputations without proof, because I don’t think people can reasonably be expected to disregard rumors and gossip.
ETA: BTW, I’m curious to hear how you guys square the claim “no one cares” about rape etc. with what has happened to Glaser, with the overwhelming majority of reactions in this thread, etc. You act like you’re part of some tiny, ignored minority even as you join the pile-on!
All of them involve rumors and not proof. Your friend’s stuff could be disappearing because her teenager took it. Your kids might have indeed fallen.
Okay, maybe the second one. But to call the third one a “rumor” is to stretch that term beyond recognition. I’m sure **Acsenray **can vouch for the fact that there is a different evidentiary standard, for a reason, between things you observed yourself and things you heard about third (or fourth, or fifth) hand.
ETA: Another key difference here is that if I let the babysitter go because of my suspicions, but don’t share them with anyone else since I don’t have proof, that babysitter has a chance at a clean slate with some other employer. It’s the poisoning of the employment well by widely broadcasting unproven allegations that is much more damaging.
I square it by virtue of my recognition of the existence of hyperbole, paired with my everyday experience of people dismissing and excusing away credible claims of sexual assault on any number of specious grounds, including dismissing them as “hearsay,” “he-said / she-said,” and “crying rape.” You know, in the real world, where things happen.
How do you square the fact that you think we should conflate criminal justice with all other human society with the fact that by your own admission, doing that leaves you utterly bereft of a mechanism for forming an opinion about most real world human behavior?
That is fucking horrific. It sounds like you feel this false rape accusation caused your friend to die. It is no surprise you have strong feelings on this matter, but it seems to me like the chain of events was much more complicated than that. It required him to make a series of bad choices in the aftermath of that injustice.
That’s not a slam on your friend, as I don’t know the specifics of his situation or what problems he faced that I didn’t. I ask myself every day why some people manage to climb out of their holes and others don’t. It’s a question that torments me because my mother’s upbringing was no less traumatizing than my own, but for some reason she couldn’t get out, and I did. I’m just saying it doesn’t make much sense to me to blame his death on that one terrible thing he experienced. There is a world of context that contributes to every decision, good or bad, that a person chooses to make.
I get so frustrated with Brock Turner et. al because his inability to accept what he’s done is the thing that’s going to ruin him. He has this tremendous opportunity for personal growth, he could acknowledge that he raped that woman and become a major force for helping kids his age to understand what consent means. Instead he is all excuses and rationalizations and the people in his life are supporting that narrative. It may be self-protective for him but if he exposed himself to the pain of what he had done it would lead to a better world for all of us.
I think it’s awfully hard for poor kids like him, from kinship groups with little social capital and no one going to college, to “get out” at all. To find their way again after a big setback is a lot to expect. I of course wish I had been able to do something to help, but I became a college dropout myself not long after (albeit with far less excuse). It’s very sad.
How so? Where have I shown sympathy for the rapist?
Ah the old “If you are a rapist, I can’t wait to see you raped in prison” saw. Kinda self-contradictory, ain’t it?:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
I appreciate this post, many great points that I think get to my point.
Only thing I will add is most criminals will do all they can to ask for leniency, thats how the Justice system works, and if they score it, why the hate?
I don’t see how that precludes a suitable punishment.
So if your child told you he or she was being molested, you would do nothing? Because you did not have evidence that would stand up in court?
If your employee came to you and told you she was being severely sexually harassed at work, you would take no action, because it was just unfounded allegations?
If one of your students came to you and told you she was raped by another student of yours, you would do nothing?
There are terms to describe this: “Utterly unfit for responsibility”. Also: “complicit”
Ironically, there are circumstances where you could go to prison, after a fair trial with all the safeguards, if you were found to have refused to take action in such cases. That’s what the word “responsible” means.
There is no such right, except in very special circumstances. Namely, if you are being prosecuted by the government for a crime. It is not a general right applying to all circumstances of your life. Do you know how much it costs to run a trial, with prosecutors, defenders, a judge, a jury, police and digging for evidence etc. ?
Can you imagine if every allegation in life needed this amount of resources?
And for those lecturing rape victims about how they should behave or what they should do after an attack:
ProPublica reported on this case of an 18-year-old woman who was raped, reported it, and then was charged with filing a false claim, because law enforcement and her own friends thought she wasn’t behaving like a rape victim should behave — An Unbelievable Story of Rape — ProPublica
And if you read the Cracked article, I linked to before — 8 Ways the Legal System Screws Rape Victims (Like Me) | Cracked.com —
There are similar explanations
With the way our justice system currently works, demanding that a rape victim immediately report it to the police is essentially forcing her to make her own life into a kind of living hell. Scolding someone for wanting to avoid that is at the least short-sighted, and won’t result in any improvement of the situation.