Donald Luskin Is No Longer the Stupidest Man Alive: Steven Landsburg Is--and the University of Rochester Has a Big Problem…
Yet another gift to our public sphere from Jacob Weisberg and Michael Kinsley…
Cord Jefferson has the report:
Steven Landsburg… economics professor at the University of Rochester. Formerly a Slate columnist…. March 20… "Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville," the post attempts to compare and contrast potential "psychic harms" associated with pornography, environmentalism, and being raped while you are passed out. If one of those things, prima facie, doesn't sound like the others to you, well, Landsburg would like to understand "what is the key difference among them?"…
After describing a scenario in which a character named "Farnsworth McCrankypants" is mentally traumatized by knowing other people watch porn ("Question 1"), and another in which "Granola McMustardseed" is distressed by the idea of wilderness desecration ("Question 2"), Landsburg poses "Question 3," which references the recently closed Steubenville rape case:
Let's suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm—no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I've read, was not even aware that she'd been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.)… Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?… I'm having trouble articulating any good reason why Question 3 is substantially different from Questions 1 and 2. As long as I'm safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits?…
Every time someone on my street turns on a porch light, trillions of photons penetrate my body… if those… caused me deep psychic distress, the law would continue to ignore them… bodily penetration does not seem to be in some sort of special protected category…
A request for comment to Landsburg has thus far gone unanswered.
