Few comparisons illustrate a false dichotomy better than the argument over whether false accusations are worse than rape and vice versa.

impotent_rage · 2010-06-06T15:51:09+00:00

Agreed. The fact is this - being raped is traumatic. Being falsely accused of rape is traumatic. Both are bad. We need to do our best as a society to fight both.

Which is worse? Irrelevant.

I think the reason that the fight keeps going this direction, is because, as with most issues, there's a sliding scale. However you design your policies, people are going to slip through the cracks somewhere.

I'm going to give some lengthy examples of this concept.

For example, let's take the issue of patient rights vs public health, on the issue of mental health. The question is, at what point should the law be able to step in and force a mentally ill person to treat their illness? On the one hand we have the argument of personal rights, that people have a right to determine what happens to their own bodies, and people should have control and a say in what happens to them. So if a person doesn't want treatment, they have the right to research it on their own and come to their own decision about whether or not they feel it is necessary or helpful. On the other hand, mental illness might impair your very ability to make a clearheaded and rational choice about your own treatment, and just how far are we comfortable, as a society, letting you deteriorate before we step in and stop you from self-destructing?

The standard has been set at "danger to self or others". You have the right to be as crazy as a loon, so long as you aren't hurting anyone. But as soon as there is significant risk of suicide, violence, or other direct and imminent bodily harm, then at that point the law is authorized to step in and commit you to a hospital against your will, until you are stabilized and no longer in danger.

This is where we have determined the mid-point on the sliding scale to be. And people fall through the cracks on both sides. On the one hand, we have people who are so paranoid that they won't talk to doctors becuase they think the doctors are out to get them, and won't let their families help them again due to paranoia, and let everything go until they've lost everything and they can't do anything but huddle under a bridge in fear. And there's absolutely nothing that their families can do to help, because they are not violent or suicidal.

On the other hand, we have angry parents or vindictive girlfriends or whatever, who have learned that they can commit a person to a hospital against their will, if they make false claims that a person has become suicidal or violent. Then, someone ends up stuck in a hospital against their will, with their rights clearly being violated, despite the fact that they have no need to be there.

But this is what always happens. Name any public policy like this, and you're going to have people who get hurt on either side. The only way to prevent one type of "fall through the cracks" is to go to an extreme where you get LOTS of people falling through the other side.

For example, suppose you theoretically are an angry family member who couldn't believe that your sister was living under a bridge, paralyzed by hallucinations, and nobody was willing to do anything at all about it. So you set out to change the law so that it's not danger to self or others any more, but now the standard is that if you have enough symptoms of a mental illness that it is more likely than not that you could be diagnosed mentally ill.

Ok, on this new change, you have much fewer people falling through the cracks on one end of the spectrum. Now, pretty much everyone who is mentally ill and not getting treatment, can be forced into a hospital if their symptoms are acting up.

However, now there's TONS of cases of people locking up family members by getting them sent off to hospitals just becuase they are angry. Now, all it takes is "she's crazy!" and everyone's shipped off to the hospital against their will. Suddenly the front page of reddit fills up with stories of large corporations sending whistleblowers to mental hospitals to discredit them, angry baby mommas sending guys to the hospital during custody battles, etc etc.

Ok, so after all this, the violation to personal rights is so extreme, that they reevaluate and say "OK we're not forcing ANYONE to get treatment against their will, EVER." Well, now we have schizophrenic people hiding under their porches shooting at passers-by because they think everyone is a government operative out to get them. Depressed people can kill themselves and family members can't do anything but watch. Etc etc. Sure, no patient rights are being violated, but dramatically dangerous situations are ending in death because nobody has legal power to step in at all.

So they adjust things right back to the middle point they had decided on, of danger to self and others. And people keep falling through the cracks on both sides, and people keep getting mad when it happens, but as an overall policy designed to maximize good and minimize damage, "danger to self or others" is the best compromise we have. It can't eliminate damage, but it minimizes it more than others.

How does this apply to rape vs false accusations of rape? Well, if rape destroys lives forever, whereas false accusations are nothing but a minor inconvenience in your day, then it makes sense to set public policy to be extremely tolerant of false accusations, if it makes sure that all legitimate rapes get prosecuted. But if rape is something which sucks but most people get over it just fine and go on to be happy and functional and mostly forget that it happened, whereas every single guy falsely accused of rape ends up killing himself, then instead we would want to set the public policy such that NO false accusations are ever allowed to be made, because unless you have 100% proof that a rape took place (think= islamic law where two or more men must have witnessed the rape and be willing to testify that it was, in fact, forced) then your rape case is going to get thrown out and we won't even tell the guy that you accused him.

Those are two extremes. Obviously, both extremes are wrong. We've got to set public policy in the middle. The middle is the point at which good is maximized and harm is minimized. It is not the point at which harm is eliminated, because that's impossible. There will always be women who truly got raped, who can't get a conviction. There will always be men who are falsely accused and greatly damaged by the ordeal. But we're trying to minimize both. The question of how much we allow of either situation, does depend on how harmful each situation is. Would we rather go closer to one extreme to eliminate one type of mistake? Or would we rather set our policy in the middle where there's roughly an equal number of true rapists that go free, and false accusations against innocent men? The "middle" policy makes sense if false accusation and true rape are both roughly equally traumatic, because, it means that the middle point is where good is maximized and harm is minimized.

Now, I don't believe we are quite in the middle yet. I think that getting to the middle requires that we protect the identities of the falsely accused until they are convicted by a court. I think this eliminates more harm than it causes. Once we put that policy in place, we'll be close enough to the middle for my comfort.

But hopefully this explains why people even care which is more traumatic, why people bother to compare it at all, when really it should be obvious that both are bad and both should be stopped.

tl:dr = public policy tries to maximize good and minimize harm, so, how comparatively harmful one is vs the other is relevant in determining what public policy is most successful.

Title	Few comparisons illustrate a false dichotomy better than the argument over whether false accusations are worse than rape and vice versa.
Author	kloo2yoo
Upvotes	19
Comments	1
Date	June 6, 2010 12:39 AM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/cbvpv/few_comparisons_illustrate_a_false_dichotomy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/few-comparisons-illustrate-a-false-dichotomy.1049234 https://theredarchive.com/post/1049234

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