Deal-Breakers and Information Monotonicity
In thinking through some of the literature on consent, deception, and deal-breakers — e.g. Tom Dougherty's "Sex, Lies, and Consent," and related discussion — I have noticed a parallel to some of the 20th-century literature on the analysis of knowledge; I wonder if exploring it might be productive.
Here's the very general idea: one way of thinking about information and consent (Dougherty's) says that, if there's a deal-breaker you don't know about, there is no valid sexual consent present. A deal-breaker is a condition such that, if you had known it obtains, you wouldn't have agreed to the sexual encounter. For example, if I am unwilling to have sex with a Republican, and I have sex with someone who, unbenownst to me, is a Republican, that fact invalidates my consent, and my partner has done a serious wrong to me.
One of the interesting facts about information is that its aggregation has non-monotonic properties. Learning that P can have a very different result — even pull in different directions — depending on whether I also learn that Q. For example, P can be evidence for R when taken on its own, but evidence against R when also in the presence of Q. (Consider P: the forecast says it'll rain today; R: it'll rain today; Q: today is 'opposite day' at the news station.) For this reason, I worry that any approach to sexual ethics that emphasizes the existence of a deal-breaker, where a deal-breaker is defined in terms of what would have happened, counterfactually, if it were known, is going to suffer counterexamples, similar in form to counterexamples that refuted the 'no defeaters' analyses of knowledge.
A 'defeater' for S's belief that p, in the analysis of knowledge literature, is a true proposition such that, if S knew it, S wouldn't justifiably believe that p. Cases of justified true belief without knowledge generally seem to include defeaters. If you knew that the clock was broken, it wouldn’t be reasonable for you to believe on its basis that it’s 2pm, which is why you don’t know it’s 2pm.
Here's the very general idea: one way of thinking about information and consent (Dougherty's) says that, if there's a deal-breaker you don't know about, there is no valid sexual consent present. A deal-breaker is a condition such that, if you had known it obtains, you wouldn't have agreed to the sexual encounter. For example, if I am unwilling to have sex with a Republican, and I have sex with someone who, unbenownst to me, is a Republican, that fact invalidates my consent, and my partner has done a serious wrong to me.
One of the interesting facts about information is that its aggregation has non-monotonic properties. Learning that P can have a very different result — even pull in different directions — depending on whether I also learn that Q. For example, P can be evidence for R when taken on its own, but evidence against R when also in the presence of Q. (Consider P: the forecast says it'll rain today; R: it'll rain today; Q: today is 'opposite day' at the news station.) For this reason, I worry that any approach to sexual ethics that emphasizes the existence of a deal-breaker, where a deal-breaker is defined in terms of what would have happened, counterfactually, if it were known, is going to suffer counterexamples, similar in form to counterexamples that refuted the 'no defeaters' analyses of knowledge.
A 'defeater' for S's belief that p, in the analysis of knowledge literature, is a true proposition such that, if S knew it, S wouldn't justifiably believe that p. Cases of justified true belief without knowledge generally seem to include defeaters. If you knew that the clock was broken, it wouldn’t be reasonable for you to believe on its basis that it’s 2pm, which is why you don’t know it’s 2pm.
A no-defeaters condition for knowledge is structurally quite parallel to a no-dealbreakers condition for valid consent. Belief is the analogue of agreement; knowledge is the analogue of valid consent:
- S doesn’t know p if there is some fact q such that, if S knew q, S wouldn’t believe p.
- S doesn’t validly consent to Ф if there is some fact q such that, if S knew p, S wouldn’t agree to Ф.
One problem with no-defeaters conditions on knowledge is that, unless one gets a bit fancy with which kind of propositions can be defeaters, it is too easy to generate defeaters for any given piece of knowledge. There will be a defeater any time there is some truth out there somewhere such that adding it to your store of knowledge would undermine belief that p. Take any plausible case of knowledge that p, for which S is not maximally certain. (I think I know, for example, that I'll be on campus tomorrow, even though it's not difficult to imagine possible ways I might be mistaken.) Now let q be some true but misleading evidence against p that I don't know. In other words, q makes p less probable, even though p is still true. (Obviously I can't specify such a q, but there could easily be such a q. For example, maybe there are warning of severe floods on the roads tonight; if I knew that, then I wouldn't be sure campus won't be closed tomorrow.) Any such q is a defeater for p, and so implies I don't know p.
In fact, given the counterfactual definition of a defeater, we don't even need q to be intuitively relevant for the truth of p. We just need it to be something, such that, if I learned it, I wouldn't justifiably believe that p. Consider some proposition r, such that I am as confident in r as I am in p, but r is false. Then let q be the true proposition that I am wrong about at least one of p and r. If I knew this, I'd suspend judgment in both; so this q too is a defeater for p. This works for any p for which I'm less than maximally certain. These are implausibly skeptical results.
Very similar results attach to dealbreakers, I think. Consider again my Republican sex partner. This is a dealbreaker because I would refuse to have sex with someone if I knew they were a Republican. But that doesn't mean that, under any possible circumstances in which someone is a Republican, I'd refuse sex. For example, I might well agree to have sex with someone if I knew they were a Republican and also that they always vote for Democrats in general elections. (They're a registered Republican because they live in a district where the Republican Primary is the most important election they can participate in, and they support moderate Republicans in the primary.)
Suppose I have a partner like that — the good kind of Republican — and I don't know any of it. Is there a dealbreaker? In a straightforward sense, yes: the fact that they're a Republican. Does it invalidate consent? I don't see why it should. So the existence of a dealbreaker doesn't look like the right kind of condition.
Given the counterfactual definition of a dealbreaker, we can even construct less relevant dealbreakers. Suppose again that Republicanism is a dealbreaker for me. Consider this time a potential sex partner who is not a Republican, but who does have some very surprising characteristic X. X is a characteristic about which I have no particular positive or negative feelings; I don't base my sexual decisions at all on whether someone has X. But X is something I'm pretty sure doesn't apply to my partner. Now consider the fact that they are X or Republican. If I learned this, I wouldn't agree to sex, because I'd think there's a very good chance that they're a Republican. So that disjunction, too, counts as a dealbreaker under the counterfactual definition. But this effectively means that there will always be some dealbreakers. As in the 'no defeaters' clause for knowledge, a 'no dealbreakers' clause for consent is too strong.
My instinct is that usually when we talk about deal-breakers, we're talking about conditions that would make you refuse to have sex with the person no matter what other conditions apply (within a certain scope). If you usually don't have sex with people who aren't Republicans, but you're perfectly willing to do so if they're clever or charming or otherwise likable, then not being a Republican is a preference, not a deal-breaker. If that's how you feel about Republicans, then even if there are instances where you wouldn't have had sex with someone if you'd known they were a Republican (because they weren't funny or charming enough to balance it out), being a Republican isn't a deal-breaker for you.
ReplyDeleteI think this understanding of what a deal-breaker is might hold up better. If there are some conditions under which you'd be willing to have sex with a Republican (like if they always vote Democrat in the general election), then being a Republican isn't a deal-breaker for you. If there are some conditions under which you'd be willing to have sex with someone who is [X or a Republican] (like if they're X and not a Republican), then their being [X or a Republican] isn't a deal-breaker for you.
Sometimes we describe our deal-breakers by speaking a little loosely--if I were to say that Republicanism is a deal-breaker for me, and someone then explains that they're registered as a Republican but always vote Democrat in the general election, I wouldn't consider it a major sacrifice to my meaning for me to clarify: "All right, I guess I didn't actually mean being a Republican is a deal-breaker--just as long as you don't vote Republican, support Republicans, act like a Republican, or hold Republican values."
Good, so this is analogous to the idea of there being no "undefeated" defeater. As in, if you knew absolutely everything, you'd believe p. Or in the consent case: if you knew everything about someone, you'd agree to have sex with them.
DeleteOne worry I now have is that this kind of approach seems to remove valid depend even more on random stuff I wouldn't expect it to depend on. Like, take my deal-breaker about Republicans. Set aside Republicans who vote for Democrats; consider the possibility that someone is a Republican in the more ordinary way, but who also has some very unusual attractive-making property that would outweigh their being a Republican in my mind. Then someone's being a Republican wouldn't actually be a deal-breaker for me. In fact, there are probably very few deal-breakers, at least until we start stipulating very strong properties.
Yes, that's about right. I'm a little wary of the "if you knew everything", which makes it sound more like this is invoking some bizarre hypothetical--all I'm really invoking is the information that would affect your decision, which presumably doesn't include, say, the number of blood cells they have. But that's just a quibble about phrasing.
DeleteCan I avoid that issue with an appeal to contextualism? When talking about who you'd be willing to have sex with, there are some conditions that seem odd or inappropriate to consider. I feel like we can usually discount conditions like a sudden resurgence of feudalism that makes the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem trivial, for example. That's what I meant by "no matter what other conditions apply (within a certain scope)."
I should also clarify that I think that the scope has more to do with what's conversationally appropriate than what's probable. The possibility of the person you go on a date with being perfectly suited to your preconceived preferences in appearance and sense of humour is probably very unlikely, but it's still conversationally appropriate to the subject of who you'd have sex with. The collapse of our current society is perhaps not all that unlikely but still conversationally inappropriate. (Although maybe I just need to start having more interesting conversations about sex.)