Perchance to Dream: Robin Hanson on Sleep-Rape

Robin Hanson thinks sexsomniacs (people who have sex in a sleepwalking state) should be punished just like regular rapists when they (unknowingly) begin to have sex with someone who does not consent.  To be clear:  rape is a heinous thing and, along with murder, stands in my mind as an essentially peerless crime.  There are few, if any, more fundamental or horrifying ways in which to violate another human being. Perhaps it was Hanson’s use of the imperative in his title (“Punish Sleep-Rape”) that rankled me.

To justify his point, he devises two possible arguments against punishment of sexsomniac rapists:

  1. We should punish premeditated or intentional transgressions more severely than we would unconscious transgressions.
  2. The mind is comprised of two distinct states: the conscious and the unconscious.  Thus, behaviors emanating from conscious processes should be punished more severely.

Hanson goes on to summarily dismiss both of these imagined arguments, presumably without being able to think of any others, and based on this dismissal concludes that the sexsomniac should not be spared the traditional punishment for rapists.

At its core, Hanson’s argument takes on faith that “free will” and “consciousness” are complete illusions, or he at least conflates consciousness with the planning of unconscious behaviors.  While it’s true that we almost certainly don’t have free will in the way we’ve traditionally imagined it, and even if behavioral decisions ultimately stem solely from unconscious processes, we still have to take the potential for inhibition into account.  Most behaviors are automatic. We may become aware of them as they are occurring, but the signals that will result in the end action have already been sent from the brain by the time that happens. Otherwise, the nature of consciousness and its bearing on our decision-making is much more complex than Hanson seems to think, as this review by Baumeister et al. from the Annual Review of Psychology shows.

Why should the ability to stop a behavior as it’s happening not be considered a crucial distinction when considering culpability?  Some behaviors can be inhibited or changed while they are happening once a person becomes aware of them, and the actions a person takes in a sleepwalking state are not likely beholden to this same inhibitory potential.

(Disclosure: I haven’t finished  reading the full review article just yet, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that consciousness’ role in decision-making should not be thought of as relating simply to the origin of an impulse.  Hanson seems woefully unappreciative of the brain’s immense complexity when that complexity doesn’t have anything to do with self-delusion or hypocrisy.  Credit goes to a commenter  on Hanson’s screed, Rob, who posted a link to the review, which is how I found it.)

To be fair to Hanson, he posted an addendum in which he says that sleep-rape should be punished as drunken acts are punished.  In my opinion he fails to differentiate between the choice—a word he would likely put in quotations in this case—a person makes when he/she gets drunk and the choice a person makes when they go to sleep.   One of those two activities is essential  to survival, and one is clearly not: They are simply not analogous states.  It’s possible Hanson was simply siding with a few commenters who suggested that sexsomniacs who are aware of their unfortunate sleep-time proclivities yet fail to take precautionary measures should be held responsible for their waking negligence.  I am not entirely unsympathetic to that argument even if I suspect laws based on that premise could never be fairly or accurately applied.  Ideally, the brain induces paralysis during sleep in order to prevent a person from physically acting out a dream.  Some drugs can help inhibit physical activity during deep sleep, but what happens when a person takes a pill and it doesn’t work? Should these people chain themselves to the bed?  Should their spouses sleep in another bedroom behind a locked door for the duration of the marriage?

Hanson can be an insightful blogger, and he often asks tough questions that require tough answers. But he’s also wont to draw specious conclusions based on flimsy evidence that happens to conform to his own biases—ironic for someone who writes a blog called Overcoming Bias. He thinks medicine is useless; he thinks prediction markets will save the world; he thinks all human interaction is based on status and signalling yet appears to believe himself free of those evolutionary accouterments.  In all of those arguments there is a kernel of truth; and if Hanson wasn’t so seemingly sure of the finality of his own opinions, I would probably be more charitable to him.  At the very least, I’ll give him credit for peaking my interest more or less consistently.

Perhaps Hanson’s viewpoints are a bit more nuanced than my general estimation suggests, though he does appear to me to deal in some unfortunate absolutes. Simply put, he smells like a contrarian, albeit one who’s worth reading even if you often disagree with him.

(Another side note, because I am a connoisseur of the parenthetical:  one reader, daedalus2u, pretty much nails Hanson’s thought  process with a satirical comment.  I assume the comment is satirical, anyway, because daedulus2u has espoused some very different thoughts on his own very interesting blog regarding the efficacy of punishment in society.  I, for one, am not sold on his notion that there is always a constructive alternative to punishment, but maybe I’ll save that for another post.)

Sleep-rape is an issue which I was aware of before reading Hanson’s post, but I hadn’t considered the notion of proper punishment in too much depth.  An interesting discussion follows in the comments; again, I shy away from those who are overly punitive, not because they don’t like rape (I don’t like rape either) but because they often seem to see the world as a collection of moral absolutes.  They seem so sure they’re right that I can’t imagine their opinions aren’t somewhat calcified.

I don’t claim to be an expert (or even especially knowledgeable) on any of this, so I’m interested in hearing any comments or alternate viewpoints.

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05

06 2011


by Evil Mammoth
posted in Uncategorized
6 Comments »
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  • Robin Hanson

    You keep saying I’m simple minded and not appreciated the complexities, but you don’t actually show any of that from what I actually said.

    • http://www.slothjockey.com/blog/evilmammoth Evil Mammoth

      I assume people will read the originating article (yours) and then follow my post, but you’re right that I should have at least given a quote that I viewed as problematic.

      Before this thing spun into something longer than it was supposed to be, my primary objection had to with the following question: “So why should we presume unconscious acts are never planned?” Your implicit answer, I think, is that we shouldn’t. You might be right, but my problem wasn’t at all with your asking the question: It was with your seemingly stark conclusion that the corresponding answer suggests we should punish sleep-rape in the way you said it should be punished: as an equal infraction to “regular” rape.

      To be clear, I don’t exactly call you simple-minded (in fact, I say you can be insightful at one point). I say that your conclusions don’t always follow from what I would view as a place of sound logic, which is slightly different. In re-reading my own blog I’ll cop to being a bit uncharitable, but in general I think it’s the tone of your posts that leads one (me) to either misinterpret how staunchly you feel about the conclusion or to doubt how deeply you’ve thought about a subject before coming to such a precise conclusion. Maybe this latter assumption is specious in its own right.

      “But conscious minds also have opportunities to monitor and encourage associated unconscious minds. In fact, there are probably more such opportunities with a single person’s head than within a married couple. This suggests that we should thus punish conscious minds for associated unconscious actions at least as much as we effectively punish criminal spouses.”

      You hint at treating the two aspects of the brain differently here, but you still don’t adequately deal with the role inhibition might play in determining how blameworthy someone might be. If I’m awake and put my hand on a stove, that’s a very different thing than my doing the same thing during a sleepwalking state. Chances are I will have a much better opportunity to prevent that action while awake than while asleep, in which case I will probably not be able to inhibit the action at all.

  • Mike Kew

    Both you and Hanson use the word “should” a lot. I don’t think either of you made it clear what you mean by it. What exactly is the *purpose* of punishment?

    A conventional answer would be “to deter similar crimes”. But how can you “deter” something that was not rationally conceived in the first place? How exactly would a stiff punishment reduce the probability of other such crimes occurring? The action that you might deter would be “negligently going to sleep without proper precautions”. Is that really the world you want to live in, where you can be compelled on penalty of jail time to take a pill before you go to sleep? And what if you can’t afford the pills, or you have an adverse reaction to them? Do we want to jail people for their body chemistry?

    Hanson’s argument that “conscious acts are first planned unconsciously. So why should we presume unconscious acts are never planned?” strikes me as a particularly specious piece of rhetoric. I would like to ask Hanson to come up with a definition of the word “planned”, such that (a) it can apply to unconscious acts, and (b) there is scope for the act of planning to be affected by the prospect of punishment.

    “To lower the status of the criminal”, says daedalus2u. But to what end? His comment paints all “punishment” as an essentially arbitrary exercise of power by the elite – if he is right, then there is no possibility of “justice”, because that’s not the point of punishment anyway. If you take that view, then it’s silly to try to come up with moral justifications for punishment – there’s no room for morality.

    Then there’s “to prevent the criminal from inflicting further harm”. In this case the punishment idea makes a little more sense. But if the true purpose is “harm minimisation”, then medical treatment is a much more rational way to achieve it, because “punishment”, particularly harsh punsihment, is a very harmful thing in itself.

    • http://www.slothjockey.com/blog/evilmammoth Evil Mammoth

      Fair question. Most of my “shoulds” referred to claims made in Hanson’s posts, but it’s probably a good thing to clarify the intended effect of the punishment we’re talking about. For my part, I simply assumed that punishment is doled out to serve as punishment theater to stop others or to stop the particular offender from re-offending, just as you said. Many punishments probably seek to do both, but in the case of sleep-rape, any punishment, if warranted, would likely be attempting to prevent re-offense rather than deter. (If we’re punishing a person’s failure to minimize this risk, then maybe one could argue the case for deterrent. By the way, I’m not saying I necessarily think that people should be held accountable for not chaining themselves to the bed, just that it would make more sense to me than to punish dream-state actions directly.)

      Your second and third paragraphs largely summarize my own issues with Hanson’s stance, and your sub-questions are questions I would like answered as well. I can’t tell if you interpreted my own rhetorical questions correctly, but they were meant to insinuate skepticism. (Though if you want to get right down to it—that is, if you want to get absolutely microscopic—we are always punishing people for their body chemistry, conscious or unconscious.)

      As for daedalus2u: Like I said, his comment read to me like a spoof of Hanson’s overarching viewpoints (though Hanson’s observations about signaling and status, frankly, are often compelling and probably do at times get closer to the root of why we act the way we do; another topic, however). I think some of daedalus2u’s own opinions were somehow melded in as well, but it’s difficult for me to say.

      I’m not sure if you’re advocating for morality to be the primary driver or not. In any case, I agree with the notion that much punishment is actually an attempt to lower the status of what the government/leaders/mainstream society views as undesirables (see: drug users, unlicensed panhandlers, etc.). In other cases, there are crimes for which most of us would probably demand some punitive action based on moral grounds (rape, murder, theft, etc.).

      I can’t quite tell from your comment if you’re arguing for the possibility of justice in punishment.

      • Mike Kew

        I think your scepticism came through pretty clearly.

        As for my own position – well, to be honest it’s more about raising problems with Hanson’s piece than establishing a defensible position of my own. Attack is always easier than defence.

        Having admitted that… I often suspect that when people advocate punishment, they’re really motivated by a very visceral desire for revenge, which they then proceed to dress up in rationalisations. It’s *hard* to come up with any consistent rationale for punishments that doesn’t lead, sooner or later, to very unwelcome conclusions. And that’s why I’m all for exploring those rationales, to see whether they really will stand up to scrutiny. It’s possible that we are, in fact, better off *not* rationalising punishments at all, but just doing what “seems right” from the viewpoint of some kind of manufactured social consensus.

    • http://www.slothjockey.com/blog/evilmammoth Evil Mammoth

      Also, sorry if you just got a rash of reply notifications. There was some strangeness with the interaction between Disqus and the blog.


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