Sex, Reason, and a Taste for the Absurd

Like much of Richard Posner\u27s best work, Sex and Reason does many things, and for that reason will no doubt attract a large and diverse readership. This heavily footnoted, exhaustively researched, and imminently accessible book is a welcome introduction to the interdisciplinary study of sex. For the lay reader it presents an arresting set of speculations about human sexuality, drawn from the author\u27s evident familiarity with a sizeable library of studies representing at least half a dozen scientific and social scientific disciplines, assembled in a readable and lively way. Of more interest, perhaps, to academicians and social scientists familiar with the literature, the book also proposes an ambitious, counter-intuitive, and sure to be controversial sociobiological argument about the essential nature of sexuality. This argument aims to account for both the universality of some sexual behaviors, on the one hand, and the extraordinary diversity of sexual customs, beliefs, and practices, on the other. Sex and Reason is an attempt by our most prominent rationalist to prove the absolute universality of economic reasoning in human choice and behavior by showing the rationality of our presumably most irrational choices and behaviors: those driven by our sexual urges. Thus, as the author states in his opening remarks, the large purpose of this book is to explain the rationality of our sexual behavior, and thereby limit, if not disprove the Aristotelian dictum, quoted in the book\u27s opening epigram, that [Sexual] pleasures are an impediment to rational deliberation, . . . it is impossible to think about anything while absorbed in them. The author\u27s main target, in other words, is neither liberal nor conservative moralism, but rather the widespread intuition, shared by academicians, legislators, and the lay public alike, that whatever the value of economic reasoning in commercial and maybe even some noncommercial spheres of life, it certainly has no relevance -- no explanatory power -- in controlling behavior and choices so thoroughly irrational -- so emotional, instinctive, biological -- as our sexual inclinations and drives. On the contrary, Posner insists, although forces beyond our control heavily determine our sexual preferences, this hardly distinguishes them from other preferences that are similarly given rather than chosen. Accordingly, the determinism of our sexual preferences hardly disqualifies them from the benefit of dispassionate study and control by the trained economist\u27s eye. I argue in this review that although Posner\u27s descriptive claim about the rationality of our sexual behavior does indeed have an odd ring to it, it is Posner\u27s normative claims -- his rigid insistence on dispassion and neutrality in the study and regulation of sexual choice -- that is ultimately the Achilles\u27 heel of this book. It becomes quickly apparent on even a casual reading that Posner\u27s insistence on moral neutrality goes well beyond his liberal sounding tolerance of deviant sexual preferences and practices. Rather, the moral neutrality Posner advocates requires a studied moral apathy toward a bewildering array of practices, customs, habits, and inclinations that cause inestimable amounts of human suffering and reveal the existence of manifest unjust subordination of large groups of persons -- primarily, women. I suggest that moral neutrality is not the attitude we ought to take toward such behaviors, as either scientists or legislators

Group Formation in the Long Tenth Century: a View from Trier and its Region

Unpaginated version of book chapter published in Christine Kleinjung and Stefan Albrecht (eds.), Das lange 10. Jahrhundert – Struktureller Wandel zwischen Zentralisierung und Fragmentierung, äußerem Druck und innerer Krise (Mainz, 2015), pp. 49–5

Advice to Students Considering Graduate Work in English

Drawing on specific case histories from over 50 students who applied to graduate programs in English Literature, Composition, and Writing, this document represents my advice to students applying nationwide to do graduate work in the various subfields of English studies

Rights, Harms, and Duties: A Response to \u3ci\u3eJustice for Hedgehogs\u3c/i\u3e

The author responds to the three jurisprudential positions that Ronald Dworkin discusses in his book--albeit briefly--so as to integrate them into his hedgehoggian program. The first is that we should think of rights as political trumps, such that the individual liberty protected by the right, and hence the behavior protected by the right, trumps in importance and in effect, both in law and in popular imaginings, the various collective goals with which the right might be in conflict. Second, we should think about our collective life, and the principles that should guide it, through the lens of the rights of individuals understood capaciously. Rights may be positive or negative, legal, constitutional, political, institutional, or moral, and might have either libertarian and regressive or egalitarian and redistributive consequences. Regardless, we should think about our collective life through the lens of individual rights rather than through the lens of the moral duty of legislators, state actors, lawmakers, or, simply, sovereigns, to make good law in the interest of the governed: the duty of lawmakers to exercise their lawmaking power in morally responsible or virtuous ways. Rights of citizens, not the moral duties of lawmakers, should guide our thinking in both politics and law. Third, the political principles that should inform our law are those which require us collectively to respect the rights of individuals to decide for themselves on the content of a good life, and do not permit or require us to collectively make those decisions and impose them on individuals through law. To live well, we must each decide for ourselves what it is to live a good life. Government must protect the individual latitude we need to live well, and that includes refraining from dictating or legislating on the basis of any state-generated understanding of the content of the good life

A Holistic Approach to Jesus the Nazarene in Matthew 2:23

In Matthew 2:23 Jesus is said to have fulfilled what the prophets spoke when he and his family moved to Nazareth, that he shall be called a Nazarene. Due to the uniqueness of this term and the town of Nazareth being found nowhere in the Old Testament, multiple views have been proposed. These views include Jesus of the despised town of Nazareth, Jesus as a Nazirite, and Jesus as the branch from Isaiah 11:1. Each of these views propose their own interpretation of this Old Testament citation. However, these views often do not acknowledge the possibility of multiple meanings intended by Matthew, thus ignoring the depth and purpose behind Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the one who fulfills the Old Testament Scriptures

The Authoritarian Impulse in Constitutional Law

Should there be greater participation by legislators and citizens in constitutional debate, theory, and decision-making? An increasing number of legal theorists from otherwise divergent perspectives have recently argued against what Paul Brest calls the principle of judicial exclusivity in our constitutional processes. These theorists contend that because issues of public morality in our culture either are, or tend to become, constitutional issues, all political actors, and most notably legislators and citizens, should consider the constitutional implications of the moral issues of the day. Because constitutional questions are essentially moral questions about how active and responsible citizens should constitute themselves, we should all engage in constitutional debate. We should stop relying on the courts to shoulder the burden of resolving the constitutional consequences of our political decisions. According to this argument, our methods of resolving moral issues in this country are deeply flawed. The flaw is that we have delegated to the courts, rather than kept for ourselves, the moral responsibility for our decisions. By protecting, cherishing, and relying upon judicial review, we have essentially alienated our moral public lives to the courts. I agree with Brest that our methods of resolving issues of public morality in this culture are deeply flawed, but I view with skepticism both the diagnosis--insufficient community participation in constitutional processes--and the cure--increased community participation in constitutional processes--suggested by the participation theorists. The call for increased participation in constitutional thought rests on the assumptions that constitutional questions are moral questions, and that constitutional debate is the forum in which we engage in moral decision-making. From these assumptions it follows that all citizens, not just courts, should take up issues of constitutionalism. If we take very seriously the text of the opinions in a significant number of recent constitutional cases, however, it is clear that as a descriptive matter, the assumption that constitutional questions are moral questions is flatly false. According to the Justices themselves, constitutional issues are by definition legal issues, as opposed to moral issues. Countless neutral principles constitutional theorists as well insist upon making a distinction between constitutional issues and moral issues. Thus, according to a well-respected strand of constitutional theory, as well as an increasing number of recent cases, constitutional questions are definitionally amoral, as are the answers they propose

Desperately Seeking a Moralist

In a recent issue of “Unbound”, Janet Halley reviews my book “Caring for Justice”, criticizing it for exhibiting a broad range of the problems she sees in all forms of identitarian legal writing, and therefore worthy of detailed critique. Halley begins her review by listing the representative missteps she finds in both my book and in identitarian politics generally, including, although certainly not limited to, an identification of the site of the subordinated group\u27s injuries-for women, reproduction and sexuality with the site of its ethical lives and insights; a tendency to differentiate and present the interests of subordinate and dominant groups, such as women and men, as inevitably opposed, such that women\u27s injuries work to men\u27s advantage and vice versa; an inclination to substitute the language of harm, injury, and ethics for the language of subordination, exploitation, and the like; and both an unhealthy aversion to politics and an insistence that changing the hearts and minds of the dominant will somehow magically reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Whether or not the list accurately captures my views on these questions, or those of identitarian scholars for whom I did not purport to speak, it is misleading in a more fundamental sense: by the end of her review, it is clear that Halley finds much more troubling sins in “Caring for Justice”, sins that are assuredly much more particular to feminism, to my feminism, and maybe just to this book, than to identitarian politics across the board. Thus, in the bulk of the review, Halley suggests that “Caring for Justice” exhibits tendencies toward both totalitarian[ism] and a slave morality, asserts an ethical view that is infantile, conveys a sense of sexual injury that is panick[ed] (this latter is not just a sin; in Halley\u27s moral ordering, it has all the markings of original sin), shows frightful signs of female- ... supremac[y], is politically paranoid, and, in toto, amounts to something she calls derisively mother feminism. The punishing epithets and psychoanalytic diagnoses flow promiscuously. Whatever else one might say about these charges, I cannot imagine why anyone would regard them as shared characteristics of identitarian scholarship. In this response, graciously invited by the editors of “The Harvard Journal of Law & Gender”, I will address some of these charges, and I will respond in some detail to the thrust of Halley\u27s complaints about the politics of injury. However, what I want to focus on first, albeit briefly, is just one of Halley\u27s characterizations of my work that, on first blush, I found to be extraordinarily peculiar and on one argument of sorts that is built on top of this characterization. I believe that this argument is at the heart of much of Halley\u27s Freudian and Nietzschean lambasting of my work

Testimony of Jack West Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

Testimony_ASQC_081094.pdf: 115 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020