For  a comprehensive play-by-play of how the Ebola crisis in West Africa spiraled out of control, read this amazing piece at the Washington Post. It illustrates very clearly the severity of the circumstances in hard-hit West African countries, and demonstrates (I think) the importance of consistent resource flow to the lay reader. It appears to me that multiple state responses will be necessary to contain the spread of Ebola in West Africa, but the contributions of non-governmental organizations have been important as well, from the very large to the very small:

Operation Blessing head David Darg and his team of volunteers distribute much-need food to families in quarantine because they’re not able to go out and get supplies and no one is brave enough to go near them.

Volunteers carry sacks of rice, oil, flour, sugar, and other supplies.

Darg said they can’t take the supplies into the house so they leave it on the doorstep.

The recipients are so grateful.

“Thank you so much for your generosity! We highly recognize your generosity and really appreciate what you’re doing,” one grandfather, whose daughter and ex-husband died last week, said.

 “You are not alone. We are here with you,” Darg told him.

“We are never alone,” the bereaved grandfather responded. “We have Jesus with us.”

If you are able, please consider supporting the dedicated organizations combating Ebola in West Africa. Among them are:

Doctors Without Borders

The American Red Cross

Samaritan’s Purse

And Many More.

Thank you so much for reading and considering.

California now has an affirmative consent law, which has been billed by some as the “yes means yes” law, as though at some point yes did not mean yes. The law mandates the following standard of consent to adjudicate accusations of sexual assault or rape on campuses receiving public funds in California:

“Affirmative consent” means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.”

Supporters of the law, like Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan, have mocked the living daylights out of anyone who suggests this law would proscribe most normal sex. Here’s Ryan:

“But the piece’s most ridiculous aspect is the assumption that following every sex act, thanks to this law, authorities will sweep in and subject both parties (but mostly the man) to an exhaustive cross examination on consent as the pair of lovebirds towel their bodily fluids off of each other in a panic. That isn’t going to happen.”

What Ryan means to say is: yes, this law would proscribe most normal sex. The way most normal people have sex does not include any measure to affirm ongoing consent. Such sex would paralyze you; ask any philosopher who has tried to define what an “action” is. If I go to the wall and flip the light switch, for example, what have I done? Have I simply turned a switch? Have I turned off the lights? Have I signaled to a conspirator in the hallway that now is the time? Have I stolen your ability to see? Maybe I have done all of these things, or maybe only some! This makes affirming consent to each individual ‘component’ of a whole sex act deliriously difficult; more challenging yet is the division of actions into pieces. When I flip the light switch, at what point have I gone from pushing it to pulling it? It’s hard to say. All of these critiques are genuine critiques; the dismissal of them comes not from their wrongness (that is, they do not misunderstand the meaning of the law) but from the fact that they will probably never actually be acted upon legally because 99.9% of people will ignore this law. That is what the defenders of the law are telling you when they say criticisms of how it would legally proscribe sex (whether that sex was ever prosecuted or not) are silly.

In that case, what is the purpose of this law? Freddie deBoer writes:

“…the purpose of this law is to effectively remove the presumption of innocence and shift the burden to the accused to prove that he sought and obtained consent in a sexual encounter. That the presumption of innocence is essentially the bedrock principle on which Western jurisprudence is built, thanks to a vast history of judicial abuse and overreach, is a fact too inconvenient to be mentioned in the realm of affective politics.”

He’s not wrong. Similar sexual assault policy changes at Harvard have spurred 28 Harvard Law professors to write a letter of objection, noting that due process and the rights of the accused are seriously threatened by policies that compromise the presumption of innocence and affirmative burden of proof. But those who defend the law likely have a legitimate complaint with the burden of proof as it currently stands: namely, people don’t tend to believe women when they claim they’ve been assaulted.

After all, that’s been one of the main themes of GamerGate, and as many other scenarios involving women victims of assault and harassment. Anita Sarkeesian says the most radical thing you can do when a woman says she’s been assaulted is to believe her. I agree: the fact that women are not generally perceived to be as credible as men is a real feminist issue.

The problem is that it is not an issue limited to rape or sexual assault or harassment. People don’t believe women when they say they’ve been assaulted, that’s true; people also don’t believe women when they say the place we’re going is 3 miles to the north, hang a left, then take exit 34b and a right off the access road, and you’re there. People constantly double-check women in ways they do not double-check men. When I say something about the research I do, I know at least half the reason I then have to spend a lot of time answering very, very unsophisticated ‘rebuttals’ is because it’s very easy to presume automatically that a young woman must be wrong, and that correcting her must be very easy. This is absolutely a feminist issue.

This is why affirmative consent laws and the way they are being handled by their defenders spell serious trouble for women. Affirmative consent laws will not actually address the problem that women are generally viewed as less credible than men. On the contrary, they seem to enforce the idea that the normal ways of determining consent don’t work when you’re dealing with women: that is, they legally codify the notion that you won’t be able to trust your gut when you’re with a woman, but that you must constantly probe her dark mysterious mind for absolute and concrete declarations of consent. All of the normal ways people determine sexual willingness and agreement — established relationships, past experiences, heuristic go-aheads — do not count in the realm of women. You just can’t trust them, you have to run them through the ringer a bit. This is already the problem.

Worse yet, the law’s defenders are prevaricating pretty openly by stating they do not actually intend for the law’s provisions to be enforced, but rather to accomplish a legal goal that, if presented nakedly, would never be acceptable. (That is, the presumption of guilt.) If you are thinking: “well, maybe some good would come of a law that helped out some victims in some otherwise difficult-to-determine cases, and the fact that its defenders are being a bit mendacious and that it makes women seem inherently confused and confusing won’t really stick”, I suggest you look at what happened with Prohibition.

Did Prohibition work? Actually, it sort of did! People generally obeyed it. And the benefits it promised really did come to pass:

“…alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkennness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.”

Yet because women voters voted for Prohibition and people didn’t like it, women’s legal activity has been permanently stained by it. Talk to any misogynist long enough, like this fine specimen at Hello Giggles’ libertarian sister blog Taki’s Magazine, and you will find that Prohibition remains one of the great go-tos for people trying to establish women’s political naiveté and disingenuousness.  That it actually had some success in accomplishing its goals wasn’t ultimately all that helpful to women, because the greater effect was to cement the notion that women are prissy school-marmish killjoys with no understanding of politics or economics. I’m not saying by any measure this was right, I’m saying this is an example of how legislation that seems convenient for women can seriously undermine the bigger project such legislation is meant to serve, namely the elevation of women as a class to equal social standing with men. In the end, Prohibition was repealed, and women’s political reputation got left holding the bag.

In terms of women’s credibility, I fear the same thing could pan out with affirmative consent laws. Nobody is claiming rape isn’t wrong or that it isn’t a problem, but the fact is that it is already illegal, and much of the struggle against the failures of the legal system in handling rape cases will consist of destroying the delusion that women are not credible agents. Affirmative consent laws will be no help there, and may well do some harm.

A friend wanted me to look at this Daily Beast piece on ownership versus access. Very interesting! Here is what I understand to be the dominant argument:

“Without an ownership society, where citizens are prudent stewards of broadly distributed private property, freedom tends to become what it was in revolutionary France—an abstract ideal that can easily arouse destructive political feelings that know no bounds. That’s why the shift from right-to-own to right-to-access has the real potential to overturn centuries of cultural certainty about the foundations of liberty and its importance to human flourishing.”

To offer examples of how we have shifted contemporarily from a society based on ownership to a society based on access, the author provides the following examples: “The triumph of access over ownership has changed the way we think about rights. Rather than a right to health care or abortion, people assert a right to access those things.” He identifies the internet as another instance where conversations have shifted from ownership to access. This is a result, he argues, of the backlash against materialism that he identifies as having peaked in the 1990s, a reaction that resulted in people “[recoiling]  against the idea that the only way to secure [the material necessities of life] was to work hard enough and long enough to own them.”

It is not immediately clear to me how one ever owns healthcare, abortion, or the internet. This is because these are all services, not goods. Further complicating matters, “healthcare access” and “internet access” are both idioms for different things; “access” does not seem to be univocal.

I am further not sure that there is an athropological link between anti-materialism, a resistance to desert theories of property, and mild expansions of state services. My difficulty in forming an opinion here is increased by the fact that I can’t tell if the sentence on “[recoiling] against the idea that the only way to secure [the material necessities of life] was to work hard enough and long enough to own them” is meant to be normative or positive. Are we saying people began to recoil against the idea that it was possible to ever come to own stuff, that they began to believe it was just factually false? Or are we saying that people began to believe that, while it is sometimes possible, it is not possible in a general enough way to morally justify that style of ownership being the only game in town? I believe there is a distinction here, but I am not clear on how it plays out in the piece.

But as for the question of ownership versus access, I hope I can offer some clarity. Many, many words have stood in for ‘ownership’ and ‘access’ over time, including usus, dominium, proprietas, ius, possessio, and usufructus. I will spare you the Latin and assure you that each of these terms (originating from Roman property law) delineates subtle distinctions in the possession, ownership, dominion over, and use (just short of or including the total destruction) of property. Especially between the years of 1322 and 1324, when the Franciscan Order had it out with Pope John XXII over whether or not they owned stuff. Eventually the entire Order was declared heretical, which tips you off to how intense this argument was, and evidently continues to be.

Fortunately for us it is not necessary to rehash the Franciscan controversy. We can look instead at how Christians have dealt with the differences between ownership and access, and outline the relationship between the two.

First things first: you generally need both ownership and access to have the use of a thing. If I tell you that you own something on the moon but can’t get on a rocket ship, you still do not effectively own it, because you have no access to it. In that case ‘ownership’ is sort of an empty idea. But if you own the object on the moon and can get on a rocket ship, now your ownership has some teeth, because you have access to the thing in order to use it. So access is an aspect of use and ownership. But in this Daily Beast piece, ‘access’ appears to be used to mean ‘use’, or the benefit of a thing without dominion or possession of it. (This is the only way the inclusion of, say, healthcare makes any sense.)

But while use of a thing doesn’t exclude others from using it as well except in the case of consumables, ownership potentially means the exclusion of everyone from the use of a thing. So for Christians like Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Isidore of Seville, and Gratian, the question became: how to we justify the private ownership of property when the earth was obviously intended for the use of all people in common? Here is St. Clement I writing in the first century:

“The common life, brethren, is necessary for all and especially for those who desire to serve God blamelessly and who wish to imitate the life of the Apostles and their disciples. The use of all things that are in the world ought to be common to all men. But through sin one man claimed this as his own and another that, and so division was made among men.”

This primitive Christian communism was a popular ideal for a very long while, and it remained so with the Franciscans, but by the medieval period the canonists had come to see some good in the institution of private property (mainly its Aristotelian virtues: the prevention of tragedy-of-commons and greater productivity), and moreover, realized they couldn’t do much to defeat it anyway. So they tried to bring the good of common use to comport with the widespread institution of private property by arguing that all ownership comes with obligations. The Daily Beast piece refers to “prudent stewardship”, and these are both terms that came out of this marriage of right ownership and right use. For the Christian, prudent stewardship is more than successful administration of one’s own properties; as St. Basil writes (then glossed by Ambrose and later Gratian):

“But you say, ‘where is the injustice if I diligently look after my own property without interfering with other people’s?’ O impudent words! Your own property, you say. What? From what stores did you bring it into this world? When you came into the light, when you came forth from your mother’s womb, with what resources, with what reserves did you come endowed? No one may call his own what is common, of which, if a man takes more than he needs, is obtained by violence. . . Who is more unjust, more avaricious, more greedy than a man who takes the food of the multitude not for his own use but for his abundance and luxuries? The bread you hold back belongs to the needy, the clothes that you shut away belong to the naked, the money that you bury in the ground is the price of redeeming and freeing the wretched.”

The medievals read this Patristic take on property very carefully. If the problem with property comes when it is excessively hoarded and others suffer via exclusion, then it is not the case that property should be wholly dispensed with, but that the exclusionary aspects of it should be severely castigated. Therefore property was understood to come with obligations, one of which was ensuring that property would be freely given up to those in need. It is therefore the obligation to give others access that underwrites, for the Christian canonists, the whole institution of private property. Thomas Aquinas ST II-II q.66 a2:

“Two things are competent to man in respect of exterior things. One is the power to procure and dispense them, and in this regard it is lawful for man to possess property. . . . The second thing that is competent to man with regard to external things is their use. On this respect man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need. Hence the Apostle says (1 Timothy 6:17-18): ‘Charge the rich of this world . . . to give easily, to communicate to others,’ etc.”

Ownership, in other words, is possible as an ethically upright institution insofar as use is readily available to the needy. If you have excessive property which you do not render to the needy, then you no longer have any right to it. Right ownership, then, should be understood as a function of correct access: only if you have met the criteria for correct use can you have legitimate ownership. So there is no conflict between access and ownership; rather, the latter depends on the correct arrangement of the former. We have always had both an ownership and an access society, in that the two are obviously folded together; what the argument needs to concern is what people should have access to, which is a point this Daily Beast way seems to shy from, though it is probably really the only relevant normative question.