From his short story Three Worlds Collide:

*When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong."

Akon's mouth hung open. "You were that prude?"

The Confessor shook his head. "There aren't any words," the Confessor said, "there aren't any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you. No, it wasn't prudery. It was a memory of disaster."

"Um," Akon said. He was trying not to smile. "I'm trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex -"

"Give it up, my lord," the Confessor said. He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it.

Fucking rationalists, man.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    i pretty much figured. the basic idea of imagining a moral universe totally unlike "ours" isn't offensive, and in fact the basis for much of the best sci-fi. the problem is Yudkowsky is an incurious asshole who wanted to put the edgiest idea he could to page, but didn't want to do the work of imagining how a society that doesn't even nominally value sexual consent would function.

    All three of our species have empathy, we have sympathy, we have a sense of fairness - the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art. Shouldn't that be enough? Wasn't that supposed to be enough? But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others' standards.

    he lays out the point pretty plainly here. Except our relationship to "historical" moral abominations like slavery and homophobia isn't anything like what he's describing because, if you make the slightest effort, it's really not difficult to see how the people of a century ago, or a decade ago, or last week, aren't too different from us, and to hold the implications of our disgust at them up to the world we live in now.