A Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain: Would Decriminalising BDSM Permit Nonconsensual Abuse?

The increasing social visibility of Bondage/Domination, Discipline/submission and Sadism/Masochism (BDSM) within Western society has placed pressure on the criminal law to account for why consensual BDSM activities continue to be criminalised where they involve the infliction of even minor injuries on participants. With moralistic and paternalistic justifications for criminalisation falling out of favour, one key justification that is gaining traction within international commentary on BDSM is the “bogus BDSM argument”. The bogus BDSM argument contends that BDSM activities should be criminalised because otherwise false claims of BDSM will be used by defendants to excuse or minimise their criminal liability for nonconsensual abuse. This article refutes this argument by showing how it relies on premises that are unjustifiable, illogical and irrelevant. This article concludes that the decriminalisation of BDSM would not permit nonconsensual abuse so long as legal officials were equipped with sufficient knowledge about the norms and conventions of BDSM culture.

     

Death and Us

As Leon Kass has noted, the conquest of illness and death has long been “the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.” But it is unstated no more. Since the late 1990s, a new generation of scientists and enthusiasts has emerged to proclaim the feasibility and desirability of radical life extension. What they promise is not just longer life, better health, and heightened vitality, but a transformation of ourselves into the sort of beings we have long wished to be, but have repeatedly failed to become: beings who are completely fulfilled and living in perfect harmony with others. Despite the obvious and profound appeal of such a fantasy, attempts to realize it, even if successful scientifically, might prove to be disastrous culturally, for reasons that go beyond concerns about the alteration of existing social structures. Ultimately, as Freud argued, life might well become stagnant, “shallow and empty,” while the fear of death might become all the more crippling.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Learning from Administrators' Predictions of Citizen Perceptions

Public agencies use surveys to solicit feedback from citizens and targeted customer groups, but many experts question whether the results of these surveys are valuable. This paper explores how a recent innovation in citizen surveys—asking public administrators to predict how citizens will respond to survey questions—may be used to increase that value and, at the same time, provide additional data of interest on its own account. The innovation is explored through two surveys: (1) a public opinion poll of Georgia residents conducted by the authors for the Georgia Department of Transportation in January 2004, and (2) a brief survey of that agency's administrators asking for their predictions of public opinion. The prediction process appeared to increase the agency's interest in the resident survey. The findings document the frequent superiority of groups—what Surowiecki terms "the wisdom of crowds"—over individuals in predicting public opinion.     

Unanimous decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court: Case stimuli and judicial attitudes

Although behavioral scholars have devoted much time and energy to attempting to explain decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court, they have virtually ignored the unanimous decision. We investigated the Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts and discovered that the liberal outcome was more successful in the unanimous cases whether those cases involve civil liberties or economic liberalism and whether they were decisions to reverse or decisions to affirm. We also ascertained that the ideological position that tended to win in the unanimous reverse cases was related to the ideological position that tended to win in the nonunanimous reverse cases, but that no such relationship was present in the two kinds of affirm cases. These two findings are in conformity with a psychometric model, which posits that the relative position of judicial attitudes and case stimuli determines the vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.