An interesting interview with an author of A Natural History of Rape.
It's very unfortunate that words like "normal" are used, since the word has
both a merely statistical historical meaning -- as they use it when they say
rape is "normal" -- and a moral meaning, which they emphatically don't use.
Frankly, social scientists will often enough intentionally conflate these
uses when it suits their own ideological views (thereby deceptively,
fallaciously, and extremely subtly transferring whatever strength their
empirical claims seem to have to their ideological views. Sexologists [who
typically seem barely to be scientists, if at all, and certainly not
philosophers, though they play them on TV] in particular seem to have a deep
passion for this). But this time that common erroneous but "useful"
conflation is making a theory even more controversial than it would
otherwise be.
John
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion.jsp?id=ns222611
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