Steven Landsburg, an economics professor at the University of Rochester, has a little though experiment for us all. I'll include the link, but it goes a little something like this:
One person has an aversion to pornography, and absolutely hates knowing that other people view it. He inists that he has been inflicted with a "psychic harm." A second person, this time an environmentalist, is outraged by the desecration of the environment and, likewise, suffers a "psychic harm" from this. The third person is passed out and then raped by a handful of individuals a la the Steubenville victim. She has no memory of the incident, suffers no physical trauma, does not become pregnant and does not suffer from a sexually-transmitted disease afterward. Since there is no tangible harm, the harm to this woman is comparable to the harm done to the first and second individuals. Therefore one should doubt the reasons for criminalizing such rapes when the rapists take care to cover up their crime. Or, as Professor Landsburg puts it: "As long as I’m safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why
shouldn’t the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits?" He goes on to compare being raped while unconscious to "trillions of photons" penetrating his body whenever someone on his street turns the porch light on.
The article, called "Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville" can be found
here.
