Winter’s Haven

Suppose that your next-door neighbor beats and rapes his wife. What is the ethically appropriate response on your part? The commonly accepted answer to this question, with which I agree completely, is to forcibly subdue the husband and lock him in a cage, both to prevent him from committing further violence and as a punishment to deter others. (Or rather, the standard response is to hire a police force to do this on your behalf.)

Now, what if someone who lives a great distance from you beats and rapes his wife? What if there’s a faraway land where this behavior is common and widely condoned by other men? As the Guardian newspaper reports, these are not hypothetical questions.

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands

…effectively legalizing rape within marriage, which is all the more horrifying for the fact that women in Afghanistan typically have little say over whether or to whom they will be married. The law also contains various other provisions eviscerating the legal rights of women in that country.

One response to those questions, and a particularly odious one, is to assert that although beating and raping one’s wife is unacceptable in our culture, it is acceptable in their culture, and we have no basis to claim that our culture is better or to impose it upon others.This argument implicitly allows their culture to be defined by a subset of the population (i.e. male clerics and their male followers), who happen to be the same group imposing their will on others by force. Afghani women presumably have a somewhat different opinion on being starved and raped by their husbands.

In principle, our response to these faraway violations of human rights should be no different than our response to violations of human rights committed next door. In practice, however, there are numerous problems which may lead a consequentialist to conclude that invading a foreign country to protect half of its population from violence at the hands of the other other half might not actually be a great idea. It’s hard to alter foreign cultures by force, and it’s easy to spend a lot of money and get a great many innocent people killed while trying.

In this case, however, I’d say intervening to protect Afghani women is the correct thing to do, since we’ve already invaded and occupied Afghanistan. That is, we’ve already paid a large part of the costs associated with the humanitarian intervention in question. At this point, allowing the Afghanistan government to legalize spousal rape is pretty much on par with, say, the Northern states fighting the Civil War and then not bothering to make slavery illegal.

One might argue that US military is not in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, but rather to stamp out the allies and supporters of the 9/11 terrorists — and we don’t want to stay there longer than we have to just to protect Shia women. I would suggest, however, that using religion to justify violence against women and committing violence against foreigners in the name of god are really two different manifestations of the same underlying problem. It’s not just a freak coincidence that the Taliban welcomed Al-Qaeda into Afghanistan.

The unfortunate fact is that much of Afghanistan is immersed in a deeply illiberal culture which is disturbingly willing to condone violence against anyone outside a narrow in-group demarcated by religion, gender, and tribe. As this horrendous law demonstrates, it’s hardly unthinkable that the current Afghani government could morph into a second incarnation of the Taliban. Protecting the basic rights of Afghani women is essential to changing that culture for the better, and the United States has every reason to do so.

This entry was posted 2009-Aug-18 and is filed under Ethics, Politics, Religion. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.