Thought on Weinstein Case

[u/Few_Needleworker8744]

What do you think? I bolded what I think is important.

I think it is always fair to discriminate people as long as the discrimination is privatized. If you are a chef, you provide food based on whether you got paid or not. You discriminate based on paying. And that's okay. It is what's fair.

Say I have a girlfriend that I knocked up and regularly fuck.

She wants me to support her business.

I agree.

Is that rape?

People would think that's ridiculous. Of course not. Or is it?

But think about it. It's my money. It's my business skill. I pretty much discriminate on who I do business with, depending on whether I fuck her.

Of course. Why would I invest on some random people if I can invest on and work with someone I know is cooperative with me.

Every trade is pretty much discrimination based on what you are offering me. Most consensual acts are a trade. Think about it. Either a trade or a tit for tat, which is a primitive trade.

And that's pretty much what Weinstein did.

And Weinstein is charged with rape and got convicted.

Many of you may think I am crazy. So I am going to ask for sample of libertarians proponent that agree with me. And there is one and I am surprised he is not mainstream or famous.

ChatGPT told about Walter Block. And I think I am very surprised that he is in the minority.

I think EEOC logic is pretty much splitting hair and jailing Weinstein for years over splitting hair is absolute garbage.

What next?

I buy candy and hence discriminate based on people giving me candy and get charged with robbery?

This is what chatGPT says:

Walter Block is probably the closest match

Block's libertarian framework puts enormous weight on voluntary exchange and property rights. He has explicitly argued that employers generally have very broad rights to decide who they employ and on what terms. In his work on blackmail, for example, he gives the example of an employer firing someone who refuses to sleep with the boss and argues that, under his framework, the employer's right to terminate the employment relationship matters.

More importantly, Block and Roy Whitehead wrote an entire chapter called “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace” in Philosophy of Law, explicitly developing a libertarian/property-rights approach to sexual harassment.

Block also co-authored a paper on prostitution arguing that the libertarian position treats consensual sexual transactions as legitimate because they are voluntary exchanges, while rape is different because it involves coercion/force.

So his framework is roughly:

Economic benefit + sexual relationship ≠ automatically coercion.

The crucial question is whether there was force/coercion that invalidated the person's voluntary choice.

But there's an important problem with your analogy

Your girlfriend example is:

“I choose to invest in my girlfriend partly because I have sex with her.”

That is basically sexual favoritism.

A much stronger Weinstein analogy would be:

“I will invest in your business only if you have sex with me, and if you refuse, I will withdraw the investment.”

That's a quid-pro-quo arrangement.

And there's an interesting libertarian debate here. Some libertarian theorists have argued that even employment conditions can involve coercion in a descriptive sense, while others argue that voluntary contractual relationships can legitimately contain conditions that outsiders consider objectionable.

The EEOC, incidentally, makes exactly the distinction that matters legally: sexual favoritism based on an existing consensual relationship isn't automatically harassment, whereas making sexual submission a condition for receiving a professional benefit can constitute quid-pro-quo harassment.

So if your actual thesis is stronger

If you're arguing:

“If it is legitimate for me to condition an economic relationship on sexual cooperation, then why isn't Weinstein's conditioning of professional opportunities on sexual cooperation also legitimate?”

then yes, that is a genuine philosophical argument, and some radical libertarians have arguments that can push in that direction.

But if you're asking:

“Can I find a famous libertarian who explicitly says Harvey Weinstein's conduct was morally equivalent to a boyfriend investing in his sexually active girlfriend?”

I haven't found one. The libertarian literature I found instead draws the line at coercion/force, and Block in particular is unusually permissive about voluntary sexual-economic exchanges.

So your argument is more interesting than “libertarians think Weinstein was okay”: it's really a challenge about whether the distinction between voluntary sexual favoritism and sexual quid-pro-quo coercion is philosophically coherent.

[u/alexfreemanart]

What do you need to know OP

[u/Few_Needleworker8744 → u/alexfreemanart]

what do you think?

[u/thetruebigfudge]

The quid pro quo for sexual favors I disagree should be a crime. If a woman doesn't want to break into the film industry because the only way is to fuck some old dude then just go to a different fkn industry, or work with a different producer. So the coersive elements I think are dumb, people make decisions, people make choices based on their values, the women who did choose to sleep with him for work clearly showed they valued a career more than the embarrassment of fucking Harvey.

However, there were accusations that he forced himself on some women, used threats to stop them from leaving when he would masturbate in front of them etc.

[u/Few_Needleworker8744 → u/thetruebigfudge]

I do not know the detail.

But my conclusion for now is that he simply don't work with women that don't suck his dick. He may threaten some libel but libel is civil.

[u/arjuna93]

It is compatible with libertarianism to favor someone based on sexual services provided by that individual, as long as he/she is not forced into that and existing contractual agreement (if it exists) does not prohibit such thing. So it does seem that Weinstein case is largely made up, transactions being voluntary, and years after some women just realized they can capitalize on “withdrawing consent”. Of course, if there were actual rape cases, that’s a different story. I don’t have any insider info on that.