重口味研究:如何看待人獸戀?

I have a very 2014 question for you: How would you respond if you found out that a man living down the street regularly has sexual intercourse with a horse?

我有一個非常適合在2014年提出的問題：如果你發現住在同一條街上的鄰居定期和一匹馬性交，你會作何反應？

Would you be morally disgusted? Consider him and his behavior an abomination? Turn him in to the police? (This would be an option in the roughly three-quarters of states that — for now — treat bestiality as a felony or misdemeanor.)

你會不會產生道德層面的厭惡感？將他和他的行爲視爲變態？會不會讓警察逮捕他？（這個選項可以在大概三分之一的州得以實現-目前這些州將人獸性交視作一項重罪或者品行不端罪。

Or would you perhaps suppress your gag reflex and try hard to be tolerant, liberal, affirming, supportive? Maybe you'd even utter the slogan that deserves to be emblazoned over our age as its all-purpose motto and mantra: Who am I to judge?

或者你也許會壓制住你的嘔吐反射症狀並努力想要對這種行爲表達容忍，自由主義，肯定，甚至支持態度?也許你甚至會吼出一句在我們這個時代備受推崇，多用途的口號和咒語：我又有什麼資格來評判別人呢？

Thanks to New York magazine, which recently ran a completely nonjudgmental 6,200-word interview with a "zoophile" who regularly enjoys sex with a mare — unironic headline: "What it's like to date a horse" — these questions have been much on my mind.

真要感謝《紐約雜誌》。它於近期刊登了一篇6200字的非主觀報道。它採訪了一位名爲“zoophile”的人，他定期同一匹母驢進行性交-採訪報道的題目頗具諷刺意義：同一匹馬約會是什麼感受。我近期一直在想着這些問題。

They should be on yours, too.

你們也真應該思考一下。

Because this is a very big deal, in cultural and moral terms.

這是一件大事，不論是文化層面還是道德層面。

No, not the fact of bestiality, which (like incest) has always been with us, but the fact of an acclaimed, mainstream publication treating it as a matter of complete moral indifference. (Aside, of course, from the requisite concern about animal abuse — a nonhuman analog to the pervasive emphasis on consent as the only relevant moral criterion for judging sexual behavior. The interview dispenses with this worry by informing us that the zoophile regularly brings his equine lover to orgasm orally — and that she often initiates acts of intimacy, showing that she appears to enjoy their sexual interactions.)

不，困擾我們的並不是人獸性交這件事（類似亂倫），而是一股收到讚揚的，主流出版物將這種事情視作對於道德的完全無視。（當然，除此之外。關於這件事情的爭議還有： 對於這個非人類代替物會產生動物虐待行爲的普遍擔心，到普遍將同意與否視爲唯一一個評判性行爲的相關道德標準。受訪者讓我們排除了這種擔心，他表示，他通過口交定期給他的馬愛人性高潮。並且他的馬兒會經常模仿親密的行爲，已示自己對於這種性交的喜愛。

Am I worried that large numbers of people will soon choose to shack up with their pets or farm animals? Not at all. I can't imagine that very many people will ever be drawn to bestiality, no matter how casually it is treated in the media.

我會擔心有很多人會選擇“搞上”他們的寵物或家畜嗎？完全不。無論媒體對獸交的態度如何隨便，我都不認爲會有多少人被吸引。

Why, then, is the New York interview a big deal? Because it's perhaps the most vivid sign yet that, in effect, the United States (and indeed the entire Western world) is running an experiment — one with very few, if any, antecedents in human history. The experiment will test what happens when a culture systematically purges all publicly affirmed notions of human flourishing, virtue and vice, elevation and degradation.

然而，爲什麼這種現象被紐約媒體採訪成一個大新聞？因爲它也許是最生動的跡象表明，美國（實質是整個西方世界）實際上正在運行一個實驗，一個很少甚至未曾出現過人類歷史先例的實驗。這個實驗將測試當一個文化去系統地，全面地否認所有人們公認的價值觀，善惡觀，榮辱觀時，會發生什麼。

Moral and religious traditionalists have seen this coming and warned about its consequences for years. And indeed, they are the ones raising the loudest ruckus about the New York interview.

道德和宗教上的保守人士已經預見到這種情形並在多年來一直警告其後果。事實上，他們也是對紐約的採訪反響最大的。

I share some of their concerns. But there are at least two problems with their analysis of the experiment.

我對他們的擔心有一些贊同，但他們的實驗分析至少存在兩個問題。

First, the trads are wrong to blame the purging of publicly affirmed notions of human flourishing on the spread of relativism. Viewed from inside traditionalist notions of virtue and vice, a culture that seeks to redefine "normal" to include zoophilia might seem like a culture defined by relativism. But it isn't. Rather, it's a culture fervently devoted to the moral principle of equal recognition and affirmation — in a word, to an absolute ethic of niceness. Moral condemnation can be mean, and therefore it's morally wrong — that's the way growing numbers of Americans think about these issues.

首先，傳統人士不應該把大衆價值觀的丟失歸咎於相對主義的傳播。從傳統觀念上美德和惡習的角度來看，一個試圖將人獸交重新定義爲“正常”的文明似乎是由相對主義定義的。但它並不是，相反，這個文明熱烈地忠於某些道德準則，而這些道德準則基於公衆的普遍認知與許可——總而言之，這個文明忠於絕對意義上的美德。道德上的譴責可以很殘忍，因此它在道德上是錯誤的——這正是越來越多的美國人在思考這些問題時用的方式。

Of course, these nonjudgmental Americans would think differently — they would continue to publicly affirm notions of human flourishing and condemn acts that diverge from the norm — if they confidently believed in the foundation of these judgments. But increasingly, they do not. Judeo-Christian piety used to supply it for many, but no longer.

當然，這些不偏不倚的人們有着不同的見解，他們將繼續肯定人類公認的價值觀並譴責與之相違背的行爲——只要他們能肯定地相信着這些判斷的基準。然而這樣的人卻越來越少。猶太教和基督教帶來的虔誠信仰提供了許多道德基準，但已不再有過去的影響力。

Then there's the option of basing our judgments on what conservative bioethicist Leon Kass once called "the wisdom of repugnance" — that is, on our commonsense moral intuitions. But as the liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued, the "ick factor" just isn't a reliable basis on which to make moral evaluations. And we know that from lived experience. Interracial romances once seemed icky, but then they didn't. Next it was homosexual acts that passed through the looking glass from repellant to respectable. Faced with this slippage and uncertainty — with a long string of reversals in moral judgment — it's no wonder that the ethic of unconditional niceness increasingly trumps all other considerations.

然後，出現了一種選擇，讓我們的判斷基於保守派生物倫理學家Leon Kass一度所說的“厭惡的智慧”——就是說，基於我們的常識中的道德直覺。但如自由主義哲學家Martha Nussbaum所辯駁的那樣，是否感覺“令人作嘔”並非一個可靠的道德評估依據。我們從各種生活經驗中已知道這一點。不同人種間的愛情曾經受到厭惡，後來則不會。然後同性戀行爲也在經歷從被排斥到被尊重的過程。面對這樣的易變與不確定性——帶有一大堆觀點相抵的道德觀——難怪有關無條件美德的倫理正日益壓倒所有其他的觀念。

And that brings us to the second way in which the trads go wrong — in speaking confidently about how we're "galloping toward Gomorrah." This implies that they know exactly where the experiment is going to end up. The truth is that they — and we — have no idea at all. Because there has never been a human society built exclusively on a morality of rights (individual consent) and an ethic of niceness, with no overarching vision of a higher human good to override or compete with it.

而這讓我們見識到了傳統出現問題的第二個面向—— 自信的談論我們如何”快速的接近罪惡之城”。這意味着他們知道這個實驗的最終結局是怎樣的。真相是他們——還有我們——根本就不知道結局是怎樣的。因爲人類歷史中從來沒有出現過單單以權利道德（個體的同意）和友善倫理爲基礎的人類社會，沒有一個更高人類善行的總體設想來推翻它或者與它進行競爭。

As I noted above, I find it hard to imagine that more than a tiny fraction of human beings will ever choose to engage in sex acts with animals, even if and when the taboo has been thoroughly deconstructed and the behavior mainstreamed by dozens of sympathetic stories in the media. I suspect the same is true about incest and polyamory. Most people will continue to live boring, mundane sex lives, monogamously committed to one human being of the opposite sex at a time.

正如我在上面所提到的，我根本無法想像會有很多人願意與動物性交，即使這樣的禁忌被重新結構以及主流媒體對這樣的行爲表示同情。我覺得這樣的道理同樣可以應用在亂倫和一夫多妻制上。大多數人將繼續過無聊的世俗的性生活，並且堅持異性的一夫一妻制。

So what, then, is there to worry about? Why is this cultural experiment a big deal?

所以還有什麼好擔憂的？這樣的文化實驗又有什麼了不起的呢？

Because it stands as a stunning testament to our ignorance about ourselves. Roughly 2,500 years since Socrates first raised the question of how we should live, several centuries since the Enlightenment encouraged us to seek and promulgate scientific knowledge about the universe and human nature, Western humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that we haven't got a clue about an answer. There is no consensus whatsoever about what ways of life are intrinsically good or bad for human beings.

因爲它對於我們自身的無知給予一個驚人的證明。大約2500年前蘇格拉底首次提出我們應該如何生活的問題，幾個世紀以來的啓蒙文化促進我們去尋找和傳播關於宇宙和人類的本性，西方人文科學好像得出了結論那就是我們還沒有得到最終的答案。關於人類如何去生活在本質上沒有評判的標準。爲什麼要結婚和有孩子呢?如果這是你想要的,當然聽起來很不錯。你準備好戀愛多元化了嗎?只要每個人都同意,又有樂趣。那麼和馬談戀愛做愛能怎麼樣呢?關鍵要確保沒有人會傷害,傷害是狹隘的定義(包括物理傷害和侵犯個人喜好)。

That's all we've got. Or at least all we're left with, now that we've shed the (ostensibly) discredited notions of human virtue that most people once affirmed.

這是我們所擁有的一切文化。或者至少這些都被我們繼承了,既然我們已經擺脫了虛僞的人類表面觀念和美德。

Is that good enough? Can we do without a publicly affirmed vision of human flourishing? Fulfilling personal preferences (whatever they happen to be), seeking consent in all interactions, and abiding by the imperative of universal niceness — is that sufficient to bring happiness? Or will a world that tells us in a million ways that we are radically undetermined in our ends leave us feeling empty, lost, alone, unmoored, at sea, spiritually adrift?

那樣足夠好嗎？我們可以脫離大衆觀念去那樣做嗎?滿足個人偏好(無論他們發生什麼),尋求交流的一致,尊重普世法則——這足以帶來幸福嗎?或者我們根本無法確定我們來自哪裏去向何方(結局的無法預料)，那種空虛，失落，孤獨，無依無靠就像在大海中漂流然而這個世界用一百萬種方式告訴我們那根本就無法解決。

I have no idea.

搞不懂哎。

But I suspect we're going to find out soon enough.

但是我們會盡快搞清楚的。