重口味研究:如何看待人兽恋?

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?

我有一个非常适合在2014年提出的问题：如果你发现住在同一条街上的邻居定期和一匹马性交，你会作何反应？

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.)

你会不会产生道德层面的厌恶感？将他和他的行为视为变态？会不会让警察逮捕他？（这个选项可以在大概三分之一的州得以实现-目前这些州将人兽性交视作一项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?

或者你也许会压制住你的呕吐反射症状并努力想要对这种行为表达容忍，自由主义，肯定，甚至支持态度?也许你甚至会吼出一句在我们这个时代备受推崇，多用途的口号和咒语：我又有什么资格来评判别人呢？

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.

真要感谢《纽约杂志》。它于近期刊登了一篇6200字的非主观报道。它采访了一位名为“zoophile”的人，他定期同一匹母驴进行性交-采访报道的题目颇具讽刺意义：同一匹马约会是什么感受。我近期一直在想着这些问题。

They should be on yours, too.

你们也真应该思考一下。

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

这是一件大事，不论是文化层面还是道德层面。

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，困扰我们的并不是人兽性交这件事（类似乱伦），而是一股收到赞扬的，主流出版物将这种事情视作对于道德的完全无视。（当然，除此之外。关于这件事情的争议还有： 对于这个非人类代替物会产生动物虐待行为的普遍担心，到普遍将同意与否视为唯一一个评判性行为的相关道德标准。受访者让我们排除了这种担心，他表示，他通过口交定期给他的马爱人性高潮。并且他的马儿会经常模仿亲密的行为，已示自己对于这种性交的喜爱。

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.

我会担心有很多人会选择“搞上”他们的宠物或家畜吗？完全不。无论媒体对兽交的态度如何随便，我都不认为会有多少人被吸引。

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，为什么这种现象被纽约媒体采访成一个大新闻？因为它也许是最生动的迹象表明，美国（实质是整个西方世界）实际上正在运行一个实验，一个很少甚至未曾出现过人类历史先例的实验。这个实验将测试当一个文化去系统地，全面地否认所有人们公认的价值观，善恶观，荣辱观时，会发生什么。

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经预见到这种情形并在多年来一直警告其后果。事实上，他们也是对纽约的采访反响最大的。

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

我对他们的担心有一些赞同，但他们的实验分析至少存在两个问题。

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，传统人士不应该把大众价值观的丢失归咎于相对主义的传播。从传统观念上美德和恶习的角度来看，一个试图将人兽交重新定义为“正常”的文明似乎是由相对主义定义的。但它并不是，相反，这个文明热烈地忠于某些道德准则，而这些道德准则基于公众的普遍认知与许可——总而言之，这个文明忠于绝对意义上的美德。道德上的谴责可以很残忍，因此它在道德上是错误的——这正是越来越多的美国人在思考这些问题时用的方式。

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.

当然，这些不偏不倚的人们有着不同的见解，他们将继续肯定人类公认的价值观并谴责与之相违背的行为——只要他们能肯定地相信着这些判断的基准。然而这样的人却越来越少。犹太教和基督教带来的虔诚信仰提供了许多道德基准，但已不再有过去的影响力。

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.

然后，出现了一种选择，让我们的判断基于保守派生物伦理学家Leon Kass一度所说的“厌恶的智慧”——就是说，基于我们的常识中的道德直觉。但如自由主义哲学家Martha Nussbaum所辩驳的那样，是否感觉“令人作呕”并非一个可靠的道德评估依据。我们从各种生活经验中已知道这一点。不同人种间的爱情曾经受到厌恶，后来则不会。然后同性恋行为也在经历从被排斥到被尊重的过程。面对这样的易变与不确定性——带有一大堆观点相抵的道德观——难怪有关无条件美德的伦理正日益压倒所有其他的观念。

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.

而这让我们见识到了传统出现问题的第二个面向—— 自信的谈论我们如何”快速的接近罪恶之城”。这意味着他们知道这个实验的最终结局是怎样的。真相是他们——还有我们——根本就不知道结局是怎样的。因为人类历史中从来没有出现过单单以权利道德（个体的同意）和友善伦理为基础的人类社会，没有一个更高人类善行的总体设想来推翻它或者与它进行竞争。

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，我根本无法想像会有很多人愿意与动物性交，即使这样的禁忌被重新结构以及主流媒体对这样的行为表示同情。我觉得这样的道理同样可以应用在乱伦和一夫多妻制上。大多数人将继续过无聊的世俗的性生活，并且坚持异性的一夫一妻制。

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

所以还有什么好担忧的？这样的文化实验又有什么了不起的呢？

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.

因为它对于我们自身的无知给予一个惊人的证明。大约2500年前苏格拉底首次提出我们应该如何生活的问题，几个世纪以来的启蒙文化促进我们去寻找和传播关于宇宙和人类的本性，西方人文科学好像得出了结论那就是我们还没有得到最终的答案。关于人类如何去生活在本质上没有评判的标准。为什么要结婚和有孩子呢?如果这是你想要的,当然听起来很不错。你准备好恋爱多元化了吗?只要每个人都同意,又有乐趣。那么和马谈恋爱做爱能怎么样呢?关键要确保没有人会伤害,伤害是狭隘的定义(包括物理伤害和侵犯个人喜好)。

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.

这是我们所拥有的一切文化。或者至少这些都被我们继承了,既然我们已经摆脱了虚伪的人类表面观念和美德。

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?

那样足够好吗？我们可以脱离大众观念去那样做吗?满足个人偏好(无论他们发生什么),寻求交流的一致,尊重普世法则——这足以带来幸福吗?或者我们根本无法确定我们来自哪里去向何方(结局的无法预料)，那种空虚，失落，孤独，无依无靠就像在大海中漂流然而这个世界用一百万种方式告诉我们那根本就无法解决。

I have no idea.

搞不懂哎。

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

但是我们会尽快搞清楚的。