Morals Aside

Karzai and Women's Rights

What can Karzai do about the treatment of women?

Morals aside, permitting the rape of women by their husbands may be preferable (you might like it better) than the alternatives. Karzai may well calculate (and you might too) that denying Afghan men what they consider to be their natural right to sexual pleasure in their wives, by force if necessary, will contribute to his losing the coming election. You might prefer to have Karzai in office even if it means that women are going to be raped by their husbands.

Someone has to be president of Afghanistan, and assuming Karzai alienates Afghan men in this fashion, the next president would then be much more likely be a staunch defender of a husband’s right to rape his wife.

Second, it may well be the case that men generally – like many animals – are likely to become violent if their sexual needs are frustrated. And it’s not clear that the options open to Canadian/American men, the option to copulate with many women other than one’s wife, is available to these poor men. Understanding this forces us to consider how the denial of sex by one’s wife might strike an Afghan man as a more serious violation of his ‘natural rights’ than it would seem to you.

This in mind you may well want to reflect on the problem of violence in Afghanistan.

Finally, a plausible reading of the Koran is that a man does have a right to copulate with his wife at will, whenever he pleases, during most of the month. That, coupled with the extremely harsh local traditions of punishment, an Afghan man has local morality entirely on his side. Indeed, the lower the level of education of an Afghan man the stronger the convictions about his morality are likely to be. Hence his convictions are likely to be well founded from a cultural point of view and to be at least as strong, or stronger, than yours.

Morality aside, we should think twice about imposing our morality in this matter.

In all this we need to remember that there is no practical way to judge which of two moralities is right – except by imposing your own.