Since the publication of my letter on the prevention of violence against women movement and the broader cause of gender equality, I have been accused of incoherence, indifference, irrational venting, indulging in personal insult and basically, outright stupidity.

Alina Rastam (AR), L Jau (AJ) and Lillian Tan (LT), firmly believe that I have made no discernible point worth responding to.

Part of this might be due to the inappropriate title. I did not set out to defend men, but only to encourage rationality.

Others who read my letter suggested that perhaps my arguments were too complex or my writing style too difficult. This might explain why AR, AJ and LT, in general, tended to pick bits and pieces to react to rather than dealing with my arguments as a whole.

In fact there were three; one criticism and two suggestions as to how to construct more arresting arguments in favour of these causes.

  • I criticised AR's proposed strategy of resorting to 'extreme' measures to encourage support via illegitimate persuasive means. I said that violence against women and the cause of gender equality reside in matters of principle and so require principled argument.

    There is no room for hyperbole and irrationality if genuine support is to be garnered. People should be offered something that they can think about, rather than blind claims they are expected to unreflectively accept by understanding the big picture via intellectual osmosis.

  • I argued that there are reasons for thinking that the grounds we now adopt in moral, political and legal reasoning may need re-examination. A more enlightened view of these grounds might reduce the incidence of decisions that continue to subjugate or inadequately protect women.

  • I suggested an argument which holds that these grounds per se (such as fault, blame or responsibility) treat women unequally when they have to express their experiences in way that denies its distinct qualities. I said that this arises from forcing their views into a male-dominated understanding of these concepts. The bus example was meant to illustrate this point. I questioned whether the second argument was already broad enough to encompass this one, as part of a more general push for democratic liberalism.

I do not wish to engage the other varied claims against me, since I believe that it is possible to simply lift lines in my letter to show that they have completely misunderstood my point. So to negate the charge of indifference, as one example, I said:

'the causes Alina wishes to defend are important ones with complex roots that need to be addressed by arguments that are matching in quality."

I would have thought this sufficient as an expression that these causes are everybody's business. Nevertheless, to adopt a line by line refutation in this manner would be unduly embarrassing to these writers and unnecessarily self-indulgent. I leave discerning readers to make up their own minds about what I did or did not say.

Perhaps I could have been more polite but my point remains the same. The violence against women movement and the gender equality cause needs arguments of suitable complexity, intellectual quality and intuitive appeal which match its importance if people are to be engaged by it.

I now suspect that these writers are labouring from a logical misconception that infects their overall argumentative strategy. They believe that the frequency of violence against women, or instances of gender inequality explains why these causes are so important.

It does not because the claim about its morality, and consequent gravity, need a separate moral argument that is grounded in value judgments. Facts usually describe something we can apprehend with the senses whereas values are statements about what is good or bad. There are no moral facts that make value statements true or false. Instead, their truth is dependent upon other more abstract claims about good or bad.

X kills Y is a fact. X's act is morally wrong is a value judgment. The second statement does not follow from the first. It would be odd to assert that murder is wrong because people happen to die. We say it is wrong on the possible argument that human lives have intrinsic value.

We use moral principles to make judgments about facts. We do not use facts alone to support value judgments because facts and values are logically distinct (see the naturalistic fallacy and David Hume, 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding').

That is one main reason why I am insisting on the need for a suitable argument grounded in principle. That would add some of the intellectual respectability violence against women and gender equality cause so desperately needs.

AR, AJ and LT appear to believe that if only the rest of us could apprehend the facts about violence against women, in the way that they have due to their own experiences and perspectives (whether due to their qualifications, involvement with violence against women or gender), we will see that the movement needs support. This is just another expression of the naturalistic fallacy.

When people ask why they should support these causes, it will not do to point to figures and statistics or to ask what if it is your mother or daughter who is violated. There needs to be some account of why the violation is wrong.

Even if these facts are attempts at eliciting moral intuitions, these intuitions need explanation which require a suitable value driven argument, like one premised on some conception of equality; another value-based argument.

Even if my arguments were difficult (and I cannot believe readers of malaysiakini are that intellectually limited) there is no reason why public debate, especially on matters as crucial and nettlesome as these, should not be of a high quality.

A crucial advancement of these issues is to avoid oversimplification which only makes people believe the issue is more straight-forward than it is. We need to reject an approach which encourages sophomoric, illogical and prejudicial reactions, rather than thought-out responses.