But whether or not we have the right to judge another person isn’t the only reason we discuss the morality of actions: we also do it in order to more rationally police our own actions, and I think this discussion is more germane from that perspective: after all, I don’t know about anyone else’s weird thoughts, only my own.
My concern is that I think it is the worst kind of hubris to assume we have absolute control over the relationship between our thought and our actions. We are not entirely rational creatures, however much we may strive to be. As such, if you regularly indulge in graphic fantasies about murdering members of a minority group, I don’t think you can be sure that doesn’t have any impact on how you view members of that group, and you have to either sucessfully stop those thoughts OR you shouldn’t ever take a job or put yourself in a positoin that would involve making judgements about whether or not you should act violently towards members of that group (e.g…, become a cop in an area with minorities, which is everywhere). If your sexual fantasies are predominatly rape fantasies, you should never be on a jury in a rape trial. If (as is already mentioned) you have pedophilliac fantasies, you limit your contact with children. It may well be that your actions and decsions won’t be affected by your thoughts, but it’s the height of arrogance, and immoral, to risk someone else’s wellbeing on your own judgement of your judgement.
I think “immorality” can be ascribed to people, but only on the basis of immoral acts. I simply don’t see the basis for calling someone immoral on the basis of thoughts, especially thoughts that they have no intention or desire to act out. If I was making plans to commit genocide, or something, that would be immoral - it’s not like you’re morally neutral right up until the event. But if I have no intention, or even any desire, to do evil, I don’t see how thinking about it is evil.
What if I recognize that my thoughts about rape are thoughts about an evil activity, and in real life I have no desire to see it happen, though? You haven’t addressed this yet (and admittedly I’ve been doing a lot of question-posing, so I can see it might have been lost in the shuffle) but that’s the central issue when we’re talking about someone with rape fantasies.
I think there’s a meaningful separation between fantasy and reality, and that I can fantasize about something that I (1) would never like to see/experience and (2) would certainly never consider doing, since both I wouldn’t enjoy it in real life and I think it’s immoral. A lot of people have fantasies about rape - I’ve made a logical case in this thread for the difference between rape fantasy and reality on the part of the person who fantasizes about it. But the people who fantasize about committing rape also understand it as only a fantasy and simply would not want to do it in real life. Evil Captor has no desire to actually have sex with an unwilling participant - it’s something hot only in fantasy, since you can ignore the realistic aspects of hurting someone very badly in fantasy. In the real world, most of us find the thought of rape repugnant, and those who have sexual fantasies about it are the same way. It’s something only hot in fantasy, not in reality.
I mean, for a possibly stretched comparison, I’m a fan of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I’ve had (non-sexual, duh) fantasies about living that sort of exciting life - who doesn’t want to be all-important and lead a life of never-ending adventure? More realistically, her life is pretty miserable most of the time. I understand that I would not enjoy actually being Buffy and slaying vampires - that it’d be a lot more frightening and sad than fun, and I have no desire to be in that kind of danger - but at the same time, it’s fun to fantasize about. It’s another example of something I can enjoy in fantasy while fully cognizant of the fact that were it possible to make it real, I wouldn’t enjoy at all.
But what about people with considerably more deviant fantasies? Going back to the above examples about raping and murdering children, divulging that you fantasize about that, even if you like it only in your imagination, is never going to be socially acceptable. Do you think that it should be? Should people (outside of whatever crowd enjoys the fantasies) discuss that, and accept it? I don’t think those fantasies are particularly immoral either, but realistically they can’t be expressed, and I’m not sure they’re not something better kept private anyway.
These fantasies are not uncommon, either. There’s plenty of erotic fiction on asstr dot org devoted to pretty horrifying themes. Simply realistically, there must be a lot of people interesting in thinking about these things but not doing them - else, there would be a lot more murder/pedophilia/attempts to create real life centaur sex slaves.
Yes, of course, especially if you rely on it if you actually do rescue someone from a burning building. Thinking along the lines of “What would I do if I were faced with this particular moral dilemma?” is something that I would encourage, and I accept that fantasies can be moral as well as immoral. I’m sorry if I interpreted your message as less serious than it was intended to be - a very rare occurrence on the Internet.
And, I’ll repeat my view that bondage fantasies aren’t immoral. I enjoy them myself.
I would agree with that 100%. There’s a distinction to be made between thinking about evil, and wanting to commit evil acts; would you regard a desire to do evil as evil? If so, we’re in agreement.
Something I would whole-heartedly support. Provided that they wanted to be sex slaves, of course.
Oh come on that’s just semantics. All you’re saying then is that deviant thoughts are correctly described as immoral because their content is immoral, but not because it’s immoral to think about them.
If I think about the color orange then my thoughts are orange and so am I? What kind of logic is that?
I think it was more of an invitation than a challenge. That happens a lot in GD, from what I’ve seen. There is a rule against trying to get two other posters to fight in the Pit, which I think you might be thinking of. At any rate, I don’t think anyone was demanding that you defend yourself, only that you had an opinion on the subject, and might be interested in discusing it. If you’re not, that’s cool. I’ll assume that means I win.
I’m not sure what you mean. I would say “Deviant thoughts are correctly described as immoral because it’s immoral to think them”. I know it’s tautological, but the essential point is my removal of the word “about” from your sentence. I don’t believe that it’s immoral to think about evil. I do believe that it’s immoral to think about doing evil, and enjoying or affirming those thoughts.
If you’re thinking about being orange, about how much enjoyment you would gain from drinking nothing but carrot juice for a month, then, yes, your thoughts are “orange”, or perhaps “orangophilic”, and you are rightly characterized as an “orange-lover”. But if you’re only thinking about orange itself, hating and rejecting it in favour of the Divine Purple, then you’re in the clear.
So say we’re discussing Deviant Dean. Deviant Dean jerks off and thinks about strangling baby ducks while he rapes them. Deviant Dean has zero desire to do it in real life, zero intention, but he enjoys masturbating while imagining it. Immoral or no?
I’d agree that an unshared fantasy might be morally nuetral, provided that the fantasizer doesn’t judge themselves.
But I think that any fantasy which becomes known to others tends to be judged by other’s (or possibly just the prevailing community’s) moral standards.
OK, but then you’re saying that thoughts are immoral because thinking about them (in a certain way anyway) is an immoral act. Earlier you said they’re not an act they just are immoral because their content meets (or rather doesn’t meet) certain standards.
So, if I get you right, thinking about immoral acts with pleasure is immoral. And so I ask again - why?
That depends: could Dean’s fantasizing develop into a desire to do it in real life?
A thought experiment: What if I were to take an act that I currently have no desire to do, or even to think about (say, rape, or sex with children, or sex with animals, or whatever) and deliberately fantasize about it every night for the next couple of weeks. I make my fantasy as appealing and erotic and attractive to myself as possible. At the end of the two weeks, will I be more likely than I was before to actually do the act in question than I was before the two weeks?
What if it was an act that I did start out with some desire to do: Would my fantasizing feed that desire, or would it provide a safe outlet for it.
A related question: what about “child porn” in which no actual children are involved—say, text descriptions or cartoons or CGI or whatever: should it be made illegal and/or considered morally repugnant? I don’t see how an answer of “yes” could be consistent with a belief that fantasies are morally neutral.
If those “zeros” are accurate, if Dean is, in real life, a paid-up member of PETA, then, yes, I accept it’s not immoral. However, I find it hard to imagine someone finding pleasure in something that they consider morally repugnant. I would say that, if Dean felt that he’d enjoy raping baby ducks, but wasn’t prepared to do it because it was illegal (and I hope it is illegal), then his fantasies would still be immoral, and he would be doing the wrong thing in enjoying them. If he hated his fantasies, but felt compelled to indulge in them anyway, I would advise him to seek professional help; I wouldn’t regard him as immoral in that situation, just - sick, in a non-judgemental sense of the word.
Considered morally repugnant, yes. Illegal, no. I regard freedom of speech as one of the most important civil liberties, even if it means that people are allowed to say and draw things that I personally find offensive.
I dunno. Ascribing morality to fantasies seems like an exercise in pointlessness to me, frankly. Fantasies don’t affect reality unless acted out; it seems to me, then, that the “morality” of such fantasies is similarly unreal. Ascribing morality to an imaginary act would seem to be akin in some sense to considering the physical properties of an imaginary object. Yes, on paper you can make very accurate predictions of how a given mass might behave under certain conditions, just as you can evaluate the morality of an actual event by envisioning it mentally. But to say that the fantasy itself is intrinsically moral or immoral is like saying that an imaginary mountain sitting on your head actually makes you heavier.
And if one does wish to go to all the effort of linking moral value to hypothetical situations, how much weight should they carry compared to real situations? If it’s infinitesimally small, then what’s the point of bringing the subject up at all? On the other hand, if the value is even remotely comparable, then how much fantasy morality should equal real-life morality? How many imaginary rapes can you commit before you become less moral than a person who commits one actual rape? A hundred? A thousand? If I give eighty billion imaginary dollars to feed imaginary big-eyed starving orphans, am I more or less moral than a person who gives ten real dollars to feed one hungry person?
Hmm. How would you define the moral nature of the following?
For a couple years, a few of my friends and I were engaged in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where we all played evil characters. We murdered, robbed, tortured, sold drugs, traded slaves, and so forth. There was, so far as I know, no masturbation involved, but everyone who played had a great time, and we delighted in topping each other for some particularly vile or depraved act in the game. Needless to say, none of us ever went out and engaged in any of these activities. It was a game, we recognized that the stuff we were doing in this fantasy world was reprehensible, but it was still a lot of fun to pretend to be a pack of arch-villains. When we got together on a weekend to play, were we committing an immoral act?
You’re right, an answer of “yes” would be absolutely inconsistent with that stance. Which is why my answer is “no, they should not be illegal.” But then, I’m very much the free speech absolutist.
Nobody yet has raised the spectre of Utilititarianism, but I think it’s been close to the surface for some time. It seems to me as though several participants in this debate regard “right” and “wrong” as something that can be objectively assessed based on the outcomes of a particular moral decision. Miller has already raised the objection to the Kantian view of morality, and I would be quite happy to reherse the standard arguments against the Benthamite view of it. However, that’s not to say it’s invalid - just to point out that it’s by no means a universal view of the general philosophic issue.
People do find pleasure in things they find morally repugnant and wouldn’t enjoy is the thing. I’m not sure how one could prove that fact, but it’s true that there’s a lot of people who fantasize about things they don’t want to do. Fantasizing about being raped is my logical example; I’ve been pointing this out - it’s logically impossible to want to be raped, but lots of people fantasize about it. That doesn’t mean they want to be raped in real life, since that’s contradictory.
So your dividing line is that it’s okay to fantasize about something you wouldn’t want to do in real life. It’s not okay to fantasize about something you would want to do but don’t because you’re scared of the legal consequences. I would agree that if the only thing stopping you from committing rape is fear of the law, you’re not a good person. I don’t think our views are really substantially different here.
But Dungeons & Dragons ™ was created by SATAN*!!! So, yes, you were immoral and Hell-bound even if you’d played good characters.
More seriously. If it’s true that you recognized your fantasy actions were reprehensible (and I have no doubt that you did), and if you enjoyed your weekends because you were having fun with your friends, rather than because you were having fantasies about murder, rape, and pillage, then, yes, you weren’t being immoral. There was an earlier post about people who enjoy slasher movies; this is something similar. IMO, enjoying and participating in depictions of evil is something different than desiring to be evil.
