I think I agree, yes. I still can’t envisage someone in a non-pathological mental state fantasizing about something they wouldn’t want to do - in your example, I would have thought (but I may be wrong) that people can distinguish between an idealized “ravishment” fantasy and what actually being raped would involve, and consider the two to be different - but the basic point, that someone who has immoral desires and still encourages them, who “would want to do it but doesn’t because they’re scared of the legal consequences”, is evil, is something I would support.
People fantasize about having sex with people not their spouses all the time. I see no reason to believe that a fantasy on which a person never acts is immoral. There is a difference, by the way, between a simple fantasy regarding an act and the envy mentioned in the Ten Commandments and the lust mentioned by Jesus in Matthew 5:28. Envy is a destructive emotion that consumes one, interfering with one’s ability to live in the real world. The “lust” that Jesus condemns is more than a simple “I think she’s hot,” but, again, an all-consuming passion that affects one’s whole attitude for the world.
I see no reason to claim that a simple fantasy that does not extend to the level of changing one’s world view or wrenching all one’s thoughts to the coveted object rises (sinks?) to the level of immorality.
If a person entertains a fantasy that does not become an obssessive aspect of one’s life, I see no reason to slap labels of “moral” or “immoral” on it.
Precisely my opinion. I don’t think it’s relevant to look at things that are simple creations of the mind as moral or immoral issues. On the other hand, I would say that developing serious feelings for someone who’s not your spouse is a situation that can’t end well, and constantly fantasizing about another particular person is probably a good way to make that happen.
The operative word (from my perspective) being “constantly.” An individual fantasy is not moral or immoral. A pattern of behavior (including the entertaining of particular thoughts) that becomes obsessive or intrudes on one’s life outside the fantasy is no longer simply a fantasy and has moved on to a different sort of condition.
I am a female.
I have consistently extremely violent fantasies. We arn’t talking romantic “ravaging”. My fantasies switch back between being the victim and being the perpetrator. I have had fantasies along these lines ever since I was a child. I have not been abused and I enjoy a healthy and normal sex life as an adult. My partners know the nature of my fantasies and sometimes we play with them, but I rarely reveal the full depths and it doesn’t consitute a major part of my partnered sex life.
I am not evil. I deplore violence in real life, I am a pacifist, and I have donated time to anti-rape causes. I have zero desire to actually participate in these acts. It makes me cry when I hear about them happening in real life. I never have these thoughts outside of a sexual context. Beyond that, I am physically incapable of acting out on these fantasies. If I was given a person with no soul who was unable to feel pain and nobody would ever know, I still wouldn’t act them out. It’s just not a part of me outside of fantasizing. Fantasy is just an entirely different substance.
However, it is a part of my sexuality and I have no desire to give it up. Sex is a strange thing, and often reflects the deepest parts of us in wierd ways. Obviously some buried part of my ego has issues with power and probably a little worried about the power that people could have over me or my need to constantly control my life or something. I don’t question it, it doesn’t question me, and everyone gets along fine. I don’t think it’s something that I need professional help for. It doesn’t bother me. It never intrudes on my life. I don’t think it represents a fundamental unbalance, as much as some little quirk somewhere thats keeps getting played out in this wierd way.
You know, I wouldn’t (personally) even go that far in psychoanalyzing yourself. Sex is, like you say, a funny thing. And power relations are, for good or for ill, a very fundamental part of human behavior. Sexualizing differences in power is probably just something that happens - just out of nowhere. Human behavior is complicated and it’s counterproductive to try to assign things a moral value when they’re not moral issues.
How most of you can assert that one’s inner life has absolutely zero bearing on who you are as a person is utterly flabbergasting to me.
lissener. Evidentally there a number of people here who are of the opinion that a thought itself, or perhaps the even the genesis of concept that is morally repugnant, no matter how extreme, or noble, or evil, or even amoral, has no bearing on anyone’s life the real world unless it is no longer private and becomes judged by others (my view), becomes a pattern of obsessed thinking (tomndebb’s view) or is acted upon by the thinker (Terrifel’s view, among others). As long as a thought is in all these three states, it is quite strictly speaking morally nuetral because it cannot hurt anyone.
Of course, this also strikes me as being an extremely fragile, unhuman and unrealistic way to declare something clearly toxic and harmful morally neutral. I suspect on some level most thoughts want to be expressed and/or acted out, or judged by others and on that level moral judgements need to be recognized and made.
That’s why they’re called “bad thoughts.”
That’s why it’s useful to have a conscience to nip this in the bud.
It’s not that your that your inner life has no bearing, as much as your sexual fantasies are not always straightforward reflection of who you are. Let’s say you have something somewhere in your phsyche. You parents tried to potty train you too early. You had a crush on your preschool teacher. Who knows. This stuff goes in to your brain, hangs around for a while, and get interpreted by your sexual self as you get older. But your sexual self can come up with some pretty funny takes on stuff. Kind of like how your dream, you are delving into your inner core, and yet the actual dream doesn’t make a lot of sense. Last night, I dreamt I was playing tag with Ashton Kucher at a funeral. Undoubtably, that dream came out of something that was going on in my head. But you can’t tell me what kind of person I am based on it.
How you can imply that each and every thought that a person entertains, including those thoughts that are deliberately outside the realm of reality (pretty much the definition of fantasy), are part and parcel of one’s “inner life” is puzzling to me.
I will never murder anyone. I resolutely avoid physical conflict, generally by trying to defuse verbal conflict and, if the situation appears to have no way to be defused, (say, encountering a hostile drunk), I will remove myself from the situation. I also avoid feuding at work, taking the position that we need to concentrate on the task and taking revenge is counterproductive.
Various people over the years have angered me to the point that I entertained taking humiliating and/or painful revenge upon them. I have never acted on those fantasies. So just what part of those fantasies have impinged on (to say nothing of represented) my inner life?
THere is such a vast disconnect here.
Whether the thought is expressed is irrelevant to this discussion, insofar as this discussion has sprung from something I said. Whether the thought results in action is irrelevant to this discussion. Whether there are worse thoughts possible, or actions that are more or less morally negative, is irrelevant. The strawman conflation of the words “moral” and “legal” is irrelevant.
As far as that goes, my view of the universe is irrelevant to your view, as is your view to mine.
I’m not proposing legislation or policy polict. I merely tried to express my own personal, individual, understanding of the moral universe a human being spends a lifetime constructing in his mind.
I’m not a saint by ANY means. But I think it’s my “duty” as a human being to strive toward “sainthood,” or whatever your local equivalent is. I’m an atheist, so I use the word “saint” figuratively, to describe the necessarily unattainable state of always, perfectly, doing the right thing. Insofar as this state *is *attainable, the road to sainthood (or moral perfection; or total, perfect honesty) begins with one’s inner life, as beautifully described by C.S. Lewis.
I believe that every act of “evil,” no matter how small or insignificant, is in its essence an act of dishonesty. Most of these tiny little moral infractions we each commit a million times a day begins, in my understanding of “how things work,” with self-deception; with convincing ourselves that it’s all right to do what, in the deepest parts of our “soul,” we know is *not *the right choice. Every time I indulge a need to be sarcastic, or to lash out angrily at someone on these boards, I do so by, first, telling myself that my anger is justified, or at least that it’s proportional. Or that I’m not being mean, only informative. That, in whatever way, it’s not really about giving myself a little curling half smile at exacting a tiny lit whip flick of vengeance of someone who I allowed to make me angry.
Whatever. It’s my belief that each of us (barring clinical sociopathy, etc.) has within him/herself a moral compass, that functions to a lesser or greater degree depending on how closely examined a life we lead. I believe that every time we do the “wrong” thing, we begin by choosing, at whatever level of consciousness, to ignore that moral compass; to tell ourselves that it’s wrong.
By that–again, personal and individual–understanding of how things “work,” every single thought we have is, to a greater or lesser degree, a moral or immoral thought.
Everything about who we are begins with our inner life. The external effects of that life, on the world around is, is secondary to the point I’m trying to make. Nonetheless, a inner life that is built upon a lifetime of moral awareness is surely more likely to instinctively do the right thing, make the right choices. But again, that’s not the point of this discussion. My point is that the only way you can declare a person’s inner life morally null, is to accede to the proposition that all of that person’s acts are also morally null, because the one flows from the other.
Damn. Din’t perview.
The types of fantasies one engages in, or muses over, or dismisses out of hand are a reflection of one’s inner life, conscience and morality. They may or may not not impign your private moral values, but I suspect that only tends to happen when one assiduously avoids judging their fantasies. These same thoughts may well receive a hostile reception if shared with others, or if you begin obsessing over them, or decide to act on them. Alternately, they may get approval and emulation. Or maybe a mixed bag of reactions.
tomndebb, most of the fantasies you mentioned are about conflict, which in real life you try to anticipate, defuse and avoid. But you have “entertained” (your word) yourself by imagining yourself doing the opposite, to exact “humiliating” (!) and “painful” (!) acts of revenge on people who’ve angered you. You seem to do so only to reinterate how inappropiate it would be to act on them outside your inner life. But don’t you see how you render a moral judgment on your own fantasies as “wrong” each time you vow never to actually do them? If I had to put a name to it, I’d say these fantasies impigned your own sense of justice, propiety and fairness.
One more common definition of fantasy than the one Tom cited are those occurances that happen against extremely long odds, like spontaneously overcoming a serious disease or ailment or winning a multimillion dollar lottery. These are not “outside reality.” They can, statistically, happen. Even to you. In that sense, dreaming about miracles are positive fantasies. Nearly all of those would be judged favorably.
Unless of course you obsess over them, share them with someone who views them as somehow morally wrong, or try to act on them when you (should) know in real life it’s not in your best interest.
On preview, I get where lissener is coming from but I disagree that whether a thought is expressed or acted upon is irrelevent to these discussions or that “moral” and “illegal” are straw man conflations.
The actions so fantasized would be wrong if carried out (or even seriously contemplated). I do not see that simply entertaining the notion of them, deriving some tiny pleasure from the imaginary, crosses over the line so that the act of fantasizing, itself, becomes wrong.
I happened to choose violence for my example because it is credible with my board behavior. I could just as easily chosen sex, despite the fact that I am less likely to ever cheat on Deb than I am to inflict harm on someone.
I disagree with lissener’s analysis because he seems to be operating from a binary position. We either think about doing bad things (that will shape us to become bad) or we think about good things. I think the mind is a much more complex operation and that we can actually indulge in fantasies without bending our personality to follow them. I think we can recognize the difference between fantasy and wishes and we can control how they affect our personal development. (Not everyone does, of course, but that is not an inherent problem with fantasizing, rather a problem with an individual’s control or grasp of reality.)
Carried to its logical conclusion, in lissener’s model, the person who fantasizes about winning the Big Game or Saving the World, thus receiving accolades from their peers and strangers, is actually engaging in self-destructive behavior because they are seeking vainglorious praise that will encourage them to seek unwarranted approval.
Similarly, in the lissener model, anyone who engages in role-playing in D&D or various war games or RPGs endangers their spirit if they take on any role other than that of the good and virtuous. I am not sure how lissener’s model of the world allows for actors who play “bad guys” since their role-playing will have an effect on their inner lives.
On the other hand, my model posits that a person can fantasize about many things without having each action ratchet us in one specific direction or another.
The person who dwells on a fantasy to the point of either losing contact with reality or to the point of letting it become a controlling desire in life does have a problem, but role-playing is simply a way to explore other realities with no danger that one will actually be led into those beliefs and fantasies are simply role-playing games that are entertained in the mind instead of shared on the playground or stage.
Ah, but I never said that the act of fantasizing itself is wrong.
But I do feel that when, after fantasizing, you say to yourself, “well, I’ll never do that in real life” something about the content and actions within that fantasy must be morally wrong to you, no matter how minutely trivial (or wholly satisfying, or even inconclusive) the amount of pleasure you derive from it is. Alternately, the moral judgment you arrive to might even be that your fantasy life is okay, or an absolute affirmation of the corrections of your actions in that fantasy. Which is why, again, you have a conscience as a guide and why other people’s thinking of your moral content of your fantasies might differ sharply from yours. It was enough to land this guy in jail.
Of course, carried to its logical conclusion, you’re also saying that no matter how repugnant or self-deludedly virtuous our fantasies become to us (or others, once they find out about them), they don’t rachet us in one specific direction either. As someone with a parent with bipolar disorder, I have a hard time buying into that position. lissener’s thinking on the matter, even in its black and white extremes, makes a bit more sense to me than the position that thought is essentially beyond morality and harmless.
This is ridiculous. How many times have I used the word “spectrum” or “compass,” to keep harping on the non-binary nature of my model?
None of these things in any way follows from my model, so please read it again and try to understand it within that context. As poorly as I obivously communicated it, you misunderstand me completely if you think that your “logical” extremes follow from my model.
This is just so basic and irrefutable that I honestly feel as if my posts are coming across completely scrambled. How basic a truth is it that who we are as a person is a reflection of the inner life of our mind? Our thoughts and feelings define our selfhood, our essence, to a far greater degree than our behavior does. Our behavior, as every individual knows, is quite often NOT a clear indication of who we really are as a person. THat self, that essence of who we are, our consciousness, is exactly the same thing as our mind. Why is this such a foreign concept? This seems to me to be one of the two or three most basically true and undeniable and universally understood truths of human existence.
Try another approach. Say you’re on a first date. Things go really well; soulmate possibilities. You go to a movie, and in the movie there’s a brutal abduction, rape, and murder. You look over and you see your date has a hardon and his eyes are glazed over like a cat watching a birdfeeder. Is that perfectly OK with you, if you’re not Evil Captor? Is that totally neutral to you? Or say you’ve found your soulmate, you’ve gotten married, and had three kids. One day you come across something that your spouse has written on the computer you share. It’s the most horrifically graphic fantasies of rape and dismemberment of children. THen you discover it’s not fiction, but a journal of his own sexual fantasies. That’s perfectly OK with you? That doesn’t change in any degree whatsoever your understanding of your husband’s moral compass?
Isn’t that a Slippery Slope?
Then we are in agreement.
Yeah. So? I don’t even think you have to wait until the event has passed by to recognize that the imaginary–that is, not real–events you have portrayed in your mind are wrong. I certainly never thought that inflicting abject humiliation on some idiot who has destroyed a department was a right and proper action.
And that jail sentence was a complete travesty of justice in which the state’s butt was saved only by the technicality that he was already under a court order to not possess such writings and the court had not made the effort to distinguish between writings he acquired and fantasies he created. Basically, we have let a (legitimate) fear regarding pedophilia overwhelm our common sense. As noted in your linked article, had he been committed to a program for treatment, part of the treatment would probably have included expressing his fantasies.
You are changing the topic (in two separate directions).
On the one hand, you try to attribute virtue to the actions portrayed in fantasy when I have explicitly rejected the notion of moral judgments within fantasies, noting that the fantasist can certainly recognize that an action is objectively evil while indulging in the fictive exploration of that action.
On the other hand, if one has wandered over the line into actually wishing for an event, one is no longer fantasizing. If one goes further to actually pursue such fantasies, then one has left fantasy behind and entered a new realm of consciousness. We may sloppily use the word “fantasizing” to mean two separate actions, but the pursuit of that which is not attainable or appropriate is separate from engaging in the play of fantasy.
If your child is attempting to act out fantasies, then the line between fantasy and life has been blurred in the child’s mind and we are no longer dealing only with fantasy.
Actually, they do.
You do, indeed, continue to refer to the continuum. However, your comments, particularly when following my post without any specific exclusion of my comments, appear to give all events on that continuum a specific direction of moving toward the good or moving toward the evil. That is binary. If you cannot conceive of neutral activity, then your position is binary.
Fantasy is play. It allows one to engage in thoughts that are, indeed, repulsive or inappropriate or unattainable to allow the player to explore situations or conditions that are totally taboo so that there is no need to explore such situations in real life. I agree that if one moves from recognizing fantasy for what it is into believing that one should act out the fantasies, regardless of appropriateness or attainability of the fantasies, then one has crossed a line in ways that will be harmful to the person. But to achieve that harmful state, one needs to move beyond fantasy.
As to your movie and diary examples, (changing the sex since I am neither going to date a person who can achieve an erection nor marry a husband), I am pretty sure that I can recognize fantasy. If I discovered some really off-putting sexual fantasies written by my wife, I would compare those fantasies to 22 years of marriage and 12 years of child-rearing in which none of those fantasies have ever been acted upon and realize that the play in which she engages is just that: situation-exploring play that lets her explore things that are not, and never will be, part of her life.
Tevildo and those who are like-minded, I’ve got a question for you:
Does whether there are real people or not involved in one’s fantasies have any bearing on its morality vs. immorality?
Are there any moral differences between:
a. Imagining that you’re doing __ to a real person
b. Imagining that you’re doing __ to a person you created whole-cloth out of your imagination.
c. Imagining that someone who doesn’t really exist is doing __ to a second imaginary person?
d. Imagining that someone who doesn’t really exist is doing __ to a second imaginary person that the person fantasizing about isn’t actually capable of doing themselves in real life? (not possible anatomically, for example)
If so, how and why are they different?
I would disagree with your fundamental premise: I believe that our behavior is (at least as far as morality is concerned) the only real indication of who we really are as people. It seems undeniable to me that the worst fantasy cannot be as morally bad as the least evil evil deed. It also seems obvious to me that things are evil because of their consequences. Murder is wrong, because when you’re done, you’ve killed someone. If you can somehow remove all the negative consequences of murder (get permission first and make sure that either an afterlife exists or that they can get reincarnated or some such), then murder ceases to become an evil act. A fantasy crime is more or less the same thing: no one is actually harmed, so no actual evil is being committed.
I reiterate Evil Captor’s earlier points: given the existence of these fantasies in the part of my mate, an attempt to satisfy them harmlessly is almost certain to have a better chance of success than repression.
It seems to me that there are two main points being argued: that evil fantasies are evil in and of themselves, and they are evil only because they increase the likelyhood of the fantasizer performing the fantasies in reality.
It would be an enormously difficult task to gather data on the second question, but a quick browsing of some of the less presentable portions of the Internet graphed along with crime rates show that unsavory pornography’s exponential growth in consumption does not correlate to a similar growth in real-life sex crimes. Given this, and in the absence of other evidence to the contrary, I therefore posit that the vast, vast majority of people can have evil fantasies without becoming at risk to carry them out.
As to the first: it simply becomes a question of definitions. If one believes that morality is fundamentally derived from one’s actions, then fantasy in the absence of actions has no moral value.
Also, I apologise if my invitation to this thread made you uncomfortable, lissener. I simply wanted your perspective, as it was your posts that made me want to have a debate on this topic in the first place.