It’s because of the risk that you might cross that line (if and only if you feel the thoughts are encouraging you to act on them) that I said it was wrong. I would also reserve the word “evil” for acting on them; but I don’t use “wrong” as synonymous with “evil”.
Is half of all fan-fiction written to encourage people to be sexually aroused by somebody’s detailed torture? I don’t read all that much of it, but that’s not the impression I got.
I didn’t mean “seeing the bad guy get their comeuppance”; though even there I’m unhappy about the stuff that goes into detailed torture scenarios.
If it’s upsetting them, then it would make sense to see a therapist.
If they start thinking they might act on it, then it would make a lot of sense to see a therapist. Unfortunately, considering the fantasy to be as wrong as the act discourages people from doing so, because they’re afraid the therapist will see them as morally evil even though what they’re trying to do is make sure they don’t commit evil.
This is a question I probably would have answered “yes” to when I was younger.
Now that I’m old and more thoroughly acquainted with the world and the people in it, I would agree with the majority here who have said that only actions are evil.
Minds are black holes in a sense. We know little to nothing about them, even, perhaps especially, our own. People with OCD, e.g., are constantly tormented by their own thoughts, with no clinical understanding of why this should be so, down to whether it is genetic, congenital or developed, or society-made. So many entries in the DSM share this near-total uncertainty. How can anyone positively condemn others for thoughts they have no immediate control over?
People have dark thoughts, thoughts that common secular morality deem bad from every angle. I’ve become more and more convinced that every single person has them. We don’t know that because for the vast majority of people, these dark thoughts are never expressed much less acted upon. Perhaps I’m wrong and some people are free from this plague. Perhaps my lumping all of humanity together is a dark thought itself.
John Pym wrote in 1628 that “Actions are louder than words.” Still true.
I would call them morally neutral. Thoughts and desires are null in effect on any other person as long as they stay thoughts and desires. There seems to be an unspoken assumption in your argument that strong “immoral” desires must eventually produce immoral actions, and that therefore the precursor event, the thought or desire, must therefore also be regarded as immoral.
People who perform immoral actions must certainly have thought about them beforehand, and there was almost certainly desire to perform them. But the reverse does not follow, and common sense tells me that most of the time the follow-on actions are not performed. It doesn’t matter whether one can control one’s thoughts, what matters is whether one can control one’s actions, and most people can and do.
In any case, no-one can know for certain what your internal thoughts and desires are; even if you tell other people, they can’t know for certain that you are telling the truth. So what is the possible point of regarding thoughts as immoral, except to torture people for what goes on in their heads. Or rather, to get them to torture themselves.
I would say yes. However, I don’t believe my position is quite in contradiction to the consensus here. It’s just that I think about it differently.
An evil idea, thought, or fantasy is an idea that would be wrong if you were to enact it. And that it is us knowing it would be wrong to enact it that prevents us from actually doing so. So we have to judge it as wrong to choose not to do it.
I am NOT saying you can’t enjoy one of these evil fantasies as long as you keep it fantasy. I’m not saying that having a wrong thought means you are a bad person.
I’m saying that the fact we know it is wrong or evil is why we don’t act on it outside of fantasy.
Anything that stays entirely in one’s head and affects no one else by definition does them no harm and cannot be morally judged by them and it’s absurd to believe otherwise.
This is a tough one. To me it depends on what you are desiring to do. If you desire to actually act them out, even if you do not, then that seems to be an evil intent. However, for instance, if you have a willing partner (of age, and species) to act out such fantasies and your desire is to act out such fantasies with said partner and imagining the roles, that would seem more of non-harmful, though that would depend on the intent of the partner as well.
So it’s how one plays the hand they are dealt, not the hand one is dealt.
This is the consequentialist approach to ethics/morality. It’s one of the major approaches to ethics, but it’s not the only one.
By this approach, thoughts and desires cannot be evil as long as they don’t hurt anybody or lead to any evil outcomes.
But even by this approach, it may well be that entertaining or indulging or dwelling on evil thoughts or desires makes it more likely that a person will act upon them, thus contributing to evil outcomes.
I think the main source for this is what Jesus said as recorded in Matthew 5:
Plenty of people have discussed and debated exactly what he meant by this and how it applies. It does seem reasonable that if you’re a person who goes around thinking “Fuck you, I wish you were dead” or who thinks of women (or men, or children, whatever your preference is) as objects for your own sexual gratification, that you’re not what I would consider a good, saintly person.
Then again, if you have “evil” thoughts but don’t act on them, I think it matters at least somewhat why you don’t act on them. If the only reason you don’t rape or murder is because you lack the opportunity or lack the courage or fear the consequences to yourself, you’re not necessarily a better human being than someone who does commit rape or murder. But if it’s your conscience that prevents you from acting on those desires because you know they’re the wrong thing to do or would have results harmful to others than just yourself? That’s different (or at least it certainly seems that way to me).
There was a notorious case in Arizona in 1977. A physician in residency who’d separated from his wife was obsessed with getting revenge on her and getting custody of their young son (his homicidal fantasies and bizarre behavior had driven her away in the first place).
He constructed a complex plot to abduct, torture and murder her, but his plans went awry when he couldn’t lure her to the intended murder location, so he gave up and returned home. Despite his not having furthered his plan beyond that point, he was convicted of attempted murder and did six years in prison (the kicker is what happened years later when his loyal second wife discovered what a monster he was - see part 2 of the linked account).
Some sociopaths have acknowledged that their overwhelming, repetitive violent fantasies inevitably led them to commit violent crimes. Those thoughts seem quite evil.
Interesting question. I think your position is that a thought can be evil or wrong, but just having it does not make a person evil, or mean they have done something wrong, since it is outside their control. Acting on it would be wrong, however, and purposely fantasising about it might be wrong if it made you more likely to act on it, negatively influenced how you treated others, or harmed your own mental health. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
Regardless, everyone seems to agree in practice that it’s actions that really matter.
I do wonder how this view interacts with ideas like implicit bias, where the assumption is that subconscious beliefs influence how people treat others. Is it possible a person can have conscious desires or fantasies without them doing the same?
I think it might be more possible. The rational portion of the mind isn’t, presumably, aware of the subconscious belief, and so can’t counteract its influence. The rational portion of the mind is aware of the conscious desire/fantasy, and therefore can counteract its influence.
It’s not necessarily wrong to have thoughts, but it can be wrong to dwell on those thoughts. For instance, it seems like a lot of affairs start with just a “harmless” thought. Someone notices an attractive person at work. They think about them more and more. They start hanging around the person. They go out to lunch. They go out to happy hours. They have a “friendly” hug when saying good bye. Eventually they are in a full blown affair. Each step along the way seemed harmless, but the process was releasing very strong hormones in their brain which greatly reduced their resolve stay platonic and professional. For a person like that, the moral thing to do is to realize they will have a lot of difficultly controlling their urges and do their best to stop those thoughts as soon as they happen. If they notice someone attractive at work, make extra effort to keep things professional, try to always have someone else around when interacting with the person, etc. The initial thought wasn’t necessarily immoral, but how they react to that thought can be immoral.
I agree about the stairsteps to trouble as a general matter.
But every one of those stairsteps you described was an action in the real world. Not merely a thought. If one is fantasizing about those happy hours and goodbye hugs at the end of the day one isn’t committing adultery, the biblical whining notwithstanding. If one is actually going to the happy hours and having the hugs, well, they already have the camel well into the tent.
Unrelated to the above …
I think @DemonTree was onto something with the implicit bias line of thinking. It’s not a perfect match, but there is some overlap there.
At the same time there’s a huge difference between evil thoughts that pop into one’s head from time to time and evil thoughts one carefully nurtures and savors and replays and …
As a metaphor for the latter, current politics in the USA shows us that one heck of a lot of white people over the last e.g. 20 years have been nurturing and savoring their inner racism while carefully keeping their mouth shut. But now they’re socially allowed, nay encouraged, to say the quiet part out loud and in response they’re shouting it all.
Yes. Quite a few years ago now, I worked with a guy who I found quite attractive, and I believe he may well have reciprocated the feeling. But I conciously tried to ignore it, and never acted on it. The interpretation I give to that Bible verse about adultery is that thoughts precede action: if you nurture such feelings then they grow, and you are more likely to act on them.
And in the same general area, what are people’s views on fantasising about a person you know? Harmless because it doesn’t affect them? Wrong because you are in some way using them without their consent? Or wrong because it’s likely to affect how you act towards them?
Yes. I think dwelling on racist thoughts is probably harmful and therefore bad. And the same for dwelling on emotions like anger or resentment, even if they are justified. At the very least it’s bad for you, and it could lead to you acting on the feelings.
I think for me it would be a matter of degree. Like the occasional fantasy, fine, but if you’re regularly fantasizing about someone you know, it could affect how you engage with them, and if you’re married or something, that could be a problem. Also just thinking about how your partner might feel if they knew.
And I think if you’re regularly fantasizing about someone you know, it could point to some issue with your current relationship, in much the same way affairs tend to happen when things are going wrong in a partnership.
As far as consent, that’s a tricky one. This person is never going to know what you’re doing, and you’re not actually doing anything to them, so I err on the side of letting people keep their thoughts to themselves. Otherwise you could argue that fantasizing about a celebrity is a violation of their consent, which feels like a strange conclusion to make.
I have had obsessive crushes on people that I knew, who were also completely and irrevocably unavailable, maybe 2 or 3 times in my life. All the fantasizing I did had zero effect on how I acted towards them, because, and maybe this is critical, I recognize the difference between fantasy and real life.
As for “in some way using them” I reject that notion completely. I was doing nothing to “them.” If I was using anything, it was an idea of them but really a different person, someone who would have been interested in me.
I simply cannot grasp why people are so interested in making moral judgments about thoughts. It seems like they are trying to find some way to prevent evil actions from happening by stopping the pre-cursors, even though there is a huge amount more thought pre-cursors than there are ever evil acts.
