You don’t have to take my word for it.
The internet and any public library are full of information on all sorts of ethics
systems.
Why not find the one you are referring to for us and let us know instead of making us guess?
Take your word for what? I have no idea what your opinion is based on. We’re talking about ethics and how it is applied in this situation.
Ethics, definition Merriam Webster: plural but sing or plural in constr : the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.
Applied to this discussion, tricking someone into doing something they would find objectionable is unethical.
So all things someone else finds objectionable are an ethical imperitave on our actions? Or, if only some things, why those things specifically.
Care to back this up, somehow?
I’ve just done a straw poll of friends, and 3/9 replied something to the effect of “it depends on how hot she is”, 1/9 said it didn’t matter at all, 1/9 said it was OK if she knew upfront*, and 4/9 were all “no way, ewww”.
This pre-emptively anecdotally counters any anecdotal evidence you may submit, and also informs me that I have 7 pretty juvenile friends.
*I didn’t restrict myself to asking male friends only.
No, not_alice is right, you are incorrectly declaring this as a universal absolute when there are, in fact, ethical systems where tricking people is perfectly OK or even praiseworthy, such as the Guardian Ethics System*, the Carney Ethics System and the Frat Boy Ethics system.
*which, as expounded by Jacobs, explicitly has “Deceive for the sake of the task” as a principle.
Note from your own page: “Deception must be for the purpose of achieving a guardian task, not a personal agenda.” Nice try, though.
Lamia, again, your example fails because a woman with implants cannot reasonably expect that a potential partner will be extremely unhappy if he later finds out those tatas were silicone. We’ve been through this already. As for poor poor transgendered folks and what they’re being compared to, so far I’ve compared a tiny sample of them (those who lie-through-omission to sexual partners) to married people and to musketeers. I think they’ll survive the indignity.
Which is entirely within the bounds of that ethical system. So what?
You seem to say this as though it cancels out my point, which was* not *that the Guardian System is the one under discussion or that the OP’s hypothetical should be judged by it. What, exactly, do you think my point was, anyway?
Now that’s a whole new Great Debate right there.
feel free to offer an alternative ethical system that meets your needs. We will check it out, then, if it passes that test, we will see if it is bound on everyone in the situation of the OP.
We are not interested in ethics systems that don’t apply, only trying tryting TRYING to get you to say the name of the one you and macgiver and tim are referring to.
Since we keep asking, and you keep avoiding the simple question, it is fair for us to infer you got nothing and are making it up.
Easy-peezy, right?
I don’t know where to start with this post. First, your link is not about ethics, it’s an intellectual exercise comparing human behavior in different environments. The name of the book is: Systems of Survival and the subtitle is: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. If you tried to use your example to represent ethical standards then “Take Vengence” is on the list of ethical behavior.
The core definition of ethics could not be any clearer. It involves the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.
harming someone psychologically is bad.
right, and all of those terms are essentially defined as people wish them to be. what could be fuzzier?
Or maybe eyou are not aware of all of the competing philosophies of ethics out there over the millennia, many of which are in works surely regarded as classics?
Look, we get it. YOU don’t want to take responsibility for what your dick might momentarily be attracted to. I don’t know if that is good, bad, or situation-dependent, or maybe won’t be clear until later.
Either way, it is fine for the purposes of this discussion. You would want to be told by a TG before you unzip her pants.
Good for you.
But don’t seek absolution by imposing “obligations” on anyone, because they simply don’t exist. If they did, you would simply point us to them.
They are all in your head, no where else. Well, in many people’s heads apparently, but none of you can point to the ethics system you seem to insist exists. Maybe you should all meet up and write it down somewhere.
You live in a black and white world with no shade of gray don’t you? :dubious:
snerk What’s the title got to do with anything? The book is very much about ethical systems. It analyses the two disparate systems Jacobs thinks are at the core of modern Western society.
Not that it matters, but it can be. That’s what you’re failing to understand. But anyway, I’m not using the list to set up an ideal ethic or anything like that, I’m only using it as examples that show that different ethical systems do exist, and that some of the things others state as absolutes, may not be so under every ethical system.
…you can’t have that without defining what is good and bad for your system. That’s what we’re asking - what are the underlying assumptions of your framework.
Well, at least this is more like it, but…
Once again, not always, and not absolutely.
And define “harm”. Am I ethically obligated to ensure a homophobic houseguest never uses a glass a previous homosexual houseguest drank from, if I know he won’t want to “in case he catches ‘The Gay’”, for instance? Hell no!
Nor is a TS ethically obligated to out himself/herself to appease bigots.
There is nothing remotely fuzzy about it. Using other people for sexual gratification at the expense of their feelings is harmful to them and therefore unethical. It could not be any clearer. Anyone who does this is a bad person and will suffer emotional self hatred for doing it. You can’t run from your conscience.
I obviously can’t back it up – I thought it was clear that it was a wild-assed guess. In fact, I used the acronym “WAG.” My larger point is that there’s an order of magnitude difference between the percentage of men who refuse to have anything to do with fake breasts and the percentage of men who refuse to have anything to do with a transgendered person’s penis. Agree or disagree?
I don’t. But as I said, I am not particularly interested in defending this analogy because I don’t think we should be trying to argue by analogy in this thread (or most other threads, for that matter).
*You know what’s even worse than arguing by analogy? Arguing by invented statistics. So your position is that the hypothetical scenario that tim314 made up is a better analogy for the hypothetical scenario in the OP than my own hypothetical scenario, because the statistics you made up yourself to apply to the situation in the OP are closer to the ones you made up for tim314’s analogy than the ones you made up for mine. Forgive me if I don’t find this a compelling argument.
*Why is it incumbent on anyone else to guess your preferences and then warn you against consenting to do something that might go against them? If your personal preferences are that important to you, it’s pretty foolish to decide that it is someone else’s responsibility to protect you from sexual situations you would find unappealing.
Didn’t you accuse me earlier of saying that some preferences were more “valid” than others? I’m still not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but it certainly seems like you’re saying that the preference not to have sex with transsexuals is more important than a preference not to have sex with women with breast implants.
I have yet to see any evidence to support the repeated claims in this thread that the overwhelming majority of men would never want to have sex with a transwoman, but even if that is true then ethics are not dictated solely by what happens to be popular.
*Post #14 says that not revealing to a potential sexual partner that one is transgendered is like not revealing that one is married. Post #110 compares transgendered people to broken cars and stinky houses. Neither of these posts limited these analogies only to transgendered people who do not reveal their histories, and they wouldn’t make much sense if they did. Under your analogies transgendered people who do reveal their history must be equivalent to adulterers who admit to their casual sex partners that they are in fact cheating on their spouses, or cars where the broken muffler hasn’t deceptively been taped back on. That’s pretty insulting.
I’d have been happy if there’d never been any analogies introduced into this thread at all, but since you’re so keen on that method of argument then I can’t help but notice that all of your analogies compare the state of being transgendered to something negative (an adulterer, a damaged or disgusting object, a fictional character you called a horrible person and a rapist or near rapist). You object to all of mine that compare being transgendered to something that is in and of itself fairly neutral but that some people would find a major turn off (breast implants, being of a particular race).
I’m sorry to say this because my general opinion of you is that you’re a good-hearted and reasonable poster, but it sure looks to me like your position here is based less on a coherent system of ethics than a personal aversion to the transgendered. That’s what a lot* of the arguments from other posters in this thread come down to as well. It’s basically just “Transwomen are gross and no one would ever want to have sex with them, so they have a duty to warn people away”, which is really just another form of the good old “Everyone else should always do what I personally want” school of ethics.
The really funny thing is that I think everyone here more or less agrees that it would in general be better for transgendered people to reveal that they are transgendered before having sex. I know I’ve said repeatedly that if the question were “Should transgendered people reveal their histories before having sex?” then my answer would be yes. But in a casual sex situation I do not believe that this “should” rises to the level of an ethical DUTY. Maybe there is some argument that could persuade me otherwise, but “they’re so gross!” isn’t it. Frankly, I am now feeling much more sympathetic towards transgendered people who don’t reveal their histories than I was at the beginning of the thread. Why should they be expected to volunteer to be treated like disgusting freaks?
*A lot, but not all. I don’t for instance consider Dangerosa’s argument that being considerate of other people’s feelings is an ethical duty to fall into this category.
Which admittedly made-up statistic did you find especially off base? If you add an error margin of +/- 100% – hell, go crazy and go +/- 500% – I don’t think it changes my general assumption that there are far, far more straight men who object to playing with concealed penises than there are who object to playing with silicone-enhanced breasts.
For the simple reason – and I thought that I explained this already – that there are many, many, many factors that would be deal-breakers for me (and I don’t even think I’m that picky!) Give me a week and I could probably compile a list of 1000 of them; I’d not want to go to start a relationship with women who think the moon landing was fake, or who think that cavemen used to ride dinosaurs, or who use the phrase “jewed them down,” or who laugh at Little People, or… Take my point? Am I really supposed to interview you? Or – here’s a Plan B – if you’ve got a really big secret (you know, like a cock) that anyone with two brain cells would think might be of interest in the decision-making process… maybe you could share that with your prospective partner, rather than forcing him/her to go on a fishing expedition?
And if she doesn’t have a cock it is OK, or are you to busy making stuff yup to be in touch with the true nature of your insecurity?
Personally, I think the proper response to your dilemma is to try rereading what I wrote in a more charitable light, rather than looking for offense that isn’t there.
I do not have a personal aversion to transgendered folks, except in a sexual context (which at this point in my life is wholly irrelevant). My analogy was perhaps not as carefully chosen as it should have been: make one small change to it, therefore. It’s like not revealing that you’re married in an open relationship. There. I think in both cases you have an ethical duty to reveal.
As for the difference between implants and sex change, I maintain that it’s due to the number of people who’d be seriously upset. Popularity enters into it because an implanted person can’t make a plausible prediction that a partner WILL get extremely upset if they find out about the implants; a transgendered person can make such a prediction. And ethics is all about the predictable outcomes of your decisions.
Your inability to grasp not_alice’s points in this thread is harming me psychologically. You have therefore acted unethically.
Citation please?
Does this claim apply to all ethics system or just the one you are making up in your head and imposing on everyone else?