No.
I think if we’re going to go for this analogy, we need to use something different. Forget the chicken stock in your soup. You’re serving a classic Italian dish, Picula ad Caval. Just as with the question in the OP, you may reasonably conclude that your dinner guest would refuse to engage in this social interaction if she knew a key fact about the interaction. In fact, it’d be a smart bet that she would be very upset if she found out she’d eaten horse. It won’t harm her to eat horse, and if she finds out afterwards that she ate horse, it would be criminal and horribly unethical for her to attack you. If she asked you about the ingredients, you’d tell her there was horse in the dish. [For purposes of this analogy, stipulate that you are in a state in which the consumption of horse meat is legal–please let’s not get sidetracked in irrelevant differences].
If you feed the dish to your guest without disclosing the key ingredient, have you acted ethically?
I’d say you haven’t, just as I have in all similar analogies. The feeding of your guest is a voluntary interaction between two adults, but by withholding a key fact that you think would change your guest’s behavior, you’ve committed a type of fraud on your guest. Not fraud under a legal definition, but rather an ethical lapse that is best labeled fraud.
LHOD, what is the impact of acting unethically? Do the ethics police now have the right to arrest you and arraign you in ethics court where, if convicted, you go to ethics jail?
If there are no impacts to acting unethically, why spend time and energy determining if an action is unethical?
Rand Rover, it’s not my fault that you didn’t read the link I offered you last time you harped on about this subject. You consider nothing unethical, IIRC, and so your input here is a waste of everyone’s time.
I must have missed it. Can you post it again? Thanks.
Also, you are wrong. It is not that I consider nothing unethical. It’s that I don’t think there are any impacts to something being unethical, so it doesn’t matter whether something is ethical or not.
Here’s a start. Start a new thread if you want to discuss this; it’s a huge broad issue and an inappropriate hijack, as though someone came into a thread about a sitcom and declared the evils of television.
The big problem with line-by-line quoting is that it forces me to either respond in the same style or omit much of the post I’m responding to. I actually wrote out a very long post in the former style, but it was annoying and I don’t want to get sucked into conducting a debate in that manner. I’m going the other route instead.
First I want to say that one of the problems about arguing by analogy is that it so often turns into arguing about the analogy. I think your marriage analogy is a bad one, but I also think we should try to just talk about transgendered people without worrying about what the best analogy would be.
On to the issue of fraud. My earlier post was a response to your four criteria for fraud as stated. These criteria didn’t say anything about some preferences being more important than others, whether a preference was held by a majority of people, whether a preference was relevant, if there was a special term for this preference, or even if Party B in actuality held a particular preference. You said that if Party A merely suspected that Party B would not want to engage in a voluntary transaction if B knew a particular fact then Party A was ethically bound to disclose this fact.
That is a terrible definition for fraud. The criteria you presented would make it impossible for members of any group that faces discrimination to maintain a reasonable level of privacy without committing fraud on a regular basis. It would be difficult for anyone to maintain a reasonable degree of privacy. We’d all be ethically bound to reveal not only our basic biographical information but all our personal shortcomings and our worst thoughts and deeds to anyone we even suspected might care. That’s absurd.
I have been skimming past some of the longer posts in this thread so maybe I’ve missed something, but I am fairly certain that no one here is arguing that transgendered people should hide their history from potential sex partners or that anyone is required to have sex with transgendered people (or anyone else they happen to consider undesirable as a partner). People are entitled to their own sexual preferences and no one should ever have to justify not wanting to have sex with someone else.
If the question posed here were “Is it better for transgendered people to reveal their history before having sex?” then I doubt anyone would say no. But that wasn’t the question. The question was one of duty. One person’s preference is not another person’s duty, especially when that preference has never even been mentioned. Adults should be able to handle screening their own sexual partners and not expect all potentially undesirable people to automatically recuse themselves.
On preview:
*No, it isn’t best labeled fraud. Why do you assume that a transgendered person who neglects to say “Just so you know, I’m transgendered” must be acting in bad faith? I spent quite some time on this earlier, and I’m disappointed to see that it was wasted. Maybe the transgendered person honestly believes that the other person either already knows or wouldn’t care.
Or maybe they just don’t feel they owe a casual sexual partner much more than a good time. The OP didn’t say anything about the two people being involved in a romantic or even a friendly relationship, he just said that they were about to have sex. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a casual sexual partner to say much about their personal history. (It’s certainly not reasonable to expect it from a casual dance partner.) That’s a big part of what makes it casual. People who aren’t comfortable not knowing basic biographical information about their sexual partners shouldn’t skip past the “getting to know you” stage.
Even within a serious relationship different people are going to have different opinions as to when the best time is to mention important personal information. It’s best for the relationship if disclosure takes place before the other party finds out some other way, but no one wants to spend their first date listening to the other person’s entire life story either. People have to make a judgment call about when is the best time to bring things up, and sometimes their judgment is not going to line up with what their partner would have preferred. But that’s just the way things go. It doesn’t necessarily mean that either party violated an ethical duty.
OK, I’ll read it.
But I think that these issues are best discussed in context. A whole thread about it will necessarily be divorced from context.
I’m fighting ignorance here. I want people to think “well shit, what DOES happen if I do something that LHOD thinks is unethical? Oh, that’s right, absolutely nothing. So why the hell would I give two seconds worth of thought to determining whether LHOD thinks what I’m about to do is unethical or not?”
Well said.
If the transgendered person honestly has either of these beliefs, then no, they’re not acting unethically. I will certainly concede that. I think in many cases, these beliefs are not reasonably held.
If, however, transgendered Tina thinks that Bob wouldn’t have sex with her if Bob knew that Tina was born Tim, and Tina doesn’t tell Bob that fact, then Tina is behaving unethically, even if her belief about Bob is wrong. She’s hiding information that she believes would be instrumental in another person’s making a free decision.
It’s not up to her to decide whether showing Bob a good time is sufficient. If she’s going to enter into this social behavior with Bob, it’s incumbent on her to be open with Bob about information that she believes Bob needs in order for him to decide whether to enter into this social behavior.
Yes, ignorance fought. Now go fight it somewhere else!
Or, to quote Mr. Gibran:
I’m gonna go have a sex change operation and have sex with someone (who I know would not have sex with me if they knew) without telling them just to piss you off.
Well, people believe all kinds of things that aren’t reasonable. My point was about intent, and I’m pleased to see your concession on that point. People can make mistakes, and it’s important to distinguish between this and deliberate wrongdoing.
*I can more or less agree with that. I can think of exceptions to the general rule of “If you know something that you believe would be important to another in making an important personal decision, you should tell them”, but most involve harm to third parties and so would be irrelevant when the only people involved are Tina and Bob.
*I think that’s a little strong, although it may just be the way you’ve phrased it. If Tina doesn’t want to do anything more than show Bob a good time then that’s her choice, but she should let him know what she has in mind. If she says upfront that she’s offering no-strings sex on the condition that there be no personal sharing or discussion of their histories then he can decide whether he’s willing to accept those terms or not. I personally would take that as a BIG warning sign and say “Thanks, but no thanks”, but I’d say Tina has the right to make the offer.
*I can more or less agree with this when it comes to sex, but I don’t think it should apply equally to all social behavior. If Bob sits down next to Tina at the bar, joins her at the dart board, or asks her to dance then that doesn’t create on obligation on her part to say “You know I’m transgendered, right?” She has a right to protect her own privacy the same as anyone else, and Tina has special reason to worry about endangering herself if she discloses personal information carelessly.
I am not usually siding with RR, but I hold the same position in this thread.
I am open to being persuaded though.
What specific ethical code are transexuals subject to?
What we have wound up talking about is if some vegan asks you if there is any meat in the dish, you say No.
Then when they find out later that you used chicken stock and get upset, you claim that chicken isn’t meat.
Same same. Everyone understands perfectly well what the vegan was asking when he said ‘meat’, and these kinds of quibbles about definitions are silly.
There are men, and there are women, and there are transgender/transvestites/chicks with dicks/intersexed/several types nobody has mentioned in the thread yet. The huge majority of people fit quite well into the first two categories, and most people want to have sex only with one or another of those two. The argument that there are several kinds of anomalies who don’t fit into ‘Man’ or 'Woman" doesn’t matter - that’s the fucking point. I don’t want to have sex with them, so if it looks like you are one of the standard two genders but aren’t, I would like to know about it.
Regards,
Shodan
I think we’re in agreement on most issues here. (RE: mysterious, no-strings-attached flings, as long as both folks choose to preserve the mystery, god bless 'em). Similarly I agree here, partly because Tina knows that there’s a low chance that Bob will be completely upset at sitting at a bar next to her. But that’s not my entire reason. I’m not sure I can put my finger on the relevant difference. Maybe after I have my coffee I can.
not alice, it’s a little astonishing that after your offensive well-poisoning earlier you think I’m interested in continuing the discussion with you.
I find the line between “considerate” and “ethical” to be very fine…i.e. inconsiderate behavior is not terribly ethical. I also don’t think people are obligated to act either ethically or considerately.
I’d say there was possible harm in the first example, and not the second two, and neither of those last two offend my ethics.
I don’t agree. My personal ethics are a matter of harm, not manners. I can’t help but read what some people here are calling “ethics” as “good taste”, instead.
And that is why they are “personal ethics” - my ethics include being considerate. Hurting someone’s feelings are casuing them harm, and manners are about providing a framework for not hurting people’s feelings.
I’d love for you to make a case for this. (Perhaps we should make another thread? I’m not sure how much of a hijack this is)
I’d counter that the only real harm from hurt feelings is a kind of self-harm, and I am* not* ethically responsible for the self-harm others inflict on themselves, especially in service to something I consider as delusional as religious proscriptions.
Note that the so-called Golden Rule plays no part in my personal ethics.
Kind of like my answer to that “taking the Lord’s name in vain” thread would have been, if I’d bothered to answer it.