If, as your roommate, I steal $100 from your sock drawer, but you don’t notice it because you’re insanely weI althy, and don’t count your $100 dollar bills, have you suffered no harm? Because you’re not aware of it doesn’t mean that you haven’t suffered harm. You have $100 less to spend.
ETA: I swear I wrote this before reading the above.
I am with the others - there is no precise alignment of ‘wrong’ and ‘harmful’.
If it is reasonable to expect a certain level of privacy in your shower, it is wrong for anyone to violate that expectation, even if you don’t notice that they did.
This is like the “Disgruntled, but perfectly healthy chef spits non-infectious saliva into your burger and you eat it without ever noticing at all” scenario. No measurable harm, but violation of a contract/expectation is still wrong.
This.
And this.
The woman in question had the moral expectation of privacy in her own shower, that no one would see her without her permission. Someone did see her without her permission - the pervert. So it is morally wrong, because her privacy was violated without her permission. Some things are wrong even if you don’t get caught.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, it was still “wrong” because the act itself was wrong. Just because the results happened to be favorable to the victim doesn’t change that.
Basically, you’re writing here : “it’s wrong because it’s wrong”. Not exactly convincing.
In the absence of harm, on what basis exactly do you decide that an action was wrong? “I and most people I know feel that it’s wrong” is no basis for a moral system. It provides no tool or method to decide whether or not a specific action is moral or not. Apart from asking you how you feel about it, which besides resulting in a catalogue rather than a moral system, is entirely subjective.
So far, even though most posters have stated that the secret filming (without any consequences for the woman) was morally wrong, but nobody stated why exactly.
It matters because watching someone naked under the shower doesn’t cause any objective harm in itself. So, you need something else to happen (for instance the woman being made aware that she has been filmed and feeling hurt because the film has been uploaded on the internet) for this action to have negative consequences for her. It’s important that nobody else will ever see the movie because otherwise there’s an obvious potential harm (although once again I don’t find the OP example very good because as soon as a film exists, there’s such a potential for harm).
And lacking any actual or potential harm done, how do you decide that an action is immoral and why?
Filming someone in the shower without their permission is wrong. It’s wrong because one of the definitions of wrong is “Filming someone in the shower without their permission”
What if instead of the woman, he took a photo of her 5 year old child in the shower?
The old example is someone shooting a sleeping person, only to find out he had already died of a heart attack.
What if I invite you to dinner, serve a casserole made of human flesh I got off of a already dead person, and you never find out?
How do you decide that? She might like to think that nobody is watching her under the shower, but I don’t know how her subjective preference creates a moral obligation on me. You can’t state that “someone somewhere doesn’t like it” is a sufficient reason to determine that an action is immoral. If you feel very very strongly that cats are better than dogs, and really don’t like me criticizing this idea it doesn’t create any moral obligation for me not to say that dogs are better than cats. So you need quite a lot more than “I really don’t like the idea of you doing something” to create a moral obligation. If there’s harm done, it’s quite easy. If you aren’t harmed in any way by my action, how can you justify preventing me from doing it?
That’s the same thing. Trying to find an exemple that appears even more outrageous doesn’t change the basic issue. You could at the contrary use a much less benign example , and the issue would still be the same. Can there be an action that is immoral despite not harming anybody?
Nope. Because in this case the action should have or at least was likely to result in harm, and it’s just by chance that it didn’t, so the action is clearly immoral on the basis of an intent and likelihood to harm.
Once again, trying to find outrageous examples doesn’t change the basic issue. Can something inconsequential be immoral?
A fair enough question.
It was a gross violation of her privacy and a form of sexual assault. Just because she was fortunate enough not to be seriously traumatized from it doesn’t excuse it or negate the fact that the gross misconduct occurred.
If, on a virtually deserted road at 3 AM, I drunkenly decided to fire off a shot at your car that harmlessly whizzed by your driver’s side window, and which you didn’t even notice because it made no contact with your vehicle, would the fact that I missed negate the fact that what I did was illegal and immoral simply because I didn’t blow your head off?
In that example the risks are obvious, the attempt at risk reduction non-existence and the consequences fatal. It’s a perfectly fine example to shoot down a statement of “it’s only immoral if it leads to harm”. But it’s not enough to justify “if there’s a risk of harm, the action is immoral”.
For instance practically every driver in the world, on practically every car journey they make, will have moments during those journeys where their humanity (by which I mean inability to be hyperfocused driving machines) leads to situations where their inattention could have lead to an accident, if a car, bike or person had been around. Does that mean that driving is immoral?
Just to be clear, I’m not saying the perv in the OP wasn’t immoral, I’m saying arguments about morality are less black and white than people like to think, and refusing to acknowledge that is what leads to kids being put on sex-offender lists for having taken nude pics of themselves.
To people that find this a confusing question. It’s a basic Philosophical Ethics question. There are many ethical schools of thought and unfortunately for modern man, a great many of them involve an appeal to some sort of objective standard. This causes us a great deal of consternation because that implies some sort of non-physical basis for morality whether that’s in the form of a God, or the universe or some untouchable, unseeable moral principle that is as yet undefined. This causes a lot of philosophers to come up with what we might call ‘natural ethics’ or ethics based around things we can see, touch, smell, etc. One of those schools of ethical thought is Consequentialism and its related Utlitarianism. These say that a moral act is evaluated upon the consequences of that act. Utilitarianism further expands on this by saying something that can be simplified as the ‘best’ act is the one which brings the most ‘good’ to the most people (Good is frequently defined as happiness, though it doesn’t have to be.) Utilitarianism actually has a lot of subsets and in some subsets, this isn’t a difficult question (rule utilitarianism as an example-although rule consequentialism/utilitarianism isn’t particularly loved by many these days. And of course ethical egoism doesn’t have an issue with it because the happiness of others is seen as irrelevant. It would likely just say ‘Don’t get caught.’ )
So anyway, this question is really just a criticism of hard consequentialism. If an action that most of us would regard as immoral actually causes no harm, then is it immoral? There are also other variations that we can take into account. What if rather than this person being a pervert, he originally filmed the woman out of fear for her safety, pretend that he had knowledge that no one else believed that there was a stalker that was intent on harming the woman and he was filming her home to see how this stalker got access to it so he could prevent the harm and inadvertently filmed her in the shower. Do the motivations change the morality of the act? What if he later decided to use the films for his own gratification? Does it make the original act immoral or just the later act?
All that this really tells us is that hard utilitarianism isn’t such a great ethical system-or at least most of us wouldn’t think so. I personally think that all utilitarian and consequentialist models are flawed, but that’s a subject of debate.
Agreed! A good example is how the Mayans not only did NOT consider human sacrifice immoral, they considered it a necessary religious act.
If this is morally neutral or even a morally good act then we should have no problem with having it done by more people.
If it doesn’t pass that test then I edge towards it being not a morally good thing.
I align with Sam Harris regarding the “best of all worlds, worst of all worlds” example of non-theistic moral goods and this one seems to drive us the wrong way along that continuum.
What if it gets shared on the internet, gets 10,000,000 views, but the woman in the video never finds out; still okay?
I understand the point you’re making, that it’s only when the woman in the video finds out about it that any actual harm is done, but I don’t share that view. If you know that someone does not want something to be done (a reasonable assumption in this case), then don’t do that thing. Saying it’s only wrong if they find out is too much like saying that anything’s okay as long as you don’t get caught.
This needs to be more specific.
How, exactly, does he film her?
Does he install a hidden camera in her shower? Obviously morally wrong.
Does he sneak up to her bathroom window and point a video camera? Again, obviously wrong.
Does he point a camera at her bathroom window from his own home? (her bathroom window is in plain view) Creepy, but not obviously wrong.
It seems to me that the question is “when does harm occur”? When the watching takes place? When the video is watched by one person? A hundred people? When the woman becomes aware of it?
You can often point to objective harm (physical injury or economic loss). That’s harder with these sorts of personal dignity type injuries. But, if I grope a sleeping woman, and she never knows, is it morally wrong? (e.g., if I Al Franken her and don’t send her the picture). I think the answer is “yes.”
I suppose my answer is that, like you can suffer economic harm and not be aware of it, you can also suffer dignity harm and not be aware of it. And while not knowing will mitigate the emotional injury that might follow the harm, doing the harm is still morally suspect.
I think this sleeping example is a good one and I’m interested in the response from the “no harm no foul” brigade - do you honestly believe it is not morally wrong to grope someone as long as they never know you did?