i keep writing the same shit over and over..

Many educated people are familiar with the classic debate over whether a person's meta-ethical position ought to have a major impact on one's behaviour (even if they are not familiar with the debate in such terms). This debate is most typically played out in the modern day between atheists/agnostics and religious believers (particularly monotheists). Many monotheists are wont to claim that disbelief in God immediately implies that purpose, or good and evil, don't have a fully mind-independent status, and, second, that belief in this doctrine of a universe without divine teleology is highly liable to promote a social collapse into bad behaviour, including criminal behaviour (which seems to imply commitment to a model with the positive prediction that non-monotheists should be less polite, more criminal, etc, unless they think that people who are disbelievers currently are morally special or something (but that seems like an 'epicycle', so to speak)). In doing so, they seem to tacitly come down on the God-as-dictator side of the Euthyphro Dilemma (they deny the possibility of rationally identifying as an irreligious moral realist (this is what they get right!)).
      More interesting to me is the fact that a similar debate has also been played out in academic, non-religious meta-ethics. Derek Parfit, the atheist moral realist (believer in eternal "normative truths" which don't require any 'metaphysical grounding'), makes it clear in On What Matters that he thought that the meta-ethical issues are of tremendous importance to humanity. There are several nods to Effective Altruism in Volume I (and maybe a few in Volume II (I read most of both volumes in 2015, and I can't remember it perfectly)), despite the fact that neither volume is actually about practical ethics - I think he thought, with some merit (as I'll shortly discuss), that people without a realist meta-ethical bent are much less likely to want to be Effective Altruists. Famously, he even says (I think he might say it first in the introduction) that, if he is wrong, his entire life would have been "a waste". Obviously, this can't be an 'objective' "waste" if he is wrong, so he is tacitly admitting that his emotional universe wouldn't change much if he convinced himself he were wrong in that very remark. But, as I say, I do at least get the strong  impression that he thinks that he may well at least have given up some elements of his self-denying altruism if he were proven wrong. This is especially strong in the section on his good friend Bernard Williams, who was, as Parfit notes, though a decent and virtuous man, not nearly so morally obsessive about distant suffering. 'Why,' Parfit might ask himself were he to give up belief in 'objective reasons', 'do I give so much of my income for people whose emotional reactions don't actually make me suffer in the here and now? I could spend money instead on things that make me happy more directly, while making an effort to remove unpleasant thoughts about starving people in distant countries from my mind!' I think that people like Singer, Pinker, Bloom, Greene, Harris and all other members of the "Effective Altruism" movement, who advocate the view that you can 'do the most good' by trying to think of how to promote "wellbeing" generally, with a decision-theoretic mindset, also quite clearly think that if one does not adopt the doctrine that moral behaviour should be motivated by considerations of consistency between the general normative principles to which we claim to be committed and our specific behaviours, then one is less likely to carry out actions which are "beneficial". So, again, here we have a mild version of the same concern of the monotheist. If you do not try to systematise the logic of your decision-making in the way the above figures do, then you are going to be a much worse person than those who do.
     I actually think that it makes perfect sense that one's meta-ethical position would affect one's actions at least a little, and that, for the average person, significantly changing one's meta-ethical stance probably does have some effect on one's emotional universe. I recently myself have consciously raised my credence in the view that all forms of systematic consequentialism - and all systematic moral frameworks - are doomed to failure: more specifically, that, whilst not all 'moral reasoning' is mere "rationalisation", since, in a given dialectical context (a situation where one is debating an ethical issue), it will often be the case that both parties are willing to commit themselves to a relevant, very generally phrased "ethical principle" and yet only one party's position on the issue in question is compatible with the logic of that principle (one case study in the essay linked), the idea that there is some 'absolutely true', self-evident, fully consistent, decidable for all moral problems (in the sense of giving a solid verdict for every possible 'moral situation) finite set of such principles that everyone should rationally accept is really quite absurd. It is absurd for too many reasons to count. The first few I already discussed in the essay linked, but I'd like to go over them again, and some more in addition. One is that (even very intelligent) people don't even agree on what the good is, or even what wellbeing is. Another is that we have no way to measure wellbeing (yes we have proxies like life expectancy, spending power and level of education for human populations, but thinking about human wellbeing even in terms of these measures quickly leads you into some very tricky territory, like the Repugnant Conclusion), and it doesn't seem at all impossible (in fact it seems damn likely to me!) that we will never turn general organismal wellbeing into a measurable theoretical construct in some properly formal model (can we quantify grades of emotional complexity among different organisms lol? even adopting an individualist rather than social or Aristotelian perspective on wellbeing, it doesn't become less absurd: given the computational theory of mind, it is in principle silly to think of thinking of happiness as reducible to arrangements of chemicals, so our 'best' bet would presumably be some kind of computational reduction or something ("The total level of wellbeing w for an organism o at time t is, for all currently perceived worldstates s­_i  (even if delusionally perceived) and the correspondent desired worldstates ds­_i, the average degree of match (continuous variable, along the Real interval [0,1]) between ds­_{i  and}  s­_{i ,} formalised in terms of the theory of mathematical isomorphism according to structurally-abstracted, idealised models of the s and the ds") but since my attempt in that preceding parenthetical interjection was a dumb joke, there is no prospect for this. Another is that we have extremely limited ability to predict future social dynamics (notwithstanding the excellent work of my man Peter Turchin!), so, even supposing for a second that the world can be objectively a better or worse place (assuming that there is some measurable quantity in the fully mind-independent world that goes up and down depending on our actions) no-one can actually claim with very much confidence at all, no matter what they are doing, that they are "making the world a better place", nor can we say that about political policies or decisions, including war (the utilitarian may want to say, as I would, that the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, were evil atrocities, but they always have in the back of their mind the butterfly effect... what about the unintended longer-term consequences? Hmm I can't be too confident that these things were even overall bad can I? (Objection: but do we really have to be that sceptical? Can't we have high credence that even from a long-term perspective the Iraq War was bad? Sure you can, but with no scientific justification whatever - and that's my point, you have no scientific justification (none of us do!)). Perhaps the only thing a utilitarian can have some confidence is the right thing to do, on the basis that they value the "wellbeing" of all organisms in general, or of "reducing suffering" in general, is to devote their life to investigating and trying to raise alarm bells about existential risks, like Nick Bostrom does. But, as always with utilitarian commitments, there is then no way to justify all the time you spend not working on this project, unless it is directly targeted at improving your ability to work at this project (like resting your brain, or trying to make a lot of money), and this means that to take fully seriously this utilitarian logic you would have to become a total fucking loser weirdo with a horrible life. (Even then, given that "good" and "bad" are not fully mind-independent properties - we know this because they don't feature in any scientific models of mind-independent phenomena which make reliable predictions - the claim that "if the world were without life completely/if humans were wiped out/if civilisation was wiped out it would be a worse or less valuable place" is yet another expressive speech act, and gibberish from a scientific standpoint (it is very easy to persuade humans that they should be concerned about existential risk, because it does seem to follow from a lot of the expressive speech acts we make about ethics that existential risks are extremely important, and yet, strangely (or not so strangely), it is impossible to get a human being to behave as if existential risks are the most important thing to deal with at all times (even Bostrom doesn't really act like this; he has a girlfriend and writes poems).)  Another, related one is that a lot of 'noble' or 'altruistic' or 'benevolent' things people say they do for utilitarian reasons don't make sense for utilitarian reasons and are instead just complicated deprivation rituals - rituals which have a very ancient legacy in religions in virtually all human societies.  For example, people like Peter Singer - people I know - say that they are vegetarian or vegan because of utilitarian logic. But even if you don't press on the claim that they usually use to back up this statement - "If a lot of people became vegetarian or vegan, there would be more wellbeing in the world/less suffering in the world" (a mere expressive speech act, given that the aggregate wellbeing of all organisms on the planet is immeasurable because we don't even know what wellbeing is (same with suffering)) - even if you pretend that this expressive speech act is something more, and just take for granted that there is some quantity "wellbeing" which would go up were more people to become vegetarians or vegans, and a dual quantity "suffering" which would go down were this to happen (which I am usually happy to do, because it is so intuitive and comfortable to think like this) - then there is still no reason why an individual person should never eat meat, because individual consumption decisions in any given situation are totally inconsequential, and the real goal should be to try one's best to persuade as many other people to be vegetarian or vegan independent of your own consumption decisions. Why not, for example, just eat whatever you want when nobody will find out but try to convince other people to go vegetarian or vegan? That way, you will have a chance of having a super-inconsequential impact on the world without even depriving yourself of delicious meat and making it way harder to keep your iron and B12 levels in a healthy range (if you're South Asian, your iron and B12 levels will probably stay in a healthy range even if you go fully vegetarian and don't take any supplements or specialise your diet, but otherwise it can be difficult). In my experience, people who identify as "utilitarians" are, without fail, just pretenders. They act like normal people except they occasionally do random shit like ask people to donate money to charity while they mutilate themselves in some way or some shit. (And then they want praise for giving money to charity, which is absurd, because why are they wasting their time on charity pranks when they should be working on existential risk lol, or at least trying to get into banking or politics lol?)
     Anyhow, to get back to the point, I've noticed - and I'm not sure where the causal arrow points in this situation - that my meta-ethical change has coincided with more of a conscious embrace on my part of Machiavellianism. I have decided that I'm happy to cheat, lie and scheme my way through life, do whatever it takes to get on top and enjoy myself. I can suppress guilt and have a good time.
    ...
    In all seriousness, if there are no reasons for action but instrumental reasons, then, well, the Humean conclusion is that, insofar as you can take 'control' of your guilt responses (and most people cannot for 'big' wrongs, admittedly), you should scheme and deceive your way through life, if that allows you to get the wanted outcomes in your life, and if you can avoid detection as a knave and blackguard. You should only work to mitigate suffering insofar as you are directly motivated to do so. And you have no reason to care whether you sometimes make expressive speech acts which, if you were to interpret them in a kind of stricter fashion, imply moral commitments that are at odds with the way you are currently spending your time. Because what do such 'inconsistencies' even matter? They don't even matter if you care about logic, because it's not really an issue of logic, unless you choose to make it into one by treating expressive speech acts as if they are more (as, admittedly, I always myself do in ethical debates).
    Anyhow, we gotta save the world from climate change I'm telling ya.

AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND FUNNY ESSAY ON META-ETHICS, ETHICS, UTILITARIANISM AND REASON

Can’t get no Ethical Satisfaction (and it’s not just me)

I have this problem in my life. It’s been lurking creepily behind me for quite a long time (I inserted “behind me” in post- because I know people like physical metaphors, even if half-assed). I mean, it’s not really my unique, personal problem (it is not up to me to explain how this amendment affects my half-assed physical metaphor); it’s a problem of abstract philosophy that causes me emotional issues. It’s very vaguely related to the better-known Frege-Geach problem – which, incidentally, is itself a problem that has been known to cause emotional issues (although not to me, only to people who refuse to see that saying that all ethical discussion and activity consists in expressive/commissive speech acts is just blatantly untenable, because that’s clearly not a satisfactory account of what’s been going on in philosophical ethics for, you know, the last few thousand years (how can you propose to explain ethical language games simpliciter unless you can account for Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Foot, Nussbaum, Singer and Parfit?)). In fact, what I just said didn’t emphasise this point enough. If you’ll permit me to apply a positive scalar to the vector we’re already skating along (people love quasi-physical linear maths metaphors the most), I want to suggest that ‘my’ problem – I use the possessive pronoun with a bashful knitting of my limbs (narrowing of the body) and a downcast gaze – is actually a problem that a very sizeable category of persons have… even if the instances of this category are not smart enough to realise it and consequently (logical, atemporal sense) do not experience any associated disquiet (to clarify a point in no need of such remediation for comic effect, if these people are depressed or anxious, it has nothing to do with this abstract philosophical problem).

Now, as a comically self-undermining disdainer of dithering coyness – sort of like Polonius (“Brevity is the soul of wit” says the least brief man in the world, much as the counter-Enlightenment mystic Jordan Peterson professes to be a Man of Science) – I staunchly refuse to dilly-dally in relating to the Reader what category of persons I am referring to in the above, and instead will immediately spit the answer out following this colon:

the utilitarians.

I want it known that I do not myself belong to this category of persons. Personally, I think that utilitarianism is a false God. And one thing that I will do very soon is explain why. But before even that, I feel strangely as if I have some sort of moral obligation (a rather rum thing, what) to say in what this problem consists – or to put it less prolixly – what this problem is.

(As the peerless philosophy stylist, Jerry Fodor, showed us, brevity has never been, and will never be, the soul of wit. If anything, it is the opposite. There is nothing witty about Hemingway. And imagine a taciturn stand-up comic. Nor are cowboys funny…)

As Ecclesiastes might urge, I will cut the hilarious bullshit now, because now is not the time. The problem is this:

Like any other smart, philosophically trained chump who is politically and ethically engaged in the world and has beliefs about what is right and wrong , about how things could go better and worse (and all that jazz), I strongly believe that the things (actions, trends, institutions) that I think are bad are bad not because they violate some divine command or some ‘rule’ forced upon us by Reason itself, but because they have (will probably have, have had) bad consequences; mutatis mutandis, that the things that I think are good are good because they have (will probably have, have had) good consequences. However, I don’t actually have any kind of systematic framework that would, as it were, ‘ground’ all these positions I take – which tend to be justified case by case, often relying on principles which I don’t take seriously wholesale – because, as made clear, I categorically reject utilitarianism (certainly, as a philosophy for living). Now, if you recall the comment I made before to the effect that I think that the problem I’m stating here is actually an unrecognised problem for pretty much all utilitarians, you might be somewhat confused, because utilitarians shouldn’t have this problem if, after all, by virtue of being utilitarians, they have the systematic framework to ground the ethical judgments they make. Unfortunately, my response to this is rather controversial – repugnant to most utilitarians (a “repugnant conclusion”). I hold the extremely edgy view, that, if you think that accepting the Humean “bundle theory” of “the self” isn’t sufficient to make a person a Buddhist (i.e. to be a Buddhist you have to actually do Buddhist activities), then, by the exact same logic, there isn’t a person alive on this entire planet who is actually a utilitarian, because no utilitarian actually lives as a utilitarian – certainly if we’re not including in this assessment any devious, J.S. Mill-influenced Satanists who think that “utility” encompasses “eudaimonia” (I feel such a move is a sure path towards not identifying as a utilitarian anymore).

Why do I hold such a mad view? Not merely because it gives me great pleasure to deflate the absurd pretensions of utilitarians – and it surely does, a major hobby of mine being to dialectically disrobe them until they are quivering like freshly shorn lambs in front of me, bleating for abatement and détente – but for two major reasons (neither of them original, both of them well-known critiques of utilitarianism), which I shall now explicate.

1.)    Nobody can even tell us what utility is; there is no formalism, nothing resembling a “neurochemical reduction”, no way of defining it beyond resort to vague, non-technical and imprecise words like “pleasure”, “pain”, “harm” and “enjoyment”, "preference realisation". How do you measure utility? How do you compare utility? How do we weigh up human versus animal utility? If you’re not the kind of utilitarian who rejects Mill’s claim about dissatisfied Socrates and the satisfied pig (i.e. you’ve moved past Bentham), then you have clearly given up on nebulous neurobabble-accounts of how you compare utility (“if the “pleasure receptors” are more excited in person A than person B, then A has more utility!”) – which is good, except that there also seems very little to stop you sliding back towards more ‘intuitive’, commonplace thinking about ethics. If you refuse to state quantitatively the ratio of ethical significance between the higher pleasures and the base pleasures (and why would you do such a patently silly thing?), then the ethical territory open to you becomes just as wide as that open to someone who rejects utilitarianism: you can go full Nietzschean and say that it’s ok if a society is highly inegalitarian and there’s lots of poverty and suffering so long as that society is producing Great Men who make magnificent works of art and achieve great scientific advances (because you think that these goods are so much more important in their contribution of utility than goods like a reduction of the proportion of the population with pneumonia or whatever); or you can go full Marxian and say that a world without Great Men would be more than fine if no-one was hungry and everyone had a nice, clean place to live; or anything in between. All is licensed. And that’s not what utilitarians want at all! The dream is a system that forces you to adopt certain judgments that aren’t even emotionally attractive to you, by virtue of the fact that they are the “correct” ones. If nobody fucking knows what this whole utility thing is about, how the fuck does this work?

2.)    A utilitarian (one who isn't drifting towards non-utilitarianism) literally has no idea what is good or bad, or what they should be doing (this is, ahem, A MASSIVE PROBLEM). If you assume, for no good reason whatsoever, that there is some vaguely conceptually appropriate sciency account of what utility really is in terms of brain states (a bunch of sentences of neurochemistry or computational neuroscience or some such) that ‘we’ will eventually arrive at (what I mean by “vaguely conceptually appropriate” is that the account will fit with enough of our existing utilitarian conclusions (and what these conclusions even are, beyond conclusions that other ethical ‘frameworks’ or ways of thinking already deliver, it is not clear to me (maybe ‘we shouldn’t brutally slaughter animals’, and ‘there’s nothing inherently wrong with fucking a dead chicken (as long as we don’t actually do it such that we cause disgust to other people)’ and ‘there are certain conceivable circumstances in which nuking a million people would be morally good’) to satisfy us that there is no better specific sciency account of this concept), and if you assume that if a person with “full knowledge” and understanding compares any two meaningfully distinct “world states” X and Y, there can only be one comparative judgment licensed by this account of utility (X = Y, X > Y or X < Y, with the same accompanying axioms as the central axioms of decision theory), then utilitarianism might be a viable organisational system for a future race of superintelligent aliens (actually, even that’s not clear at all, but whatever). However, as things stand, in the boring present, utilitarians don’t know what utility is and they can’t compare world states. Utilitarians (those who haven’t gone in the Millian direction and aren’t sliding towards a richer cosmos of values (becoming more like the rest of us chumps)) can’t even confidently assert morally banal propositions like that Hitler contributed more evil to the world than good. They simply cannot, because they don’t know if it’s “true” according to their system. The world is far too complicated to decide. What if all the history-trajectories involving Hitler and people very similar to Hitler taking control of Germany in the 1930s (people we can also call Hitler, for convenience (metaphysics like this is too impossible as to be a good use of time)) are massively outnumbered by ‘adjacent’ history-trajectories where the planet experiences nuclear Armageddon and civilisation is wiped out? NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS. Which means that even extremely basic moral judgments are unavailable for utilitarians! THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. UTILITARIANS PAY ATTENTION PLEASE!

Anyhow, to reiterate my key point, what this means is that utilitarians may believe they have a systematic framework for making ethical judgments, but they actually don’t; instead, they’re just making shit up and being edgy on taboos because they’re assholes (that is essentially what I think).

Meanwhile, as I kept saying before, I am myself in a major bind because I do actually think there is such a thing as ethical reasoning, and I believe in evaluating goods and bads by consequences, but I don’t actually take that logic all the way, which is, at least on the face of it (and we’ll see why we might need to look beneath the face in a minute), illogical. As I’ve explained before (e.g. in this essay (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/a-philosophically-involved-work.html), which, incidentally, I am very ambivalent about and which shouldn’t be taken as a statement of fully mature thoughts), analytic ethics survives because (crudely) some ethical judgments are more logical than others. In slightly more precise terms, I have previously noted the following:

“The way rational ethical discourse works can be illustrated by a simple, abstract model:

Person A agrees with person B that x (where x is some ethical principle or a highly general ethical judgment). Person B points out that person A is violating x in the case of y (where y is some specific issue: women’s rights, race, animal welfare, abortion, whatever). Person A argues that position on y is not a violation of x because of an error in Person B’s argument, or because of empirical considerations which Person B has overlooked. The debate either continues with further discussion of the merits in each other’s arguments or onto further discussion of the empirical considerations.”

This model explains why I am unambiguously right that, e.g., cat cullings in Australia are a good thing (I know this is a weird case study but, strangely, it’s pretty much optimal for the purpose, apart from the fact of its being ‘weird’):

People who oppose the culling of cats will claim that it is deeply wrong because YOU SHOULDN’T KILL ANIMALS IN COLD BLOOD, because IT IS WRONG TO KILL or because WE SHOULDN’T INTERFERE WITH “NATURE” (it tends to be very emotive, very deontological thinking, or, as with the last one, rather quaint and philosophically idiotic teleological thinking). But if you point out that native marsupials – all of which are vulnerable – and native birds are killed in their millions by these cats, in a fashion that surely causes tremendous suffering to these prey animals (being stalked, chased, leapt upon, bitten, scratched and ripped open is presumably a significantly more painful way to die than getting cleanly shot, as the cats are), they literally have no response, because this is also majorly unpalatable to them or should be unacceptable to them according to the ‘reasons’ they actually give. And so the inevitable outcome to such a response is either that they get up and walk away angrily, moronically repeat what they already said before, or concede that you are right and that they were mistaken. (Also, you can point out that the teleological way of thinking about nature as something that shouldn’t be “interfered with” is silly on every possible level, given that God doesn’t exist and such, and also the fact, in this specific case, that WE INTRODUCED CATS TO AUSTRALIA TO BEGIN WITH.)

This model probably also explains why anyone who says that the Iraq War was a horrific crime is correct, and explains similar such things. (I’m actually not being ironic, which may be disappointing to some.)

Anyhow, the reason that this model is emotionally unsatisfying on a deeper level is that it relativises correct and incorrect ethical verdicts to the principles that people choose to bring into play and can agree on when debating a specific ethical problem. Which is another way of saying what I said before: like it or not, there is no systematic framework. Which is another way of saying that there’s no way of justifying an entire network of ethical positions, i.e. your whole ethical worldview. Which is another way of saying that you can’t necessarily reconcile your ethical positions on different issues, even if those ethical positions were each arrived at in a pretty rational sort of way (with thinking consistent with my model of desirable ethical thinking). And responding with this sort of rubbish (https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/949454134716936192 “Why not just use all the frameworks, picking and choosing whenever we encounter a problem?”) is not any kind of solution, because those “theories” that Shermer mentions in that tweet are simply logically inconsistent with each other in all kinds of complicated ways (there’s almost nothing that survives as a coherent doctrine if you were to actually try to mash them all together), and the contextual picking and choosing of which “theory” to apply where will have nothing to do with Reason.

So no, there’s no happy ending, and everyone has to deal with this problem. And that sort of sucks.

An Essay that could go much deeper on "Evolutionary Debunking" of Morality and those Psychologists who think that Science can tell us about Meta-ethics

4. How reliable is moral cognition? Does evolution debunk morality?

Evolution does not “debunk morality” (a stupid and annoying phrase). Hume gave the main arguments debunking strong (non-teleology-based) moral objectivism long before Darwin. Evolution put the final nail in the coffin of teleological metaphysics, which further reinforced the importance of Hume’s arguments, and 20^th Century work in evolutionary biology, ethology, evolutionary psychology and (evolutionary) neuroscience has helped bring out the important implications of the fact that our ‘moral faculty’ is at least grounded in a limbic system and norm-generator that have their specific form only because this form has been selected for. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to claim that these discoveries have had earth-shattering conclusions for meta-ethics: they have not shown that a Mackean Error Theory or some form of expressivism is the correct account of human moral language, because they have not shown that it is impossible to reason about ethics. I argue that, in roughly the same way that we accept that knowledge of evolution does not “debunk” mathematics, we ought to accept that knowledge of evolution does not “debunk” the grand philosophical tradition of reasoning about ethics, from Plato to Parfit (or show that we should give up debating ethical dilemmas).[1] 

Long before Darwin, David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature famously argued: a) that one can’t deduce a prescription from any number of descriptive statements, b) that beliefs are not in themselves motivating and c) that it is a category error to think that desires or preferences are rational or irrational in themselves. The first is a straightforward logical truth,[2] with (of course) extremely important consequences for very naïve views about ethics. Nevertheless, the observation of this logical truth was not fatal to full-blooded moral objectivism for scientific rationalists before Darwin, because a pre-Darwinian scientific rationalist could still rationally believe in some kind of teleological metaphysics. In fact, most pre-Darwinian Enlightenment figures did believe in some kind of teleological metaphysics (either taking the form of Christianity (like Newton, Locke or Kant) or some kind of Deism (like Spinoza or Voltaire)). Galileo and Newton had obviously shown that Aristotle’s teleological physics was hopelessly flawed, but their theories hadn’t shown that there could not be purpose in creation. Newton certainly didn’t think he had shown that!

However, as philosophers have been pointing out for more than a century, with Darwin’s theory of evolution came the deathblow to the ancient Aristotelian worldview that design was inherent in nature (that, e.g., the undeniable telos of Man, “the rational animal”, is to be a zoon politikon who fully exercises his powers of reason and attains eudaimonia). This is because Darwin showed that all appearance of design in nature was just that: teleonomy, not teleology, because all life evolved from completely unconscious processes over very long stretches of time. This conclusion destroys any claim for the objectivity of teleological ethics, thereby rendering unjustifiable arguments from “the natural” for or against actions or practices.[3] 

Without any contribution from an understanding of evolution, b) and c) do further violence, if true, to naïve ethical views, because they jointly imply the conclusions i) that even if there were absolutely ‘true’ moral judgments which all sufficiently intelligent species would eventually converge on, an omniscient (and logically omniscient) organism could recognise these ‘true’ judgments and act monstrously nevertheless, because of a lack of motivation to do good, and ii) that it would be a category error to think that this lack of motivation would be in itself rational or irrational. Although the most extreme Humean view on rationality of preferences certainly runs into trouble (because having an intransitive preference set seems clearly irrational and because, as Derek Parfit showed [1984, 2011], one can at least come up with niche examples of arbitrary, self-defeating preferences that seem clearly irrational by any standard), a slightly moderated version seems basically impossible to deny. Pertinently, Darwin’s theory gave this line of thought a further power, by bringing out the massive historical contingency of our feelings towards con-specifics. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself illustrates this point: 

“In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If […] men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters.” [Darwin, 1981/1871: 73]

The basic thought here is that different species have different limbic systems and different forms of social cognition (mainly(?)) because of different historical trajectories, and that there’s no basis for the intuition that one kind of limbic system or form of social cognition produces the true judgments (whereas there is an obvious basis for thinking that having a bigger neocortex may allow for better reasoning, etc).

Since the middle of the 20^th Century, a huge amount of progress has been made in the fields of theoretical evolutionary biology, ethology (particularly primatology), social psychology and neuroscience towards understanding the evolutionary ‘roots’ of our moral faculty and the way people commonly make ethical judgments (the role of reason). Some have claimed that some of this research has dramatic meta-ethical conclusions. I disagree. In the short space I have left, I will do my best to show that this is the wrong inference.

In the introduction, my words suggested that I was mostly concerned with those who have used Darwinian research to argue either for an Error Theory about ethics or some form of expressivism, but there’s actually another, more interesting group who have used this research for a strong meta-ethical conclusion: utilitarians like Peter Singer, Joshua Greene and (possibly) Steven Pinker who think that theoretical evolutionary biology and psychology show a) that we rely on gut intuitions which we rationalise constantly, but that this is specifically a failure to think in consequentialist terms, b) that a rational person ought to become a utilitarian, and c) that ‘reason’ is the main engine of moral progress, where moral progress is basically identified with “expanding the moral circle”. This argument is expounded in greatest detail by Greene in his 2013 book Moral Tribes, although Singer’s well-cited 2005 paper “Ethics and Intuitions” instantiates this argument as well. Quite apart from the simplistic science that is often marshalled in service of this argument (see my first assignment on “Ethics and Intuitions”)[4], it is a category mistake, as Massimo Pigliucci [2012] and Thomas Nagel [2013] argue, to think that empirical research could in itself strongly favour one moral theory over another. Of course, Singer and Greene realise that they also need a philosophical argument to support their interpretation of this evidence – however, like Pigliucci and Nagel, I believe that their arguments fall short of establishing their very strong conclusion that utilitarianism is the ‘true theory’, or the one sensible choice for a rationalist.

As Nagel points out in his 2013 review of Moral Tribes, “You can’t learn about morality from brain science”, there appears to be a contradiction in Greene’s position. On the one hand, Greene does not want to say that utilitarianism is the true theory, i.e. taking a strong realist stance, (as Singer has in recent times been strongly tempted towards [2016]) and yet his advocacy of a sub-Millian utilitarianism with principles that are deeply counterintuitive and unfollowable – which even Greene admits he doesn’t come close to following – strongly suggests the view, as Nagel puts it, that morality is something “more […] than human”. Why a non-realist would hold such a view is inexplicable. Moreover, as Nagel suggests, it is strongly contrary to available evidence to hold that deontic principles can’t form the basis for a universal human ethic, as we can see in the phenomenal international success of ‘human rights’ since World War II [Pinker, 2011 (funnily enough)]. Like Singer, therefore, Greene does not have the grounds he thinks he has to repudiate a more Rawlsian approach to ethical reasoning, without the extreme ambition of de-humanising ethics.

More generally, I think that one thing that unites this utilitarian group of Greene et al, and the as-yet-undiscussed group who use Darwinian research to defend some form of strong anti-rationalism (represented by Haidt) is that they infer from evidence that a massive amount of “rationalisation” goes on in the production of moral judgments by non-philosophers [Haidt, 2012] that major philosophical debates must boil down merely to a clash between very elaborate competing rationalisations. I myself believe that Haidt’s research casts serious doubt on some of the basic assumptions that motivated many great philosophers (e.g. Kant), but I also think there is much of importance that it doesn’t cast doubt on. It doesn’t cast doubt on the fact that human beings can’t change their mind when exposed to moral reasons (in the Rawlsian sense), nor that an astute philosopher can’t tell when a person’s commitment to abstract principle x is in conflict with their position on specific issue y.

Moreover, as Pigliucci points out [2012], one needn’t believe in the ‘truth’ of one moral theory to believe in the possibility of making progress with ethical reasoning. One can, like Pigliucci and I, believe that different frameworks can be applied to different problems. In short, it is not inconsistent with Hume, Darwin or modern psychological and neuroscientific research to advocate a weak form of moral rationalism, which would be committed to the view that certain points of consensus among modern philosophers have much to do with reason (that extreme speciesism is a mistake, that racism and sexism are wrong), but not committed to the view that all issues or dilemmas have a determinate, superassertible verdict which all rational people must accept, or that there is one ultimate theory which all rational people should ultimately converge towards, contra Derek Parfit [2011].

Reference List

Aitken, Thomas (2017). “First Assignment for How Biology Matters to Philosophy: Report”. Accessible (if need be) from:

<http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/a-brief-philosophy-of-biology.html>

Darwin, Charles (1981/1871). The Descent of Man, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

Greene, Joshua (2013). Moral Tribes, Penguin Press.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Press.

Hume, David (1737). A Treatise of Human Nature, 1992 edition, Prometheus Books, New York.

Nagel, Thomas (2013). “You can’t learn about morality from brain scans”, New Republic. Accessible from:

<https://newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel>

Parfit, Derek (2011). On What Matters, Oxford University Press.

Pigliucci, Massimo (2012). Answers for Aristotle, Basic Books, New York.

Priest, Graham (1997). “Sexual perversion”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75:3, 360-372.

Turchin, Peter (2005). War and Peace and War, Penguin US.

Turchin, Peter (2015). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Best Co-operators on Earth, Beresta Books.

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[1] Knowledge of evolution can help us see that some of the great moral philosophers were more seriously mistaken about various matters than others, with the teleological philosophers (like Plato and his fellow ancients) the most fundamentally mistaken about what can reasonably be said to justify moral claims. The view I will defend is simply that ethical reasoning is not always faux-reasoning or rationalising in the sense that the best ethical reasoners in the philosophical tradition really are deriving conclusions directly from the axioms (general ethical principles) they set up (the constraint on possible axioms is just that any axiom has to seem very appealing to (at least most of) us).

[2] Easy to overlook, of course, because so much of our language is normatively infused, as Hilary Putnam argued (I don’t have time to argue that it would be wrong to think that the linguistic ‘entanglement’ shows that Hume’s ‘guillotine’ is unjustified).

[3] A brief contemporary discussion of this point can be found in Graham Priest’s 1997 paper Sexual Perversion, which points out that to a Darwinian and moral rationalist moral objections using language like “perversion” and “unnatural” carry no weight: if by natural you mean historically adaptive and selected for, then the objection doesn’t go through because a behaviour’s historical adaptiveness has no logical bearing on its rightness or wrongness (this is more or less Hume or G.E. Moore re-hashed).

[4] Pinker, perhaps Singer’s main influence and very much a proponent of the gene-centric theory of evolution, seems unaware of the evidence that Hobbes’ description of ‘human nature’ matches only about 25% of the population in experiments of co-operation games (including outside the West) [Turchin 2005], generally overlooks the massive historical and sociological evidence that people can be highly self-sacrificing for what Atran calls “sacred values” [2001] (though Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature does cite Atran in relation to Israel-Palestine), and seems unaware of the case for multilevel group selection as an explanation of human ‘ultrasociality’, as articulated, for example, in Turchin [2005, 2015].

Maybe one of the best, simple presentations of fallacies in dumb scientism about ethics (the scientism of extreme simpletons like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, etc)

Phillip Kitcher's 1994 paper dismantling E.O. Wilson's program of biologicizing ethics: Just a neat presentation of the ancient arguments that defeat dumb scientistic, logic-denying positions on ethics 

http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/167win10/kitcher%20-%20four%20ways%20of%20biologicizing%20ethics.pdf

From Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Elliot Sober

These dumb fucks will never stop ignoring Hume. They will never learn.

An Essay called "Ethics of Abortion Redux"

Ethics of Abortion Redux

I support lenient abortion laws. I think that we should minimise the obstacles placed in the way of safe abortions at clinics. Nevertheless, unlike the majority of liberals and leftists, I don't think the ethics of abortion are clear-cut. I am right and they are wrong: the vast majority of liberals and leftists haven't thought very hard about the ethics of abortion (not surprising, given that very few people think hard about anything). I think it's obvious to anyone familiar with the argument of Don Marquis – a cruder version of which I came to independently, and wrote about in an old essay (published in September 2015) called "Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation" – that the matter is not straightforward. I will explain my reasons for supporting lenient abortion laws despite this much later on. But for now I will explain why the question of the morality of abortion is tricky, and why much of what "pro-choice" advocates say about abortion is as unrigorous as the religious malarkey of the "pro-lifers".

A lot (probably most) of what pro-choice progressives say about abortion is pure BS. Most pro-choice progressives seem convinced that, once you abandon religion, there is no argument whatsoever. This leads them to treat slogans like “Men would never tolerate having their reproductive rights infringed" as trump cards – obvious proof of male hypocrisy and the persistence of patriarchal domination within our society. Similarly, it leads them to see memes like that doctored image of Hillary Clinton, surrounded by women, signing away men’s right to ejaculate outside of reproduction, as rational takedowns. The problem is that one can only see the exertion of legislative control over abortion as unambiguous male hypocrisy if you presuppose that the analogy is completely clear – that there is not a hint of a morally relevant difference – between the reproductive role of females and the reproductive role of males. But the analogy is clearly not clear: as we all know, females incubate proto-human beings whereas males produce only gametes. And, as I will later argue, that is indeed a morally relevant difference.

A similar line that one often hears is the following: “If men had uteruses, there’s no way they’d be signing such draconian laws”. The problem with this slogan is that if men had uteruses and didn’t make such laws, then it’s hard to see in what sense they’d still be men. In fact, the sentence verges on total nonsense. It is essentially impossible to analyse the sentence in a way that makes any sense.  This is the best I’ve got: “If you imagine a world identical to our own, but except for the male (biological) sex there is a different sex which has the psychology of biological males in our current world and dominates the highest levels of government and business in the way that males do in our current world, but which reproduces in the way females do (and this would, of course, also mean that this sex has a vagina and ovaries and big breasts for lactating and wide hips for giving birth and that this sex ovulates, which would mean an entire different evolutionary history (which would mean that this sex looks like females in our current world in every possible way (gracile facial features, less body hair, etc), and would, of course, mean that the “women” in this world would have to be sexually male to produce the sperm for the “men”), then in this world the new sex we are imagining, which looks identical to the female sex but which we are calling “men”, would not make restrictive abortion laws.”

The main problem with this analysis, however, is that the best theory for the origin of patriarchy puts uteruses – the nature of female reproduction – front and centre, meaning that it is almost certainly not reasonable to imagine a world in which uterus-holders are the sex oppressing the other. The dominant theory for the origin of patriarchy (more precisely, the dominant theory for the fact that every civilisation ever is a patriarchy) holds that patriarchy begins when people settle down in chiefdoms or states. In chiefdoms or states, the wide kin connections and strong extended-family relations of hunter-gatherer societies fall apart (replaced by more ‘nuclear’ relations), and women no longer spend their time in the company of other women, with a communally decided group of different possible sexual partners (based roughly on genetic distance). Instead, women become extremely important to their (struggling, farm-working) fathers for their reproductive capacity – for their role as dowry generators. In order that “buyers” of women can be assured that their family line is secure (and because males are evolutionarily programmed to want only their sperm to enter women in whom they have sexual interest), virginity suddenly becomes extremely important, and in order to guarantee virginity, the veil emerges and women are kept to the home. And thus, women become chattel.

Anyway, that was incredibly perfunctory, but the point is that the uterus was very likely key to the origin of patriarchy, which means, in turn, that “Men with uteruses” would not be men; they would be women in every possible sense, including in the sense that they would be the oppressed sex.

 Finally, as for the "my body, my right" line (or the emphasis on “bodily autonomy” in general), it should be obvious why this isn’t a trump card: it presupposes that there is nothing wrong with abortion. Rapists aren't allowed to defend themselves by saying "my body, my right" – and why? Because one's bodily autonomy ends when it affects another's.

Now, there is, of course, a perfectly respectable way of arguing that there is nothing wrong with abortion (any instance of abortion, no matter what trimester the woman is in, no matter her personal circumstances and the effects a baby would have on her life), and this is the Singerian way. However, as we will later see, it does have implications that most find very unsavoury and deeply unsettling. Meanwhile, Don Marquis’ argument that abortion is seriously wrong (that individual abortions may be more or less wrong (depending on woman’s circumstance, etc) but that all abortions are probably more wrong than, say, any case of theft) has its own very troubling implications – primarily for population ethics. The fact that both these positions are unsatisfactory in their own way will ultimately lead me to a very odd conclusion. But we’ll get to that much later.

Because Don Marquis and Peter Singer both employ the same style of moral reasoning (the only possible style of moral reasoning, which essentially involves figuring out which moral position on the given contentious moral issue is most compatible with moral principles that people would overwhelmingly agree on), it is not surprising that they have a lot of common ground. Both Marquis and Singer agree that lots of ‘factors’ make individual acts of killing wrong, and that the differing presence of these factors in different cases explains  why not all acts of killing are equally wrong (killing Hitler is less wrong than killing Gandhi, etc). Both also use the word “killing” in such a way that entails that aborting a foetus is an act of killing (so there is no semantic gulf). Finally, both think there is a feature of a sizeable subset of acts of killing whose presence in a given act of killing is sufficient to make that act of killing wrong, irrespective of other factors. For Marquis, the key feature is deprivation of conscious, intelligent experience: he claims that the effect that the killing of humans (or proto-humans) who have a possible, conscious future has in depriving these creatures of future prospects – of future experience, of future joy, love and fulfilment, of future goals and achievements – is that feature of a sizeable subset of acts of killing whose presence is sufficient to make any act of killing with that feature wrong (incidentally, this principle may ‘justify’ the common belief that killing animals (other species) with a future is not necessarily seriously wrong: even other mammals probably don’t have the same richness of experience as humans, or the same ability to remember the past and to formulate long-term goals for the future, which means the deprivation is not as great). For Singer, the feature of a sizeable subset of acts of killing whose presence in a given act of killing is sufficient to make that act of killing wrong is the effect that that the killing of creatures with an ‘ideal desire to live’ has in denying these creatures their life. So whereas Marquis emphasises the importance of objective deprivation, Singer thinks what matters more is the victim’s psychology.

At this point, you may be wondering what work the “ideal” adjective does in Singer’s story. The answer is not actually straightforward. The obvious work it’s doing is covering every case where the person killed has a ‘good life’ and is more or less ‘content’ but who feels no specific desire at the point of their being killed to “live” (including cases where the person killed is asleep or temporarily unconscious and thus probably has no ‘desires’ at all (depending on one’s understanding of philosophy of desire)). I think Singer has also suggested that it may cover cases where the person killed is depressed and feels terrible about life and their future, but would, if they had not been killed, soon overcome their depression. However, this does seem a little dodgy (does it not?).

Marquis, meanwhile, thinks that – regardless of other factors – it is wrong to kill a person who is severely depressed and will never emerge from their depression, unless their depression is so bad that they won’t even have any future worth living. Singer would have to say, I believe, that killing a severely depressed person who will never emerge from their depression is not necessarily wrong, even if they do actually have some future worth living (the killing may, of course, be wrong because of the distress it will cause other people (family members, friends, etc)).

The above implication of Singer’s position is, I suspect, already a little bit troubling to some people, but that’s not half of it. There are actually far more troubling implications – and these implications are the reason for the controversy Singer has often faced (in particular, the massive backlash to Singer in Germany). It’s obvious why placing the emphasis on the ‘ideal desire to live’ makes abortion permissible, because there is no reason to think that foetuses are capable of having a “desire to live”, or probably even anything we could reasonably call a “desire” at all (and having an unwanted baby can, of course, ruin women’s lives, as well as the lives of those around her). But placing the emphasis on the ‘ideal desire to live’ also means that killing the mentally disabled, killing senile and impaired old people, and killing very small infants (at least), is not wrong in itself. That is to say, if killing a mentally disabled child wouldn’t cause anyone distress and if the killing was carried out in such a way that didn’t cause the mentally disabled child any suffering, then Singer believes it would be permissible. Even if it did cause his mother a nontrivial degree of distress, it would only be wrong in proportion to that amount of distress. I think many people find this to be a repugnant conclusion.[1]  

I have myself invented a thought experiment where our intuitions seem to strongly militate against the Singerian position (the thought experiment was originally contained in the aforementioned essay called “Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation”):
"Imagine, if you will, a healthy woman late in the first trimester of her pregnancy, roughly 10-12 weeks in (the start of foetushood). Suppose, if you can, that one day this woman contracts a very strange and disturbing urge. For whatever reason – be it insanity, iniquity or both – there is nothing in the world she wants more to do than scramble her foetus’ brains. We can also suppose she has three methods at her disposal. She could hire an unscrupulous and highly skilled surgeon who could use keyhole surgery to get inside the uterus, break through the weak skull and fiddle around carefully with the developing brain; she could ingest some kind of futuristic nanotechnology capsule which heads directly towards the uterus and, when on a conduit towards it, begins to release some kind of neurotoxic chemical; or she could just drink a lot of alcohol and take a lot of harmful drugs. Since her desire is not wanton malice, it is important to her that she does not do so much damage that the foetus dies. Indeed, she does want the foetus to survive to become a braindamaged baby and human. Thus, whichever method this woman opts for, we can be sure she will be careful not to take it too far."

We thus imagine that this woman brings a severely retarded child into the world, probably blind and unco-ordinated and maybe with autonomic issues, and that it’s all her fault. The terrifying thing is that Singer’s position entails that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, except insofar as it causes other people distress – and it may not cause anyone distress. In fact, if we imagine that the woman kills the retarded child soon after it is born, without anyone’s knowledge (and painlessly), then Singer would say that nothing bad has happened at all. In fact, if she is such a sadist that this whole sick performance gives her pleasure, then Singer would be forced to the conclusion that this series of events is overall a good thing.

My friend HR tried to get around this thought experiment by means of the following argument:
"The scrambling is wrong at the moment of its occurrence for the same reason that my setting up on the footpath a caltrop which contains a neurotoxin that will seriously retard the first person to step on the caltrop is wrong at the moment of its occurrence: it drastically increases the probability that a misfortune will befall an unconsenting agent.

That the infant is born retarded – was never a non-retarded person, as the caltrop victim was – is immaterial: what matters is that the infant is indeed a person at the moment of its birth and thenceforth. It is when the infant becomes a person (whenever we judge that to be) that a victim of the mother comes into existence. (Whether the person retarded by their mother is eventually capable of comprehending their plight, or wishing it were otherwise, is also irrelevant: it is sufficient that all people considered sound of mind [like the caltrop victim] would consider mental soundness preferable to mental deficiency [and it is this preference that generates the initial intuition that the scrambler is acting immorally {and even if one took the ignorance-is-bliss line, in favour of retardation, the mother remains condemnable for acting in a way /she/ believes to be harming an eventual person}]).

This is a structural similarity between two cases that evinces the importance of victimisability in ethical problems.

But what if the caltrop contained not a retardant but a fatal neurotoxin? It is indisputable that the act is still deeply immoral – for it is a form of unjustified murder, an axiomatic sin in the world’s ethical systems. Is abortion, the antenatal analogue, equivalently immoral? No, and this is the kicker: because there never exists a person to be the victim of an act of killing. In the scrambling case, a person comes to suffer a misfortune initiated before their personhood. In the retardant caltrop case, a person comes to sustain an ill in the ‘normal’ way that people sustain ills – so too in the case of the fatal caltrop. But in the case of abortion, no person is /deprived/, to use Marquis’ buzzword, of a valuable future. There is no person. A future in which a foetus becomes a person is merely averted.

Your fatal error in interpreting your own thought experiment was to focus to the exclusion of all else on the fact of a particular future being averted in both the case of the scrambling (a future in which there exists a mentally sound person) and the abortion (a future in which a person exists). You treated this similarity as one that renders the two cases equivalent, but they’re not. You assumed that we impute wrongness to the scrambling /only/ because it involves the aversion of a preferable future, but this is incorrect. The scrambling is wrong because the preferable future of a /particular person/ is averted. You ignored the ontic criterion."

Now this is an interesting way of arguing (Singer plus an extra subtlety) but it's flawed, as HR conceded: the notion that what really matters is that everyone can 'see' a victim is just an ad hoc rationalisation of his intuitions, without basis in any familiar ethical principle. If the human being that resulted from the disturbed woman's pregnancy was severely retarded, and thus had no ability to conceive of himself as a victim and feel loss, and yet we still think that what she did was wrong, that can only be because the Marquisian objective notion of deprivation matters, not just the Singerian deprivation+ideal desire to live. 

Our intuitions about premature babies also seem to clash with the Singerian position. If a late-second-trimester baby is put in an infant incubator, I think 99% of people would say that it would be deeply wrong for a nurse (or someone else) to switch off the machine and allow it to die, even if the parents never found out that the baby had been killed and therefore never had to feel the distress of knowing that someone had intervened in their baby’s future.

Of course, the Marquisian position that abortion is seriously wrong (not as bad as murdering a human being out of the womb who has loved ones and specific goals, but still very wrong) and should be avoided if at all possible has some of its own problems. As we’ve seen, Marquis' big claim is that objective deprivation of future experience is what matters. Marquis claims to surmount the regress objection – 'But doesn't your view make wanking wrong?' – by putting the morally significant boundary at the point of clear individuation. The problem with putting the significant boundary at the point of clear individuation (which Marquis has suggested is after the 16-cell stage, when the cells are no longer 'totipotent' and no 'twinning' can occur) is that we can now split these totipotent cells and implant them into women to gestate. It seems that Marquis would say that all these humans in potentia should be born, or at least preserved for as long as possible – and this does seem to raise big problems for population ethics. And it might be worse than this: it’s not clear that he wouldn’t be forced to the conclusion that we should split the totipotent cells. Marquis would almost certainly reject this claim, and he would defend this rejection by saying that the fact that it’s bad to destroy any one of the post-split cells does not imply that it is good to create more potential life by splitting the totipotent cells to begin with. But I’m not sure of this response: I think it’s ultimately not clear why, if depriving life is such a terrible thing, it’s in no way a good thing to try to create more of it. How can life and conscious experience be simultaneously so valuable that losing the potential for any is a great tragedy, and so unimportant that it is not in any way actually a good thing to create more?

In general, if you look at the bigger picture – all the larger issues tangled up in the actual practical reality of abortion – Marquis’ position does seem, even if ‘right’, not ‘implementable’ in an ethical way. It would be natural to suppose that someone who feels that abortions are seriously morally wrong would want to stop women having abortions post-haste. However, the fact is that if just a small percentage of women around the world with unwanted pregnancies decided to forego an abortion because of government policy instituted as a result of this moral conclusion, that would lead to a massive jump in population (and would continue to have an effect on increasing the population if women were (somehow) continuously made to maintain unwanted pregnancies). This, in turn, would, of course, lead to the further degradation of the planet, further claims over limited resources, further poverty, further urban overcrowding, and exacerbate the terrifying, possibly existential (to civilisation) ecological disaster we are already facing.

Pro-choicers often make a similar point, though with a focus on how punitive laws affect female happiness and feminism rather than on ecology and society as a whole. They point out that banning abortion at clinics is certainly not going to eliminate all abortions – it may not even significantly reduce the overall rate of abortions – and probably leads to more misery in the world by forcing women into parlous situations or forcing them to have children which they do not want, at risk to their dreams and careers.

Marquis would probably claim that, because he can recognise the very bad things that would result from punitive law changes on abortion, he doesn’t really believe that it would be desirable to stop all women having abortions, unless this outcome was achieved by birth control. But whilst this would be a good response to this particular objection, this retreat might induce us to question whether he really thinks abortion is seriously wrong.

Of course, Singer, like any utilitarian, does himself have to deal with more theoretical issues in population ethics – those raised by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons. But clearly by having a permissive view of abortion, he avoids all of Marquis’ problems.

So, seeing as both positions face problems, what’s my conclusion? The answer is that I think the abortion debate reveals the limits of ethical reasoning. I think there's no clear fact of the matter; I think that abortions perhaps should be avoided (even first-trimester abortions), but I really don’t strong feelings about this (especially because it’s easier to empathise with the woman who already exists than the proto-person). That’s my strange view.

And so why do I support lenient abortion laws? Precisely because I don’t really have strong feelings about the ethics of abortion. The government shouldn’t legally prevent women from doing something that is not unambiguously seriously wrong (which is why even Marquis’ position doesn’t necessarily have strong legislative implications, as we just saw).

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[1] To be fair, Marquis’ position itself suggests that killing a mentally disabled person may be less bad, all else being equal, than killing someone of high intelligence, because there is probably less to deprive. 

A Philosophically Involved Work (Assuming too much Prior Knowledge) called "My Defence of Virtue Ethics/Secular Sacred Ethics (not an Oxymoron, as I explicate the terms), plus my Anti-Dionysian Manifesto, plus an Elaborate Discussion of Meta-Ethics" appended to which is an amended version of my thoughts on pornography originally published on this blog in March 2015 as part of the longer post called "My Formal Defence of Feminism"

My Defence of Virtue Ethics/Secular Sacred Ethics (not an Oxymoron, as I explicate the terms), plus my Anti-Dionysian Manifesto, plus an Elaborate Discussion of Meta-Ethics

I have recently come to the view that, in a specific but familiar and non-sophistic sense of ‘religion’, it is unreasonable to think that we could completely expunge the 'religious' from ethics and from the main ethical rituals which structure our lives (strongly counter to at least the stated views of most academic moral philosophers, all utilitarians, Derek Parfit, Toby Ord, Peter Singer, and so on, though not nearly as edgy as it sounds, as will become clear).[1] More precisely (and therefore more helpfully), I think it is a deep mistake to think of human moral behaviour as possibly divorceable from unmistakeably 'sacred' impulses (the impulse to be part of something ‘bigger’, the impulse for the ‘divine’ in the sense of ‘the pure’ (the Platonic, the perfect), the impulse for awe, the impulse for ‘transcendence’ (powerful emotional, self-stripping experiences with other humans)), from rituals and practices which have always dominated both organised religions in large-scale societies and small, local religions in hunter-horticultural or hunter-gatherer societies (special social gatherings based around festivals, often involving music, dance and food (which still persist today in the West, eg Christmas, Easter and national holidays, where families/kin-groups get together and engage in certain rituals), and funeral ceremonies), and from absolute, synchronic commitments to (highly vague) "sacred values" (sacred values include Justice, Liberty, Peace, Democracy, Human Rights, Animal Rights, Purity, the Community, the Nation) which do not in fact reduce to utilitarian calculations or a deontological scheme, and should not (morally).[2] I regard this as essentially an alternative way of saying that the 'virtue ethical' approach is wholly superior to the utilitarian or deontological approach to ethics (which is a controversial claim in itself, because probably the majority of self-described ‘virtue ethicists’ would also describe themselves as ‘irreligious’, but footnote 2 explains why this should essentially be a truistic claim, once you understand my usage of ‘religion’), and also as an alternative way of saying that no-one really is, that no-one can be, and that no-one should even try to be, a 'true' utilitarian or deontologist. 

So why do I believe all these crazy things? One reductive way of putting my rationale is that I believe that our 'folk ethics’ or ‘folk morality’ (our ‘moral faculty’, as it were) is much more akin to a 'virtue theory' than a 'praxic' (action-based (& context-independent & universal)) or 'deontic' (rule-based (& context-independent & universal)) theory. This is evidenced by the well-known profusion of thought experiments that militate against utilitarian and deontological conclusions on so many fundamental issues. For Utilitarianism, there is Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment, Robert Nozick’s Utility Monster thought experiment, Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion(s), the conflict between the standard Trolley Problem and the structurally analogous Surgery scenario, the Fat Man alteration of the Trolley Problem, the problem of How to Say on a Utilitarian Calculus what's Bad about the Happy Patriarchally Oppressed Woman or Slave (has to do with our overwhelming Aristotelian intuitions that happiness as wellbeing  or flourishing is inherently bound up with morality, and social conditions, not just internal psychological states), the problem of our Massively Disproportionate Concern for our Own Family and Close Friends than Anyone Else, the Protected-Sex Brother-Sister Incest Dilemma, and also just the fundamental problem that it seems wrong to try to measure or quantify wellbeing and flourishing (and impossible to compare different ‘types’ of ‘utility’, as J.S. Mill famously noted). Meanwhile, for Deontology, there is the famous Don't Lie to a Murderous Lunatic problem, which raises the deontology-destroying reality that context matters massively for our intuitive evaluations of the rightness or wrongness of individual actions. 

The truth (as Susan Wolf noted, in 1982: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/susanwolfessay1982.pdf) is that what we really value in people is not the utility they contribute to the world (which no-one can calculate anyway, which, of course, is the central flaw of any kind of serious utilitarianism (any kind of utilitarianism that isn't in a perpetual process of regression to a more virtue-ethical philosophy (I see J.S. Mill as being a kind of fake utilitarian, more like a virtue ethicist (which is why I'm happy to accept a kind of Millian utilitarianism – better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, cultivation of reason is very important, art and culture are very important, and so on))), nor their ability to coldly perform their moral duties in total self-mastery. Instead, what we value in our family and friends is vague qualities or virtues – that they are 'decent', 'honest', 'caring', 'loving', perhaps 'courageous' and perhaps 'self-sacrificing' (but not too much). None of these vague qualities reduces to a utilitarian calculus, or a deontological scheme: 'decency' has mostly to do with tiny things that are not rational to a utilitarian, like good manners, saying "please" and "thank you", smiling often, and displaying warmth and affection (you can be ‘decent’ without donating to charity or being an activist, or having any interest in politics whatsoever); perfect honesty and ingenuousness will not earn you the label 'honest' (instead, probably 'creepy', 'cold', 'disgusting', 'malicious'); to be 'caring' it is not sufficient to perform certain actions, but to do so with some degree of ‘authentic’ love for the person (not just "in accordance with duty", even though Kant, of course, thought this was more admirable); it is unclear what you even have to do to be called a 'loving' person; 'courage' is definitely in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute guide as to which actions are courageous, because actions that require a great deal of nerve-steeling to one person may be easy to another; and 'self-sacrifice' is very similar to courage. Meanwhile, what we value in saints (moral leaders whom we only see from a distance) is asceticism (plain clothes, lack of grooming, renunciation of base pleasures) and purity (related) – neither of which qualities can be reduced to utilitarian considerations (though it may be the case that utilitarians happen to exhibit these qualities of saints (eg Singer wears plain clothes because he doesn’t want to waste money on clothes)). 

Reasoning along these lines, I have long toyed with the view that pretty much everyone is religious, in my specific, briefly explained sense; I think I am now embracing it (a lot of my opinions are made real by being set down on computer). All people engage in certain sacred rituals with kin (I engage in Christmas ceremonies, I attend family funerals, I go camping with my extended maternal family at Easter (always to the same place, where we always do the same things, and go on the same walks), I used to go always to South Durras in the Summer for family beach holidays, I go to the Sydney test every year, no matter who’s playing (and yes, I do regard this as a religious experience)). All people  have 'sacred' experiences: I have these in most National Parks I have visited (I really do get feelings of religious awe in certain landscapes), when listening to music (and, incidentally, religious music (Medieval church music, Bach and Mozart’s religious music (masses, requiems, etc), Arvo Part's imitation of religious music, and Sufjan Stevens’ explicitly religious folk-pop-orchestral music) is some of the most powerful music I listen to), when reading great literature, and sometimes when just in the garden or just in the street (I have written about my Ricky-Fittsian tendencies before, early in this essay, http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/an-extremely-long-essay-called-are.html, and it’s clear here also: http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/extract-6.html). Importantly, these experiences are sacred not just in some weak, poetic sense, but in the sense that, when we are trying to articulate what it was like to be in the middle of one, we have to resort to explicitly non-naturalistic language, using words like "transcendence", "transformation", "uplifting", perhaps talking about "seeing the mind of God" or "getting a glimpse of something more than human, higher than our realm" and so on. And most people have  ethical commitments in the political sphere which are sacred in the sense that literally nothing except a brain injury could induce them to compromise on them: I am committed in this sense to proper action on climate change across the West (though with a particular focus on my own country, naturally), nuclear disarmament, reform of the EU before it splinters completely, reversing inequality across the West , fixing the corrupt plutocratic US political system, fixing our own corrupt political system in Australia, writing off private debts across the West to combat debt deflation that is causing stagnation everywhere (to counteract the Japan syndrome), ending Wall St regulatory capture, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, I have long held the view (though it has recently been refined and precisified) that being religious (in this sense) is perfectly compatible with atheism, if atheism is understood as mere adeism, rather than as committed to the somewhat 'Protestant' view of religions as essentially just sets of truth-apt propositions deriving from scriptures, with no particular connection to ritual, ceremony and tradition, which is empirically inferior (as a generalisation) to the view of religions as sets of practices and rituals based around “a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception” [Atran, 2002: 4]. Obviously, even this latter definition of “religion” doesn’t fit my own particular usage, since I am using the word in a way that doesn’t entail any kind of commitment to the existence of supernatural agents – but I personally don’t think commitment to non-agentive supernatural entities, like “Human Rights”, “Animal Rights”, is a world apart from commitment to agentive supernatural entities. Moreover, a great deal of the moral language we use is pretty much meaningless (What does “All mean are created equal” actually mean, for example?). Incidentally, Atran himself agrees, as you can see in this discussion (in which the “Humanist” panellist is a total imbecile literally incapable of making an argument): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xomaqSOxZiU.

A number of disparate factors led to my recent conversion to virtue ethics (though I never subscribed to utilitarianism, and I never identified as a deontologist, so I was effectively a virtue ethicist by default (I am using the term “virtue ethics” in such a way that any moral and caring atheist person who doesn’t belong to a major organised religion and rejects utilitarianism and deontology and any other formal ethical system is necessarily a virtue ethicist)). I read two books by Scott Atran – most importantly, his excellent work on the evolutionary basis of religion, In Gods we Trust (suffers from tiny sample size in the few actual experiments cited but wonderful philosophical analysis of vaguer anthropological and historical evidence, with excellent discussions of evolutionary biology and psychology) – and recognised that there are certain basic human dispositions exploited by religion which we cannot expunge from human nature and which, if you know what to look for, remain highly marked even in the contemporary secular West (eg I think that political activism could not occur without people being able to suspend doubt and scepticism, and absolutely committing themselves to the sacred values of Justice, Liberty, Democracy with scant concern for the consequences of their individual actions on a utilitarian calculus, and I think that individual eating habits are basically impossible to justify on a utilitarian basis (I think this for the same reason that political scientists say that voting is irrational in self-interested terms (inconsequentiality of tiny decisions in a massive society), which means that vegetarianism is essentially motivated either by dodgy reasoning or by commitment to certain sacred values (Animal Rights, the Protection of the Earth, Purity). Another factor was just alluded to: over the past year, I slowly became a vegetarian with roughly utilitarian considerations in mind (incidentally, I still do believe in applying utilitarian-type reasoning in certain narrow domains, while maintaining awareness that utility calculations are necessarily highly dodgy, and that there's not much hope of reaching any real Truth) but, soon after I started actually adopting fairly strict vegetarian practices, it suddenly struck me that I couldn't really justify my individual ethical eating habits on utilitarian grounds. I therefore decided to regard my vegetarianism as a form of activism, and as a kind of religious commitment – part of a broader pursuit of a more pure, 'wholesome', ascetic, roughly Stoicist life (a pursuit which might have contributed to the high degree of peace, fulfilment and tranquillity I have achieved for quite a while now, along with some small social and academic changes, and emerging from the throes of adolescence (I suspect the rate of hormone production inside of me has slowed)).

The last factor in my conversion was my recognition that even a mild anti-pornography stance would be hard to justify on utilitarian grounds, and that the fact that my moral opposition to pornography could only be expressed in a kind of virtue-ethical or even religious language (using terms like “human dignity” and “debasement”). I realise that there is no evidence to support the claim that the increasing reliance on internet pornography among young people is leading to more rape, just as there is no evidence to support the claim that increasing play of violent video games by young people is leading to more violent crime. As I argued in my original 9000 words on the subject (which can be found here: http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/a-62-page-formal-defence-of-feminism.html), I do think there is reason to think that massive sadistic, misogynistic porn consumption among young people today might definitely be contributing to regressive attitudes towards women and sexism (and I think there is very good reason to think, backed up by the things I cited in that piece, to think that young people rapidly are steered towards seriously fucking disgusting and sadistic material because of its highly visible presentation on major porn sites (and certain uncomfortable facts about human sexuality are the endogenous factor). But to a utilitarian, this conjecture gives weak grounds for any kind of strong stance. The fundamental reason I don’t like internet pornography – why I don’t like the plenitude of raw flesh and fucking online, why I don’t like BDSM, why I don’t believe in choking or vicious sex – is because I fear and revile the Dionysian aspect of human nature, that is, the Id. I am religious committed to human dignity, I believe in temperance, I believe in self-control, self-restraint, I am a fearless advocate for the superego. I don’t think it is a good thing that so much violence is so freely available, because I know that, to so many, it is delicious. I see it in myself. That’s why I originally took the stance: horror at my disgusting, hideous, satanic and irrepressible sadistic Id – horror at the gulf (nay war) between my higher moral commitments (to human autonomy, to women’s rights and freedom, etc) and my animalistic and sadistic arousal reflexes.

I have appended a revised version of my pornography critique below this essay.

Evidently, it is clear that I have watched plenty of porn myself, and only managed long-term abstention (the process of actually tamping down on my porn-watching habits began when I hit 17, and I had only started a few months before I hit 16) by underhanded and arguably illicit techniques – essentially, my rule has been that I avoid videos of explicit porn, but everything else is off limits.

The extremely important thing to emphasise is that, according to the way I understand my moral rejection of pornography and my moral commitment to human dignity, my own failure on this doesn’t have to make me any kind of hypocrite. This claim is key to understanding my overall argument. What needs to be understood is this: I don’t see my moral commitment to human dignity as a universal moral imperative, but as a personal, vague, weakly binding sacred commitment; I don’t see moral rejection of pornography as a universal moral imperative, but as a personal, vague, weakly binding religious renunciation. What this means is that I don't actually expect other people to adopt a similar stance, nor do I judge anyone for a minor vice like watching sadistic pornography (in which acts are performed which debase human beings and one’s own mind is polluted). I don’t actually expect other people to commit themselves to the upholding of “human dignity” and I don’t expect other people to try very hard to resist impulses towards sexual sadism, for the same reason that I don’t expect the majority of the population to be Stoics (Stoicism is an ethical philosophy (a non-mystical, non-supernatural, non-allegory-based religion) only suited for those with a certain type of personality (temperate, calm) and brain chemistry (healthy)). Incidentally, I see my dignitarian moral creed as bound up with my non-doctrinal subscription to a Stoicist way of life; upholding human dignity in this way is the same as living in accordance with Nature, where “Nature” is human nature according to the Aristotelian teleological understanding of human beings as the rational animal or the political animal, the one animal capable of eschewing the base impulses of lesser animals and living a life of higher cerebration and higher morality (in pursuit of Eudaimonia). I certainly don’t think it’s possible for 99% of people to avoid internet pornography, because I can’t even myself avoid it, despite my unusually strong frontal lobes. I have had massive stretches without looking at any videos of sex online, but I still look at proto-porn even then. I don’t expect people to try hard to suppress certain sexual desires that they have that lead them to engage in degrading sex acts. Even if I did, I would not seek to universalise this creed – to impose it and its commitments on everyone. It’s just a life philosophy (a non-mystical, non-supernatural religion), a personal map for navigating the world, not a set of absolute prescriptions that all must follow – Stoicism is meant to be like this. I also don't judge people for the very minor vices which result from hedonism and which are characteristic of 'animalism': watching sadistic, debasing pornography, engaging in BDSM, spending every weekend getting trashed at nightclubs, watching trash TV, playing video games constantly, enjoying trash culture. I just regard these acts as displaying minor vice.

Whilst I do score highly Left-libertarian on political compass tests – whilst I am highly Left-libertarian (eg I think it’s (ethically) straightforward that basically all workplaces should be democratic (which is arguably a way of saying that I am an anarcho-syndicalist))[3] – I am also anti-Dionysian. I believe that human beings should try their best to avoid animalistic and base impulses. I believe human beings should try their best to avoid Dionysian vices like hedonism (excess partying, excess drinking, drug-taking, and so on), hooliganism, impoliteness, uncouthness, anger, rage, tribalism, fanaticism, and that they should do their best to avoid practices which corrode their ‘essential dignity’ (which obviously does not exist but which I am religiously committed to).

I can imagine a sensible person objecting at this point that this is all primitive nonsense, and shows that I’ve been stupefied by an insidious brand of proto-Scrutonian mysticism or backward, pre-Enlightenment religious morality, abandoning the guiding hand of reason in my ethical thought in favour of a resort to primitive intuitions evident in my use of terms like “animalism” and “debasement”, and my central endorsement of the primitive concept of “human dignity” – all of which terms, according to their most natural and literal interpretation, betray an irrational commitment to some kind of divine teleology that can’t be reconciled with our post-Darwinian understanding of the world. Graham Priest is, of course, correct in his very lucid paper “Sexual perversion” (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048409712347951?journalCode=rajp20) that our post-Darwinian understanding of the world allows no room for a cogent account of “sexual perversion” (What is not natural if we, and everything we do, is part of nature, and there is no ultimate purpose? Why should some behaviour’s being adaptive constitute a reason to value it?). However, this is actually orthogonal to my own argument, because the fact is that we do have overwhelming intuitions (which I’m about to marshal) that some consensual ‘sexual’ acts are clearly more sadistic, violent or degrading than others. Now, it is possible that Priest would argue that intuitions about this last concept, ‘degradingness’, are on the same level as intuitions about perversion, and obviously he thinks that he should try our best to ignore our intuitions about perversion – but hopefully the intuition-milking that I’m about to engage in will be powerful enough to make this position seem kind of crazy.

Ejaculating on someone’s face is degrading (and disgusting) in much the same way that smearing shit on someone’s face is degrading (and disgusting); it seems to me obvious that it implies a kind of disrespect and latent contempt for the person on whom it is being carried out (it is certainly not deeply immoral to ejaculate on someone’s face, but I certainly don’t think that a moral saint would engage in such practices). Penetrating a partner in a way that causes severe pain is sadistic, violent and degrading; and choking someone is sadistic, violent and degrading. Probably there is no point using the term “perversion” to describe the enjoyment of these types of acts (and on this I suppose I agree with Priest), but the fact remains that such sexual acts are less morally unimpeachable sexual acts than sexual acts in which all participants are aroused and there is no element of overt domination or violence. (Incidentally, I certainly don’t see why it is too strong to use the term “perversion” (just as a kind of generic term of abuse) to describe the enjoyment of non-consensual violent and sadistic sexual acts, like rape and child molestation (and yet Priest, of course, concludes his paper by seemingly suggesting that we should discard the term entirely)).

More generally, despite the default liberal position on ‘kinks’ being that any sexual act is fine if both parties, when sober, calm and compos mentis, consent in the right way (with a ‘safe word’ if need be, etc), it seems to me obvious that this position isn’t so uncomplicated as it seems to the hard-line porn-industry-and-prostitution-defenders. One source of complication is this ‘compos mentis’ requirement. Now, clearly (to me anyway), it is still wrong to beat someone severely even if they seem to be compos mentis and agree to be severely beaten; it is still wrong to violently kill someone even if they seem compos mentis and agree to it beforehand (even signing on to the violence of the death, let’s say). A defender of this doctrine of consent would say that the very act of agreeing to be severely beaten (let alone violently killed) shows that the person is non compos mentis, and this invalidates their consent. But there surely is a grey area here, in terms of things that one could agree to undergo without that making one insane. Some masochists do agree to being severely flogged; others agree to be choked to the point of almost-suffocation during intercourse; many pornstars agree, with the incentive of monetary reward, to literally being brutally sexually attacked, or to being tortured. At what point exactly does the violence of the thing agreed to to become so severe that we say that the agreer must be non compos mentis? In the case of pornstars agreeing to violent sexual acts, at what point does the violence of the thing agreed to become so severe that we say that either they are non compos mentis or they are clearly acting out of financial desperation in such a way that equally invalidates the consent? It is common to see porn-industry-defenders (and prostitution-legalisation advocates) use the standard liberal consent doctrine as a means of morally excusing the horrific things that are filmed, but they always ignore these complications. I personally think that, no matter what happened in the background, and no matter what happens in the future with monetary compensation, if a woman is physically destroyed by multiple men, in such a way that requires surgical treatment, that is a crime. AND YET THIS HAPPENS IN THE PORN INDUSTRY, WAY OUT IN THE OPEN. THIS IS WHAT I FIND HORRIFYING.

The porn actress Stoya has defended her job on the basis that it’s no more exploitative than any other profession. I find this claim highly questionable, but even if true, I think she – along with all “sex workers” (prostitutes) and their defenders who use this same line to defend their work – doesn’t properly process its moral implications. The world we live in is fundamentally immoral, because we do not have socialism, in the sense of workers owning their workplaces. Porn actresses are wage slaves, just as I am a wage slave in my retail job. In an ideal world, people would not have to rent themselves (and, in the case of porn actresses, their literal naked bodies, enduring horrible, degrading acts) just to pay their bills.

Anyway, to return to Priest and my arguments about sex: clearly, not all sex has to be sadistic and degrading – clearly, distinctions can be made. This is what Priest underplays. Masturbation, for example, though always sin as sinful by religious movements, is not sadistic and degrading (unless someone’s imaginative stimulus is the thought of raping someone, say). One can make these judgments without worrying at all about what’s ‘natural’.

                               

All the preceding discussion probably made me look like a meta-ethical ‘anti-realist’ of some kind: an emotivist, error theorist, or quasi-realist.  But this is not the case.

I think that a major flaw of philosophy for literally millennia, still persisting today, is that philosophers generally avoid messy or ugly positions; instead, they are attracted to binaries. I think Blackburn’s quasi-realism is the closest to the meta-ethical truth of any meta-ethical theory I am aware of, and I think a key part of this is that it is a messy, composite view. Blackburn’s position basically straddles Emotivism and Error Theory: like Mackie and moral realists, he acknowledges the complexity of moral language, and the intricacy of moral reasoning and discourse; unlike both Mackie and Ayer, he claims that morality is at least partly realist (in the sense that moral arguments are never about nothing, always pointing to facts about the world); unlike Mackie, he prefers not to say that ordinary moral language is “in error”; like Mackie and Ayer, he claims that “ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as if they were real properties”; and, unlike Mackie and like Ayer, he is ultimately a non-cognitivist (“ethical sentences” are not truth-apt). This view, though quite involved, makes sense of a lot of aspects of morality and moral discourse. Overall, it seems to me pretty commendable.

My own view, however, is yet more messy (I have decided to call it None-of-the-Above-ism about ethics). I will now attempt to explain it:

I believe that some ethical judgments can be understood as truth-apt propositions; I believe that other ethical judgments and moral pronouncements are best understood as non-truth-apt illocutionary acts of various kinds (using Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts [1975], I think some are “directives”, some are “commissives”, some are “expressives” and some are “declarations”); I believe that there is a large role for reason in ethics, but (as is clear) I don’t believe in creating formal systems which spit out verdicts on individual actions.

Unlike perhaps the majority of contemporary meta-ethicists (but with Derek Parfit), I am actually quite happy to say that there are such things as "ethical truths", because I think there are some ethical judgments which ought to be understood as propositions, and that some of these are even borderline analytic or conceptual truths which are, undoubtedly, SUPER-ANTHROPIC in a sense I can explicate easily (super-anthropic ≠ “objective”, which is rarely a useful word (not messy enough, you see)).Take the following three 'atomic' or 'axiomatic' ethical judgments: Suffering is bad; Caring for others is good; Killing is wrong. Take the ‘Golden Rule’: you should treat others as you would wish to be treated.  The first three are all self-evident propositions because they really are borderline analytic truths: how can suffering not be a bad thing? An individual’s suffering can only ever not be an awful thing if it causes less suffering to others, or to that same person in the future. How can caring for others not be good? How can killing not be wrong? Even a utilitarian will admit that killing is only permissible when it is necessary to prevent more killing. The last one is just self-evident, and nothing more can be said.

One can’t actually refute this position. All the classic objections to any kind of ‘realist’ position of this kind are to do with the grounding of the ethical judgments (even if “Suffering is bad” essentially seems like an analytic truth, we can’t say it’s actually true because there’s not really an objective property of “badness”). The supposed problem is essentially the same problem that motivates Priest to say that there is not really such a thing as a sexual perversion: to put it briefly and crudely, it is that, since Darwin is right and there is no ultimate Purpose in nature, “goodness” and “badness” are not ‘natural properties’ and we can’t derive an ‘ought’ from and ‘is’ (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” sort of thing). We have a ‘moral faculty’ (a bunch of complex emotions and impulses, and a certain way of coming to judgments) only because of our contingent evolutionary history; other species have different ‘moral faculties’, with different emotions and impulses, designed by their own contingent evolutionary history, and there is no reason to think that ours is more alethically faithful. If lions could speak, they would not agree with our moral judgments – and not just because they are not as smart as us.

But there are two possible lines of attack on this classic argument. One is the Fuck Your Grounding, I Don’t Have to Ground This Shit objection (Parfit uses this himself). As you can read in part 6 of On What Matters, Parfit believes that there is an analogy between 2+2=4 and the proposition “Suffering is bad” in the sense that they are both just radiantly, incontrovertibly true, and not because of anything else (they don’t need grounding, and they can’t be grounded). As he writes on his Philpapers profile:

“I believe that, though nothing could be truer than the truths of arithmetic, these truths have no ontological implications. I am a Non-Metaphysical Cognitivist about arithmetic, about normative truths, and several other areas of our thinking. Such truths involve entities and properties that have no ontological status. Numbers, for example, are neither real nor unreal, and neither actual nor merely possible. Even if nothing had ever existed, in the ontological sense, there would have been various truths, and abstract entities, in a non-ontological sense.”

I believe this is a coherent position, and, of course, nobody can say for sure that it’s false.

The second line of attack is much less lofty; I call it the Fuck Objective Truth, I’m Happy with Super-Anthropic Truth objection (and as far as I know, I’m the only proponent of it). It goes like this: if we encountered another intelligent alien species, it seems to me a near certainty that they would also regard the ethical statements I listed above as intuitively self-evident. Why would they have analogous beliefs? Because any intelligent species would have to have something akin to a strong moral faculty to reach civilisation, because it seems overwhelmingly likely that civilisation requires co-operation, co-ordination and altruism. This means that these are probably propositions that all possible civilisations would agree with. In turn, this means that Error Theorism is unreasonable, because it is obviously insane to declare a proposition false that all possible civilisations would regard as self-evident (at least, this seems obvious to me, but I believe in degrees of truth, so I’m a weirdo anyway (like I think we should think of Super-Anthropic Truths as being like 0.8 or 0.9 true, on a scale where only Really Clearly Objective Truths like 2+2=4 take the value 1, and commonsense, everyday “truths” like Grass is green, because they are vague (referring to ontologically vague objects and using ontologically vague properties) and don’t absolutely hold (because often grass is yellow, and because some species of grass are purple, and because the rhizomes are white and so on), only get a value of like 0.75 true or something)).

Like pretty much everyone, I also have strong intuitions that other, less fundamental ethical judgments should also be understood as truth-apt propositions: I intuitively think that ‘killing babies is wrong’ is a true proposition, that ‘women deserve equal rights to men’ is a true proposition, that ‘racial equality is good’ is a true proposition, that ‘the massive income inequality in the US is profoundly unjust and should be corrected’ is a true proposition and so on. But since I don’t have any strategy like that exemplified above to defend these intuitions, I think these judgments might be better understood not as propositions, but as non-truth-apt illocutionary acts. I think the first judgment should be understood as an expressive – in some sense, a person making such a claim is really expressing the emotion of horror at the idea of someone killing babies and/or really expressing the emotion of desperate hope that the idea of someone killing babies horrifies whoever they are addressing, and people beyond. The second one should be understood (depending on real-life context) as an expressive and/or a directive – a person making such a claim is probably expressing sadness at their perception of the various injustices women face and/or commanding others to “Treat women with respect!”. The third one should be understood as an expressive and/or a directive. Finally, the fourth one should be understood as an expressive and/or a directive and/or a commissive (that is, the speaker might be expressing commitment to actually fighting the inequality). Ultimately, I lean towards the view that the vast majority of ethical judgments should be analysed in this way – only my aforementioned atomic or axiomatic ethical judgments can be understood as truth-apt propositions.

(We have barely started and the messiness is already highly distinct.)

Let us now discuss the role of reason in ethics.

As anyone who has thought about the matter realises, words like “freedom” and “justice” have no place in a scientific metaphysics; instead, they are conceptually complex words with a sort of magical power. In language that Atran uses, I would say that freedom and justice are transcendental and sacred values: their meaning is often elusive, and highly malleable, and yet these words are placed at the centre of all of our lives. One’s commitment to such values is clearly to a dominant degree dependent on one’s limbic system – that is to say, one’s emotional makeup (created by a mixture of genes, epigenes, environment (incl. culture) and random events) – rather than one’s neocortex and frontal lobes (that is to say, one’s higher faculties). It is not that we find facts in nature that tell us to value freedom or to value justice (or their close relatives, “autonomy” (human rights) and “equality”); instead, we value them because they seem right.

Obviously, we can come up with more precise ideas of what justice and freedom are about (à la John Rawls with justice), and suggest particular ways we ought best to understand them (and here reason immediately begins to come in: ‘the natural freedom conception is bad because it leads to inconsistencies’, etc). Nevertheless, what I said remains basically true. There’s still a strong limit on the extent to which we can use philosophy to make the words freedom and justice non-magical; in fact, making them non-transcendental and non-sacred would seem to strongly reduce our desire to commit ourselves to ‘fighting for them’.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that Chomsky himself holds this standard epistemological view.  I know this because he implies it in a response to an interviewer asking whether he has “faith”:

"I believe in a principle that was enunciated rather well by Bertrand Russell, which is that you should try to keep away from having irrational beliefs. You should believe things for which you can find some evidence, apart from commitment to principles – like equality, freedom, and justice” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ51k8EiKh0].  

Despite my belief that such values are really transcendental and sacred, I still don’t think (as I said) that the moral relativists are right by any means, and for a couple of reasons. The main one is that the vast majority of people today, whether on the Left or on the Right, say that they are committed to the abstract moral principles of “justice” and “freedom” (even if they might vary on the “equality” component of “justice”). This means that the deeper epistemological or metaphysical question doesn’t even come up: you can immediately begin evaluating people on their consistency – whether their views actually do align with this commitment or not – rather than worrying about how to justify the values themselves. The second reason is related to that comment I just made about consistency: it is the view that ethical reasoning is reasoning, and that some people are therefore objectively more right than others.

Because ethical reasoning is reasoning, it is bound by the laws of logic. Though the starting point is our moral 'faculty', which was programmed by evolution by our utterly contingent evolutionary history, clear norms of rational debate still apply (that’s why moral philosophy exists). Consider someone who is rabidly sexist or racist, for example. Do we say that such people are no less irrational than someone who doesn’t share their prejudices on women’s rights or civil rights? No. Instead, we can ask them why they think men deserve to have more freedom than women, and why they think this is just, and examine their justifications (and they always give justifications, however feeble) and point out the flaws. Racists and sexists invariably justify their beliefs on the basis of very dodgy reasoning, usually involving empirical errors which betray a total statistical illiteracy and incomprehension of the complexity of genetic inheritance, as well as deeper philosophical errors (the appeal to ‘the natural’ that Priest discusses), and this ‘reasoning’ invariably turns out to be a post hoc rationalisation of their primal revulsion towards the out-group in question. By contrast, someone who is not rabidly sexist or racist doesn’t face the same issues. They can say that they are committed to “freedom” and “justice” for men and women, whites and blacks, because it would be completely arbitrary to not universalise the commitment when there are no grounds to think that these groups substantively differ (if at all) in any possible criterion of moral worth – consciousness, rationality, creativity, etc. They avoid arbitrariness and they avoid inconsistency.

The way rational ethical discourse works can be illustrated by a simple, abstract model:

Person A agrees with person B that x (where x is some ethical principle or a highly general ethical judgment). Person B points out that person A is violating x in the case of y (where y is some specific issue: women’s rights, race, animal welfare, abortion, whatever). Person A argues that position on y is not a violation of x because of an error in Person B’s argument, or because of empirical considerations which Person B has overlooked. The debate either continues with further discussion of the merits in each other’s arguments or onto further discussion of the empirical considerations.

So what moral relativists still fail to see is that once you do enter the logical space – once you start debating ethics in a serious, philosophically rigorous manner – it’s pretty clear that some moral beliefs are better founded than others. Some moral beliefs simply meet the evidence, and the basic principles of logic, far better than others. Consistency is the essence of reasoning, and for morality, that means universalising one’s values. And as Peter Singer famously noted, universalising one’s values leads inevitably to the “expansion of the moral circle”. This means that better ethical reasoners are going to be less tribalist and traditionalist people (less nationalist, sexist and racist people): people who are capable of extending their moral sentiments outside their own family and social groups, to outsiders and foreigners, to humanity itself, and even to other creatures. The better ethical reasoners eschew values like purity, loyalty and traditionalism in ethical arguments (the values of the Right) since such values can’t be universalised. The better ethical reasoners subscribe only to universalisable values like freedom or justice, or to utilitarianism. Values like purity, loyalty and traditionalism are inherently parochial, and they lead the apportioning of moral worth based on completely circumstantial factors (the place one happened to be born in, the station one happened to be born in, the class one happened to be born in, the religion one happened to be born in).

Steven Pinker expresses this same idea in one of the best passages from his mostly excellent book The Better Angels of our Nature:

“When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases – given that they were doing their biology properly, and given that DNA really does have four bases, in the long run they could hardly have discovered anything else – we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually agree against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely. The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings. I think this process of moral discovery was a significant cause of the Humanitarian Revolution. […]

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. If I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not to stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours if I want you to take me seriously (say, by retaining my right to stand on your foot, or to stab you, or to let your children drown). I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I’m standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

You and I ought to reach this moral understanding not just so we can have a logically consistent conversation but because mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children when they get into trouble, and refrain from knifing each other than we would be if we hoarded our surpluses while they rotted, let each other’s children drown, and feuded incessantly. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one where we both are unselfish.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. This foundation of morality may be seen in the many versions of the Golden Rule that have been discovered by the world’s major religions, and also in Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hobbes and Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal.”

Clearly, our moral norms are fairly mutable, and they’ve changed a lot over the millennia. But our moral emotions and basic intuitions have not changed; instead, the main dynamic over the past few centuries, since the Enlightenment, has been “expanding the circle of empathy”. And this has occurred (argues Pinker, following Peter Singer) largely as a result of applying abstract reasoning to ethics, which has driven our beliefs towards ever greater consistency and universality. We have slowly learned to believe that, if it’s wrong for our group, it’s wrong for all groups, and all members of humankind (and now, increasingly, animalkind). That’s why fully-fledged moral relativists are wrong: just as us Westerners have advanced scientifically far further than any previous civilisation, we have also advanced the furthest morally.^[4]

Reason can’t get us the whole way to our moral beliefs and commitments, of course. There is a narrow and a broad reason for this. The narrow one is that there is a massive role for overwhelming indefensible intuitions (including taboos) in basically all of our moral reasoning (utilitarians try to fight it, but, as I will argue, unsuccessfully). The central role for primal intuitions completely disconnected from the value of “harm-reduction” in our ethical lives that explains why self-professed “act utilitarians” (classic, Benthamian utilitarians) spend almost most all of their lives not being act utilitarians.^[5] One example of an indefensible moral position we all take is that we should focus more on, and care more about, the wellbeing of our family and friends than anyone else. Peter Singer’s whole career has been a battle against this, but his quest is futile (also I completely disagree with the apolitical philosophy of Effective Altruism (you don’t alleviate poverty in Africa by giving donations to Western charities, you reform the World Bank and IMF, you end violent imposition of ‘liberalisation’ on countries which need instead to nurture their fledgling industries and develop sound institutions)). And then you have taboos. Taboos are actually a crucial ingredient in our moral reasoning, as several famous thought experiments show (main one is the Protected Sex-Brother-Sister Incest Dilemma, which I also mentioned right near the beginning when listing the general issues with utilitarianism). Indeed, trying to abandon taboos completely seems highly dangerous: traditional utilitarianism is capable of producing at least plausible-seeming arguments for infanticide, eugenics and even genocide.^[6] Moreover, Benthamian utilitarianism even seems to struggle to deal with ethical issues that seem rather basic. Imagine, for example, a 19^th Century woman who lives a happy married life to a kind man who doesn’t coerce, dominate or abuse her, but does possess legal rights of domination. Thinking in classical utilitarian terms (as opposed to more Millian utilitarian terms), it is impossible to see why there is something fundamentally wrong with this situation, even if the woman is happy (just as there’s profoundly wrong with slavery even if the slave is happy) (I also mentioned this thought experiment in my list). Utilitarianism doesn’t allow for the badness of “false consciousness”, and it doesn’t accommodate our powerful intuitions that domination is bad, even if it is not enacted.

I also think there are some ethical issues on which there is no position which unambiguously has the weight of reasons behind it. Controversially, I think one of these is abortion, as I argued a long time ago (http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/an-essay-called-deep-moral-dilemmas-and.html), drawing on a ‘deprivation argument’ that I developed myself, but which I later learned had been previously developed here: http://faculty.polytechnic.org/gfeldmeth/45.marquis.pdf. Basically, I think there’s no decisive winner in the conflict between the Marquisian and the Singerian position.

Meanwhile, the broad reason has to do with Hume’s famous insights about the relationship between reason and the passions: that is, the is-ought gap. Since people are often confused about the is-ought gap, I will now give a brief explanation of its relevance to the current discussion.

Whilst our ethical discourse doesn’t have to violate the is-ought gap to work, because everyone accepts (in the abstract) a basic bedrock (Justice and Liberty are good, Suffering is bad, the Golden Rule is correct, etc), that clearly doesn’t mean that the is-ought gap doesn’t come into ‘haunt’ our ethical behaviour. We can see this by thinking about a case study: the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, culminating in today’s historically astonishing level of tolerance.

Although rational ethical discourse does have some kind of connection to empirical facts (this is straightforward, and was highlighted in my previous discussion), it is not the case that scientific discoveries can change social attitudes. For example, I do not believe that a scientific discovery could, on its own, have effected a great ethical transformation in social acceptance of homosexuality. Why do I think this? The first reason is that I think it is clearly not possible for a society to go from shunning, denigrating and oppressing a certain group of people to being highly tolerant of that group and changing laws to suit without a massive emotional transformation (in fact, this change is essentially an emotional transformation). The second reason is that I think that it is possible for people to have an inconsistency between their general commitments to values or ethical judgments and their specific stances, and do nothing about it.

It should be said, of course, that one reason why it is possible to do nothing about such an inconsistency is trivial and has no bearing on the is-ought gap: human frailty – people often fail to realise inconsistencies in their reasoning, and people can believe there’s no inconsistency simply because they have the empirical facts wrong (like Person A in our abstract model of rational ethical discourse). But the more important reason is this: that people can simply fail to care sufficiently about inconsistencies in their ethical reasoning to make any effort to alter their instinctive emotional reactions about the specific issue on which the inconsistency is manifest.

It is probable that a significant number of people in the 1950s were dimly aware that they had no strong rational case against homosexuality, but were simply disgusted by homosexuality, believing strongly that it was a “perversion” or “abomination”. (Along similar lines, many people today are dimly aware that they have no strong rational case for eating meat, but they just don’t give enough of a fuck to change their eating habits.) The most significant change to occur in the two decades following the 1950s was not that more people came to simply recognise an inconsistency between their general ethical commitments and their specific stance on homosexuality, but that more people began to see homosexuals as normal human beings deserving of dignity and respect, whether or not they also were aware of the rational ethical case. In the vocabulary of evolutionary psychology, more and more people began to assimilate homosexuals into their “in-group”.

 It no doubt helped that increasing numbers of young people were abandoning Christian morality in the 1960s and accepting the Darwinian fact we keep raising that, since we live in a non-agent-designed, non-teleological world (only a teleonomic one), the idea that homosexuality is “unnatural” is incoherent (everything is natural; homosexuality may not be adaptive, but nor is listening to classical music). And, on this point, it is certainly no accident that atheism has a strong connection to homosexual tolerance. It is no accident, for example, that Bertrand Russell was one of the strong, very early advocates of gay tolerance, because, as a Darwinian and Atheist and hedonist utilitarian, he saw that he could not claim to be committed to universal principles of justice and liberty, and yet simultaneously condemn and revile homosexuality. To do this consistently would only be possible only if some kind of teleological metaphysics was correct (such as the teleological metaphysics bound up in the clerical doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and homosexuals were thus abominations or mistakes who sin against Nature or sin against God. Russell’s recognition that this metaphysics was wrong was undoubtedly a significant determinant of his stridently anti-Victorian mores and highly progressive, tolerant ethics.

But, of course, the crucial point I’ve been making is that Russell could have recognised the inconsistency in his thoughts and done nothing about it. And of those young people in the sixties who started a movement for gay tolerance, many would have known nothing of metaphysics, teleology, or the significance of Darwin’s theory, and of those young people who were not part of the movement for gay tolerance, many surely did know about metaphysics, teleology and the significance of Darwin’s theory.

That’s really what the is-ought gap is about: this fundamental truth that descriptive facts can’t motivate or move us. Or, in more tragic terms: this fundamental truth that one can know all the facts in the world about some evil in the world and the lack of rational ethical arguments for its existence, and simply not give a fuck.

We can now finally move onto my claim that we should avoid formalised ethical systems. A perceptive reader would have noticed that my defence of the role of reason in ethical discourse is in at least some kind of surface tension with the nature of my own ‘religious’ non-universalised commitment to human dignity and rejection of pornography. But note that I did still give a serious argument for the view that one can make ethical distinctions between consensual sex acts. I pointed out that some consensual sexual acts are unambiguously more sadistic or degrading than others (and sadism is something that seems at least to me obviously a bad thing), even if not any more or less ‘natural’; and I pointed out that there are obviously non-consensual sexual acts, like rape and child molestation, which are clearly deeply immoral, and whose corollary fetishes might reasonably be called “perversions” just because we all agree that there’s something violent about the sexual acts themselves. I then briefly pointed out the complications with the common liberal doctrine that the criterion of informed, sober consent is sufficient to make a sexual act morally permissible.

Now, obviously, the nature of my commitment to ‘human dignity’, as I explained it (a personal, vague, weakly binding sacred commitment) is not the same kind of commitment that could form the basis for rational ethical discourse (because, for the purposes of rational ethical discourse, one needs to be able to test one’s abstract commitment against actual positions on specific issues, and this commitment is merely abstract and vague). But that is not really an issue either. The whole point is that I don’t want to judge other people for failing to meet this commitment, nor do I really want to take it that seriously myself. So I have quarantined this ethical commitment from my more important ones, which I do subject to rational scrutiny, as far as it goes.

This brings me to an extremely important point: I believe that it is fine and reasonable (and ultimately impossible to avoid) having ethical commitments which are not ultimately defensible, and engaging in ethical rituals which involve commitments to certain beliefs which are not ultimately defensible, just as long as these ethical commitments are personal and benign. I see this claim as directly relevant to my thesis at the beginning, about the impossibility for a truly irreligious secular ethics. I believe that it is fine to be committed to human dignity in the way that I am, and – crucially – I think it is fine in much the same way that it is fine to observe arbitrary, superstitious rituals at funerals (eg burying the dead loved one in a big, elaborate, speech-filled ceremony and making sure, when they are buried, that they are either placed near their relatives or put in some other spot that was significant to them during their lives); or to temporarily suspend abandon naturalism in favour of mystical beliefs in Transcendence, Absolution, the Platonic Heaven and Divine Truth when listening to some hauntingly beautiful or otherwise emotionally transformative music, or reading some breathtakingly beautiful poetry; or to temporarily suspend naturalism in favour of mystical beliefs in Great Men, with Superhuman Abilities when watching any kind of sporting match in which some magnificent feat is being achieved. Sacred beliefs are bound up with sacred activities, and sacred activities are key to our moral behaviour. That is what I mean when I say that it is a mistake to try to remove religion from ethics.

Shortened, Amended Version of the Final Section of the 33,000-word Feminism Thesis I Published in March 2015

I fear and revile internet pornography much more than most people who do not belong to a major world religion. I understand that the standard liberal or leftist reaction to someone decrying porn is to dismiss them as prudes, conservative authoritarians or simply hysterical. But I think that most young people would themselves acknowledge that the influence of internet pornography is a moral issue for our generation. I personally have little doubt that the normalisation and increasing ubiquity of hardcore pornography, combined with the uniquely misogynistic culture of the internet generally, is having a nontrivial effect on young people, and their attitude towards women (including some young girls’ sense of self-worth and such). I think it’s probably unlikely that it’s going to produce a spike in violent attacks on women, but I do think that it could have more subtle and insidious effects. I realise such claims are highly contentious, and perhaps even seem ludicrous. However, if you have those intuitions, I urge you to put them aside. I urge you to take my arguments seriously.

Let me preface my case by making something absolutely clear: I have absolutely no problem with pornography in principle. I believe, unequivocally, that people should be able to use some kind of stimulus to get themselves off. Certainly, it seems quite clear to me that masturbation (whether assisted by erotica or not) is a salubrious and beneficial pastime. Not only that, but I support the position that everyone should masturbate (see, not priggish!). Quite apart from anything else, infrequent ejaculation is linked with prostate cancer in men, and I have heard (although I can’t be bothered to look up any studies that might corroborate this supposition) that masturbation has positive psychological outcomes in women. Masturbation is clearly not harmful in any way, and I think that looking at some images of attractive people is a good way to facilitate it.

I also have no problem with video pornography in principle. I’m told that video pornography is a feeble substitute for the real thing, but if people are masturbating they are obviously unable to access the real thing (at least for the time being), and thus it seems only logical to endorse that they watch video porn.

Nevertheless, I claim there are a number of decisive problems with the supposedly corollary attitude to pornography that says everything is fine, and all resistance to pornography must therefore be prudish or priggish (although I guess I see these as slurs anyway). Most importantly, I submit that most of the pornography one finds anywhere is egregiously misogynistic, demeaning and degrading, and a huge proportion of this is unabashedly violent and rapey. Second, I claim that to avoid such material while still seeking out porn, one has to make a serious, concerted effort – clearly too much to ask of a young horny adolescent desperate to liberate their superabundant fluids. Finally, I assert – contrary to the received dogma of a lot of liberal anti-moralists – that the things we view and consume (what “cultural artefacts” we choose to expose ourselves to) can, over time, have a significant impact on both our general psychology and even our fundamental beliefs, especially if such items are as volatile and extreme as images of explicit sexual violence and domination (and I also endorse some loosely Freudian ideas which bolster this point of view (dark ‘animalistic’ urges are lurking within all of us)). Fortunately, I will soon support these positions with evidence (although my argument will turn out to be primarily a moral one).

So my aim is to persuade you that the unprecedented normalisation of porn may have effects that a lot of more levelheaded, resolutely anti-prudish liberals and leftists have not seriously countenanced: that is, to try to persuade you why we should not regard mass-consumption of porn as just like the purchase of plastic toys, or the preponderance of movies featuring male protagonists enacting violence.

Everyone knows that pornography has never been so easily accessible. Any person with an internet connection can type in a single word and immediately be transported to multitudinous sites depicting erotic acts of almost infinite variety. There is a veritable cornucopia of carnal material available. For a young man, the plenitude of raw flesh, and the sheer diversity and splendour of sexual acts, is truly jaw-dropping. Yet it takes extremely little to drift into the darker regions of this paradise, and for a number of very important reasons. Perhaps the greatest of these is the nature of the porn sites themselves. Anyone who has spent any time on any of the major, popular internet porn websites – say, Pornhub or Redtube – knows that the following things are standard^[7]:

1.)    There are myriad categories to choose from, ranging from the relatively pedestrian and vanilla (say, Big Boobs or Lesbian or Masturbation or MILF) to the slightly perverted (say, Anal or Blow Job or Threesome or a specific racial group (Asian, “Ebony” and Latino are the default options) or Orgy or “Real Life” or “Hentai”) to the seriously misogynistic or violent (say, Gang Bang or Double Penetration or “Glory Holes” or “Cum Shots” or the ominously named “Extreme”). 

2.)    Female porn stars are always the cynosure of any given professional video depicting heterosexual sex. If there’s only one female pornstar involved in the video, typically the videos begin with her strutting and gyrating and posing in a bikini, which she slowly strips off her (invariably) voluptuous physique, all to the accompaniment of music. Later, when the sex begins, she is always the focus of most of the shots, with her genitals being a particular object of attention. Unsurprisingly, when the woman is giving a blowjob while genuflecting below a male (or males), the shot is never from the perspective of the woman, but almost always a ‘POV’ (point of view) shot from the man looking down at her distended mouth, as she slurps and gags. 

3.)    As that last sentence implies, blowjobs in every single porn video I’ve ever seen involve the woman forcing her mouth so far onto a penis that she chokes and gags, punctuated with turkey slaps across her bedizened, obedient face. Moreover, the man often then contributes to the woman’s suffocation and pain while she is fellating him by pushing on the back of her head until she can swallow no further and his penis is presumably pressing painfully against her throat, severely restricting her breathing. As also implied by my description, this kind of extreme blow job technique inevitably results in unsettling slurping and gurgling sounds, a phenomenon which only amplifies the perversion and degradation of the act.  Another thing to note about oral sex in porn videos is that the woman always does the blow job before any cunnilingus occurs (if it occurs at all, and its absence is probably the norm).

4.)    In the professional porn videos with (attempted) plots, the woman (or women) are almost always playing characters in traditional gender roles. The secretary-coming-on-to-the-boss, the bored-housewife-seducing-the-handy-man, the horny-childlike-school-girl-offering-herself-to-authority-figure (I needn’t say what’s wrong with that) and sexy-nurse-spontaneously-fucking-a-patient clichés are still mined heavily, and no producer essays to subvert any of them.

5.)    The male pornstars are almost always considerably older than their co-stars (except when it’s a MILF video, where the dynamic is reversed). The male pornstars also typically have preposterously oversized penises, often truly gargantuan, equine things that more closely resemble weapons than human genitals. This is probably manageable for the women for the most part, and no doubt enhances the pleasure for some of them in certain circumstances. But there is no doubt that, in some videos, the man is not gentle or considerate when inserting his enormous phallus into the woman’s throat or vagina or, worst of all, anus. Such savagery must inevitably cause her harm (rectal prolapse, anyone?) and tremendous, possibly excruciating pain. Indeed, it often appears as if the penetration is deliberately sadistic: the thrusting is often extremely vigorous and brutish, and the woman’s pleasure seems utterly disdained (she does still typically feign enjoyment, though, even when her throat or anus is being rammed and ravaged (sometimes she doesn’t, of course, and these videos are still watched)).

6.)    All female pornstars have glabrous, prepubescent vaginas or, alternatively, a perfectly manicured and creepily named “landing strip”. All male pornstars have perfectly plucked genitals.

7.)    There is a huge genre of videos, likely both real and fake, where women are manipulated, blackmailed or coerced into sex by men. Such videos are almost always filmed from the perspective of the predatory male, obviously, and also follow porn tropes in always featuring blow jobs but no female pleasuring. The most popular and recognisable subcategory of this genre is the “Fake Taxi” series, all starring the same male performer (the taxi driver). Admittedly, I’m 99% sure 99% (if not all) of the females who sit in the back of his taxi are themselves actually pornstars and complicit in his plan to seduce them. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the plots are often conspicuously rapey. One I can recall, for example, involved the taxi driver taking the vulnerable young woman into a car park – completely against her will and in contempt for her protests and pleading – before demanding that she have sex with him in order to be returned home. Simulations of unambiguous rape like that are not even very rare (and they never look like simulations either).

8.)    Women are vessels for semen. Almost every heterosexual-sex porn video finishes with a male ejaculation either onto or into a woman. What are creepily called “creampies” are very common, as are what are creepily called “facials”. “Anal creampies” also crop up frequently. Since such a conclusion to sex is not at all necessary and either begrimes the woman or disposes her unprotected body to pregnancy, such acts can only signify degradation, domination and dehumanisation. The jettisoning of one’s ejaculate on another’s face – the centre of their character, the window to the soul – is clearly the ultimate act of disgrace. There is also an entire fetish based on this depraved idea of the woman as a receptacle for semen: its name is Bukkake. In videos in this genre, the woman is typically surrounded by a circle of dirty, masturbating men, whom she attends to one by one, fellating their hideous penises until they cum into a glass. Eventually, after she has finished, she drinks the glass, thereby ingesting the cumulative genital fluid of an entire crowd of men. This has got to be seriously injurious, quite apart from being utterly disgusting.

9.)    The comments on the videos are really fucking creepy and often deeply misogynistic. (This is brilliantly exploited by one of the best comedy pages on Facebook, “Pornhub comments on stock photos”.)

10.)  Misogynistic or violent videos are nearly ubiquitous on such sites, and the “Top Rated” sections are most assuredly not an exception – they are not filled with the anomalies (the “romantic” or feminist videos) – but quite the opposite. Thus, misogynistic or violent videos are the ones you’re most likely to watch unless you’re very discerning and make a concerted effort to seek out the more vanilla material.

Despite how grim, sordid and depraved I have made these popular internet porn sites appear by enumerating these basic features, I don’t believe I have exaggerated or distorted the facts at all. This is truly how it is, and any half-avid watcher of internet porn knows it. The former war correspondent for The New York Times, irreligious theologian and self-professed socialist Chris Hedges is one of the brave critics to draw attention to this truth. He has interviewed several of the victims of the industry. Here are two of his articles in which he lays out the horrors of the industry with great eloquence and power (and his typical theological hyperbole):

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20091011_the_victims_of_pornography

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pornography_is_what_the_end_of_the_world_looks_like_20150215

There are also plenty of other, more sober sources backing up my claims:

An excellent ABC article on pornography by a psychologist can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/05/29/4245269.htm

A shocking article by the respected Canadian-English-Australian psychologist Cordelia Fine can be found here^[8]:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/september/1365560803/cordelia-fine/porn-ultimatum

Robert Jensen is another person whose writings are worth seeking out (although he is a bit too much of a social constructionist for my liking). His collected works on the subject can be found here: http://robertwjensen.org/articles/by-topic/gender-sexuality-and-pornography/

This harrowing documentary is definitely worth watching, despite its direct confrontation of the subject matter, including real clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiNsjaGFVVU

This is another very good documentary, of a very different type: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMtXa3vScY

There are also three very good Ted talks on the matter. Gail Dines does a stellar job in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YpHNImNsx8

Gary Wilson makes a cogent argument in this, drawing on evolutionary psychology and citing some interesting work on anxiety among males: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU

A handsome Israeli man makes an impassioned, moving case in this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU

Hopefully, reading my ten-point description and investigating some of these other sources will have shocked some porn-ignoramuses into consensus now. I do understand, though, that one could still have strong grounds for doubting the claims I’ve made about the pernicious effects of pornography. In none of these sources is there any proven link between the consumption of internet porn and serious psychological damage or sex crimes. In fact, despite the loud cries of feminists, there is no clear evidence that sexual assault and battery have risen dramatically in recent years – or at all. I also haven’t refuted any of the standard progressive objections to the fear or censure of pornography. Yet I believe I can do both those things.

Before I do, though, here’s what I imagine a porn-supporting liberal might say at this point:

The porn companies can only respond to the demand. If nobody wanted sadistic and so-called “misogynistic” material, they wouldn’t make it; thus, there is clearly a high demand for it. In the same way, if the viewers really wanted vanilla, tame, gentle pornography, the whole porn industry would shift to meet that demand. It hasn’t; therefore, watchers of pornography must prefer that kind of hardcore material anyway, and any attempt to ameliorate the culture is futile.  Instead, it’s obvious that people with unusual fetishes and twisted fantasies gravitate to porn in order to see what they desire. Porn does not do the shaping. Also, you have to bear in mind that a lot of loners, losers and weirdos spend time on the internet, and that probably skews the general impression of the type of porn most people watch. The important point is that nobody is seriously affected by watching pornography. Your argument is analogous to those put forward by the kind of contemptible Puritanical parents who decry the pollution of their children’s minds by Grand Theft Auto or Heavy Metal music. There’s no evidence that exposure to images on a screen could have anything more than an infinitesimal, inconsequential real-world impact. If you deny that, you’re a fool.

Now, it may be true that we shouldn’t blame Call of Duty for Anders Brehvik, but it is equally obvious that a hard-line view of the type expressed by my imaginary adversary above – a hard-line doctrine of ‘image inconsequentialism’ – is false. Everyone knows that the books you read, the movies you watch and the games you play have some psychological effect on you. Who can seriously deny that at least some of their beliefs and attitudes have been at least partly affected by the kinds of movies they watched as a kid, or their favourite author? Who can seriously deny that their character is not partly shaped by the kinds of things they use to entertain or edify themselves? Clearly, no-one can deny that all such media induce in us various emotions, provoke in us various thoughts, and leave in us memories which we can’t easily erase!

Two simple questions then follow from this: in what ways is the content and consumption of pornography different from more conventional cultural items? And what effect does this difference have?

As one would expect, we will deal with the first question first.

I have claimed that the content of an average pornographic video to be found on any of the popular websites is typically violent and misogynistic (in ways that I have precisely described). However, I can understand that someone comparing porn videos to horror films might say that the violence in an average porn video ultimately rates very lowly compared to an R movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or one of the Saw movies. Yet I contend that this is an exceedingly simplistic and misleading way of comparing the two genres, and conceals a lot of vital differences.

Perhaps the most significant difference between a horror film and a porn video is that porn videos are far more real, in a number of senses of that word. Most obviously, porn videos depict violent action that is really occurring. The women in porn videos are also “actors”, but with the crucial difference that they do their own stunts, and these very often require them to relinquish all control of their body to men, and endure painful and degrading acts. It is true that to enjoy a horror movie, one needs to suspend disbelief: one needs to pretend, on one level, that the serial killer really is performing those gory acts and those people really are in a state of total agony, horror and despair. This fact might lead one to think that, for the average viewer, a horror movie probably feels as “real” as a porn video. But it is equally true that, on another level, everyone watching a horror movie does know that the acts are not real. It seems clear that if they knew that the acts were real, at least 95% of them would immediately be too horrified and sickened to actually watch the films. I can make this claim because such films do actually exist. They’re called snuff films. Nobody believes that people should just be left alone to watch snuff films. On the contrary, people who do are roundly condemned, and denounced as demons, sickos, perverts, psychopaths etc. Rightly so. 

I am not saying, of course, that the average porn film should be regarded as a kind of diluted snuff film. Yet I am saying that porn films are a hell of a lot more real-feeling than any creation of Hollywood, and deliberately try to bear more verisimilitude. It’s important to note that this is one of the aims of porn, since if people didn’t feel that they were somehow intruding on (or vicariously participating in) a highly raw and real experience, then a lot of the appeal would disappear. Crucially, I believe this fundamental difference in verisimilitude between a horror film and a porn video is profoundly significant. In porn, the viewer need not suspend disbelief about anything other than the plot. They know that body parts are really grinding and interacting, and that sensations are being felt by each party. They know that human beings are pleasuring or hurting each other on the screen right in front of their eyes. Though the encounter may be contrived and cameras encircle the performers, when they watch the gonzo and violent material – when they are watching a woman being brutally penetrated, for example – they know that the act itself is completely real. Indeed, they are watching the video in full knowledge of her probable suffering. The porn director intends the viewer to enjoy her suffering. As I described before in my list, a huge number of popular porn videos are explicitly designed to seem real and spontaneous, and, in a few cases, presumably are. Numerous porn videos depict women being demeaned and subjugated in what looks, in every way possible, to be real life (and I would claim that the women are being demeaned and subjugated, not just fictionally demeaned in the way, say, Isabella Rossellini is in Blue Velvet, because the acts are really happening to the porn actress, and she is really enduring them). I believe this must have serious implications for its impact. The fact that a viewer feels sure that it is not just, say, fictional rape that they’re watching, but the real thing – that must, that does, make a huge difference.

I submit that there are also certain important presentational differences between horror films and porn videos that radically change how the viewer receives the action occurring on the screen.  Film shots do not typically assume the point of view of any of the characters. I believe this is one reason why we are able to separate real life from a film so easily. In a horror movie, a point of view shot can work so effectively because it suddenly thrusts us into the position of the cowering, terrified victim, or possibly – more intriguingly – the marauding, psychopathic killer. For the most part, though, I think it’s fair to generalise that most horror movies, like most movies generally, are shot from a removed position, firmly establishing the viewer as an impartial observer of the happenings, rather than a participant. One of the reasons porn videos don’t look like Hollywood movies is because the default camera shots are not impartial and not artful. By my reckoning, there are essentially only two types of shot in porn: those engineered to directly titillate the viewer, as in a close-up of an erogenous body part or some interacting genitals, and those engineered to evoke the sensation in the viewer that he is actually one of the participants (that he is doing the thrusting or whatever). Often, a single shot serves both purposes, but the directors rarely get more creative than that. There are no long shots, there are no close-ups on faces (unless a woman has been splattered with semen) and there sure as hell aren’t any shots where, by virtue of its symbolic significance, the setting is more important than the humans. Instead, the viewer is immersed in the rutting, writhing and slapping, and encouraged to feel as if he is either partaking in it or – more sinisterly – the master of it. When the acts are violent, more often than not a point-of-view shot is used. Clearly, the viewer is exhorted to become the punisher, to revel in the sadism and brutality. Such a technique is not used in any horror movie I’ve ever heard of.

This brings us onto the differences in the consumption of a horror movie and a porn video. I believe there are vital differences in the way people consume porn from the way they consume other things. Indeed, this, I opine, is where the liberal porn-supporter’s analogy between a porn video and a horror film disintegrates completely. The simple truth is that even if there were a horror movie which was shot exactly like a porn film, and – like porn – was designed to look like real life, I would not be concerned about it. The reason is elementary: assuming it was like any other horror film, many people might watch it, but they wouldn’t do so hundreds of times, and allow it to dominate their lives. Its consumption would be very different from the consumption of porn. Unlike porn, they would not view it compulsively, over and over again, night after night after night. With the possible exception of disfigured freaks living in dank basements, nobody gets addicted to a horror movie and replays the most grisly moments every night as they jerk themselves off. But people do with porn. Many people do. Millions of people do. More and more men and more and more women. It is becoming normalised, trivialised and sanitised, even as the porn videos themselves stay exactly the same. This is clearly a stark difference.

Although I have been confident in my polemic against pornography so far, it is at this point that I run into problems. Basically, all of them were raised by my imaginary opponent in his last rebuttal, and they can be re-posed as questions. Although I have already marshalled some empirical evidence of the harms of pornography through those various sources I linked earlier, one could argue that there is still insufficient evidence to suggest that porn is actually doing anything really bad. Does porn really have the ability to like rewire the sexuality of millions of normal people or create an explosion of sexism and misogyny? Is there any reason to think that people who are not innately attracted to sadistic sex would ever gravitate towards it? And, perhaps most importantly, what grounds do I have for denying their sexual preference if they are not determined to actually emulate it, or to commit any criminal offences because of it?

The first two questions are clearly related, though in a subtle fashion. Incidentally, their relationship is one of the things that makes it so difficult to answer them. Not only is it extremely hard to know what a teenager’s sexuality was like before porn exposure (since nowadays the emergence of a sexuality tends to coincide with exposure to porn), but there are actually very few young men around who don’t watch porn. Both Gary Wilson and Gail Dines present strong cases that young teenage boys and men (as well as young girls) are inexorably drawn towards more sadistic material by the way porn is presented on the internet, particularly the abundance and conspicuousness of hardcore and brutal scenes. Of course, the problem for such an argument is that, even if they claim that the porn sites are shepherding young, impressionable teenage boys towards revolting sadism – as in a grooming process – these young, impressionable teenage boys still need to avoid being totally disgusted by the revolting sadism to watch it all. In fact, they not only need to avoid being totally disgusted; they need to be aroused in some way by begging women, gagging blowjobs, brutal penetration and semen-smeared faces. Thus, even if Dines and Wilson allow for a few brutalising exposures that activate a certain circuit in the brain (or whatever), they are still assuming something very dark about male sexuality. Wilson acknowledges this obliquely, with reference to his evo psych conjecture about male preference for sexual diversity, but he doesn’t really confront it directly. Gail talks about young boys being shocked and disquieted by what they find on the internet, but she doesn’t try to claim that it’s a gradual process of conditioning that causes them to be simultaneously aroused by sadistic sex; instead, she just seems to assume that most of them are aroused immediately. In fact, one could argue (in fact, I am suggesting) that this is what makes pornography more dangerous: it awakens the cruel, animalistic part of us that otherwise lies dormant and still (I know that’s what I personally felt like the more I slid down the grimy rabbit hole (at the same time I was railing against misogyny directed at Julia Gillard)).

The same tricky dilemma arises when one recognises that millions upon millions of women bought Fifty Shades of Gray, or that a huge amount of heterosexual women devour narratives in which strong, confident, high-status men sweep trembling women off their feet, tear open their corsets and “ravish” them. Even social constructionist feminists sometimes seem to leave an exception for sexuality in their social constructionist framework, lest they become like Andrea Dworkin. Such feminists must realise that if they do assume that sexual preferences are entirely ‘constructed’, the most obvious conclusion is the Dworkian one: that women’s sexual preferences are tainted by patriarchy, that heterosexual sex is a kind of rape, and that porn is inherently a patriarchal industry centred around male domination (if not rape). The solution for those feminists who are unequivocally “sex-positive” (as well as all liberal anti-moralists) is to claim that one’s base instincts and one’s more civilised, intellectual beliefs are decisively demarcated, and perhaps simply immiscible. BDSM advocates are constantly heard saying that all this nasty stuff is “just fantasy” and that as long as the acts are done between two consenting adults, only a Puritan could object. I do not agree with this claim. My response to it shall simultaneously answer the third question, since I will argue that certain sexual acts can be bad without being crimes.

The first reason I think this view is misguided is a very simple neuroscientific fact. It can be summed up in one sentence: sexuality does not sit in its own little box in the brain, because the brain is not made up of perfectly secure little boxes. One’s lusts can affect one’s ‘higher’ thoughts, just as any of one’s passions can affect one’s higher thoughts. This truism means that, if you are a man who enjoys (consensually) hurting women, you probably don’t just have thoughts about hurting women when you are actually hurting women. In fact, it probably crosses your mind more frequently than you’d like to admit. Similarly, if you are a woman who enjoys being (consensually) hurt, you probably don’t just have thoughts about being hurt when you are actually being hurt. It probably crosses your mind more frequently than you’d like to admit also.

The second reason is moral. It seems to me obvious that consent has its limits: it is still wrong to beat someone severely even if they agreed to it beforehand; it is obviously wrong to murder someone even if they agree to it. That’s why I don’t understand how people can so blithely claim that if a not-completely-off-her-face or mentally retarded porn actress merely consents to being physically destroyed by multiple men (in such a way that requires surgical treatment, let’s say, because this really happens to mainstream porn actresses, as horrific as that is), the brutal, savage act is ok. It is not! It is simply not! And let’s please not forget the fact that the reason these women consent is money, not some deep inner desire to become slaves to vicious brutes who wreck their bodies in front of hot, bright fluorescent lights and a crowd of leering men filming and shooting instructions, in full knowledge that the images of their bodies being savaged will be distributed to hundreds of thousands of sadistic grimacing goblins across the world, pulling madly on their little red penises like they are trying to start a lawnmower. Many of these pornstars come from poverty, many are drug addicts trying to pay for their next hit, all the young ones – like all young people in America – are debt peons struggling to survive in the vicious gauntlet that is America for the 99%. They are all being exploited, because they are all wage slaves.

My final line of attack is much more unusual. I hold the rather conservative view that people ought not to be doing things that degrade and debase them, even if they consent to this brutalising. This view is based on a rather quaint moral notion called “human dignity”.

I believe in human dignity and I am not ashamed to say it. More soberly, I don’t believe it to be any more of a primitive concern than the concern with autonomy. In instrumental terms, the belief in human dignity is very important, because it increases our sense of moral responsibility and compassion. If you see people as worthless animals – savages, beasts, brutes, scum, vermin, pests, rats, cockroaches – then you will necessarily empathise with them less, and you will be far more willing to hurt, abuse or subjugate them. History offers ample proof of this. As Steven Pinker documents in The Better Angels of our Nature, tribes and civilisations have dehumanised and essentialised members of the out-group throughout history. This has allowed them to rape and murder wantonly, without guilt or contrition. The examples of this basic dynamic are almost infinite in the annals of history. The Roman Empire saw everyone outside their borders as “barbarians”, and would slaughter these barbarians without scruple; the Medieval Crusaders saw the Muslims as heretical brutes and happily butchered them in pursuit of their divine goal; the cruelty and viciousness of colonialism was enabled by the belief in white superiority and the power of God’s light (on the side of the West); the slaveholders of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th Centuries felt no sympathy for their slaves because of a perception that blacks were bestial and subhuman; the Holocaust was able to occur because of a gradual process of Jewish dehumanisation, accelerated by the relegation of the Jewish population to the ghettos, which made them more filthy and emaciated, and therefore disgusting (we tend to moralise disgust, as Pinker repeatedly affirms); and in the Vietnam War, American commandos were capable of massacring Vietnamese peasants with utter equanimity and calm by reducing them to subhuman “gooks”. In fact, this essentialising of the “other” is a fundamental element of human nature: tribalism, racism and prejudice have existed in all human societies, and competitive sport today offers us an excellent example of how fluidly we organise into internally cohesive, externally hostile groups. It is very easy for us to feel profound sympathy for people within our group or team, and utter coldness and hostility towards those outside of it. Both players and spectators in sporting matches demonstrate this emphatically.

     Although I focussed on historical examples of violence, war and genocide in that paragraph, I could just have easily used historical examples of sexism. In fact, as Pinker points out in almost all of his books, women have been reduced to “chattel” – the property of their father when unmarried, the property of their husband when married – in basically every culture ever documented. In various civilisations across the planet, it has been thought that, if a woman is raped, the rapist should be punished by being forced to marry the woman he has raped, since that way the woman’s father gets the damaged ‘property’ off his hands. Clearly, men have not found it hard to dehumanise women in the past. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that porn could help men dehumanise women today.

So these are the justifications for my belief in human dignity. I believe these justifications are sufficient to prop up my views about unusual sexual proclivities: in particular, my conviction that one has a moral obligation to avoid all practices that degrade and debase human beings, and which rob them of their essential dignity. This means hardcore pornography of all kinds, and BDSM of all kinds. I believe that one even has a moral obligation to try to suppress sexual fantasies of violence and sadism. I know this is most likely impossible for most people to achieve, but I still believe it is a worthy ideal (contra Kant, ought doesn’t necessarily imply can). Though I certainly don’t advocate the banning of pornography or the prohibition of any forms of sexual activity, I do tend to hold the rather quaint view that sex should always be about love. I think sex without love has just become a crude, animalistic act – mating or copulating. Such an activity is surely beneath us as human beings.

I don’t expect many people to be able to live up to any of these extreme moral beliefs, but I also don’t see how one can disagree with the moral argument that says that human dignity is important and that certain sexual practices destroy that dignity. I don’t see how one can deny that tying someone to a bed and flogging them is destroying their dignity; how sadistically penetrating an orifice is destroying the dignity of the person to which it belongs; and how using someone merely as a body to fuck is destroying their dignity. Ultimately, therefore, whether you make this commitment to human dignity or shirk it completely is really just a question of how much you care about morality. I know I often struggle to care about morality, and that’s proven to me every time I succumb to animalistic temptations and look up porn online (researching this essay has led to multiple relapses). But I still try to resist these base fantasies and desires, because I know that the most important part of me – the civilised, neocortical, abstract-thinking part – cares about morality profoundly. I know that this true part of me – my soul, the seat of my identity and character – reviles this terrible degradation of human beings and knows the tremendous importance of human dignity. And this, to me, is what matters.

To finally return to the first question, one of the reasons for thinking that pornography has had a nontrivial impact on the minds of young people – that it has indeed increased sexism and misogyny – is the sexist ugliness of the internet. The internet is infamous for being a repository of an enormous amount of porn. The figure that “The internet is 90% pornography” is notorious, and is used often as a fodder for jokes, even it is a little erroneous. The internet is equally infamous for being the playground of misogynists, and for the entire communities of such cretins that it hosts. I believe that this correlation has some causal component. One might immediately object to this claim by pointing out that half the world is on the internet, and so if the internet is infamous for porn and misogyny, then that just means the entire world is, on the whole, dominated by lust and by hatred of women. That fact would seem implausible, or if not, still immediately detrimental to my position, because porn in my view would then have to assume an almost omnipotent power as the source of much of the hatred of women globally. However, I am not claiming that porn is the source of much of the hatred of women globally. That would clearly be a great folly. What I am saying is that the anti-feminist and misogynistic vitriol we so often see on internet forums and media sites, the proliferation and massive popularity of misogynistic comedy pages on Facebook, the proliferation and massive popularity of sexist jokes on social media sites, the incandescent rage displayed towards women on the internet all the time – that all of this is connected in some way to the hardcore pornography that is so ubiquitous in the virtual realm. Indeed, these two strands of internet infamy so often intertwine, and are – I believe – doing so more and more as porn is assimilated into the mainstream culture. How many times do you see sexist Facebook pages using lewd pictures or videos (i.e. porn of some description) to objectify and demean women for “humour”? How many sexual images are used to make sexist jokes? How often do misogynists on the internet talk about “anal” – clearly an artefact of porn? How many teenage misogynists use the violent sexual language of porn when attempting to lambast and ridicule women on the internet? How many millions of internet users downloaded those leaked pornographic photos of Jennifer Lawrence and others? If you spend any time on the internet, you will know the answer to all these questions is “a lot”.

Evidently, this is not iron-clad proof, but many of the sources I linked earlier do lend credence to this view, demonstrating conclusively that exposure to porn can increase sexism.

If you have not been swayed by any of these arguments and still think that porn is essentially benign and that the increasing numbers of young people who are becoming compulsive viewers of it are not being affected by it in any serious way, I can’t help you. In your favour, though, it should be said that there are some important counterarguments that I haven’t yet addressed. In particular, the third of my re-posed questions still sticks out, even after that screed about dignity. How do I assimilate the fact, for example, that many millions of women bought E.L. James’ books, and got themselves off to its dramatisation of a deeply lopsided, arguably violent and certainly very retrograde relationship? Do a huge number of heterosexual women want to be sexually dominated by nature or by enculturation? And what about the female pornstars themselves? I’ve ignored their perspective completely. That’s hardly feminist, is it? Some of these pornstars are actually professed feminists, too, so how’s that for a conflict? Moreover, they earn a lot of money, too, and a lot of them say they enjoy their work, even when it’s a little on the extreme side.^[9] In fact, most of them are far more prosperous and successful than the men. So pornography could arguably be called a “feminist” profession. What am I to make of that? And who am I to tell these pornstars that they’re working in a fundamentally misogynistic profession, making videos that foster misogyny and exacerbate the plight of women everywhere? And would I really be helping the cause of women if I stopped millions of people watching porn, and thereby hurt the porn industry and all the thousands of women in it?

As regards the first point, about female sexual preferences, I don’t think the answer is straightforward. There do seem to be a few reasons why you’d expect heterosexual relationships to be skewed towards male dominance on average (for example, it makes sense in evolutionary terms that the bigger and stronger sex would be the sexually dominant sex). So one could argue that pressing the case for dignity is itself a social constructionist move; in seeking a more pure morality, I’m possibly denying fundamental human nature. Maybe there is no such thing as an ‘equal’, fully dignified sexual act. Maybe sex is fundamentally about power. Certainly, I’ve made the case that with 95% of men, arousal by images of erotic dominance and sadism is probably not something that has to be rigorously trained (it does need to be triggered somehow (for example, by repeated porn watching)). So, conceivably, there could be a deep coding for sexual dominance in heterosexual men that is just sort of ‘lying beneath the surface’, as I suggested before. We all know about Freud’s Id, a.k.a. the “beast” within the heart of man, a.k.a. the “darkness of man”. Perhaps widespread attraction to sadistic pornography is just a vindication of this idea. You might even say that it is a good thing that large numbers of men are able to release these primal urges in the privacy of their own home, by themselves, because otherwise they would do it in real-life. The rise of violent video games has coincided with a decrease in teen crime, so perhaps – you might say – porn could help to reduce rapes (though I don’t think there’s any evidence of this).

As regards the second point, about female pornstars themselves, I suspect the dilemma’s not as profound as it seems, and for one reason: if there were better jobs available for women, far fewer women would choose to go into pornography. Although one or two successful pornstars claim they “love” their job (such as Asa Akira), some successful ones have admitted they don’t love it, or find it to be a psychological and physical burden (for example, Stoya, Kagney Linn-Karter, Katie St Ives and Juelz Ventura). For the less successful ones – the ones who don’t have strong incomes – it is fair to say that the vast majority do not love the job at all. In fact, I strongly suspect that most of them hate it and would like to get out; they are bound only be economic insecurity. Clearly, no female pornstar actually wants to play the role of a victim in a simulated rape, or to be penetrated by multiple men. The fact that no female pornstar is ever happy to do extreme scenes is reflected in the far higher wages paid for these scenes. The pornstar manager Mark Spiegler has revealed the rates demanded by female pornstars for different types of acts: it begins at $800 for a girl-girl scene, then $1,000 for a guy-girl scene, then $1,200 or more for anal sex, and for “double penetration”, it suddenly jumps to $4,000 or more. What this final number really represents is financial compensation for physical and psychological trauma. You have to pay someone a lot of money for them to let you torture them.

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[1] I keep questioning whether my usage here just causes unnecessary confusion. Evidently, I am leaning towards the side of ‘No’. I just don’t think there’s a better word to use. Reformulation with the word ‘sacred’ doesn’t work perfectly. (I mean, I personally quite like thinking of myself as “religious”, but I know most atheists do not, because they are not working with the categories I have in mind.)

[2] So the one difference between this sense of religion and the more typical sense of religion is that this sense of religion has nothing to do with belief in supernatural agents (“Gods”, “spirits”, and the like). One might object that irreligious ethics and ethical reasoning is precisely defined by its independence of belief in supernatural agents. That would be a reasonable definition, but what I’m really saying, in any case (as will shortly become clear) is that all formal ethical systems, whether utilitarian (Benthamian, Millian, Sedgwickian, Singerian), deontological (Kantian, Korsgaardian) or in-between (Parfitian, Scanlonian) are doomed (to widely varying degrees, admittedly) to be in significant conflict with actual human desires, impulses and behaviours, and ignore the personal and social rituals which form an important component of everyone’s moral behaviour.

[3] Though note that this certainly does not entail that I would accept all and any actions that would predictably contribute to this goal.

[4] Note, however, that there is certainly no equivalence. One of the major differences is that moral progress has come from the bottom-up (mainly during the 60s), not the top-down, like science (which is funded by the government and government organisations). Moral norms cannot progress from within the establishment; they only progress when the establishment is confronted.

[5] The other major part of the explanation is that, even if you have loads of time, it’s basically impossible to do serious cost-benefit calculations for anything, because the world is so complex.

This is not to say, of course, that utilitarianism is pointless, sterile or should be abandoned. On the contrary. Just as certain mathematical techniques can be applied to solve specific problems despite being strictly non-realistic (like Newtonian mechanics, or Euclidean geometry, or infinity), traditional utilitarianism is still an extremely important tool for all those debates where we think our intuitions ought not to count. As a matter of fact, it features in the most important ethical debates raging today. Traditional utilitarianism is the preferred framework for basically all of bioethics –not surprising since the point of bioethics is to probe taboos – and it is generally the preferred framework for vegetarians.

Incidentally, it was the utilitarians who basically gave birth to vegetarianism, just as they were also pioneers of the liberation of women (see John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women). Jeremy Bentham’s famous slogan about suffering is both the genesis of vegetarianism and the starting point of all vegetarian debate today: “The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk” but, “Can they suffer?””

Such a beautiful quote, and such an important moment in the history of moral philosophy.

[6] It’s worth pointing out utilitarian arguments for very big conclusions (both the ones for repugnant outcomes and those for good outcomes) might be wrong even according to utilitarian theory (that’s why I said “plausible-seeming”), because of the impossibility of accurate calculation and weighing of “utility”. In fact, the right conclusions according to utilitarian theory might be even more “repugnant” than anything we have imagined so far. If we suppose that it’s possible for a superintelligent alien to literally calculate the “utilities” of all the organisms on our planet (not just humans), and if we imagine that such an alien were to come down to our planet tomorrow, we should confidently expect this alien to tell us that most or all of these arguments are simply wrong. The reason we should expect this is that no human utilitarian-based arguments are based on even approximate attempts to calculate and aggregate huge numbers of individual utilities (imagine the computing power!), and even for individual moral actions, we have no way of computing long-term consequences (us humans can’t even work out the long-term consequences of a single butterfly flapping its wings in a forest, let alone a government policy (think chaos, and the abject failure of economic modelling).

Actually, it’s worse than that, because we don’t even have any idea how to measure human ‘utility’.

No, it’s actually it’s worse than that: we have no idea what ‘utility’ even is! Should it be restricted to hedonic pleasures or not? Does intelligence have the potential to increase the utility derived from certain stimuli? Do fish feel pain?

[7] As a teenage porn-watcher myself, like all my peers at school (bar maybe one or two), I did hundreds of hours of research from the age of 15 to 17 and a half. I had always felt that there was something deeply sick about porn (of course, there is something very strange and incongruous about sex anyway, since the sight of naked bodies doing things to each other seems out of tune with civilisation in a pretty fundamental way), but for some reason I can’t explain, it was this sense of perversion that eventually came to arouse me most. One of the first times I went on one of those sites, before I even had the ability to masturbate, I remember looking at a giant collage of very young women with penises in their mouths, covered in semen. There was something utterly bizarre about it, and very disturbing. Later, I remember being highly disturbed by the violent ads that appeared on the side of the screen, depicting grotesque scenes of simulated paedophilia or simulated rape. Eventually, however, I became desensitised. Upon reaching 17, I started to take action. Feeling that it was polluting my mind, corrupting my sexuality and taking my sexuality in a very disturbing, sadistic direction, I began to wean myself off my pornographic habit. My main strategy was to look at raunchy music videos or pictures of buxom ladies instead of images. Gradually, I built up a greater and greater resistance to my urges. There were many relapses, but the broad trend was towards abstention. I have now more or less defeated my addiction (although there is always tremendous temptation, especially since I know the names of about twenty female pornstars). Luckily for me, I never had any trouble masturbating without any stimulus at all, and I tend to do that far more often now.

[8] One annoying thing about this article is, at the end, Fine seems to imply that if women were equal within our current system (she mentions getting more women on boards), porn would stop being violent… What? I can see why she doesn’t want to think about the fact that millions of men are aroused by misogynistic sadism but it seems highly unlikely that more women at the apex of a vicious society would suddenly change porn and the things men are aroused by.

[9] As you can find out from antipornography.org, there are some female pornstars who have been severely traumatised, and both psychologically and physically hurt, and who now speak out against the industry. But I have no doubt that many of the most successful female pornstars think it’s a pretty good job. (Of the less successful ones, I have serious doubts.)