Repudiating Anti-Populism Part I

Fatal Contradictions and Flaws in the Arguments against ‘Strong Democracy’: Part I: the Mistaken Inference from the Argument for Rule by the Epistemic Elite to the Desirability of Rule by Elites (Part II will be Flaws in the Rikerian Argument from Arrow’s Theorem against the so-called ‘Classical Doctrine’ and Rousseau)

Part I: Fatal Problems with making the intuitive jump from the sound ‘Argument from the Irrationality, Moral Stupidity and Ignorance of the Masses for Rule by the Moral and Epistemic Elite’ (Argument for ‘Epistocracy’) to a Rejection of more Participatory Models of Democracy in favour of more Schumpeterian or Neoliberal Models of Democracy

“Democracy: the fools have a right to vote. Dictatorship: the fools have a right to rule.”

Bertrand Russell

A long-standing argument in political philosophy, ultimately dating back to Plato in The Republic, goes like this (I have to present it in an ugly way, because I’m trying to compress Plato’s version and more contemporary variations into one):

1.      The great mass of people in the world are totally incompetent in the political domain (deficient in understanding, rationality, knowledge and moral wisdom (don’t worry, I will later properly discuss how “moral wisdom” fits in and try to resolve the complications it poses)). Most people are (relative to the elite caste that we introduce in premise 3) stupid, irrational, intemperate, brutish, poorly morally attuned, highly tribal, and highly ignorant (without the curiosity and love of truth required to ameliorate this), severely afflicted by biases and not at all capable of perceiving the “common good”, only their own narrow selfish interests, or their group’s.

(Modern versions of this premise mention research in behavioural economics (the “heuristics and biases research program”), psychology, and political-science studies of voting behaviour which powerfully undermine what are called ‘Enlightenment ideas’ about human rationality[1]: the notion that ‘we’ (meaning most members of our species) typically decide our political stances on a given issue by means of careful deliberation and a sober appraisal of the relevant facts, with our general principles formulated according to weighty moral deliberation. This is contrasted with the reality that we are totally controlled by “System 1” – beholden to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic in our thinking about difficult issues, by the halo effect in our appraisal of persons (people seem to be disturbingly affected by the looks, tone of voice and charisma of politicians and rhetors), by blind tribal and group loyalties, and by unswerving, often dangerous fealty to sacred values whose very subjection to scrutiny is seen as sacrilege by the pious. A recent popular book on this research was called Democracy for Realists by Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. I haven’t actually read this and won’t (I’m not going to go near a book with that title – sorry), but I’m well-aware of the research, a lot of which is pretty disturbing.)  

2.      These uncomfortable facts mean that if you give the masses some degree of control over decision-making, they are not going to make anything close to an optimal decision for society as a whole. There is indeed a strong possibility of disastrous outcomes. Empirically, we know that democratic elections can have extremely bad outcomes, and that people tend to form into irrationally polarised groups.

3.      There is a narrow minority of people who are not totally incompetent in the political domain (the “true navigator”[s], in Plato’s famous ship metaphor), and could formulate better, evidence-based policies that would lead to the greater good of all. (In modern versions of this argument, these are understood to be people with PhDs: both those with claimed expertise in fields where public policy is studied – that is, the “policy wonks” in economic ‘science’ or political ‘science’ – and also academics with more narrow, less intrinsically political domains of expertise nevertheless relevant to political decision-making. That means engineers, urban planners, energy experts (physicists), industrial chemists, ecological experts, climate scientists, and so on. In a vastly different era – a world without academic specialists and where the political leaders had only a ‘city state’ to rule over (in a much simpler political system) – Plato saw this narrow minority as those people with moral wisdom (a powerful sense of the common good, a view to the big picture) and probably a high degree of general knowledge relevant domain (trade theory, transport, civil engineering, whatever), and rigorously considered ideas on how to improve things. Plato, famously, called his imaginary elite caste the “Philosopher Kings” (and clearly imagined himself as one of them). Perhaps the best version of the modern argument imagines all the social and physical science PhDs working together with the most-respected political philosophers in academia. Crudely, the political philosophers would set the overall goals – the teloi – and the scientists would try to work out how to reach them.)

Lemma: it is better if policies are formulated by people who have a better-than-average idea of the effects, short-term and long-term, of major policies, and it is better that morally wise people are developing the goals motivating the policies than the vicious.

Conclusion: ideally, it would be better if we had no politicians and all decision-making was carried out by the narrow minority who are not totally incompetent (as we saw above, this narrow minority could be different in different visions, but the argument is valid in any case).

This argument is sound (or at least it’s easy to formulate a precise version of it that is). Although I didn’t actually cite any of the specific research that has been done backing up the first two premises, that can be found anywhere. It certainly suffices to show that most people do not reason according to the standards of the best experts in their fields. Basically, I don’t think you can really push on these empirical claims at all – and most don’t. You can’t deny that some people are more intelligent and knowledgeable than others. I also think it is wrong to deny that some people are more morally wise than others (but, since I know this is a little more controversial, I’ll argue for it in a minute).

One (apparent) reason to object to this argument would be moral: considerations of social equality and contractualist-type reasoning would suggest that everyone should be encouraged as much as possible to be engaged in the political process, because political decisions will affect their lives, and people ought to have a role (at least symbolic) in the process that ends up shaping their lives. Nevertheless, if we really do have the most morally wise people, and the most sophisticated social scientists, making the big political decisions (and that’s the point) they will clearly have a better chance at arranging things in a way that turns out morally better than less morally wise people and people with no training in mathematical modelling of complex systems and massive empirical databases.

I’ll further develop my response to this objection in a paragraph’s time, but at this point, I want to stress that, as I just implied above, on my own best version of the argument for epistocracy as applied to the contemporary world, I would stipulate that the social scientists in charge use sophisticated dynamical models and dynamic computer-modelling like Steve Keen or Peter Turchin, i.e. practice ‘cliodynamics’, even though the vast majority of current social scientists, in economics and sociology, do not use complex systems mathematics at all, and therefore do not have even the beginnings of a scientific understanding of the long-term and the big picture. Is this a bit ‘convenient’ for me? Well, maybe, but by stipulation, we’re imagining the elite caste of experts being in charge, not second-rate experts. Nonetheless, is it still a problem for the argument that most social ‘scientists’ today are not doing what they should be doing and literally do not understand anything about the fundamental dynamics of social evolution? That most social ‘scientists’ are no better at predicting even the short-term effects of policies than the best guess of Average Jane?  That most social ‘scientists’ are only ‘experts’ insofar as they are well-versed with the extensive but pre-scientific literature in their field of choice and have a larger inventory of data in their heads than the average person? Well, I mean, it does depend on how, precisely, the argument is phrased (or how we interpret it): if instead we mean by the social science ‘experts’ those people whom a future social scientist with judgment which we can’t question from our own viewpoint would deem to be most qualified to make the decisions (as I implied above, I obviously think it overwhelmingly likely that future social scientists, if social science advances significantly, will be using complex systems mathematics and lots of data, à la cliodynamics), then these considerations don’t pose a problem. Even so, we are at least starting to hint at one of my objections to the way the best version of this argument is used.

Now that that’s been clarified, we should do a little more work dispelling the moral objection to the argument. One way to develop the objection would be by denying the proposition that some people have more moral wisdom than others, which does, on its surface, seem committed to a false Platonic notion that it is contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger (that an individual desire or preference can be designated rational or irrational).[2] But it doesn’t have to be; I see moral wisdom as a vague but real quality corresponding to one’s ability and propensity to try one’s best to make sure one’s ethical positions on specific issues line up with the set of very-hard-to-deny general abstract principles or ‘ethical axioms’ on which one’s ethical system is built (this certainly doesn’t mean you have to be a utilitarian to be morally wise (I count as morally wise and I’m not a utilitarian), but I would suggest that the moral morally wise would have to use consequentialist reasoning most of the time). I think that the best respected political philosophers in analytic philosophy are all very morally wise, and so I would happy for them to play the role of the morally wise group (I also suspect that scientists are, on average, more morally wise than the average person (they do tend to be left-wing (ha!))).

The more fundamental issue with the objection is that it discounts the possibility that if we put the morally wise people in charge, they wouldn’t immediately say ‘We ought to diminish our own power because, whatever the consequences, it is a moral imperative that we have a system where as many people as possible are symbolically involved (i.e. a full-suffrage electoral system).’ If, by stipulation, they are the most morally wise people then, if that conclusion is the morally right one, then they would come to it and follow its consequences to their logical conclusion. More plausibly, one could imagine them keeping their power within the elite caste but telling the social scientists that their central goal should be to work out how to bring about a transformation of society (probably gradual) towards the J.S. Millian or Deweyian or Patemanian or late-Robert-Dahlian vision of widespread institutional democracy, in which schools are made increasingly democratic and the curriculum encourages a great deal more collaboration and unstructured creative activity; workplaces become increasingly democratic, with more corporations beginning to lose their Stalinist hierarchies in favour of an organisation more akin to that of the oft-cited (by libertarian leftists) Mondragon Corporation in Spain; where local councils play an increasing role in all people’s lives, being an important place of communal congregation and polite discussion about the local issues; and where a larger proportion of the population than currently acquires an expertise comparable to that of the elite caste. The point is that such worries are unjustified, based on a misunderstanding of what is being said.

Another objection – from the other ‘side’, as it were – is the Hayekian objection to “central planning” on the basis of the necessary extreme ignorance of central planners in a massive, complex society. This objection doesn’t work because, whilst it is obviously and importantly true that there are strong limits on the extent to which even the most expert of human experts can see the long-term effects of policies in a highly complex world, all large-scale societies require a state engaging in some planning, with long-term planning better than short-term (compare the success of the “East Asian Tigers” over the last thirty years to the US’ decline). Without central planning, there could be no large-scale fightback against climate change, no system enabling massive infrastructure, education and health spending vital for the future of a society. Moreover, when a society, so to speak, ‘relaxes central planning’ in the Mount Pelerin Society-sense, by allowing the corporate and financial sectors to take over politics – an experiment that the US has been working on since Reagan – the society is not actually reducing central planning in a literal sense (just replacing the central planners, installing ‘corporatism’), and is instead setting itself up for disaster and social breakdown (which we’re seeing). I don’t think it is too strong to say that centralised planning is necessary for a large-scale society; the notion that one could have a well-functioning, cohesive large-scale society without any kind of state is an extremely dangerous pathology which ought not to merit any attention whatsoever.

It is also ancient news that hundreds of rapacious corporations doing their own thing will not lead to expense of the common or greater good: this is the Paradox of the Commons. When the already limited propensity of the state to protect the environment and implement other useful corporate regulations (most regulations are terrible, we should openly admit, but it is deranged to want none) is attenuated (by regulatory capture by the corporate and financial sectors in capitalist societies, along with cultural shifts), we are in deep trouble; indeed, we are in deep trouble right now. Just to take an example, climate change may lead to the end of organised human life.

The notion of a large-scale society without a state actually engaging in planning is a nonsense, or rather an aneurysm.

Anyhow, that’s why I think this argument is sound.

But what really annoys me is when people take the leap from this argument to a Schumpeterian or Popperian or Walter-Lippmanian, ‘neoliberal’ vision of democracy as “elite competition”: that is, when people say that the fact that most people are stupid, tribalist and irrational means that the only function of electoral democracy should be to “remove bad rulers” and that that policy formulation should be left to whoever happens to have the most influence at the top of the pecking order (i.e. corporate and financial elites and the ‘policy wonks’ who don’t massively alienate these elites). The reason this is a very bad inference is that a rational and wise person has more grounds to trust the mass of the people than the elite caste that happen to hold power, because this elite caste are not the smartest and wisest people in our society, and instead further their own interests at the expense of the common good. The Bertrand Russell quote at the beginning basically sums up my view on this.

Now, I just asserted that, but do I have evidence? The answer is yes.

First question: do corporate and financial elites actually affect policy? The answer to this is an unequivocal yes, and in two ways: by influencing politicians and the system of selecting politicians (by gaining greater control over the direction of the political parties themselves), and by influencing public attitudes. Here is what I wrote about it in January 2016, within this massive document which used to be one of my featured posts (http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/a-67-page-dismantling-of-economics-of.html):

“Perhaps the most important argument Stiglitz makes in The Price of Inequality is on the impact of inequality on democracy. Influenced by Thomas Ferguson’s Investment Theory of Party Competition, Stiglitz shows how capitalist democracies have an inherent tendency towards plutocracy, and how that tendency is further exacerbated by inequality.   

The influence of wealth on ‘democracy’ works at all levels of the process. For average Janes and Joes, voting in an election provides little benefit and often involves a hefty cost. Researching the candidates and their policies is time-consuming and difficult; registration can be a burden; voting (in the US) takes place on a workday, making it hard for those who need to work to survive; and getting to polling stations may be challenging, especially for people with limited mobility. All this gets easier the wealthier you are – thus reducing the cost.

Wealth insinuates itself into the process in quite subtle ways, too. It is more likely for those with greater education to be politically engaged, and to trust in the democratic process. The highly educated also tend to be wealthier, and their extensive education means they are likely to be thoroughly indoctrinated in state myths. Conversely, it is more likely for the disillusioned, distrustful and radical to abandon voting at all. All these factors guarantee that those who do vote will tend to have views fitting neatly within the conventional doctrinal system; dissidents and radicals will be filtered out.

Then there are the direct influences. For the very wealthy, the democratic process is fundamentally different, because they don’t just vote; they also participate financially. Participating in the system in this way turns the process of engagement from a burden into a potential boon. By putting their money into the political process, wealthy people are essentially making an investment – one that may be paid off handsomely if the outcome is a government passing policies more favourable to them and their fortune. Since our Western political system is very open to money flows and money equals power in our economic system, being wealthy does give one significant power to shape the process in our society. In the US, the corruptibility of their system was increased only recently by the 2010 decision in the case of Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission. As Stiglitz describes it, this ruling “essentially approved unbridled corporate campaign spending” by allowing “corporations and unions to exercise “free speech” in supporting candidates and causes in elections to the same degree as individual human beings” (my emphasis). It is not hard to see why such loosening of regulations is poisonous to democracy: “Since corporations have many millions of times the resources of the vast majority of individual Americans, the decision has the potential to create a class of super-wealth political campaigners with a one-dimensional political interest: enhancing their profits”.

Even without regressive laws like these, the wealthy have a number of channels of influence: personal donations, standard corporate donations, and – if they’re mega-wealthy – through their own personal lobbying organisations. As Stiglitz observes, one of the ironies of this system is that the wealthy have a strong incentive to make common people disillusioned with the political process, and – at the same time – common people are often disillusioned with the political process because of the impression it is rigged. The wealthy have this incentive because they knew that if people are sufficiently disgusted with the process to stop voting, a higher proportion of the votes will favour the corporate and financial puppets instead. As David Foster Wallace informed the readers of Rolling Stone Magazine in his worst essay, “Up, Simba”, “If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”

The height of the absurdity comes in the fact that, because the fatcats know the spectre of the bought-election is one of the things that causes common people to become disillusioned and disenfranchised, some of them may have an incentive to advertise their corrosion of democracy. Of course, is not at all in the best interests of the politicians to display the donations they receive from the wealthy, as they still want average people voting for them, and that will best be achieved under the pretence that they are authentic, sincere and committed to the common good. On the other hand, the fact that the politicians are not really sincere and not really committed to the common good – and are instead perfidious, venal and megalomaniacal crooks – may also increase disgust and disillusionment, thus reinforcing the plutocratic trend.

The most important arm of plutocratic control is, of course, the media – as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demonstrate in Manufacturing Consent.

Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” includes five “filters” of information that function to exclude more radical, dissident or anti-establishment views, or to discourage critical thinking and sophisticated analysis, thus setting the parameters for the doctrinal system. As they themselves put it, “[The filters] fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”. These filters are as follows:

“(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.”

Wikipedia offers an excellent explanation of the action of these five filters:

Ownership[edit]

Main article: Concentration of media ownership

The size and profit-seeking imperative of dominant media corporations create a bias. The authors point to how in the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers but excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the 'respectable' wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless, there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system. The authors posit that these earlier radical papers were not constrained by corporate ownership and were therefore free to criticize the capitalist system.

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are currently either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Advertising[edit]

The second filter of the propaganda model is funding generated through advertising. Most newspapers have to attract advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, they would have to increase the price of their newspaper. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of the 'people's newspapers' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the actual clientele served by the newspaper includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this filter, the news is "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the content and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news has only a marginal role as the product.

Sourcing[edit]

The third of Herman and Chomsky's five filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: "The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest." Even large media corporations such as the BBC cannot afford to place reporters everywhere. They concentrate their resources where news stories are likely to happen: the White House, the Pentagon, 10 Downing Street and other central news "terminals". Although British newspapers may occasionally complain about the "spin-doctoring" of New Labour, for example, they are dependent upon the pronouncements of "the Prime Minister's personal spokesperson" for government news. Business corporations and trade organizations are also trusted sources of stories considered newsworthy. Editors and journalists who offend these powerful news sources, perhaps by questioning the veracity or bias of the furnished material, can be threatened with the denial of access to their media life-blood - fresh news.^[3] Thus, the media become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depend upon.

This relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts" and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Flak[edit]

The fourth filter is 'flak', described by Herman and Chomsky as 'negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and Bills before Congress and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action'. Business organizations regularly come together to form flak machines. An example is the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to attack the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.^{[citation needed]}

For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted efforts to manage public information.

Anti-Communism and fear[edit]

“	So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.	”
— Noam Chomsky[4]

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was 'anti-communism'. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. Chomsky updated the model as "fear", often as 'the enemy' or an 'evil dictator' such as Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. This is exemplified in British tabloid headlines of 'Smash Saddam!' and 'Clobba Slobba!'.^[5] The same is said to extend to mainstream reporting of environmentalistsas 'eco-terrorists'. The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.^[5]

Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, the press and so forth. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests. Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1991), anticommunism was replaced by the "War on Terror", as the major social control mechanism. //

Chomsky also emphasises the importance of the journalists themselves in maintaining the conformity and narrowness of the media. Chomsky has argued that intellectuals, as a class, tend to fit within a narrow doctrinal system, having had certain commitments inculcated into them by their extensive education, including a general servility to power and a belief in the righteousness of the establishment.

 In later editions of Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky have also considered the question of whether the internet has substantially changed the media landscape, and therefore invalidated the model. This is what they conclude:

“Although the Internet has been a valuable addition to the communications arsenal of dissidents and protesters, it has limitations as a critical tool. For one thing, those whose information needs are most acute are not well served by the Internet-many lack access, its databases are not designed to meet their needs, and the use of databases (and effective use of the Internet in general) presupposes knowledge and organization. The Internet is not an instrument of mass communication for those lacking brand names, an already existing large audience, and/or large resources. Only sizable commercial organizations have been able to make large numbers aware of the existence of their Internet offerings. The privatization of the Internet's hardware, the rapid commercialization and concentration of Internet portals and servers and their integration into non-Internet conglomerates – the AOL-Time Warner merger was a giant step in that direction – and the private and concentrated control of the new broadband technology, together threaten to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle. The past few years have witnessed a rapid penetration of the Internet by the leading newspapers and media conglomerates, all fearful of being outflanked by small pioneer users of the new technology, and willing (and able) to accept losses for years while testing out these new waters. Anxious to reduce these losses, however, and with advertisers leery of the value of spending in a medium characterized by excessive audience control and rapid surfing, the large media entrants into the Internet have gravitated to making familiar compromises-more attention to selling goods, cutting back on news, and providing features immediately attractive to audiences and advertisers. The Boston Globe (a subsidiary of the New York Times) and the Washington Post are offering e-commerce goods and services; and Ledbetter notes that "it's troubling that none of the newspaper portals feels that quality journalism is at the center of its strategy ... because journalism doesn't help you sell things." Former New York Times editor Max Frankel says that the more newspapers pursue Internet audiences, "the more will sex, sports, violence, and comedy appear on their menus, slighting, if not altogether ignoring, the news of foreign wars or welfare reform." New technologies are mainly introduced to meet corporate needs, and those of recent years have permitted media firms to shrink staff even as they achieve greater outputs, and they have made possible global distribution systems that reduce the number of media entities. The audience "interaction" facilitated by advancing interactive capabilities mainly help audience members to shop, but they also allow media firms to collect detailed information on their audiences, and thus to fine-tune program features and ads to individual characteristics as well as to sell by a click during programs. Along with reducing privacy, this should intensify commercialization.”

The hyper-infantilised, utterly nugatory nature of the most popular new-media site, Buzzfeed, would seem to confirm this analysis, as would the generally trivial and superficial news articles produced by slightly more ‘serious’ websites like HuffPost, Salon and Junkee. This analysis is also consonant with the precipitous decline in quality of traditional news outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald as they’ve started following an internet-advertising revenue model that is wholly reliant on ‘traffic’ and ‘clicks’. Clickbait of all kinds – generic celebrity stories, inane discussions of celebrity behaviour, reposting of viral videos with superfluous synopses, commentary on episodes of TV shows or important moments within them, lewd pictures of celebrities, sensationalised grotesquery (you-won’t-believe-what-she-did-next or a-grandma-has-been-butchered-and-eaten-by-her-grandson), and highly personal, utterly vacuous op-eds – is now de rigeur for almost all formerly ‘serious’ news outlets, not just the Murdoch tabloids. The advertising model is also strongly encouraging the use of ‘integrated advertising’ – ads disguised as serious, impartial news articles – which represents a fairly Orwellian trend towards the total commercialisation of information.

It is true that one can find all sorts of very radical, very incisive and very cogent news sources on the internet, and that one can – for example – easily access the collected essays of Noam Chomsky, as well as literally hundreds of his speeches on Youtube. The internet has also enabled dissident communities to spring up, and it allows activists from all over the world to network and organise much more efficiently than they could in the past. Nevertheless, the propaganda model still survives, since the inherent corporatism of all popular news outlets has not changed. To be a popular website one must rely on advertising and a massive volume of clicks. It is very difficult for rigorous, righteous and honest journalism to meet these requirements.

To return to the general argument about money’s influence on democracy, it’s worth pointing out that there is considerable empirical evidence for all this abstract speculation about the nature of Western ‘democracy’ (but particularly US democracy). Stiglitz mentions in the preface to the second edition that $2 billion was spent in the 2011-2012 US election campaign by people in the 1%. As he then points out, inequality didn’t come up as a topic of debate in that campaign once – not even from Obama’s mouth. Another fact that would seem to explain the bank-welfare policies that have dominated Washington since Reagan (including the bail-outs after the crisis and the total lack of criminal action on reckless bankers) is that there are an estimated “2.5 banking lobbyists for every US representative”.

One study that Chomsky often likes to refer to when discussing the plutocratic nature of American society is a paper called Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by the Princeton scholar Martin Gilens. Gilens found that the majority of the US population is effectively disenfranchised. Based on surveys of their opinions, he found that about 70 percent of the population, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale, has no influence on policy. Moving up the scale, by contrast, influence slowly increases. Finally, at the very top are those who – in Chomsky’s words – “pretty much determine policy”. Stiglitz highlights a similar kind of study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. This found that, in most people’s ideal distribution, the top 40% had less wealth than the top 20% currently holds. Moreover, as he notes, “when asked to choose between two distributions (shown on a pie chart), participants overwhelmingly chose one that reflected the distribution in Sweden over that in the United States (92% to 8%)”.

The evidence from these studies proves that the Republicans should not be getting any votes from the downtrodden and unemployed. The fact that they do is therefore a testament to the power of the propaganda system in America. By the same token, even the fact that the Democrats get so many votes from the downtrodden and poor is a testament to the power of the propaganda system in America.

Some more evidence for the propaganda model can be found in the almost complete failure of the mainstream media to ever mention the plutocracy in America and the preference of the Democratic-establishment media (such as The New Yorker and New York Times) for Clinton over Sanders, typically facilitated by their refusal to mention the money-problem.”

A very well-cited and rigorous 2006 paper on corporate media influence can be found here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12169.pdf. Thomas Ferguson’s most recent (and very strong) article (with collaborators) on the political influence of wealth can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2817705.

We can perhaps also see some evidence of the influence of Exxon’s lobbying and influence campaigns [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy#Funding_of_climate_change_denial] in the US’ higher levels of climate change denial than most other developed countries [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/18/what-the-world-thinks-about-climate-change-in-7-charts/] (though the propertarian, right-libertarian ideology of the South also encourages the conspiracy that climate change is a ruse for the imposition of global communism by left elites).

Second question: would the world be a better place if our political-economic system was more populist? I think this question is hard to answer because it’s so vague. Nevertheless, one generalisation that one can seemingly extract from studies of polling attitudes is that the public is generally more ‘left’ than the elites, even if they don’t realise it. There seems to be good evidence that people are extremely easily manipulated just by framing and language. In his review of Democracy for Realists [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/democracy-people-power-governments-policy], George Monbiot summarises these findings as follows: “When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on “welfare”. In the approach to the 1991 Gulf war, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were willing to “use military force”; less than 30% were willing to “go to war”.”

This does show an incredible irrationality on the part of most of the public, but it also shows that Chomsky is not completely wrong when he talks of the media’s role in “driving” benevolent feelings and natural sympathy out of people’s heads. One generalisation that one can seemingly make about studies of public policy attitudes is that the public is significantly more ‘left’ than the political leaders (who, as well as being generally far wealthier than the public, and as well as being influenced by major concentrations of corporate and financial power, also tend to be old and male). We can also see massive indirect evidence that a decline in the effect of public attitudes on public policy leads to worse outcomes in the terrible outcomes in the developed world that have resulted from the Neoliberal assault (see my other writings for more).

     To sum up my argument in this essay: Plato was right that rule by philosopher kings is ideally better than democracy, but that this argument has zero implications for the real world.

Part I is done now. I’ll get onto part II when I read Gerry Mackie’s book on why certain anti-democratic interpretations of Arrow’s Theorem are fucking stupid; I currently know all about his arguments because I learnt about them in my really excellent “Democratic Theory” unit in my second semester last year. I don’t know how long part II will take to finish.

Addendum on 28th July 2017:
I forgot to include Dewey's responses to Lippmann, which go something as follows.
1.) The cynicism about 'human nature' of the anti-populist liberal ought to lead to a profound cynicism about the ability of our  political institutions to select for the best qualified epistemic elites, or our ability to 'design' (or rather collectively engineer) systems that select for these people (I covered this one in the above, but not explicitly).
2.) If people are so stupid, irrational and bad at thinking about politics, the most direct remedy that suggests itself is improving the educational system (making the educational system more Deweyian!) (along with eliminating heavy metals from places where people live and such like) and encouraging greater civic participation (one thing that Neoliberals ignore in Mill is that he strongly advocated this kind of 'remedy', as Carole Pateman took great pains to illustrate). Political scientists researching 'deliberative democracy' have done experiments on the effects of communal deliberation on political ignorance, and the results are arguably quite 'hopeful' [no Wikipedia or blog summary of this research available; I encountered some of it in the one political-philosophy unit I've done at university. It's easy to find academic reviews]. But the anti-populist liberal vision seems not only opposed to this ambition, but corrosive to it, since they want to exclude the masses from practising the skills that might help them get better at thinking better about politics.
[Thanks to John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook.]

---

[1] I tend to think this description is misleading. It’s not like great Enlightenment figures were unaware that there existed stupid, brutish, superstitious, ignorant, highly tribal and fickle people; indeed, there clearly was a far higher degree of popular irrationality, superstition, ignorance and tribalism in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th Centuries, because there was not mass public education, and literacy itself was a rare and rarefied skill. Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (though right-wing people like to call Rousseau ‘counter-Enlightenment’), Adam Smith, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill [insert ‘Enlightenment figure’ here] all would been acutely aware that the vast majority of people within their own societies wouldn’t even have had the slightest clue what the ‘scientific method’ was, let alone have the capacity to “proportion their beliefs to the evidence” or to reason about morality based on abstract, generalised principles. Now, clearly, “rationality” was rather a buzzword when it came to the theory of human nature for many of these figures (though it certainly wasn’t for Hume or Rousseau, for example), but one has to realise two things about this: a) that the word rationality was used in a far broader sense than the conventional modern sense of Bayesian rationality (rationality as ability to avoid systematic bias and follow the evidence as best one can), and b) that most Enlightenment figures thought of human nature in an Aristotelian teleological way (remember, they came before Darwin, and even for the agnostics/atheists/Deists like Hume, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, J.S. Mill, Spinoza and Voltaire, believing that there might be some kind of purpose in the universe was completely reasonable). As it was for Aristotle, the word “rationality” for many Enlightenment theorists encompassed all kinds of higher cognitive traits that were (and are, to some extent) thought to be more or less unique to human beings as a species.   If you think about human nature in teleological terms, you may well conclude that “Man is the rational animal” even if most humans were fickle and stupid, incapable of responding to reasons, guided by base instincts and animalistic drives (and so on), because you simply observe that language and abstract thought are unique features of humans as a species and you reason that cultivating these abilities must be our divine purpose.

[2] Most philosophers think that, though a preference taken on its own can’t be ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, there is at least one type of preference-set that is objectively irrational: an intransitive preference set (you prefer A to B and B to C, but C to A). Hume doesn’t explore such things in his account (it may be that he was unfamiliar with the notion of transitivity). A nontrivial number further think that you’re objectively irrational if you have preferences that are arbitrary and self-defeating (i.e. preferring a minute of pain now and an hour of pain tomorrow to half an hour of pain now and a minute tomorrow (inconsistent with your own broader self-interest)), and many of this nontrivial number – most famously, Derek Parfit – thinks this opens the way for ethical objectivism. 

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.)