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).
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).
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))
–
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 (Ã 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 17th,
18th and 19th 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.
