This is the first in our Thought Lab series, in which political theorist Paul Sagar comes by to chat about thought experiments and the themes they raise.
This week, we ask: are harmless acts ever morally wrong?
Official liberal morality says “no” but most actual liberals will “yes,” if you find the right example. What about sex with dead chickens? Or your siblings? Or a child sex doll? If nobody is around to see you or hear you, is it still wrong to wear blackface?
But this episode isn’t just a game of “would you rather?” Paul and I also discuss Jon Haidt’s moral psychology and why a strictly harm-based moral theory can’t do justice to most people’s moral intuitions.
I want to know: Do you agree with Paul? Think he’s repugnant? Too uptight? We promise to anonymously share compliments or abuse with him.
Links
Paul Sagar Website
Paul Sagar essay on moral luck, Aeon
Jonathan Haidt The Righteous Mind
Child sex doll case CBC
“My Little Chicken,” Adam Sandler
This is the first in our Thought Lab series, in which political theorist Paul Sagar comes by to chat about thought experiments and the themes they raise.
This week, we ask: are harmless acts ever morally wrong?
Official liberal morality says “no” but most actual liberals will “yes,” if you find the right example. What about sex with dead chickens? Or your siblings? Or a child sex doll? If nobody is around to see you or hear you, is it still wrong to wear blackface?
But this episode isn’t just a game of “would you rather?” Paul and I also discuss Jon Haidt’s moral psychology and why a strictly harm-based moral theory can’t do justice to most people’s moral intuitions.
I want to know: Do you agree with Paul? Think he’s repugnant? Too uptight? We promise to anonymously share compliments or abuse with him.
Links
Paul Sagar Website
Paul Sagar essay on moral luck, Aeon
Jonathan Haidt The Righteous Mind
Child sex doll case CBC
“My Little Chicken,” Adam Sandler
Today, Paul Sagar of King's College London comes by to talk about sex with dead chickens, incest, blackface and child sex dolls. I'm Clif Mark. This is good in theory. Today on good in theory, we have Paul cigar back our three syndicates from the book, one of Republic. He's a political theorist at King's College London. And we decided to try a little mini series about thought experiments. Now, philosophers love thought experiments, you don't have to buy a lab or go interview people. What you do in a thought experiment, is you dream up some kind of situation, you start thinking about what you think about it, you ask other people, and the idea is that these hypothetical or abstract real situations, can help you get clear on specific aspects of different political questions you want to explore. Is that is that about? Right, Paul?
Paul Sagar:Yeah, I think that that certainly gives us a good idea of what we're starting out with, but it might be helpful to use an example. And you brought an example that you like to use in class. Yeah, that's right. So the the question I like to ask my students is, Is it wrong to have sex with the chicken? All right. Oh, no more precisely, in fact, straight away, I should qualify that as a good philosopher and be more precise. Specifically, Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken?
Clif Mark:Well, that that was that was going to be my first question. This specific question is like a very famous thought experiment, particularly in psychology circles. So there's a guy called Jonathan Haidt, he made a lot of this thought experiment, so we are going to run it. I'm going to roleplay at the beginning. The student who finds it reprehensible to have sex with the dead chicken. And so Professor Sagar that's discussing Of course, it's wrong to have sex with a chicken.
Paul Sagar:You're gonna harm the chicken Well, maybe not. It's dead. But did you did you kill the chicken and have sex with it? No, no, no, that the chicken died of natural causes. So that no, no chickens were actively harmed for the end of having sex with them. The chicken had died naturally, of natural causes. It wasn't okay, it wasn't bred as a sex chicken. But still, this is wrong. Like it's unhygenic you could catch a disease. And that's certainly true. And that's a risk. But luckily, the person and this this thought experiment, who we're imagining here has taken precautions accordingly, they froze the the carcass of the chicken, specifically to kill off any bacteria. And they in fact, take great precautions using antiseptic wipes, antibacterial hand wash. And of course, prophylactics to ensure that there is no dangers of transmission. So, so there's no harm to the individual. So we can specify that the chicken wasn't harmed. And we've taken every precaution, the person in question is taking every precaution to avoid harm. So there's no harm here.
Clif Mark:It kind of amazed me that the first two things you thought to make the chicken safe the chicken sex safe was to freeze it. And to use wipes rather than to put on a condom, but okay. I got there. Yeah, you got there. You got there. So, um,
Paul Sagar:I still am not convinced that that really meets my problem with having sex with a dead chicken. And I think that, like you shouldn't have said that the chicken would if someone sees you What if like, a child walks by the window and sees you fucking this chicken cars. Yeah, that's a fair concern. But I think we can eliminate that as well as part of a procedure hemicycle the curtains are drawn, right? And the person who does this act, they make sure they take great pains to ensure that no passerby could see this, they lock all their doors and windows, they draw their curtains, they do it in a room where there's no chance of anybody sing because they realize that other people might not like this. So they want to be careful here and they are very careful and ensure that nobody is going to witnesses that it's totally private.
Clif Mark:Okay, so, look, having sex with a dead chicken is is wrong.
Paul Sagar:Maybe you don't harm someone, but it just it just seems wrong. Okay, but why does it seem wrong? What is it about it? But the situation so we've specified that no one's being harmed the chicken isn't being harmed, the chicken died of natural causes. The person involved isn't going to harm themselves. No one's gonna witness this. It seems as though there is no identifiable problem here. So if you're feeling that there's nonetheless something wrong about this, we need to try and locate that some Maybe there's some other things in play that you might you might have a concern here.
Clif Mark:Okay, at this point, I just want to step out of my character as troubled student and ask you to explain what it is you're trying to accomplish by this kind of interaction in class.
Paul Sagar:So what I try and do is get them to position that to the position that you just role played, right? Which is, some of them want to say, ooh, and well, actually, all of them want to say, ooh, right. At first, they try to maneuver the mechanics of the thought experiment, to try and find a reason why what they're saying isn't just Ooh, but that's wrong. So harm is an obvious place to first look, right? Is it harming chickens is bad, right? Because we have the chickens about to eliminate that from the full expression, the chicken isn't being harmed, okay, so that one's out. So that's not going to serve as a justification. The second is harm to the person fucking the ticket, right? So that's an obvious place to go as well. causing harm to yourself is wrong. So that justifies my sense of move. But I eliminate that through the antibacterial wipes and the use of condoms, right? Then there's the world the harm to third parties, which we eliminate that by saying the curtains are drawn. And what we're trying to do here is get to a position where we're focused on specifically the act of having intercourse with a dead chicken, and nothing else. So right, so you still, we still are saying, ooh, right. But we've taken away all the reasons that people think of first explain why. And at that point, when we've taken all those reasons, and I focused everybody down onto the very specific thing, because all these other things are get out. They're all ways of trying to change the scenario and find answers that fit what people want to say, when you first posed the question. But you try and control all that, which is what a good thought experiment does. And you focus on the very specific thing we want to talk about here, which is, is the act of intercourse with a dead chicken in and of itself wrong. And by this point, everyone in the room is pretty agreed that it's an EU thing, right? They don't like it, then I ask, not what you would do. But is it right for somebody else to do it. And here in my classes, and we should talk in a minute and think we will talk in a minute about how this varies in different contexts. But in my classes, I ask people to put their hands up, and about 70% of students say, I don't like it, I wouldn't do it. But if that person really isn't harming anybody else, no one's gonna look through the window, the chicken died of natural causes. They're not gonna harm cells. It's gross. But it's their right to do that. And so it's not morally wrong. It's just it's just disgusting. About 30% of them, the other 30% stick to their guns. And they say, not only does it make me feel good, but there is something morally wrong here. And then it gets really interesting because because not only do you have a split between those who want to say, Well, look, no, I wouldn't do it, but each to their own zone cannot harming others. And those who want to say no, there's more to morality than that. What's very interesting is when you push the students on what it is, you actually get some really interesting answers. And yeah, like, like what? Well, the most convincing answer I've heard, it made me change my mind about this. So originally, when I read the thought experiment in the Jonathan Haidt book, which will go on to talk about, and I was with, you know, the kind of 70% students that look, you know, it's not what I would do, but it's, it's gross, but people have a right to do gross things, as long as it's in private. And then some of my students said to me, a couple of years ago, I first ran this thought experiment, they said no, because it disrespects the body of the chicken. And as if what do you mean by that? Well, they say, Well, that was a living creature. And as a living creature, it's owed a certain level of respect, even in death. So there are certain things that you should and shouldn't do. Even if nobody's being harmed, harm does not exhaust all there is to say about morality in these kind of situations. And I thought that was really interesting, because that actually chimed with me. And I thought, now there is something there now. And now, there are lots of complicated questions about whether I should stop other people from having sex with dead chicken, right. But it did seem to me that those students were right to say that, that even if those people should still be allowed to do it, what they're doing may nonetheless be something I want to call wrong. And what what's interesting is when I've quizzed students about this, those who usually initially go for that answer and stick to their guns about it tend to be either vegetarians, or people from a religious background. And often people from the Indian subcontinent where the idea of animal bodies having a certain sanctity is much stronger than in a Western tradition. Right. So you mentioned cultural differences and religious differences. But Haidt also found even class differences right within the same city. So he was working at Penn, and then he goes across the street a few miles away to West Philadelphia, in a much more working class neighborhood and He gets a totally different set of answers from this Ivy League University. Because on this side of the tracks, we don't fuck chickens, right? Yeah. And that's all there is to say about it, right. And I liked that experiment, that thought experiment, because one, it's quite, quite silly, but also shows you how to how to narrow the scope. But it actually tells us something, which is that
Clif Mark:people like you and me, because I have the same kind of response to you is like, man, I don't care if you want to fuck that chicken, like, That's gross. But whatever. We're the minority that actually when you go in, find this out, when you actually do a bit of real world empirical stuff. When you get off out of the armchair, and actually go and test more than more than just your own intuitions, you actually find something out. So an important point that about thought experiment has its full value, when it's when it's used with empirical research. Right? And that doesn't mean just doing another psychology study on campus, because University undergrads are an exception, right? They are what Haidt calls weird, acronym, W, E, IR D, and that stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Something like that. And so Haidt's point is that these weird people who are northern Western Europeans, especially Americans, and then there's a class vector, so yeah, especially rich Americans, especially college students. They're weird. They're the ones who have an abstract harm based morality. Yeah. So they're the ones who are kind of okay with fucking a chicken, if it doesn't hurt anyone. And yeah, the more you're not part of those groups, the more likely you are to say, it's just wrong to fuck the chicken for other reasons, even if it's not harmful. Yeah. And the weird people tend to turn up a lot in university classrooms in western universities. And there, they may be the majority, but overall, they're actually a minority. Yeah. So I think I have two questions. And the first one is from the point of view of the students who are really against fucking chickens. So the people who are not weird, if you've got this group, it's a minority in the classroom, a majority in society, and they have these genuine, serious moral misgivings about sex with a chicken's corpse.
Paul Sagar:Isn't it going to be really uncomfortable and unpleasant for them to be talking about in class and you hear all these weird liberal bourgeois kids just laughing and joking about fucking the chicken and giggling? Yeah. This just seems to me a very cringe uncomfortable situation? No, I mean, in a way, that's another useful point to bring up about thought experiments, though. One thing that I again, I always tried to instill in my students right at the start of their first year is, when you do philosophy, sometimes you have to go to really uncomfortable places. And thought experiments can be useful for that, because they can allow us to suspend our normal moral convictions to explore scenarios which primer face You know, in advance, we definitely know what we think about that. But experiments can help us check if we do think what we think we think that makes sense. And also, if we want to be confident about the reasons why we think what we claim, and that can sometimes mean being uncomfortable. You know, if you're if you really care about the sanctity of chickens, then that might not be a thumb thought experiment to run. But it might teach you something about why you think chickens are Sankt, you know, have a sanctity, it might teach you that you don't think that maybe upon reflection, you realize that, well, you know, the chickens dead, and it's going to be eating anyway. So what difference does it make if you have sex? And so it could go in the other direction, too.
Clif Mark:Okay, good. I like that. I think you do have to get uncomfortable to advance in your philosophical beliefs. But let me ask you another question from the other side, which is, if you get one of these weird students, one of these hyper rationalist types who are always looking for answers and harm based moralities. They recognize that there are these other people who think fucking a dead chicken is wrong, even though no one gets harmed. They notice that they're kind of from what you call a religious mindset. And so they say, well, these people, they're just superstitious. They're just giving reasons based on religion, emotion, feelings of disgust. And in a liberal free society, we need to give each other reasons and so we don't have to listen to these kind of superstitious ideas about the sanctity of the body of a chicken.
Paul Sagar:So this is a difficult one because I think I'm almost I'm torn in some ways, because part of me feels a certain ethical affinity with them, because I'm, you know, acronym weird. And I have the kind of intuitions that well, you know, it's not for me, but no one's being hurt here. And I kind of subscribe to the idea of no one's being hurt than do what you like. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to make the sort of hostile offend offensive as in like, you know, offense defense move of saying, well, therefore these people don't matter. And they should be disregarded to some extent, because I think part of the job of philosophy is to understand moral phenomena, not simply to go around dictating what's right and what's wrong, and who should do what, who shouldn't and who's rational, who's irrational. But understanding that if well, if to a huge proportion of the population, it really does matter that you shouldn't have sex with dead chickens, then that's data about how morality functions for these people that I at least want to be aware of. And be I'd want to know, well, why do they feel like that? And maybe they have a point, right? And I actually think this was true, when I run this experiment for the first few times with my students. And one of my very bright students just said, But look, you know, it's this just, it's disrespectful. It's disrespectful to the animal to the body of the animal. And I suddenly thought, I agree with that. I thought that I was fully, you know, well, harm principle. And it's not, it's not for me, and you know, I wouldn't do it. I think on balance, I still wouldn't necessarily condemn somebody who did that as being morally and the wrong, I might think it was disgusting. But one of the reasons I think it was disgusting was because there's a certain respect accorded to live in creatures even in death. Okay, you have some sympathy for this view. But I want to push a little more
Clif Mark:in that direction, because these experiments, the dead chicken, and so on their moral confounding experiments. Yeah. The idea is to give people in intuition that they can't explain using their usual reasons, like the harm principle. Yeah. And so the problem with the chicken example is that you get people like you and me, who don't have especially strong intuitions either way about the chicken. Yeah. So are there other thought experiments, that you can elicit that kind of intuition that isn't easily explainable by harm? Yeah, I taught to think off the top of my head. But well, I suppose incest might be one, right? So incest is a taboo that's still pretty strong, even amongst people who take themselves to be you know, it's only about reason and you know, and you say, Well, if the consenting brother and sister and I are using contraception, and there's no chance of creating a deformity baby, then you know, so this is a another example from Jonathan Haidt, right? It's right, Julian mark, that brother and sister, they're on a vacation in France, and they just decided to be really fun. Hey, why don't we have sex? These two kinds of contraception, they do it. It brings them closer, their relationship is improved as siblings and they never do again.
Paul Sagar:If you ask the classroom, and this one people are saying no, no, no, it's not okay. And I know for me, at least my intuition against incense is stronger than my intuitions against James x. So what's interesting here is, as you said before, in most places, disgust is a moral emotion. But what the prototypically weird in that acronym sense person, like your, your earnest student, who really is a sharp philosopher, and thinks I was gonna say, it's exactly structurally it's exactly the same as the chicken example. So if I've been consistent, I can't have any more objection to consensual incest, where there is no, there's no chance of reproducing, then I can against the dead chicken fucker. But the person who finds it wrong can throw any kind of reason at you, they can say it's wrong, because they're gonna have to form children. Okay, well, they use contraception. She's concerned so so so it's not about the children. It's about the act itself. You know what, like, it's incest. And there's always like this abuse of power relationship instances, usually abuse. But usually it is. But in this particular case, this is a thought experiments, we can stipulate the truth of her by turn as we wish, which is why in a way that useful, right? So in this case, it is not an abuse of power relationship. It is a loving, completely consensual engagement between two adults without any nefarious power dynamics. We can just stipulate that in a thorough expert, right? To isolate, again, it's just the act of incest that we want to know, is it wrong. And so like, one of the this is one of the interesting ones, that people will give all these reasons. And then at the end of it, all their reasons are defeated. But they're still left with this feeling that all the same, even if no one's getting hurt, and they're not gonna have deformed babies. And isn't that like, ads wrong? So what's interesting about you said, that is precisely that people will try and keep giving reasons, right? Because what that's telling you is that they feel the disgust, emotion, and they're trying to rationalize it. They're trying to find reasons that justify their emotion of disgust. It's not they have reasons and therefore they feel disgust. It's they have discussed it like immediately as an IT sort of strong overwhelming response, and then they want to be able to justify that once you push them on it. Usually people just have the emotion. And that's all that's going on. What's interesting in the case of the really sort of sharp and very weird philosophy undergraduate students is, they will, if they're, if they're generally being consistent will admit, okay, well, like with the chicken. There's nothing, you know, I wouldn't do it, but there's nothing wrong. But then what's what we've discovered that is just how weird weird morality is. Because if most human moral response is, now you've got these cases of people who have removed disgust as a moral emotion, and that's a form of morality. But it's a really unusual form of browsing. Maybe it's a superior one, perhaps that's a separate argument. But it's really strange. If you compare that to the default in human beings. Yeah, I like the kind of social science results that weird people are in the minority, etc. But I think philosophically, more interesting is that friction you can get between people's moral intuitions that something is wrong. And their common moral theories, their harm based moral theories that we all reach for, that don't really account for why they think things are wrong. Yeah. It reminds me of Socrates. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, that's, in some ways, why, again, to go back to the rank of guide us, it is, it is such a good thought experiment, because what it allows is for Socrates to do precisely that to show people that they thought they knew something, and it turns out, they didn't know that thing. And they didn't understand their own beliefs or their own positions. And, and again, that's why they can be useful, but but again, they can also distort if they're not handled carefully.
Clif Mark:Absolutely. And at risk of not handling a thought experiment carefully. Please forgive me listener. Let me try another case on you, Paul. Because you're a weird guy. I mean, you're sympathetic to the people who condemn incest and chicken fucking, but you don't have those intuitions yourself. So think about this same chicken situation, curtains drawn, the neighbors can't hear. No one's ever going to find out. Is it morally wrong? For a white man to put on blackface and say racist slurs in his own home?
Paul Sagar:Yeah, that's a really good one. Cuz, in Okay, that's really good, because I'm having a real like, reaction tonight, like, and I was gonna say, Well, I think you're gonna struggle here, Cliff, because I'm a pretty paidup liberal when it comes to that. So technical, liberal individual rights, like, you know, don't harm other people do whatever you want. But that will really like made me think. I don't think I am comfortable with that. And I'm trying to work out what it is whether I have a defensible intuitive reaction in terms of no because of this, that I can explain in terms of harm or disrespect or something, or whether it's just that I just think that behavior like that is fundamentally something you shouldn't do. And I guess you could say that. Okay, so let's specify, if it was done by somebody who is actually, you know, they'd secretly really, really want to join the KKK, but they're just too scared of being socially ostracized. This is like somebody who actually wants to be publicly racist, but realizes that, you know, they'll be shamed on Twitter and fired and so they've, you know, they're scared, but so this is a way of them acting out their racist urges without being punished. I don't want to talk about clearly I don't, that's not okay. Why because I disapprove of that person's underlying racism, right. But if it's somebody who does it, well, okay, okay. Okay. But if they hold back, and they don't do it, they still have the underlying racism. Right? And I still object to them. But there's something about acting it out. I gotta say this, that they're gleefully indulging this racism, they that they want to own it, but the only reason they can't own it is because they don't want to be punished. So they're still they're still doing a bad thing. Because they're acting out on it. They're just damage limiting in terms of the blowback. Okay. What is what is the difference between acting out and just acting it out in your mind? Well, yeah, and I what I said, That's really interesting. And that gets us to something that I've actually written on for the website a on which is called the problem of moral luck. And why actually doing stuff seems to us morally worse than simply imagining it, or alternatively, attempting to do it, but because of some random consequence, which you didn't even foresee you didn't actually it was actually a throat follow through. So for example, okay, okay, before we go too deeply into the subtleties of moral luck. We can do another episode on that. Let's change up the parameters a little bit. So say, this person is not a closet kkk want to be he just enjoys a weird kind of cosplay that involves blackface in the same way that your English posh people like dressing up as Nazis.
Clif Mark:See sometimes even though they might not.
Paul Sagar:So when you when you do it like that, if it's just, they just have a weird fetish for the costume play, and it doesn't betray any unsavory attitude of race. See, they have the unsavory attitudes. Let's say they're doing it because of unsavory attitudes, but they know that they don't want to hurt anyone. But they're like, Can I just enjoy a little racism by myself? So no, so they're not going to hurt anyone. So hey, I think we have actually found a distinction, right? If it's the second case, if they want to enjoy those unsavory attitudes, then insofar as I have a moral and political objections of people who have who take pleasure in racism like that, and they are doing so, then it's not okay. But if they just have a weird Quirk, where they like doing blackface because they know they shouldn't, and they actually don't have any views about black people. They just really enjoy doing blackface. Uh, huh. No, I mean, this is very unlikely, of course, given what we know about the psychology of anyone who would want to put on blackface and do this, but let's stipulate we can do that. careful what you say about my prime minister. But Oh, God, I forgot about that. But let's say that they're a very weird psychological case where they just like doing blackface, they actually have not a racist thought in their mind and never have no even subconsciously. In that case, I want to say, okay, it's weird, but it's a little bit like fucking the chicken, right? Because it's just a weird person who has a weird fetish for a certain kind of makeup. Now, if it turns out that they have that fetish, because they've got some some nasty attitudes towards black people. I'm gonna change my moral response there and say, there is something dodgy about this. There is something okay, so there is something dodgy What I'm saying is, give me the reason why is it dodgy for someone to have bad intentions that they didn't act? Well, I'll give you a different case.
Clif Mark:And maybe you'll feel more comfortable talking about this and talking about race. There was a case in Canada this last year, where a guy got arrested for like, ordering a child sex doll. Right.
Paul Sagar:So what's wrong with fucking that doll? Yeah. So this is a bit like the answers question. And I think this one is, is tougher for Well, maybe not tougher, maybe. Because so when that case comes around, it's interesting that people always go to Oh, well, you know, they'll probably graduate to having sex with real children, right? Or, or you know that the doll was modeled on a real child who's What is it? What No, let's just imagine that the doll is just adult. And this this pedophile only has sex with the doll. Never download any internet porn. Let's say that the doll, let's take it further, let's say the doll is their release mechanism that prevents them from acting out their impulses on raising your children or downloading real pornography. In that case, I think I want to say that there isn't anything wrong with the doll. Right. Okay. Great. So but that's that, that that's more like the incest question, than the racism question seems different to me. And I'm not quite sure why.
Unknown:Like, yeah. But this is
Paul Sagar:a thought experiments, right? Good, good thought experiment, because I've now realized that I have different intuitive kind of gut responses to these two cases. And I'm not entirely sure I can explain why I have those different gut responses to those two different cases. But sex law one, if you specify it tightly, like that looks to me like the incest case, which means like the chicken case, races, the racist blackface guy. Doesn't. That that seems to me different. And I'm not sure why.
Clif Mark:Like, we could strip away different parts of like, maybe it's not blackface, maybe he's just doing funny impressions. Maybe there's jokes like, you know, maybe it's it's a different kinds of prejudice. So it's just about like, so one of the things I want to pick up on what you said about the pedophile case, which is that and you know, this is implicit in all of these moral confounding cases, people like this, this is just the the first step on a slippery slope to you know, bang kids, or with any of these cases, like they look for empirical reasons they want to generate harm, they want to find out, right? So like, the incest case, or like, what about these unborn babies that are not gonna be born, they're gonna be deformed, wronging them. And I like to capture that moment, because that's exactly the kind of thing to make people suspicious of their own reasons, right? Because like, you feel something and you're just grasping at causes. And these are the kinds of reasons you grasp for. And so all of these things any like, material, harm based, obvious, utilitarian reason not to do something that people find morally disgusting. I'm suspicious of, because people are just grasping for those reasons to justify their, you know, gut moral impulses. Yeah, I think that's right. And and you think it's your you don't have any got Marlin parcel is against fucking kids just against being racist? No, I have got more
Paul Sagar:kids. But if the dollar is used people to stop people fucking kids that is much less clear to me that the dollar is a problem, right? Uh huh. And maybe the Z you're already going you're like looking to harm and utilitarianism for an answer. Yeah, because I think something like Peter philia probably has to be understood in a consequentialist framework, right? And because the the, the the bad and having sex with children, for me lies in the awful harm that it does to the children. And this is where again, it's a little bit like the chicken example to me, because it seems to me that the mere act of intercourse with a child, I don't have the taboo response to that in and of itself being and this is again, why I'm weird, right? Because most people would say no, there's something about the act itself, which is morally just just wrong. And there's nothing else to be said here. My sense is no, what makes it wrong is that it's terrible for the child. And in which case that if the harm to the children was being removed, because the pert the pedophile is having sex with a doll instead, there's an argument for giving pedophile sex dolls. Okay, good. Excellent. Give me the file sex dolls. Because we care more that children don't get fucked than that pieces of plastic that are shaped like children. Fine. Now, I want to triangulate you back to our closed door racists because we've taken the harm out of the example. And you tell me that pedophilia is understood in terms of harm to children. But you don't think that racism should be understood in terms of harm to oppress people? Because I don't think the only moral wrongs are harms. I think there are other things that are very wrong. And some of them can be attitudes that you have to other people. Wonderful. What are they? So thinking that members of another race are inferior simply because they're a member of another race is an attitude that I think is morally objectionable and anyone who has that attitude, then I have a moral objection to them. This is where I think there's an interesting difference with pedophilia, because I take it that most pedophiles have urges that they can no more control sexually than I can control my own sexuality. They're just in the unfortunate position of being attracted to other living agents for whom there is no scenario in which acting out those urges, could be morally permissible given the harms that would be inflicted upon those other people, those children. So we're talking about two different things. I think racism is an attitude towards other human beings, whereas pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is beyond conscious control. And for which one shouldn't one shouldn't be held culpable for the mere sexual attraction, one should be held liable for acting on the attraction that should and correctly is a crime and is morally repugnant. Whereas I think that the attitude of racism is also morally repugnant, not just acting on that attitude. So that's, that's so they're different. They're different in that respect. Okay, so then having the racist attitudes behind closed doors is morally equivalent to having them and acting on them. Like having them in not what is acting on them as less bad. So acting on them adds a whole other set of wrongs, right, which is that you're gonna do bad things to other not you're behind closed doors. Oh, so so so so so and Okay, yeah, you know, so this is it. This is an interesting point, which is, why does dress it? Yeah, maybe it's given that it's behind closed doors, I'm much less bothered about it right, even if it was acting out in public so so there is already a gradation here and I guess because it's still an outward manifestation of something which I would rather people didn't as ideally I wouldn't have the attitudes full stop be if they are going to have the attitudes I'd rather it was kept completely internal at least as a some kind of attempt to not in to not bring that kind of thing out in the world. I would think that the the attempt to keep it purely internal is itself an improvement. Private acting out on it dressing up in blackface simply and private. Well, okay, it's better than going out and doing it in the world, but it's still manifesting that actually even if just to oneself, it's still letting out a certain kind of attitude towards other people, which I think is a morally repugnant attitude. Okay. there's not gonna be any harm in the serious.
Clif Mark:I thought you said you were like a super liberal individualist kind of guy. I don't know. Now you want to get into people's brains you don't even care with the attitude that they may or may not have chosen that they might have like contracted through the brainwashing it is a popular culture and implicit messaging and our you grow up with these attitudes. You can't necessarily help it. You're doing
Paul Sagar:Your best not to like expose it to the real world or hurt anyone and and yet still condemned. Yeah, based on your and your attitude. So I actually think that's actually a really, really important but difficult point, actually, I think that actually gets to something really profound, which is on the one hand, I think it's correct that we should have moral judgments about other people's attitudes. And we should feel strongly about certain kinds of attitudes and having severe moral disproven form. Racism is one, right. But I also think it's true that a lot of racists no more chose to be racist. And this is maybe where the example with Peter Thiel, they'd like to break down to some degree that they no more chose to be racist. And I chose to not be a racist, because probably the attitudes started forming in them at a young age, when they were subjected to various social pressures and forms of education that they didn't choose. And then you get into the question, basically, of freewill and its compatibility with ethics. Because if you push all of this stuff hard enough, you will find that Yeah, nobody chose to have her now you could still hold them accountable for not maybe trying to self reflect on their attitudes and thinking, well, maybe these attitudes have unpleasant consequences, and that maybe you should prove her. And you know, I would like to say that non racist attitudes hold up better to facts as we know them about human life, human society, human suffering, and somebody who refuses to take those facts on board and change their views. Well, that's a further moral problem. But what you raise is an important point that these things go deep. Yeah, well, I don't want to go too deep down the road of freewill and moral responsibility, because that's a very philosophy department road that I personally don't care that much about. But I am really interested in picking up your point about attitudes being wrong, or especially how expressing attitudes can be wrong. Yeah. Because, as you know, in my own research, I was really interested in disrespect, insult, the reasons people would get into duels, stuff like that things that are offensive. Yeah. And I think today, because the harm based morality is so popular. People look at these insults, especially things that people call offensive, microaggressions, things like that. And they want to come up with some kind of harm based reason for Yeah, they say, Oh,
Clif Mark:the accumulate, they build up over time, and they're traumatizing, and they can cause emotional damage. And all that is true, it may be true, but I just want to say, it's not necessarily true in every case. So in essence, if someone makes a racist joke at my expense, I want to be able to explain why they're an asshole. without necessarily trying to say that they harmed me, I'm not sure it would be about harm, it would probably be about respect, okay, and harms don't need to simply be about
Paul Sagar:physical or even psychological pain that one suffers, it could be about the status accorded to individuals. And in terms of their standing regarding others. And if one experts repeatedly that kind of interaction, then one status in society, and we all care deeply about our standing in the eyes of others, would not match up in a way that most of us would be happy with. So So that seems to me an important thing that we'd want to bring in as well, which isn't simply a straightforwardly understood as a harm. Absolutely. I agree with you completely. But that's because I think that respect and recognition are actually morally important. And I think that we're actually in the minority here. Because people are beholding to this harm based model of morality. And so they'll say, Why are you getting so offended? It's just about status. It's just about your feelings, etc.
Clif Mark:There's no harm, there's no foul. And I think that issues of status and respect, have a hard time fitting into the kind of paradigm of harm. And people on both sides are, are beholden to this, because if we allow respect, then we can explain why insults are wrong. But if we have to make it harmful, then just asking the question of what's wrong with harmless racism are harmless sexism is going to make some people's blood boil. But that's only because we're trying to force everything into this paradigm of harm.
Unknown:Yeah.
Paul Sagar:Yeah. And that's why I think the weird style rationalist morality is probably defective in various important ways because these other factors are important and we do need to find a place for them and interact They will turn out to be important to us. Often in cases where we didn't realize that they were important to us that they, it isn't just that, you know, the people out there who haven't thought about philosophy very much have these kinds of thoughts about status. But we, the philosophers are really just focused on, you know, reason and getting clear, will turn out that actually what's doing the work. And a lot of these cases will turn out for us as well, to be much more bound up with these kinds of concerns then,
Clif Mark:is often issued. Yeah. And that is one of my favorite things about these moral dumbfounding thought experiments is to find the parts even in the middle of the minds and hearts of the rationalist where there are not completely rationalist and they don't want to give up the intuition. That's good. And sometimes I think sometimes that can be, it depends who you're trying to prove it to. Because the really hardcore rationalists will, will go down with the ship, right? They'll just be like you say, no boy, no matter how big. And then and then there comes a point where you kind of have to say, Well,
Paul Sagar:do you not realize that by buying so many bullets, what you've what you've got left isn't anything that you might want to live according to the distance, that you've lost a lot here and that and you may not be able to convince the bullet biter, they may just continue to stubbornly God. But the rest of the class, you know, might be thinking, well, if that's what they claim, morality really is. I'm not sure that's what I want. No morality, that doesn't look like the morality for me. Nice. I like that point. And actually, I think maybe that's a good point for us to end on. The idea that being perfectly rational and utterly, ruthlessly consistent does not necessarily produce the best, most satisfying moral philosophy. Unless you have something else to add about this set of thought experiments that we talked about today. No, I I thought, yeah, I think we got we got we got we got some heavy stuff there. Like What Did We cover racism? necrophilia, incest?
Clif Mark:Yeah, that was that was pretty good. For a first run all the hits. I think we've offended we must have offended a lot of people. So I'm sure your Twitter feed will be alive. Yeah, I don't. I don't think we're important enough for people to get that mad at us. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Well, thanks for having me. And where can our listeners find you online if they need more Paul in their life?
Paul Sagar:hate mail can be directed via my website. If you just Google my name, Paul Sagar. That's with an A two A's and as a ga R and King's College London you find my faculty webpage and then through that you can find links to things that I've done.
Clif Mark:And for listeners who aren't quite ready to jump in and read his whole book, Paul's got a lot of great essays on the Eon website, a eo n it's an online magazine. Lots of great stuff. Check them out there and thanks again. Paul. Come back soon.
Paul Sagar:Thanks very much Clif