Suppse that I had a device that would cause a mild but sensible vibration in the nasal membranes of the person I pointed it at. Absent consent or a significant reason, it would be wrong to use this device on a stranger.
But the same is not true if we replace nasal membranes with the tympanic membrane: we routinely vibrate the tympanic membranes of strangers with neither consent nor significant reason, say when we ask a stranger on the street for directions.
In both cases one is inducing a physical change of arrangement of body parts in the other person without their consent. We may suppose that hedonically there is no difference: perhaps the vibration and the speech are both mildly unpleasant. The case can be tweaked so that the impact on autonomy is greater in either case (e.g., the unwilling listener may identify themselves as the sort of person who doesn’t listen to arguments) or so that it is equal.
It is tempting to say that we have a default consent to hearing others out. But default consents can be withdrawn, and we are permitted to vibrate tympanic membranes even against the express directions of their possessor. If during an argument someone says “I don’t want to hear another word!” it is not morally wrong to respond verbally nonetheless.
This implies that the need for consent does not supervene on hedonic or autonomy facts. It depends on details of the intervention that go beyond these.
The fact that in my thought experiment an apparatus is used in the nasal but not the aural case is not relevant. If one speaks through a speech generating device, as famously Hawking did, one is no less permitted to vibrate strangers’ tympanic membranes with the speech. And it would be just as wrong to go up to strangers and blow air into their nostrils in order to vibrate their nasal membranes as to use a device.
So what is the difference?
The difference, I think, is that it is a part of the proper function of the tympanic membrane to receive speech from random strangers, whether one consents to this or not, while the nasal membranes have no such proper function. It is as if our human nature gives permission to others to speak to us, but does not give such a permission for nasal membrane vibration.
I think this is difficult to account for in anything other than natural law or divine command ethics.
20 comments:
It occurs to me that natural law has an alternate way to capture this: instead of it being an issue of proper function, it could be an issue of flourishing. Maybe nasal autonomy is a part of our flourishing but not aural autonomy?
I think the issue might be the nature of the contact being social vs. non-social which matters. Imagine a similar device which caused a stranger to have their ear membranes tingled in a way such that they hear the sounds of someone saying "Excuse me sir, could you tell which way Main Street is?", even without anyone making that utterance. It would be immoral to use that device. However, it's fine to stimulate nasal membranes of strangers, even on a crowded bus when you've just come back from a heavy workout at the gym.
It seems that membrane stimulations which result from normal human social interactions are fine, and non-social stimulations are what cause trouble. I suspect that normal deontology and probably utilitarianism can tell a story about this.
Good point about normal social interaction. But note the "normal". Here I think we need something like human nature to explain that. For mere statistical or socially defined normalcy will not do. Imagine a society where commoners do not speak to nobles. It's nonetheless morally permissible. I want to say it's normal for any human to be able to speak to any other within earshot (subject to reasonable constraints, such as not waking the sleeping without good reason).
I really do not see what the issue is here.
"Normal" is explained by the way human beings evolved and still do evolve. Humans have evolved to be social beings. They might also have evolved in another way, as completely solitary beings who absolutely do not want any "membranes" tingled by others.
In that case, I think it would be morally wrong to deliberately stimulate any of its membranes.
No need to throw in vague notions like natural law or divine command here.
I think "normal function" may be a sufficient concept (teleological or not). A normal function of the eardrum is to facilitate communication, which may be obtained at various times as not always anticipated, so that allowing others to communicate to us at diverse occasions via vibrations in our ears is ordinary human function. Whereas the nose has its own function that may not include being vibrated (might it bleed if vibrated in some ways?).
Walter:
Evolutionary accounts of normalcy don't work: there are too many counterexamples. :-) But that's a long story.
But even if they work, it would be odd to think that there would be moral principles about how we should treat people that depend on what happened millions of years ago. In other words, it seems quite irrelevant to the question of the morality of vibrating someone's nasal membranes what the evolutionary pressures for the development of these membranes were millions of years ago. That's ancient history.
William:
The fact that it is a normal function of some organ to be sensitive to unexpected stimulation does not suffice to make it right to provide that unexpected stimulation. It's also a normal function of our cheek skin to be sensitive to pressure at times that we do not anticipate, but it does not follow that a stranger can go up to us and pat us on the cheek without permission.
So one needs reference to normalcy not just on the patient side but on the agent side. And there, I think, we run into some problems. First, it doesn't seem normal to engage strangers in off-topic conversation, but it's not it's immoral. Second, it is difficult to see why, apart from a natural law or divine command ethics, we would think that there is a strong default permission to do what is normal.
Alex
Evolutionary accounts of normalcy do work if one realizes that normalcy evolves
That also answers your second objection.
It's probably impossible to separate the normal in biology from the normative when it comes to humans. Evolutionary accounts attempt to explain the normative as a kind of fitness, but the normativity of fitness itself tends to then be an unexplainable given.
William
Fitness isn't normative. It's better for survival, that's all.
Walter:
If you explain why a human state or action is good by pointing out how it increased tribal fitness in the past, but then you say fitness is "better for survival, that's all", where did the goodness go in my explanation?
William
Where have I said that a human action is good? I was talking about normalcy, not about goodness.
So, what increased fitness in the past was normal in the past and may or may not be normal now.
Walter:
I fully agree with what you say within the limits you have set, but I think it deprives us of any traction within the conversation about determining whether or not a given stimulus application done by one person to another is good or not. Which I though was the point of the OP.
William
I think the OP confuses normalcy with moral acceptability.
'If during an argument someone says “I don’t want to hear another word!” it is not morally wrong to respond verbally nonetheless'.
Responding verbally is a 'normal' thing. As Alex puts it, we routinely do it. We don't routinely vibrate someone's nasal membranes.
But, if we analyse both cases, and we arrive at "deliberately doing something to a person that this person doesn't like and doesn't consent to without having good reason to do so", then if one thinks that moral wrongness exists, this is clearly morally wrong. It's just that one thing is routinely done while the other isn't.
It may be that vibrating someone's nasal membranes is worse than responding verbally when anaother person doesn't want it, but that is a gradual difference.
Raping someone is worse than vibrating someone's nasal membranes, but that doesn't make vibrating nasal membranes right.
Alex
"The difference, I think, is that it is a part of the proper function of the tympanic membrane to receive speech from random strangers, whether one consents to this or not, while the nasal membranes have no such proper function".
Proper function are explained by evolution, so we can alter this statement to, "The difference, I think, is that the tympanic membrane evolved to receive speech from random strangers, whether one consents to this or not, while the nasal membranes did not evolve to have that function."
William:
But our skin evolved to receive non-consensual painful inputs from random strangers, too (it is evolutionarily very useful to notice if random stranger is punching you in the back), but it does not follow that it is permissible to provide such inputs (apart from special circumstances).
Alex
I think you were responding to me
Anyway, the skin did not evolve to receive non-consensual painful imputs from random strangers.
That is merely a side effect, it's not a proper functions.
My point is that proper functions are explained by evolution, by which I mean that the 'evolutionary advantage' of the tympatic membrane is that it can receive information, while the evolutional advantage' of the skin ( or the nasal membrane) lies elsewhere.
I meant the skin with its touch sensors. These surely did evolve to receive a very wide range of inputs. Ancient people who did not feel anything when hit were not likely to survive a sneak attack.
Alex
But in that case, the proper function of the skin, the nasal membrane and the tympatic membrane are the same: receiving information, that sometimes Involves the sensation of pain or unpleasantness.
That means that human nature cannot explain thé difference, unless it's only a matter of gradation.
We feel that one 'intrusion' is worse than the other, probably because we are more used to the other intrusion.
Walter:
Right!
So the quick sketch of a natural law story at the end of my post was wrong: the difference does not simply lie in the proper functions of the two membranes.
That has become clearer and clearer to me as I've been responding to commments.
The bigger point I was trying to make is that one cannot give a "Kantian" derivation of the difference between the permissible and impermissible behaviors from general principles about autonomy. One needs something else, something about the unnaturalness of vibrating the nasal membranes of non-consenting strangers.
Alex
Whether something is permissible or not is subject to evolution.
I think if you want to make a case for 'naturalness' as a condition for perrmissibilty, I think you will have to come up with a clearer example, because vibrating someone's tympatic membrane without consult and without a serious reason may be permissible, but IMO it is definitely morally wrong.
Or do you think purposely annoying People is not wrong?
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