Discovering duties

The progress of biology involves, inter alia, the discovery of unknown kinds of organisms. The progress of ethics involves, inter alia, the discovery of unknown duties. There is a vague disquiet one feels, however, at the suggestion that one has discovered a new duty, especially one hitherto unrecognized and generally violated by people. It may seem, especially to those with conservative inclinations, unduly revisionary.

But in fact it is no more revisionary than the discovery of unknown species. Of course, once discovered, a revision to some theories may be called for, but the simple fact that there is an unknown species is entirely unsurprising. Likewise, the simple fact that there is an unknown duty should be unsurprising. Actions are presumed to be permissible unless there is a specific argument why they are not. In general, we have very little in the way of positive evidence for the permissibility of an action. Except in cases where the permissibility follows from the obligatoriness, or when we have some divine revelation (e.g., we know that all the actions done by Jesus were permissible), we typically assume the action to be innocent until proven guilty. But the flip side of such a presumption of innocence is that the presumption is highly defeasible, and so it should be no surprise if we should discover a new duty.

Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that moral progress consists largely in the discovery of unknown duties or, equivalently, unknown prohibitions. Some discoveries are simply the result of new situations raising new questions—the discovery by Anscombe, Wojtyla, Paul VI and others that the moral prohibition against unnatural sexual activity generalizes to a prohibition against all contraception (except through abstinence) was triggered by the advent of effective non-barrier methods of contraception. But some discoveries concern activities people have blithely engaged in for centuries, such as our discovery that there is a prohibition against buying and selling people or that it is wrong to execute criminals when lesser penalties are sufficient to prevent crime. Of course, some dispute the correctness of some of the claimed discoveries. And, of course, the discovered prohibitions tend to follow from principles that were previously available.

My last post, on fantasies, is meant to be that kind of contribution to moral progress, albeit more modest.

Fantasies and autonomy

Sometimes we fantasize about specific others behaving a certain way with regard to us. Sexual fantasies are one species of the genus I am interested in, but the genus is wider than that. There can, for instance, be fantasies about the recognition of our excellences, about others doing something humiliating, about climbing Mount Everest with one's best friend, etc.

To fantasize about a situation is more than just to think about the possibility of it. As in the case of hoping, there is a positive attitude towards the situation, though unlike in the case of hope, there need be no expectation. The positive attitude by itself shows that fantasizing about a bad situation (e.g., about one's being cruel to someone or one's engaging in an illicit flirtation) is wrong—for, surely, our attitudes should be appropriate to their object, and the attitude towards something bad should negative. In such a case, we have what Aquinas calls the sin of "morose delectation". Moreover, beyond a positive attitude, there is a first-person involvement in a fantasy--one reacts emotionally to it in somewhat the way one would were it real.

What I said so far shouldn't be controversial, though in the past I've had trouble getting some students to accept that morality governs the life of the mind.

But I want to note a different kind of badness in fantasies involving the behavior of specific others, even when the situation fantasized about is not actually a bad one. This kind of badness occurs when the fantasy does not respect others as autonomous persons. The fantasizer is, after all, in charge of the situation. She is like film director, telling this actor to do this that actor to say that. But unlike a real film director who does this in cooperation with actors who have read the script and agreed to act according to it, the typical fantasizer is arranging the persons in her mind without any cooperation, all on her own. And herein lies both the attraction and the danger of the fantasy. The fantasizer in creating the fantasy is in a sense more powerful than God in creating the world. For while God cannot make a person freely do something (this is true by the relevant definition of "freely"), the fantasizer can. It can, for instance, be a part of the fantasy that some persons freely fawn on her. This attitude of being in charge of others can be a way of using them.

I want to qualify this a little. There is a certain respecting of autonomy if the behavior of the fantasy's characters is constrained by the real-life behavior or commitments of the persons. If I have had a number of delightful conversations with George, there perhaps is nothing wrong in fantasizing about another, since in doing so I am constrained by George's actual character, and thus he is to some extent autonomous even as found in my mind. If I do this well, I might even find myself rebuked by fantasy-George in the course of the fantasized conversation. Likewise, if someone has undertaken a morally licit commitment to do something with me, it does not seem problematic to look forward vividly to that activity. Again, the actual person has had a moment of autonomy in the creation of the fantasy.

But the more the fantasizer is in charge in arranging the behavior of the characters in the fantasy for her own gratification, the more problematic this fantasizing is, as it is a failure to respect the fact that others are independent persons, not subordinate to her pleasure.

On obvious objection is that I am confusing fiction and reality. The student who fantasizes about me saying that his shoddy paper, which he whipped off during the half hour before it was due, was the best I have ever read is not actually making me do anything. This is true, I respond. But he is in an important way using me for his own gratification. His fantasy gets its life from my reality. That I am not actually physically affected by the fantasy does not mean that I am not used—certainly, the voyeur's victim is used by the voyeur even if the victim does not find out.

It is true that when sane people fantasize, they can typically distinguish fact from fiction. But at the same time, what gives pleasure in the fantasy is a deliberate mental relaxing of the distinction, a willing suspension of disbelief. To treat the characters that inhabit one's fantasy as pawns to be moved in accordance with one's desires for one's gratification is seriously problematic, and it develops a disrespectful habit of the mental treatment of others. Even if one is right that this habit will not overflow into controlling behavior—and how can one be sure of that?—the mental attitudes are themselves morally bad.

Prediction of choices

Here's something a bit funny. We're told that people's decisions can be predicted by brain scan several seconds before the people think they've made a conscious decision. John Dylan-Haynes, one of the researchers, says: "Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in". What is the evidence that the study provided for this interesting claim? According to the New Scientist's summary: "By deciphering the brain signals with a computer program, the researchers could predict which button a subject had pressed about 60% of the time – slightly better than a random guess." (The choice is a binary one.)

So the claim which the data supports is that several seconds before the subject thinks she's made a choice, the brain is in a state that makes one of the choices somewhat more likely than the other. Now, we can ask: Which of two hypotheses does this data support better?

1. Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in.
2. Unconscious factors a significant amount of time before the conscious decision indeterministically affect the likelihood that we will consciously make one decision rather than another.

It seems clear that the data moderately supports (2) over (1). Why, then, would the researcher opt for (1) despite the data? Perhaps on the basis of other studies--but if so, then what he should say is that the present data weakens the evidence for his thesis (maybe he did and the New Scientist didn't quote that?). Or maybe the researcher thinks that improvements in the prediction procedure will eventually make it work at 100% accuracy. But the present prediction accuracy gives one very little reason to think this. Maybe the data rules out the hypothesis that there is no unconscious processes involved in decision-making, and hence offers support for (1) over the hypothesis that there is no unconscious component to decision-making at all, but who believes that hypothesis anyway?

It's worth noting that in ordinary situations where we ordinarily take people to have free will, we are often able to predict people's decisions with much better than 60% probability. This isn't to denigrate the brain-scanner. The case here is of a binary choice between button pushes, and our own accuracy would probably be fairly poor. Still, it would be fun to compare the brain-scanner against the accuracy in prediction by a researcher looking through a one-way mirror, seeing which button the person gazes towards, etc.

All that said, I actually have little problem with claim (1): I am not aware of a good argument that freedom (even of the libertarian sort) requires that one be aware of the decision when one makes it. In fact, if anything, it fits better with my preferred model of free will to have the awareness of the decision be explanatorily and maybe even causally posterior to the decision.

Yet another counterexample to utilitarianism and reason why personal identity matters

Suppose that the world contains an infinite row of people, whom we can (if we don't mind doing such a thing at least in a thought experiment) number in order ...,-4,-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3,4,.... All of these people are the same in all morally relevant, with one exception. The folks with negative numbers are all very miserable, with an equal amount of misery, and the folks with non-negative numbers are all blissfully happy, with an equal amount of happiness. A reliable genie offers you a choice: If you raise your left hand, person with number -1 will be made blissfully happy, like the people with numbers 0,1,2,3,4,...; if you don't raise your right hand, person number 0 will be made as miserable as the people with negative numbers.

What should you do? It's clear: lift your left hand. You clearly have decisive reason to do this. But notice that total utility need not be changed by your action (assume for simplicity your own and the genie's utility is not changed). In fact, the situation where persons numbered ...,-4,-3,-2 are miserable and those numbered -1,0,1,2,3,4,... are blissfully happy is isomorphic to the situation where those numbered ...,-4,-3,-2,-1,0 are miserable and those numbered 1,2,3,4,... are blissfully happy. So on utilitarian grounds, there is nothing to choose from between these two options.

Someone whose ethics is not centered on the maximization of utility will notice that even though the total utility in both cases is the same (whatever it is: it seems to be infinity minus infinity!), there is a difference for two specific people, namely those numbered -1 and 0. This is yet another way in which personal identity matters. Unless persons have an identity over time or between worlds (or both), we have a hard time making sense of the difference the two cases. Utilitarianism does not particularly care about the identities of persons, and that's why it has trouble with this case.

Utilitarianism can perhaps be fixed to account for this. One might supplement it with the idea that when comparing utilities between possible outcomes, we only compute differences in utility. When choosing between options A and B, we let u(x,F) be the utility that possible person x has if F is chosen, and then sum up u(x,A)-u(x,B) over the union of the possible persons in the relevant A-world and the relevant B-world. Notice, though, that looking at it this way emphasize the importance of personal identity between worlds—it matters which goods and bads befall whom. Once we agree that it matters which goods and bads befall whom, utilitarianism should seem significantly less plausible. And we may still be able to manufacture counterexamples. Suppose the genie adds that however you choose, an infinite number of equally blissful genies causally isolated from everybody else, will pop into existence, but these genies will be numerically different in the scenario where you lift your left hand from the ones who pop into existence in the scenario where you don't lift your left hand. Then, the above utility difference method will generate infinite minus infinity as the difference between the two scenarios, which doesn't allow for a decision.

Babette's Feast

I showed Babette's Feast once again. I was this time struck by the nuanced critique of a religion of the word. The congregation to a large extent has a religion of the word—sometimes spoken and sometimes sung.

The word spoken, by itself, is not enough, even when it is the right word. Lorens, the young officer, is able to take the devout words and use them to rise socially. (I am reminded of Aquinas' remark that without grace even the Gospels would be dead and useless.) Still, the word when spoken in the right spirit can avail much: there is clearly much good in the congregation and its pastor, and the pastor's words are an occasion of grace.

Nor does singing the word suffice. Singing in and of itself avails little, as the episode with Papin suggests, but when the right words are spoken in the right spirit, again we see that much is accomplished for the sake of the community. But it is not enough.

The daughters of the pastor add good deeds to the mix. Much good is achieved. But all this, while very good, is not enough. The right word is spoken and sung, in the right spirit, and accompanied with good works. But the congregation's love still threatens to fall to pieces around old animosities. Even a religion of word and deed is not enough: one needs the love-feast, the eucharist, the sacrament.

Each of the three is essential. The pastor brings the word. His daughters continue to hold on to his word, trying to keep at alive in the community, and giving it flesh in their charitable deeds. But Babette puts it all together, integrating word and deed into sacrament. And now the congregants reconcile to each other, and unity is restored. But the word did prepare the way for this, and the reconciliation in many cases is accomplished through words. It is all needed.

History of philosophy

Occasionally, I find myself party to conversations about analytic and continental philosophy. It seems to me that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sextus, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, ibn-Rushd, al-Ghazali, Maimonedes, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant and Frege all practiced analytic philosophy for a significant part of their philosophical lives—some of these, indeed, for just about all of their philosophical lives. When I read these people, I find them kindred souls, clearly engaged in the same rational pursuits, using pretty much the same tools, as I am. To denigrate analytic philosophy would, thus, be to cut oneself off from much of our philosophical tradition, and to lack the tools of analytic philosophy is to severely limit one's ability to engage this tradition. Fortunately, I have found it rare these days for continental philosophers to denigrate analytic philosophy.

I presume continental philosophers can likewise trace their lineage through the history of Western philosophy, though some of the names will be different. Significantly, I expect that just every major figure in the middle ages will have to be left out, and perhaps also Aristotle (but Plato and Socrates would stay), but one can in exchange add a number of more recent luminaries like Pascal, Hegel and Kierkegaard. By and large, continental philosophy strikes me as a more recent development. (Nothing wrong with that!)

I worry a bit about unconsciousness of ignorance. I am basically entirely ignorant of continental philosophy. Yet it does not seem to me that this ignorance significantly hampers my understanding of any pre-20th century philosophers I've read with the possible exception of Husserl. I presume that likewise continental philosophers who do not know any analytic philosophy do not think they are missing out on much understanding of major historical figures. So, I guess, I should conclude that probably I am missing out on major insights through my ignorance. On the other hand, maybe we're all lucky, and the insights about, say, Plato and Ockham that I'm missing by ignorance of continental philosophy are not insights I am that interested in, and the insights about them that the continental philosopher ignorant of analytic philosophy is missing out on are ones that she is not that interested in. But this doesn't seem right—philosophy is, surely, properly a holistic enterprise.

Conjunctive analyses

Sometimes we try to analyze a concept as a conjunction of two or more concepts. Thus, we might say that x knows p provided p is true and x justifiably believes p. Frequently, such proposed analyses founder on counterexamples—Gettier examples in this case.

I want to highlight one kind of failure. Sometimes analyzing x's being an F in terms of x's being a G and x's being an H, fails because to be an F, not only does x have to be a G and an H, but x's Gness and Hness have to be appropriately connected. While Gness and Hness are ingredients in Fness, their interconnection matters, just as one doesn't simply specify an organic compound by listing the number of atoms of each type in the compound, but one must also specify their interconnection.

I suspect this kind of connection-failure of conjunctive definitions is common. One way to see what is wrong with the justified true belief analysis of knowledge is to note that there has to be a connection between the justification and the truth and the belief. Specifying what the connection has to be like is hard (that is my understatement of the week).

Here's another case of the same sort. Suppose we say that an action is a murder provided it is a killing and morally wrong. Then we have a counterexample. Igor, who used to be a KGB assassin, has turned over a new leaf. As part of his turning over a new leaf, he has promised his wife that, no matter what, he will never kill again, no matter what. Maybe in ordinary cases that promise would be inappropriate. But given Igor's life history, it is quite appropriate. Now, Tatyana has just mugged Igor and is about to stab him to death so as not to leave any witnesses. Igor picks up a rock and kills her in self-defense. What he has done was a killing and it was morally wrong—it was the breaking of a promise. But it wasn't a murder because the connection between the fact that the action was a killing and the fact that the action was morally wrong wasn't of the right sort. (One might try to say that it was a killing and immoral, but wasn't immoral qua killing.)

When we hear a conjunctive analysis being given in philosophy, I think it's time to look for a connection-counterexample, a case where each conjunct is satisfied, but the satisfaction of the conjuncts lacks the right kind of interconnection. Sometimes, I think, one can intuitively tell that a proposed analysis is unsatisfactory for lack of such interconnection even without coming up with a counterexample. Here is a case in point. Consider the notion of "causal necessitation". A natural-sounding definition is this: an event E causally necessitates an event F provided that (i) it is nomically necessary that if E holds, then F holds; and (ii) E causes F. But even if it turns out that this is a correct characterization—that necessarily E causally necessitates F if and only if (i) and (ii) hold—I don't think it's a good definition. For it misses out the fact that one wants a connection between the necessitating and the causing—the co-presence of the two factors shouldn't be merely coincidental. But it's really hard to come up with an uncontroversial case where we have a difference between the two. (Interestingly, it may be possible to do so if Molinism is true.)

We are rightly suspicious of disjunctive analyses. I think we should have a similar, though weaker, suspicion of conjunctive ones.

There is a structural connection between the points in this post and Aristotle's Metaphysics H6. The point is also similar to Geach's discussion of the good. We cannot define a "good basketball player" as someone who is (i) good and (ii) a basketball player.

Analyses: a hypothesis

In philosophy journals, one occasionally sees things like this:

Necessarily, x is an F if and only if x satisfies each of the following n conditions:
(i) ...
(ii) ...
(iii) ...
(iv) ...
...

I hypothesize that every philosophical claim of this form that has ever been made in print by a Western philosopher with the number of conditions n greater than or equal to 4 is:

1. false, and/or
2. stipulative, and/or
3. circular, and/or
4. redundant.

By "circular" I mean that Fness is implicitly or explicitly found in the conditions. By "redundant" I mean that one of the conditions is entailed by the others.

My evidence for the hypothesis is inductive. I have never seen a correct, non-stipulative, non-circular and non-redundant set of necessary and sufficient conditions for anything philosophical where there are more than three conditions.

It could be that the hypothesis is false. Is there a counterexample?

Art as argument

I once ran a panel discussion between an Islamic theologian and a philosopher of art. The Islamic theologian was defending what she claimed was traditional Islamic jurisprudence, that for the sake of freedom of inquiry it is legally permitted to write anything in the context of intellectual verbal argument (even really nasty things about the founder of Islam, as long as long as they were supported by argumentation), but that there are restrictions on, say, what is permitted in art. The idea was that in intellectual inquiry, verbal expressions have a privileged status.

It seems to me that this account of inquiry is somewhat impoverished. While argument can be made in words, it can also be made in other ways. In their fun Handbook of Christian Apologetics Kreeft and Tacelli give this argument for the existence of God:

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.
You either see this one or you don't.

I may not see it, because my own appreciation of music is most deficient[note 1], but I see the kind of argument that is made here, and it is not an argument in words—simply asserting that there is the music of J. S. Bach doesn't do the job. The music is an essential part of the argument itself.

Or consider the following argument:

1. 
2. Therefore, war is wrong.

Does it make sense to simply incorporate a work of art as a premise to an argument. One problem—and this may be the reason for the apparent Islamic privileging of verbal arguments—is that arguments that incorporate a work of art as a premise are hard to criticize. I am not a pacifist. So I accept that the above argument is unsound. But it is really hard to see what I deny. Do I deny premise (1), i.e., deny Guernica? That seems to be a category mistake. Or do I deny that (2) follows from (1)? So there is something unfair about the use of art in argument—one is putting oneself beyond criticism, except maybe by a competing work of art.

Difficulties with this notwithstanding, I do think the idea that a work of art can express an otherwise ineffable proposition is defensible. Perhaps Guernica expresses the proposition that war is like this (isn't it fun to use hyperlinks to indicate referrents of demonstratives?). If so, then while denying Guernica is a category mistake, denying the proposition expressed by Guernica is no category mistake.

If so, then poems, songs, novels, etc. can express propositions that have truth value. This might be relevant to an account of Biblical inerrancy that includes the full range of genres found in Scripture.

Final note: I think the Bach and Guernica arguments may have different logical forms. It may not be that the music of Bach itself expresses something that implies the existence of God, so that the music is not a premise, but only a part of a premise—the premise that there is this [mp3 download is from here].

Love of substances

Thesis: Necessarily, it is appropriate to love x in the primary (or focal) sense of "love" if and only if x is a substance.

Why? Maybe because of the Augustinian and Thomistic doctrine of the interchangeability of being and love, and the Aristotelian doctrine that substances are what has being in the primary sense.

If the Thesis is true, this has metaphysical and ethical consequences. Metaphysical consequence: All persons are substances. Ethical consequence: We shouldn't love countries, nations, ecosystems, galaxies, ideas, etc. in the primary sense of "love". If, further, we add the Aristotelian claim that the only real substances there are beings that have life, we get the useful fact that we shouldn't love our non-living material possessions in the primary sense of "love". (I am open, however, to particles being substances. It's odd to say that I should love particles in the primary sense. But less odd when one considers the fact that they do have a sort of "life", and even less odd when one adds that love needs to be proportioned to the dignity of the beloved, so that particles, though lovable in the primary sense, are lovable in only a little way.)

Why do we need substances if presentism holds?

If presentism holds, it makes perfect sense to talk of what Alexander and Bucephalus did, of the properties they had, of the relations they stood in, and so on, and for none of this do we need Alexander and Bucephalus to exist. After all, Bucephalus doesn't exist any more. Alexander does exist (in heaven, purgatory or hell), but his present existence has nothing to do with the truth of propositions such as that Alexander conquered much of the world and rode Bucephalus. Bucephalus led a full horsey life, as descriptively rich as the life of any presently existing horse. Truths about the past are just as true as truths about the present, and according to the presentist, we do not surrender realism in the case of truths about the past.

But if we can make sense of talk about the past without positing past substances, why can't we equally make sense of talk of the present without positing present substances? If one can be a realist and yet say that dinosaurs once walked the earth without quantifying over dinosaurs, why can't we equally well be realists and yet say that horses now walk the earth without quantifying over horses?

There is a hole in this argument. Perhaps on Cartesian grounds it is undeniable that I now exist, and hence that there is at least one presently existing substance—I. But it is unclear that the Cartesian argument establishes my present existence. I think to myself: "I think, therefore I am." What gives evidence for the "I think" is already in the past by the time I get to the "I am". So, rather, I should say: "I think, therefore I was." At least, I can say this: any certainty that I have about the "I am" is a certainty that I also have about the "I was". Anyway, this seems beside the point. For the same strategy that the presentist uses to explain the truth of "Bucephalus was" without presupposing Bucephalus can surely be used to explain the truth of "Alexander Pruss is" without presupposing Alexander Pruss.

I am not satisfied with this argument. I feel that a sophistry is in the air, or else that I am unfair to presentists. But I suspect the following is true: The presentist who accepts a tenseless quantifier, a tenseless "exists", which I'll indicate as "exists*", and who then says that only presently existing things exist*, will probably be subject to this worry. On the other hand, the presentist who doesn't accept a tenseless quantifier may have some difficulty in explaining presentism: it is a triviality that only presently existing things presently exist.

An argument for incompatibilism

The following argument is valid:

1. Normally, if an embodied person freely does A, then x could have done otherwise than she did. (Premise)
2. It is a common occurrence that an embodied person freely does something. (Premise)
3. If a general conditional holds normally, and specific cases of the antecedent are common, then it is nomically possible that the antecedent and consequent hold simultaneously. (Premise)
4. Therefore, it is nomically possible that there be an embodied person x and an action A such that x does A freely and x could have not done A. (By (1)-(3))
5. Metaphysically necessarily, if an embodied person x does A freely and x could have done otherwise, then determinism is false. (Premise)
6. Therefore, it is nomically possible that determinism does not hold. (By (4) and (5))
7. If determinism holds, then it holds of nomic necessity. (Premise)
8. Therefore, determinism does not hold. (By (6) and (7))

Observe that the Principle of Alternate Possibilities in (1) is not subject to any Frankfurt-style counterexamples. I got this Principle based on an idea of David Alexander, but I don't think he endorses this version.

I think the tough question is whether (3) holds. But I think it at least holds as a probabilistic principle: if normally (if p, then q), and if cases of p are common, then probably a case of both p and q is nomically possible. In fact, a stronger probabilistic claim seems to hold: probably some case of both p and q actually holds. (When I talk about cases, I am assuming that the conditional is a quantified one: for all x, if P(x), then Q(x).) If so, then the conclusion would be that probably determinism does not hold. (Not earthshaking in light of the fact that there is some direct reason from physics to think it does not hold.) But the stronger non-probabilistic claim is also plausible. How could something be normal and yet nomically impossible?

[Edited to fix typo in argument and attribution of PAP.]

Advertising

In an earlier post, I went after sexual stuff in advertising. It's time to move on to food. The following argument is valid:

1. It is wrong to intentionally make someone feel inappropriate hunger. (Premise)
2. Some food advertising intentionally makes people feel inappropriate hunger. (Premise)
3. Some food advertising is wrong. (By (1) and (2))

Inappropriate hunger is basically hunger when one is not in need of food.[note 1] I don't know for sure that (2) is true, but it seems plausible—certainly food advertising can make one feel inappropriate hunger, and it would be surprising if this weren't intetional. Premise (1) is surely close to the truth at least. Maybe it needs some qualifier like "prima facie", or maybe there is a lack of consent condition that needs to be added (it seems plausible that it is permissible to do medical research where inappopriate hunger is induced in consenting subjects). But I suspect that even if one appropriately qualifies (1), this will not affect the application here. That something like (1) holds seems to be a clear consequence of the fact that either hunger in general or at least inappropriate hunger is a bad.

I suppose few people dispute (3). The likely health consequences of some food advertising are sufficient to establish (3). But what's interesting is that this argument provides another reason, a non-consequentialistic one, to object to the advertising.

There are analogies to other kinds of induction of desire in advertising. But not all induction of desire is problematic. Induction of an appropriate desire is in itself unproblematic. Thus charity advertising that induces a desire to help the needy is not problematic (assuming there isn't something else wrong there), since a desire to help the needy is appropriate.

Let me end with a question: Suppose that advertisers limited themselves to morally licit advertising: no induction of inappropriate emotions, no false statements (and that includes not making statements about your product being better than the competitor unless you believe it on good grounds), etc. How well would advertising work then?

Sexual cases are different

One vague but real division line among thinkers about sexuality is whether sexual cases are in some important way different from all or most other cases. Some writers on the right, for instance, think that in sexual cases categories like "the sacred" or "desecration" are applicable, or that there are higher moral standards in sexual cases (so that, e.g., it may not be immoral to misuse a finger, but is wrong to misuse a sexual organ, or it is not always wrong to use someone non-sexually but always wrong to use someone sexually). At the same time, the idea of sexual cases as somehow different has historically also been found among some left-leaning folk as well, such as in quasi-religious ideas of transforming the world through removing our culture's sexual restrictions (one probably wouldn't talk of transforming the world through removing our culture's dietary restrictions[note 1]), or in the idea that sexual oppression is particularly bad. Other writers, on the other hand, hold that sexual ethics is not in any significant way different from other areas of ethics (C. S. Lewis says this explicitly in The Four Loves).

Who is right? Well, here I just want to note one way in which our attitudes towards sex are different from our attitudes towards other activities. Sex is impermissible without consent, and while there are other activities of which that is true, the requirement of consent in sexual cases is much more stringent than in most non-sexual cases. Here is one way in which this is so. For some activities, such as the eating of ice cream, the consent of a minor or someone generally incompetent is acceptable. For many activities for which the consent of of a minor or someone generally incompetent is acceptable, such as medical procedures, the consent of a proxy is sufficient. However, in sex we are suspicious of the consent of a minor and we do not allow proxy consent. There are not many other cases like that.

That is not to say that there are no other cases like that. Some Christian denominations that reject infant baptism can be seen as treating baptism in this way. I can also see how someone might take this view of certain kinds of major life-changing medical procedures that arguably do not treat an organic condition, like physician-assisted suicide (here "life-changing" is an understatement), sex-reassignment or the amputation of the limb of an apotemnophiliac. Note that an analogy between sex and these cases underscores the idea that there is something momentous about sexual cases. Our rules on voting are somewhat similar but not quite the same: one must cast one's vote oneself, not have a proxy cast it for one[note 2]and one must be of age, but the difference is that one does not need to be competent other than by age.

If there is a difference, we may ask why there is such a difference. One consideration is that sex is a momentous matter because it is closely related to life-and-death matters—sex does, after all, involve the functioning of reproductive organs (this is true not just in the case of intercourse). Another is that love is always something momentous—the duty to love is the ground of all other moral rules—and sex ought to be the consummation of a particular kind of love (eros), so it inherits momentousness from it; moreover, one might argue that the particular kind love that sex ought to be the consummation of a love between free and equal persons, and consent thus is plausibly required. One might also bring in contingent psychological features of sexual cases, but I would prefer not to do that, because those could be absent, and the consent requirements would still be in place. In any case, it is clearer that there is something different about sex than most other activities—that is a datum—but what that difference is is harder to capture.

Seduction, advertising and provocative dress

Thesis: It is wrong to intentionally attempt to sexually excite another person without the other's consent.

I will argue for the Thesis in a moment. But at the moment, I want to clarify a few things and give some consequences. I take it to be a consequence of the Thesis that the following three actions are wrong:

1. Including sexually suggestive imagery in advertising in non-pornographic media in order that the viewer might be sexually excited and thus inclined to favor the product.
2. Dressing in a provocative way in public in order to sexually excite others.
3. Seducing another by trying to cause another to become sexually excited, when the other does not consent to being caused to become sexually excited, whether the means be a romantic dinner, ethanol, unfermented grape juice, a movie, a touch, a word, etc.

Both to clarify the Thesis and to explain why these follow from it, note first that consent is not the same as enjoyment or wishing. Thus, that a reader of a magazine might enjoy being sexually excited at a model in an ad does not entail that the reader consents to that excitement. One way to see this is to consider the following case. Yakov is a Jewish man who smells some delicious sweet and sour pork while walking by a Chinese restaurant. He wishes God had permitted him to eat sweet and sour pork. He then remembers that in Talmudic law, it is permissible to violate kashrut to save your life (except in times of religious persecution). The food smells so good that he desires that the cook should come out, point a gun at his head, and tell him to eat some sweet and sour pork. He would enjoy this, moreover. (Let's suppose he's a very brave man much given to pleasures of the palate, so the sight of a gun pointed at his head would not spoil the delicious taste.) However, the fact that he wishes the cook to do this, and that he would enjoy it, does not contradict the fact that he has not consented to having a gun placed to his head. One can desire something and know that one would enjoy it when it would come, but nonetheless not consent to it.[note 1]

Thus, even if it were true that the readers of a magazine would enjoy the sexual excitement, it would not follow that they consent to it. I do restrict claim (1) to the case of non-pornographic magazines, because the reader of a pornographic magazine can be presumed to give consent to being sexually excited by the contents. (This might be partly definitional of a pornographic magazine. I am not saying that there is nothing wrong with pornography, just that its wrongness does not follow from the Thesis.) Likewise, that someone comes to enjoy being seduced, and even comes to consent to its continuation, does not entail that the initial attempt to sexually excite was consented to. At the same time, consent can be implicit in a context, so this is not going to cover all cases of seduction (e.g., it will not cover seduction in the context of a relationship where such seduction is implicitly consented to and where the implicit consent is not withdrawn—again, I do not want to say that all consensual seduction is acceptable, but only that it does not violate the Thesis).

Observe, also, that expectation is not the same as consent. A person might expect that a popular non-pornographic magazine contains some provocative imagery, or that a date will try to seduce one, but expectation is not the same as consent. It should be no defense in a theft case that a man knew that a neighborhood was rife with muggers when he went out for a walk and hence he consensually handed over his wallet, so it wasn't theft.[note 2]

In any case, even if most readers of some non-pornographic magazine or most bystanders consented to being sexually excited, there would surely be some who did not, and if the intention was to excite all readers or all bystanders of the appropriate sex and sexual orientation, then some would be excited non-consensually, and a violation of the Thesis would occur.

What is kind of interesting about this argument is that many arguments against the sexual objectification of women have involved the harm to women from such objectification (see, e.g., Dworkin). While I think such arguments are basically sound, they miss out on a dimension of the question, which is that in many not overtly pornographic contexts the male viewers are not consenting to sexual excitation, and hence are being wronged.

I am assuming here that sexual excitement is a state of the person that includes some emotional and some physiological components, and that these physiological components involve, at least in part, the physiological state of the person's sexual systems.

Why should we believe the Thesis? I think it follows from the same considerations as make sexual assault be wrong. Sexual assault can range from full-scale violent rape to a sexual pat on the behind. What is common in all of these cases is that the contact is sexual in nature and not consented to. (Whether the contact is desired, wished for or enjoyed ought to be irrelevant to the question whether a sexual assault occurred, though obviously the more undesired the contact, the worse the crime.) It seems plausible to suppose that any sexual manipulation of parts of the physiological sexual systems of a person is wrong.[note 3] Nor should it matter much whether the manipulation is done directly by means of the assailant's body, or by the intermediate use of some tool. Even if the manipulation is done by means of the victim's own self without the victim's consent, this is surely sexual assault (think of the case of hypnotizing an unconsenting subject[note 4]).

Cases of intentionally sexually exciting someone are cases of intentionally manipulating the physiological sexual systems of the other. Hence if they are non-consensual, they are wrong for the same reasons that sexual assaults not involving physical contact are wrong. Hence the Thesis is true.

Interestingly, then, sexual assaults against men are not as rare as people think—I suspect a lot of ordinary magazines contain them.