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Alicorn comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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I think it is unethical (not necessarily "irrational") to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I'd be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I've also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that's a very different matter). I don't think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I'm sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can't observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn't think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow "acting" on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).
Actually the accusation was not of a 'thought crime', but rather of doing something unethical with your thoughts.
If you believe that there are some actions that are unethical, I fail to see how some of those actions can't be thoughts, unless you think thoughts are metaphysically different from other actions.
Actually I think we're dealing in virtue ethics here.
That seems very unlikely on the face of it (I hadn't meant it in a specifically virtue ethics context, and Alicorn isn't necessarily a fan), though I'd also gotten that impression from some of the phrasings in Alicorn's recent comment. Surely though it's an empirical question whether thinking of people in a particular way predisposes one to behave differently about them.
But what did you mean by that?
...Thought crime? Really? That's what you get from me saying that it's unethical to think of people as suitable objects of manipulation? Yes, I used the word "think", but the emphasis was really on "suitable". I could have used the phrasing "it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people", or "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" or "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false", or "to speak of people as suitable objects of manipulation reflects an ethically abhorrent facet of the speaker's personality" - and meant more or less the same thing. Is that clearer?
I'd phrase it a little bit differently, but overall, yeah, I'd accept that position. That is, I basically agree with you here.
Alternately (probably a bit more general but, I think, capturing the main relevant offensive bits) "goal systems which do not assign inherent terminal value to persons, but only see them in terms of instrumental value are immoral goal systems."
"it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people" "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false"
Ahem... Why? To me, these claims seem baseless and to some great degree, false.
It would seem that you and I disagree on matters of ethics, then - probably on an awfully basic level.
I suspect you're using the word "manipulation" to mean different things.
For that matter, a lot of "manipulation" goes on in Brennan's world, it's expected on all sides, they don't think of themselves as immoral because of it, and I would go ahead and endorse that aspect of their fictional existence. I think that it's manipulation of someone who isn't expecting manipulation which is the main ethical problem.