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pjeby comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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If I didn't do that, how would we know we weren't understanding each other? Now at least I can try to distinguish "offensive" from "repulsive", and ask what term you would use in place of "goal-oriented mating behavior" that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
That men and women do stuff to "get" mates. This was what the original poster stated, that you appeared to object to the mere discussion of, and have further said that you wished people wouldn't mention directly, only by way of euphemism or substitution of more-specific phrases.
I guess I missed them. All I heard you saying was that it's bad to talk about men "getting" women by having money. Are you saying it's unethical that it happens, or that it's unethical to discuss it? I think I'm confused now.
Which behavior? Seeking mates, or talking about the fact that people do?
You seem to be implying that it's your gender that makes you repulsed, but that makes no sense to me. I assume the women's magazines that sell on the basis of "getting" men would not do so if the repulsion [that I understand you to be saying] you have were universal to your gender, AND it were not a sexist double standard.
I've been using "objectification" to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn't the only one, but it's the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By "objectify", I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me", the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, "If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", would not make sense if you changed "people" to "cars", because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. "So-and-so is five feet six inches tall"; "that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall".)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
I still have very little idea what you mean by 'objectification' and 'objectify people'.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko's comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
I had negative associations attached to Roko's comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko's suggestions. However, I wouldn't have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of 'objectificaton' or 'objectifying', or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word 'get' by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of 'getting a girlfriend/boyfriend'.
I'm sorry you don't understand where I'm coming from. I don't have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don't share your desires? If the desire in question was something like "I desire to behave ethically" that would be okay, but there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.
It's certainly nice that your attraction isn't dominated solely by physical features, but that isn't actually what "attractive" means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if "conventionally physically attractive" was what Roko meant, there doesn't seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can't both be okay simultaneously.
I don't see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it's okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it'd be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it'd just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.
Not more than, but "getting a [girl/boy]friend" isn't unloaded language either... (I have been known to use the word "obtain" with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that's mostly because "marry" would sound redundant.)
Read Roko's comment again and you'll realize that Wu wei is quite justified in being put off by it. Roko was implying that people who do not adopt these specific values are setting themselves up for failure at their goals due to not being motivated enough.
In my opinion, Roko's whole argument reeks of availability bias. People who have attained more wealth and social status are certainly more salient to us, but this doesn't make them more influential by real-world measures. Still, money makes the world go round and having more wealthy philanthropists who can look beyond warm fuzzies to actual utilons created would be a very good thing.
Then why is "getting" objectionable? I (obviously) don't "get" it, no pun intended.
This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don't), though now that you mention it, I wouldn't be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.
Ultimately each person's ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences "if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2" and "if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2". We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like "how long would it take me to fall from a building" -- which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working "inside-out" , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered "outside-in", starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires "person-specific" reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin -- a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants -- turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the "falling from a building" example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience -- what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc -- but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
I'm not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener"?
You make a very good point. I'm tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I've given this more thought all I will say is that it'd probably be better to say "a garden" than "a gardener".
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile's question if we replace "gardener" with "butler"?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I'm going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it's okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I've said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it's "at least honest" to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it's no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It's when random "attractive women"/"girls"/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you're protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn't mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl - that's objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It's still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape - these are no-nos. But what's wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people's decision-making algorithms.)
Nothing, unless by "more awesome" you mean "more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish".
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by "wrong" you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it's just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
If you're talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they're going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner - even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24/7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things. Don't make me invoke Godwinski's Law.
It seems to me that you're saying that merely wanting sex is dehumanizing.
It's not.
What?
No.
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it's supposed to be invoked when someone calls one's opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It's certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of 'objectification' that we've inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)'s notion of alienation.
That said, I don't think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn's characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) "get lots of prostitutes".
Marx's equivalent to objectification is actually called "commodity fetishism" (seriously - no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his "labor-power" is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the "commercial production process") is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees--it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that's a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the "acceptable" side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward "unacceptable".
As for me, since I figure it's heading that way, I'm getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I'm 70 years old I don't embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.
I'm not sure if a gardener is "objectified" (I find that an confusing word). He or she certainly is a substitutable unit of gardening skill. Another gardener with the same skill would be just as good. Similar does apply to "attractive woman". Another attractive woman would fit the job just as well. Leaving aside "objectified", it's certainly impersonal.
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me" makes no sense.
That appears to contradict your earlier definition:
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be "like a non-person"?
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning - i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it's objectification.
(I'm not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you're classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it's more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you're not, I'll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
Because grammar is like that. For instance, most sentences that use gendered pronouns would be deeply strange if applied to non-boat inanimate objects, but that doesn't stop some such sentences from being objectifying.
No, sometimes things I find repulsive are non-objectifying, and are bad for some other reason. Occasionally, I'm even repulsed by things that are not unethical.
Not so. By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
...and how is that useful?!
That's like saying that it's good to dislike chocolate because then you can make sure nobody gives you any, or that banging your head on the wall is a pleasure because it feels good when you stop. It'd be more useful to just not bang your head, unless there's something else you're getting from the activity.
Then kindly point out what noun phrase you would have replaced. Or in the alternative, please provide a definition of "objectification" that doesn't boil down to, "I know it when I see it."
I really have no clue what you're talking about in the first bit. Do you think that having ethical opinions is useless because if one didn't have them it would save one a headache? Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation? Are you even trying to understand what I'm typing?
Second bit:
"If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me." -> "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes."
What I was saying was that I think considering people's words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
I also think repulsion is not an appropriate response to "detecting an ethical violation", since that emotion motivates signaling behavior rather than useful behavior. For example, it encourages one to communicate one's beliefs in a judgmental way that communicates entitlement, and discourages co-operation from others.
So, how do you arrive at this substitution? You keep removing the part that only a person can do, so if that rule is applied consistently, you end up with any statement being objectification.
Words are verbal behavior. If you don't think people can be held ethically responsible for verbal behavior, I'm sure I could come up with some persuasive examples, but I'm no longer sure this discussion is worth my attention, as you're very persistent in missing the point.
Please reread:
Sure, there are unethical verbal behaviors. Truthfully expressing opinions or discussing one's goals are not among them, however.
Even if somebody opines that their goal is to do something awful to me, then if that is a true statement, it is actually ethically good for them to give me advance warning! So considering someone's (truthful) verbal behavior about their goals or opinions as unethical is simply not useful to me, regardless of what opinion I may hold about what behavior may result from that opinion or goal.
But what if somebody, in opining that their goal is to do something awful to you, solicits ideas on what awful things to do and how to accomplish them, and encourages others to do awful things to you themselves?
I think that situation is closer to what Alicorn is objecting to.
People can phrase things in many ways. There is a difference which may be ethically relevant between:
"So-and-so is a [profanity] and I'm going to lose it and [threats of violence] if he doesn't leave me alone!"
and
"I don't like so-and-so and I wish he'd go away. I might do something really regrettable if he doesn't; he just gets on my nerves that much."
Even though the goals and opinions might be just alike. That is verbal behavior that goes above and beyond just truthfully stating things.