Comments Elsewhere

Joe:

“But the badness of rape isn’t from the pleasure of the rapist. It’s from the pain of the person being raped.”

Kennedy:

That’s easily factored out for the sake of argument: Rape a woman who’s passed out drunk. She’ll never know.

No pain. Is that pleasure good?

Joe:

Maybe this deserves its own post, but what many of you are discussing (e.g., Constant’s game show, or JTK’s passed out woman) are problems if and only if one interprets utilitarianism to mean that one ought always perform whatever action has the greatest utility.

There are, however, good reasons for thinking that direct, act-utilitarianism is self-effacing. That is, there may well be (and I think are) good utilitarian reasons for abandoning act-utilitarianism. That’s why I said in an earlier comment that I think utilitarianism actually justifies rules that cannot normally be violated. We call these rights. And the most important of those rights is best expressed by something very much like the harm principle.

So, to JTK, the reason I don’t rape the drunk passed out woman who won’t know is that doing so violates the harm principle. And obeying the harm principle is what all-things-considered will maximize utility over the long run. And to Constant, the problem with the game show is not infinite pain of rape (which you rightly criticize); it’s that the game show violates the harm principle.

Joe, you just changed the subject.

Kennedy didn’t ask you whether or not you would rape someone who was drunk and passed out. (Or what your reasons for doing so or not doing so would be.) He asked you whether the pleasure that you would gain from the rape would be a good thing. (Or, more precisely, whether the fact that you received pleasure while no-one else received pain, would make for a net increase in the preponderance of good things over bad.) Gesturing at rule-utilitarianism, or to other forms of indirect utilitarianism, does not answer the question, unless making the gesture is also meant to imply “Yes, it would be for the best, but that’s only a problem if you think its being for the best would license me to do it. It wouldn’t, and here’s why.”

I can’t speak for Kennedy, but I certainly think that treating a sufficiently stealthy rapist’s pleasure as any sort of good at all is a problem, whether or not that conclusion would license actually trying to secure the good in particular instances. Whatever you may think of stupid or hollow pleasures (such as the ones you mention in your post), the idea that the depraved pleasures taken from wicked acts should not be dignified as “goods” is hardly wacky, spooky, or elitist. On the contrary, I’d suggest that denying such an evident truth can be explained by little other than dogmatic shamelessness.