Comments Elsewhere

Joe,

I think the issue with Kennedy’s question is to bring the commitments expressed in your post into greater relief than was provided for by the cases you set out. Not to change the subject to whether or not those commitments would lead you to commit rape under the a given set of circumstances. I also think you misunderstood my reference to “stealth,” which was purely to refer back to Kennedy’s point (that there are plausible cases where a rape might never be noticed by the victim), not to introduce any new considerations.

The main point of my remarks is to suggest that it is not even remotely spooky to suggest that there are depraved pleasures, which are worth abstaining from independent of any further considerations about the effects of the acts or rules or life-stories or whatever necessary to produce them. Pleasures derived from hurting, degrading, or violating innocent people are one such example. (I think pleasures derived from, say, necrophilia or bestiality are another.) These distinctions are not spooky or unfamiliar; they are part of common-sense morality. While common-sense morality may be mistaken, and may need to be revised on particulars in light of rational criticism, the burden is on you to produce some argument that it does need to be revised on this point. I don’t see where you’ve done that; all you’ve done thus far is point out that everybody seems to prefer pleasure in the abstract to pain in the abstract. (That’s true enough, but so what? That doesn’t rule out people valuing something else as an end in itself in addition to pleasure, and it doesn’t rule out the possibility of particular instances of pleasure turning out to be evils.)

And no, I don’t think that describing rape as a wicked act begs the question. I’m referring to a pre-reflective judgment that rape is wicked. I happen to think this judgment is part of the data that any possibly correct theory of ethics would need to explain, not a conclusion that needs to be derived from the theory — if your theory could justify raping uncnoscious women, then that’s as good a reason as any for thinking that your theory needs to be chucked out. But whether or not you share my views on philosophical method in ethics, the point of referring to the pre-reflective judgment was merely to explain the general distinction that I was making amongst pleasures, not to invoke any particular view about which acts are in fact wicked or how you ought to discover that. (Specifically, to make a three-way distinction amongst 1. refined or wholesome pleasures, 2. coarse or hollow pleasures, and 3. depraved pleasures. Part of the point of the distinction was to suggest that common-sense morality generally judges the pleasantness of 1. to be a good but the pleasantness of 3. to be, if anything, an evil. Another part of the point was to suggest that your reflections on “elitism” didn’t actually address the issue of depraved pleasures. Whether or not it’s justified, scorn for the pleasures of “sports entertainment” is quite a different beast from scorn for the pleasures of rape and pillage.) In any case, if you don’t like the word “wicked” you could get a less precise but more wertfrei statement of the distinction by substituting “depraved pleasures taken from hurting, demeaning, or violating other people” for “depraved pleasures taken from wicked acts.”