Pleasurably Regarding the Pain of Fictional Others Aaron Smuts (Rhode Island College –
[email protected] – http://www.aaronsmuts.com) General Question: Is it morally bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? Thesis: Yes. It is intrinsically morally bad to enjoy evil, actual (past, present, and future) or merely imagined. Significance: 1) Independent moral significance; 2) Art and Morality (secondary concern) Qualifications Q1. I am only concerned with suffering, or pain above a non-trivial threshold: ex. balls, wood chippers, daffy duck. Q2. I will focus on the most unambiguous case: malicious pleasure in undeserved suffering. Q3. I am not defending a deontic claim (e.g. "right" or "wrong"). I. Support: Four Examples E1. Banana Peel We can't account for the moral badness of malicious pleasure in terms of its welfare impact. i. Undiscovered malicious pleasure has no welfare impact on the injured. ii. Feeling malicious pleasure is not intrinsically prudential bad. iii. Any possible instrumental badness is not our source of concern. E2. Charlie the Lover of Bestial Suffering E3. Moore's Universe of Cruel Thought "If we then consider what judgment we should pass upon a universe which consisted solely of minds thus occupied [with thoughts of cruelty], without the smallest hope that there would ever exist in it the smallest consciousness of any object other than those proper to these passions, or any feeling directed to any such object, I think that we cannot avoid the conclusion that the existence of such a universe would be a far worse evil than the existence of none at all." (Moore, PE sec. 125) E4. Two Worlds: Kittens vs. Torture Fantasies II. Two Objections O1. Autonomous Fantasy Objection Two Types of Fantasy (Christopher Cherry, "The Inward and the Outward"): F1. Surrogate Fantasy F2. Autonomous Fantasy: ex. one might enjoy rape fantasies but not want to rape or witness an actual rape Four Kinds of Imagining (Bernard Williams, "Imagination and the Self") I1. as a spectator not in the imagined world, I2. as an actor in the imagined world doing things, I3. as an outside observer watching oneself do things, and I4. as inhabiting the sphere of action, but merely observing. Reply to the Autonomous Fantasy Objection: Two Sub-Conclusions SC1: Ontological status is largely irrelevant: ex. Happy subject of a Milgram shock experiment (Hurka, VVV p.163). SC2: Belief in the existence of the object is not required for the pleasure to be evil: ex. E3 and E4 above. O2. Harmless Objection (= mental statism + welfarism) Welfare (aka well-being, prudential value) = what makes a life good for the one who lives it. Mental Statism = the sole bearers of intrinsic prudential value are subjective mental states. Welfarism = the ultimate source of all moral value, obligations, or reasons is welfare. [3 forms: good, right, reasons] Reply to the Harmless Objection I accept mental statism and reject welfarism. Three objections to welfarism: OW1: What is a morally good distribution of welfare? We need another good, such as justice. OW2: It makes it hard to account for what's wrong with undiscovered lies and broken deathbed promises. OW3: Other first-order goods matter, such as autonomy, achievement, and knowledge. ex. Two Treatments [for an animal rights advocate] (Sen, "Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom")
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III. Accounting for Fictional Differences Key Question: If SC1 and SC2, why is it worse to take pleasure in actual suffering than in fictional suffering? Hurka’s Suggestions HS1: Partial failure of disbelief suspension. HS2: The closer to reality the object, the worse the pleasure and vice versa. HS3: Autonomous fantasy is less bad then surrogate fantasy. My Suggestions MS1: We only encounter fictions via representations. The failure of sympathy is typically not as bad. MS2: We cannot be disrespectful of fictional characters. MS3: Representations are often partly to blame for our reactions. - ex. A Clockwork Orange: Kubrick vs. Burgess.
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