A dildo also isn’t able to consent. A carrot isn’t able to consent and is more alive than the roadkill (since it can still reproduce). Ability to consent is something we require from conscious beings, but we generally don’t require it from objects, and corpses blur the line.
I definitely get the “ick” feeling from necrophilia, so my knee-jerk reaction is to consider it immoral, but it isn’t actually that easy to come up with a consistent justification for that condemnation.
A dildo also isn’t able to consent. A carrot isn’t able to consent and is more alive than the roadkill (since it can still reproduce).
A dildo was never alive, and a carrot is not a sentient creature.
Ability to consent is something we require from conscious beings, but we generally don’t require it from objects, and corpses blur the line.
Why does a corpse blur the line? Or is this DnD logic and a corpse is just an object? A corpse should be treated like the person it was, so it still needs consent otherwise you’re still raping it.
but it isn’t actually that easy to come up with a consistent justification for that condemnation.
It absolutely is: a sentient (not even sapient, but sentient) being’s bodily autonomy is inviolable without their consent.
Extending your logic to make my point, if a corpse is blurring the line, what about brain dead coma patients, especially ones that are infertile? Are they ok to rape? They’re alive and can’t reproduce, so what’s the difference, right?
A corpse is not a sentient creature. Former sentience is not the same as sentience.
A corpse should be treated like the person it was, so it still needs consent otherwise you’re still raping it.
That’s your opinion, and it’s completely valid, but what’s your justification for why someone else should agree?
Extending your logic to make my point, if a corpse is blurring the line, what about brain dead coma patients, especially ones that are infertile? Are they ok to rape? They’re alive and can’t reproduce, so what’s the difference, right?
Well, they’re alive, for one. Corpses by definition are not. And what we think of as “brain-dead” is the long-term and potentially permanent loss of consciousness and therefore sapience, but sentience is a bit harder to disprove.
Your standard seems to be “current or former sentient beings,” which is consistent, but you haven’t given a justification for the “or former” part. Current sentient beings experience suffering, so that’s a pretty good reason, but corpses don’t.
I cannot fucking believe I’m going to participate here…
… but when you’re talking to someone about organ donation, you’d typically say something like “You can’t take them with you. That isn’t you anymore. You’re dead. It’s just meat now.”
… and that’s as much as I’m going to say because gross
But this is actually why we decide whether or not we participate in postmortem organ donation while we’re alive - we make the conscious decision ahead of time. Which is still then consistent with the consent argument
If someone writes in their will that their dick shall be made into a dildo so that their partner can keep having sex with them, they can do that.
I find it gross, but not immoral.
Weird from a cultural perspective where any sort of non-medical interference with a corpse is frowned upon, so we’re trained from a very young age to find any of that stuff icky/morbid. Other cultures may not have that same aversion.
Kinda in the same vein as we in North America have a very conservative opinion on being naked in public where other cultures couldn’t care less.
What I’m asking is if a person who wants to and does have sex with corpses, knowing that this is socially profane and must be kept secret, is this a trustable person?
Also, respect for the dead often involves rituals that are non-medical. I think disease obviously played a part in how these rituals were formed, but I don’t think that disease is the primary reason people care.
Sure, but I can also construct a moral framework in which it’s ok for me to murder anyone I don’t like because my not-mental-illness-sky-daddy said so.
Moral relativism is bullshit and can be used to justify anything.
The idea that you’re morally obligated to maximize your own health to minimize your burden on society usually doesn’t stand up well to follow up questions.
Realistically, the societal health costs of being obese would be statistically higher than fucking roadkill. I think most people would find themselves pausing before suggesting to an obese person that thier obesity is more morally problematic than fucking roadkill.
There is something to health of an individual in a society and morality, it’s pretty hard for me to ignore that intuition. I just don’t know a real formulation which doesn’t introduce more issues to a system of morality than it resolves? Curious if anyone had one.
When I read liability, my instinct was contagion. There is absolutely a moral obligation to minimize contagion—we did a whole covid-lockdown thing about it.
Being obese is too self-contained an issue, if it is an issue, I think. The only one suffering, if they are suffering, would be the obese person, and the only externalization of that would be financial costs that are too abstract for people to take personally.
I have the great privilege of living in a society with socialized Healthcare, so these questions do come up from time to time.
The lifetime Healthcare costs for people who have conditions which can be mitigated by lifestyle choices is a real thing. Smoking, being an obvious example much less touchy than obesity. Even if I’m extremely comfortable with the slice of my taxes that go to Healthcare… wouldn’t it be great if we got to spend less on smoking-related issues, and could instead buy more MRI machines. Merely pay for more doctors? Nurses? Expand the treatments we can even offer?
Just because they’re abstract, doesn’t make it any less of a question of morality. I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking from the perspective of the personal responsibility of maintaining the overall health of your society. One is just accepted by society.
I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking
I don’t understand what you mean.
Smoking isn’t contagious. Smoking might be socially contagious, but that’s a different kind. Smoking and the resulting cancer would be the kind of disease that people “choose” to take on, which is different from being accosted by influenza.
You might be thinking about this on a societal level? I meant interpersonally. Showing up to an event while sick and without a mask is a little fucked up. And covid touches on the societal, but my chief moral complaint is really with people who were neglectful of the community effort to minimize harm during a pandemic, who would choose possibly killing somebody’s grandma so that they could go to the beach. I’m not really thinking about… taxes.
Whether it is ethical for people to “overuse” the medical services their society provides I think depends ultimately on what it is fair to ask people to do, and what the actual consequences of not doing them are.
Like, is it immoral to get a dildo stuck up your arse? Because you’re wasting a doctor’s time. I feel like we might be touching on such austere efficiencies that we’re beginning to lose sight of what a doctor is for.
Harm is harm. If my recklessness gives you covid, that’s harm. I harmed you. If my wanton habits strain the Healthcare system such that they’re expending money on my emphasima instead of more MRIs, and the lack of MRIs mean the diagnostic delays kept you from finding a brain tumor before it became inoperable, that’s harm too. I harmed you.
It’s comfortable to hide behind layers of abstraction. That’s just morality laundering.
If I give you covid, and you die, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you spread it to your grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you give someone else covid, and THEY give it to THIER grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
And if I give… etc etc etc etc. How far down this chain do I gotta go before you say “ah ok, no morality issue there”?
Does it matter if you expose people but none actually get it? Does it matter if people get it, but as a result of the chain reaction nobody dies?
Probably not, right? The irresponsibility of the act has already established that it was wrong, regardless of the dilution along a chain and regardless of the actual outcome. You don’t KNOW what will happen, you just have statistical models.
You might never know WHICH bean made you fart. It doesn’t matter. The collective effect produced a result.
And what if spending money on the MRI for the guy with the brain tumor delays a study on Alzheimer’s disease? And what if that Alzheimer’s study took money that could have been used to further develop gene therapy?
I don’t really understand the point of this.
If a guy has a dildo stuck up his arse, he needs help. …There’s no follow up point, he just needs help.
I would find a medical industry that harbors contempt for the indignity of having to help this guy… pathetic. Like, it’s silly.
[edit] Let me amend one thing, 'cause I reread the original comment.
I think that neglectfully spreading an illness is more morally objectionable than recklessly contracting one. A known one, anyway. Covid is somewhat special because disease vectors and not actually knowing if you had it or how it spread was more on people’s minds.
Kinda, I think we’re in the same zone, but I feel you’re kinda glancing off some important points, and also bringing in unrelated concepts.
What if the money spent on the mri could have been spent on alzheimers?
Well, if at the time it was reasonable to expect that the investment in MRIs was the most effective thing to do for society that’s fine. That’s just a choice made with reasonable expectations of a positive outcome that ultimately turned out to be suboptimal. It isn’t reasonable to expect that smoking won’t statistically be detrimental to your health. It’s a self-inflicted wound, done knowing this was a likly outcome. This is the critical difference there.
Now, as for unrelated topics, you’ve muddled two distinct ideas: “moral evaluation of actions”, and “evaluation of worthiness to recieve care”.
If you need an ER doctor to pull a dildo out of your ass, but didn’t reasonably expect to demand society to end up having to pay for it, then I see no moral issue, just like if someone forgets thier hair straightener on and thier house lights on fire and the firefighters risk thier lives to rescue you.
If you fully expected to require an ER doctor beforehand, yah, morality issue there. If you light your own house on fire on purpose because you wanted to get carried down a ladder, same deal.
Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be helped. Doesn’t imply that you must not, may, or are obligated to feel contempt or whatever. Evaluating the STATE of a moral agent RESPONDING to a moral transgression of another is several steps removed from the ideas of the morality of self-harm in a social collective with finite support resources.
Anyways, long story short… I don’t mean to say that the two cases are morally identical. They’re both actions that needlessly risk degrading the overall health of your society. I think if you want to frame ONE as a moral issue, they BOTH are.
So, to my original point… I don’t know if the public health angle for the moral evaluation is a great one here. I think it’s hard to build a consistent and reliable moral model around.
I think you’re strawmanning this. I didn’t say you are obligated to maximize your health. But that’s different from knowingly making yourself ill.
In Sweden we spend a lot of resources treating people for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) which is almost exclusively the result of smoking. I think it’s wrong to smoke given how much it costs fellow tax payers and how it takes away resources from people who suffer from ailments that are not a result of their actions.
That said, everyone deserves compassion and it’s also wrong not to help people who are suffering regardless of the reason. But that’s part of what makes it bad to knowingly hurt yourself - you’re imposing an obligation onto other people.
Morally wrong? No. Disgusting and disrespectful? Absolutely.
Is it not? I’m not religious, but I still find it morally wrong to have sex with something that didn’t consent to it.
Whether the animal is alive or dead, it isn’t able to consent. And since the animal cannot consent, it is therefore rape, making it morally wrong.
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A dildo also isn’t able to consent. A carrot isn’t able to consent and is more alive than the roadkill (since it can still reproduce). Ability to consent is something we require from conscious beings, but we generally don’t require it from objects, and corpses blur the line.
I definitely get the “ick” feeling from necrophilia, so my knee-jerk reaction is to consider it immoral, but it isn’t actually that easy to come up with a consistent justification for that condemnation.
A dildo was never alive, and a carrot is not a sentient creature.
Why does a corpse blur the line? Or is this DnD logic and a corpse is just an object? A corpse should be treated like the person it was, so it still needs consent otherwise you’re still raping it.
It absolutely is: a sentient (not even sapient, but sentient) being’s bodily autonomy is inviolable without their consent.
Extending your logic to make my point, if a corpse is blurring the line, what about brain dead coma patients, especially ones that are infertile? Are they ok to rape? They’re alive and can’t reproduce, so what’s the difference, right?
A corpse is not a sentient creature. Former sentience is not the same as sentience.
That’s your opinion, and it’s completely valid, but what’s your justification for why someone else should agree?
Well, they’re alive, for one. Corpses by definition are not. And what we think of as “brain-dead” is the long-term and potentially permanent loss of consciousness and therefore sapience, but sentience is a bit harder to disprove.
Your standard seems to be “current or former sentient beings,” which is consistent, but you haven’t given a justification for the “or former” part. Current sentient beings experience suffering, so that’s a pretty good reason, but corpses don’t.
UT OH
I cannot fucking believe I’m going to participate here…
… but when you’re talking to someone about organ donation, you’d typically say something like “You can’t take them with you. That isn’t you anymore. You’re dead. It’s just meat now.”
… and that’s as much as I’m going to say because gross
But this is actually why we decide whether or not we participate in postmortem organ donation while we’re alive - we make the conscious decision ahead of time. Which is still then consistent with the consent argument
So then if I consent to someone fucking my corpse after I’m gone, it becomes morally OK for them to do it.
If someone writes in their will that their dick shall be made into a dildo so that their partner can keep having sex with them, they can do that. I find it gross, but not immoral.
Pretty sure you can’t. I’d bet that most countries have specific laws against owing human body parts.
Well yea I guess if I go tell shawty she can ride my hog after I get the death erection and she does it I can’t really be mad at her can I
I don’t even know how to approach that but you do you I suppose
With regard to the corpse, maybe.
There’s possibly a virtue ethics argument against the person doing it? Like, it’s a little weird that they want to, right?
Weird from a cultural perspective where any sort of non-medical interference with a corpse is frowned upon, so we’re trained from a very young age to find any of that stuff icky/morbid. Other cultures may not have that same aversion.
Kinda in the same vein as we in North America have a very conservative opinion on being naked in public where other cultures couldn’t care less.
I’m already a moral relativist.
What I’m asking is if a person who wants to and does have sex with corpses, knowing that this is socially profane and must be kept secret, is this a trustable person?
Also, respect for the dead often involves rituals that are non-medical. I think disease obviously played a part in how these rituals were formed, but I don’t think that disease is the primary reason people care.
That makes it immoral in your framework. But you can simply construct one that doesn’t require consent, then it wouldn’t be wrong.
Sure, but I can also construct a moral framework in which it’s ok for me to murder anyone I don’t like because my not-mental-illness-sky-daddy said so.
Moral relativism is bullshit and can be used to justify anything.
Exactly, you can construct what ever moral framework you want to, sky daddy or not.
What if it’s a plant instead? It once was alive, and is incapable of consent. Is it morally wrong to make a dildo out of wood? What about bone?
A plant is not an animal, and is also not a sentient creature. A bone is a part of an animal harvested and used as a tool, not the animal itself.
It’s a simple line to draw.
Also it’s likely to make you sick and then you become a liability to your community = immoral.
The idea that you’re morally obligated to maximize your own health to minimize your burden on society usually doesn’t stand up well to follow up questions.
Realistically, the societal health costs of being obese would be statistically higher than fucking roadkill. I think most people would find themselves pausing before suggesting to an obese person that thier obesity is more morally problematic than fucking roadkill.
There is something to health of an individual in a society and morality, it’s pretty hard for me to ignore that intuition. I just don’t know a real formulation which doesn’t introduce more issues to a system of morality than it resolves? Curious if anyone had one.
When I read liability, my instinct was contagion. There is absolutely a moral obligation to minimize contagion—we did a whole covid-lockdown thing about it.
Being obese is too self-contained an issue, if it is an issue, I think. The only one suffering, if they are suffering, would be the obese person, and the only externalization of that would be financial costs that are too abstract for people to take personally.
I have the great privilege of living in a society with socialized Healthcare, so these questions do come up from time to time.
The lifetime Healthcare costs for people who have conditions which can be mitigated by lifestyle choices is a real thing. Smoking, being an obvious example much less touchy than obesity. Even if I’m extremely comfortable with the slice of my taxes that go to Healthcare… wouldn’t it be great if we got to spend less on smoking-related issues, and could instead buy more MRI machines. Merely pay for more doctors? Nurses? Expand the treatments we can even offer?
Just because they’re abstract, doesn’t make it any less of a question of morality. I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking from the perspective of the personal responsibility of maintaining the overall health of your society. One is just accepted by society.
I don’t understand what you mean.
Smoking isn’t contagious. Smoking might be socially contagious, but that’s a different kind. Smoking and the resulting cancer would be the kind of disease that people “choose” to take on, which is different from being accosted by influenza.
You might be thinking about this on a societal level? I meant interpersonally. Showing up to an event while sick and without a mask is a little fucked up. And covid touches on the societal, but my chief moral complaint is really with people who were neglectful of the community effort to minimize harm during a pandemic, who would choose possibly killing somebody’s grandma so that they could go to the beach. I’m not really thinking about… taxes.
Whether it is ethical for people to “overuse” the medical services their society provides I think depends ultimately on what it is fair to ask people to do, and what the actual consequences of not doing them are.
Like, is it immoral to get a dildo stuck up your arse? Because you’re wasting a doctor’s time. I feel like we might be touching on such austere efficiencies that we’re beginning to lose sight of what a doctor is for.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Harm is harm. If my recklessness gives you covid, that’s harm. I harmed you. If my wanton habits strain the Healthcare system such that they’re expending money on my emphasima instead of more MRIs, and the lack of MRIs mean the diagnostic delays kept you from finding a brain tumor before it became inoperable, that’s harm too. I harmed you.
It’s comfortable to hide behind layers of abstraction. That’s just morality laundering.
If I give you covid, and you die, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you spread it to your grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you give someone else covid, and THEY give it to THIER grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
And if I give… etc etc etc etc. How far down this chain do I gotta go before you say “ah ok, no morality issue there”?
Does it matter if you expose people but none actually get it? Does it matter if people get it, but as a result of the chain reaction nobody dies?
Probably not, right? The irresponsibility of the act has already established that it was wrong, regardless of the dilution along a chain and regardless of the actual outcome. You don’t KNOW what will happen, you just have statistical models.
You might never know WHICH bean made you fart. It doesn’t matter. The collective effect produced a result.
And what if spending money on the MRI for the guy with the brain tumor delays a study on Alzheimer’s disease? And what if that Alzheimer’s study took money that could have been used to further develop gene therapy?
I don’t really understand the point of this.
If a guy has a dildo stuck up his arse, he needs help. …There’s no follow up point, he just needs help.
I would find a medical industry that harbors contempt for the indignity of having to help this guy… pathetic. Like, it’s silly.
[edit] Let me amend one thing, 'cause I reread the original comment.
I think that neglectfully spreading an illness is more morally objectionable than recklessly contracting one. A known one, anyway. Covid is somewhat special because disease vectors and not actually knowing if you had it or how it spread was more on people’s minds.
Does this touch on anything you’re saying?
Kinda, I think we’re in the same zone, but I feel you’re kinda glancing off some important points, and also bringing in unrelated concepts.
What if the money spent on the mri could have been spent on alzheimers?
Well, if at the time it was reasonable to expect that the investment in MRIs was the most effective thing to do for society that’s fine. That’s just a choice made with reasonable expectations of a positive outcome that ultimately turned out to be suboptimal. It isn’t reasonable to expect that smoking won’t statistically be detrimental to your health. It’s a self-inflicted wound, done knowing this was a likly outcome. This is the critical difference there.
Now, as for unrelated topics, you’ve muddled two distinct ideas: “moral evaluation of actions”, and “evaluation of worthiness to recieve care”.
If you need an ER doctor to pull a dildo out of your ass, but didn’t reasonably expect to demand society to end up having to pay for it, then I see no moral issue, just like if someone forgets thier hair straightener on and thier house lights on fire and the firefighters risk thier lives to rescue you.
If you fully expected to require an ER doctor beforehand, yah, morality issue there. If you light your own house on fire on purpose because you wanted to get carried down a ladder, same deal.
Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be helped. Doesn’t imply that you must not, may, or are obligated to feel contempt or whatever. Evaluating the STATE of a moral agent RESPONDING to a moral transgression of another is several steps removed from the ideas of the morality of self-harm in a social collective with finite support resources.
Anyways, long story short… I don’t mean to say that the two cases are morally identical. They’re both actions that needlessly risk degrading the overall health of your society. I think if you want to frame ONE as a moral issue, they BOTH are.
So, to my original point… I don’t know if the public health angle for the moral evaluation is a great one here. I think it’s hard to build a consistent and reliable moral model around.
I think you’re strawmanning this. I didn’t say you are obligated to maximize your health. But that’s different from knowingly making yourself ill.
In Sweden we spend a lot of resources treating people for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) which is almost exclusively the result of smoking. I think it’s wrong to smoke given how much it costs fellow tax payers and how it takes away resources from people who suffer from ailments that are not a result of their actions.
That said, everyone deserves compassion and it’s also wrong not to help people who are suffering regardless of the reason. But that’s part of what makes it bad to knowingly hurt yourself - you’re imposing an obligation onto other people.